Some suspect that in Copenhagen, rich countries might agree to pay poor countries to stop cutting forests.
(Photo by John J. Mosesso, courtesy of the National Biological Information Infrastructure)
World leaders are meeting in Copenhagen,
Denmark next month to begin dealing with
global climate change. A firm treaty is
off the table for now, but one idea they’re
thinking through is to preserve forests
and have them absorb heat-trapping carbon
dioxide. Shawn Allee reports,
some scientists want all this forest talk
to include animals, not just trees:
Transcript
World leaders are meeting in Copenhagen,
Denmark next month to begin dealing with
global climate change. A firm treaty is
off the table for now, but one idea they’re
thinking through is to preserve forests
and have them absorb heat-trapping carbon
dioxide. Shawn Allee reports,
some scientists want all this forest talk
to include animals, not just trees:
Stuart Pimm is a biologist at Duke University. He says in Copenhagen, rich countries might agree to pay poor countries to stop cutting forests. Pimm says that’s great but not all forests are equal.
“Some forests have more carbon in them than others, and some forests have more species in them than others.”
Pimm and other biologists say carbon pricing alone might mean carbon-poor forests get cut – even if they’re home to lots of animal species. They want negotiators to somehow tweak any climate agreement.
“So we should be encouraging countries not to burn their forests, but we should encourage them not to burn the forests that are so biologically rich.”
Climate negotiators could take up Pimm’s idea next month in Copenhagen.
One NYC artist recruited arborists and neighbors to record messages about the city's trees. She placed markers in the cement listing numbers to call to hear the recordings. (Photo by Samara Freemark)
Trees along big city streets have a rough
life. Between pollution, development,
and vandalism, street trees die off at
a pretty alarming rate. One New York
artist thinks if people knew more about
street trees, they’d appreciate them more –
and treat them better. Samara Freemark reports from New York’s “Tree
Museum”:
Transcript
Trees along big city streets have a rough
life. Between pollution, development,
and vandalism, street trees die off at
a pretty alarming rate. One New York
artist thinks if people knew more about
street trees, they’d appreciate them more –
and treat them better. Samara Freemark reports from New York’s “Tree
Museum”:
When artist Katie Holten was commissioned to do a piece commemorating Grand Concourse boulevard in the Bronx, the first thing she thought of was trees. The Concourse, after all, is lined with them. The problem was, no one else seemed to notice they were even there.
“I had conversations with people who were sitting under the trees for the shade. And I’d ask them about what they thought of the trees. And they would say, ‘oh, there aren’t any trees on the concourse.’ But they were sitting underneath one.”
And if people did notice the trees, they weren’t always thrilled they were there.
“Kids told me that trees should all be chopped down because they couldn’t see the view. A teacher told me that all trees were the same, that there was only one kind of tree.”
People didn’t pay much attention to the trees. When they did, they often abused them – which is pretty common treatment for the trees that line city streets. People pin street trees with flyers. They spray trees with grafitti. They chain their bikes around trees, stripping their bark. City buses jump curbs and plow into trees. And developers chop them down to put up new buildings.
“You can’t just stick a tree in the ground and hope for the best. It’s a really tough environment.”
In fact, half of all trees planted in New York City die.
Holten figured one way to protect street trees was to get people to understand all the good that trees do.
So she recruited arborists and neighbors to record messages about the Grand Concourse’s trees. She placed markers in the cement listing numbers to call to hear the recordings. And she called the whole thing the Tree Museum.
“There are 100 trees along the 4 miles. And each of the trees gets a small marker. So we can walk up here to 165th street and I’ll show you one. Here’s one of the markers- nice and dirty.”
(sound of dialing in)
We dial and hear…
“I’d like to a moment to say thank you to this tree. This tree is busy cooling the air and helping to keep the river clean. The leaves in the canopy above are pulling water out of the air, reducing humidity, like an AC.”
It’s not really clear how many people are actually calling in to the museum, or whether the recordings are changing anyone’s mind. But it’s a start.
Joyce Hoagy lives further up the Concourse. She recorded a message for tree number 31. And now she feels kind of possessive of it.
“This is my tree. It’s a honey locust and I’m identified by it.”
Hoagy says Bronx trees have been under particular threat lately. This year the city cut down hundreds of mature oaks to make room for the new Yankees stadium.
“One street had these giant oaks, and they formed this canopy. And on the hottest day of the year you could walk down…people didn’t know what they had till it was gone.”
So now Joyce Hoagy’s spreading the word about the Tree Museum too. She hopes it will give her neighbors a hundred reasons to care about trees around them – and watch out for them.
A poster from the Department of Veterans Affairs offering help and resources to veterans exposed to Agent Orange.
(Photo courtesy of the Department of Veterans Affairs)
The US Department of Veterans
Affairs is offering new help to
Vietnam-era vets. The VA says
it can now assist vets who have
ailments related to Agent Orange
exposure. Mark Brush has more:
Transcript
The US Department of Veterans
Affairs is offering new help to
Vietnam-era vets. The VA says
it can now assist vets who have
ailments related to Agent Orange
exposure. Mark Brush has more:
During the Vietnam War, the herbicide known as Agent Orange was sprayed over jungles and forests. It was used to strip the leaves from the trees and expose enemy soldiers.
Some US soldiers who were exposed to the herbicide have long complained about health problems.
Now, the Department of Veterans Affairs says it will help these veterans with disability benefits.
Exposure to Agent Orange has been tied to health problems like parkinson’s disease, cancer, and heart problems.
Allan Oates is with the US Military Veterans with Parkinson’s. He served in Vietnam. And was exposed to Agent Orange. He says his group was thrilled by the VA’s decision.
“It was just an exhilarating feeling to have these people knowing that they were going to get the help that they deserved.”
Oates says many Vietnam era veterans don’t know yet that help is available to them.
The VA estimates that 2.6 million military personnel were potentially exposed to sprayed Agent Orange.
Forest researchers say cities need
to plant different kinds of trees.
Many cities plant only a handful of
species. (Photo courtesy of the US Forest Service)
Urban forest researchers say cities
need different kinds of trees. Having
too many of the same kind of trees
encourages pests. Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
Urban forest researchers say cities
need different kinds of trees. Having
too many of the same kind of trees
encourages pests. Lester Graham reports:
Pests have already wiped out native trees such as chestnuts, elms and now ash.
James Kielbaso is a forester with Michigan State University. He says native trees are great but, one of his students has found some cities are too reliant on them.
“An urban tree population should not consist of any more than ten or fifteen percent of any one species. He’s finding the trees that are most over-used tend to be our native trees.”
In some cases, maples make up 30% of a city’s trees. That means if a disease or a pest hits maples, a city could lose a third of its urban forest.
Kielbaso says people should plant tree species not already in the neighborhood and a few hardy foreign species could help diversify a city forest.
The CCC worked on soil conservation projects, built 3,000 state parks, and replanted forests. The men in the CCC planted three-billion trees - that’s estimated to be half of the trees ever planted by humans in the U.S. (Photo courtesy of the National Resources Conservation Service)
Today we hear a lot of news calling
this “the worst recession since the
Great Depression.” Tonight, PBS
begins airing a series of documentaries
from American Experience called
“The 1930s.” Lester Graham reports
the series looks back at the Great
Depression:
Transcript
Today we hear a lot of news calling
this “the worst recession since the
Great Depression.” Tonight, PBS
begins airing a series of documentaries
from American Experience called
“The 1930s.” Lester Graham reports
the series looks back at the Great
Depression:
The documentaries in “The 1930s” series look at the stockmarket crash, the Dust Bowl, and the government’s response – such as President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Robert Stone directed one of the five documentaries. He looked at the Civilian Conservation Corps – the CCC. Stone says it was the first of Roosevelt’s work programs, but it also tackled the biggest environmental disasters.
“We’d spent hundreds of years just chopping down all of the forests in this country and over-using all of the farmland. The topsoil was all running into our rivers and off into the ocean. And it reached a sort of crisis point in the 1920s and early ‘30s.”
FDR had watched the forests disappear and soil erode near his home in Hyde Park, New York. Putting men to work correcting those problems made sense to him.
“FDR was very aware of that. He started a sort of mini-Civilian Conservation Corps in New York state when he was Governor and then when he went to the White House he came up with the Civilian Conservation Corps.”
FDR: “We are planning within a few days to ask the Congress for legislation to enable the government to take on public works, thus stimulating directly and indirectly the employment of many others in well-considered projects.”
But this was new for government. At that time, helping the poor was something for charity, not government.
Harley Jolley is one of four CCC veterans who tell their stories in the documentary.
He says hiring unemployed young men to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps was new to politicians. But they saw it for the practical politics it was.
“And because all those politicians were well aware that they had young men in their hometown, in their home state that could vote for them next time around, ‘Yeah, yeah, we’ll go with you.’ And very quickly it came to pass.”
FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps was the first, but several work programs followed.
The CCC worked on soil conservation projects, built three-thousand state parks and replanted forests. The men in the CCC planted three-billion trees – that’s estimated to be half of the trees ever planted by humans in the U.S.
This revolutionary idea got off the ground quickly. Camps were set up in every state. Men worked under military officers. The Civilian Conservation Corps members were required to send most of their pay back home.
Sometimes nearby towns welcomed the young men. CCC veteran Vincente Ximenes says, other times, people were wary of Roosevelt’s army of workers.
“And there were some farmers who didn’t like FDR and what he did. He was called a Communist, a Socialist, any name you could find. So, therefore, the CCC-ers also, of course, were no good as far as they were concerned.”
And it wasn’t just farmers.
The documentary’s director, Robert Stone says, in the beginning, President Roosevelt faced a lot of opposition to his government ‘green jobs’ program.
“Well, there were concerns very similar to what you have today with concerns about deficit spending.”
“The national debt today is 30-billion as compared to 19-billions under Hoover. And God knows Hoover was bad enough.”
“So that was on the right. And on the left there were concerns about paying these people a dollar-a-day. The unions were upset about it. But the success of it was such that it really quelled most any opposition.”
The Civilian Conservation Corps documentary, like the other documentaries in the 1930s American Experience series, looks at the connections between environmental damage and economic collapse in a way that still resonates today.
This photo, taken in August 1947, shows a load of white pine logs being hauled in Idaho. (Photo courtesy of the US Forest Service)
Climate change means faster growing
trees. Kyle Norris looks at ongoing
research that’s looking at how that
plays out:
Transcript
Climate change means faster growing
trees. Kyle Norris looks at ongoing
research that’s looking at how that
plays out:
Maybe you remember this from grade-school science: trees take in carbon
dioxide—that’s a gas emitted from burning fossil fuels. Then trees convert that
CO2 into oxygen. So with more carbon dioxide, trees are really taking off.
Wendy Jones is a research associate. She’s with Michigan Technological
University and she’s been studying young trees for the past eleven years.
Not only does carbon dioxide make trees grow faster, but warmer temperatures
help prolong the growing season. Jones says that could be good for the timber
industry.
“We could cut the trees sooner because they’re growing faster.”
For example, fast-growing aspen trees are used in everything from paper to
matchsticks. Jones says climate change could mean aspens could be harvested in
25 years instead of 35 years.
Wangari Maathai in Kenya in 2004 - the year she won the Nobel Peace Prize. (Photo by Mia MacDonald, courtesy of the Green Belt Movement)
This week, the world’s leaders are
talking about climate change. The
talks are part of ongoing negotiations
on a climate change treaty between the
world’s countries. The hope is for an
agreement in Cophenhagen in December.
A Nobel Peace Prize winner is visting
the United States to talk about the role
of trees in climate change. Wangari
Maathai spoke
with Lester Graham about the importance
of saving the rainforests of the world:
Transcript
This week, the world’s leaders are
talking about climate change. The
talks are part of ongoing negotiations
on a climate change treaty between the
world’s countries. The hope is for an
agreement in Cophenhagen in December.
A Nobel Peace Prize winner is visting
the United States to talk about the role
of trees in climate change. Wangari
Maathai spoke
with Lester Graham about the importance
of saving the rainforests of the world:
Wangari Maathai: Because 20% of the greenhouse gasses, especially carbon, comes from deforestation and forest degradation.
Lester Graham: You know, in the US, it seems the rainforests are so far away – it’s hard to imagine what I can do to have some affect on their future. What can someone like me to do save the rainforest?
Maathai: Even though we live very far from the Amazon, or from the Congo forests, or from the Southeast Asian blocks of forest, these three are the major lands of the planet. They control the climate from very far away. So, the planet is very small when you come to discuss these huge ecosystems.
Graham: But what is it I can do to change things?
Maathai: Well, one thing I think is very, very important – especially here, in North America – when legislators are discussing this issue at Capitol Hill, is to influence your legislator. Convince him or her that dealing with climate change is a very important issue and that it is very important to have legislation that will facilitate this. Because no matter how much we know and recognize the dangers, until our leaders give us legislation around which we can work, it just continues to be talking. And we need this legislation, so I hope citizens will call their leaders.
Graham: What, specifically, can the United States do to save rainforests around the world?
Maathai: Well, I think that one of the agreements that we are hoping will take place in Copenhagen – and America will be part of this – in fact, we hope that America will provide the leadership in Copenhagen – is to agree on a financial mechanism that will help countries that have huge forests – the Amazon, the Congo, the forests in Indonesia and Borneo and that region – that there will be money that will be made available so that these countries will be financially compensated so that they keep these forests standing. Now, if America, the United States of America, if she’s left out – the way she was left out in Kyoto – we can’t go very far. Because, believe me, America – her actions, her attitude – influences the thinking in the world. So I’m hoping that America will provide the leadership and will also contribute towards the financial mechanism that is needed to support forests.
Graham: In your leadership of Green Belt in your native country of Kenya, you’ve used the action of planting a tree as a political statement. In the US, we spend a lot of time talking about using less fossil fuels, but there’s not a lot of talk about planting trees. Are we missing part of the solution?
Maathai: I think it’s very important to encourage farmers, individual citizens to plant trees. And, I’m very happy to know that in some of your states, tree planting has been embraced as one of the solutions. It’s one of the activities that every one of us citizens can do and feel good about it, and teach kids to do it, because every tree will count. And when there are 7 billion of us, almost, in the whole world, so you can imagine, if every one of us planted a tree and made sure that tree survived – can you imagine the impact?
Wangari Maathai won the Nobel
Peace Prize in 2004 for her work in
forestry and women’s issues. She spoke
with The Environment Report’s Lester
Graham.
Leading Edge Aviation has put in an application to offer as many as 300 helicopter tours a year around the edge of Crater Lake. Travis Warthen is the company Vice President.
(Photo by Jessica Robinson)
Scott Silver is Executive Director of Wild Wilderness, a group that monitors motorized recreation on public lands.
(Photo by Jessica Robinson)
Some worry that the noise from helicopters would be a disruption to people enjoying Crater Lake National Park.
(Photo by Jessica Robinson)
When Congress returns from its August
recess, one of the tasks on the agenda is
confirming President Obama’s pick to head
the National Park Service. If confirmed,
Jonathan Jarvis will have some tough
decisions to make about what kinds of tourist
attractions to allow in the parks. Jessica
Robinson reports on the latest proposal to
add aerial sightseeing tours at a National
Park in Oregon:
Transcript
When Congress returns from its August
recess, one of the tasks on the agenda is
confirming President Obama’s pick to head
the National Park Service. If confirmed,
Jonathan Jarvis will have some tough
decisions to make about what kinds of tourist
attractions to allow in the parks. Jessica
Robinson reports on the latest proposal to
add aerial sightseeing tours at a National
Park in Oregon:
Nearly 8,000 years ago, Mount Mazama spit out ash and lava and collapsed in on itself, leaving what became Crater Lake.
Park Superintendent Craig Ackerman says the stillness of the blue waters is matched only by the stillness in the air.
“You can stand on the east flank of Mount Scott and you can absolutely hear the wind whispering through the white bark pines and the hemlocks.”
It’s true – there are moments when it’s just your footsteps, the wind, and the birds.
But then, at the popular viewpoints, there are the other species you find at many national parks: like Toyotas, Winnebagos, and Harleys.
(sound of a motorcycle)
Now, a company up the road in Bend, Oregon, has a proposal that could add one more sound to the mix.
(sound of a helicopter)
Leading Edge Aviation has put in an application to offer as many as 300 helicopter tours a year around the edge of Crater Lake. Travis Warthen is the company Vice President.
“I mean, it really is a majestic sight to see. And, the noise level is less than that of a car – you know, definitely motorcycles, RVs, the bus tours. I mean, it’s difficult for us to understand the huge opposition.”
At 1,000 feet up, he says, the choppers sound to someone on the ground, about as loud as a normal conversation.
“So you say, ‘it’s already compromised by the motorcycles and the motor-homes, so what’s wrong with a little more?’”
That’s Scott Silver. He’s executive director of Wild Wilderness, a group he started with a friend to monitor motorized recreation on public lands.
Silver sits in his back yard, just across town from the aviation company proposing the tours. He says National Parks should provide a respite from some of the noise we’re used to in everyday life. As he explains this, a passing helicopter interrupts our interview.
(sound of a helicopter)
“That’s actually the helicopter from the hospital. But, okay, it’s no big deal really in town. It’s just a distraction. But everyone still stops and looks up if it’s flying over a national park. And really, why should visitors have need to look up to listen to sounds over head?”
National Parks advocates worry that helicopter flights at the Grand Canyon, Glacier National Park, and others are making commercial tours the norm for parks visitors. They’re hoping Obama’s pick to lead the National Park Service, Jonathan Jarvis – a former Crater Lake biologist – will reverse the trend.
But here’s the rub: there’s nothing stopping you from flying over any National Park right now – if you have a private plane.
And Jeff Allen, head of the Crater Lake Trust, wonders if that’s fair.
“There’s a part of me that feels like, if you’re going to allow it at all, I’d rather see regular folks be able to have that experience, than have you have to go out and own a plane or know someone who owns a plane.”
Aerial tours of Crater Lake won’t be offered any time soon though. There’s a hefty backlog of similar requests at other parks – and they’ll all have to go through not one but two federal bureaucracies: the National Park Service and the FAA.
Biologists Jim Farquhar and Mike Smith inspect the cormorant nests in the treetops. (Photo by Karen Kelly)
Some black-crowned night heron chicks in a nest. They've returned to Little Murphy Island on the St. Lawrence River after four years of cormorant management. The cormorants often destroy the vegetation the herons nest in. (Photo by Karen Kelly)
fisherman Steve Sharland. He feels the cormorant should be eradicated from the region. (Photo by Karen Kelly)
The pesticide DDT almost wiped
out the double-crested cormorant.
Now, the bird is thriving, and it’s
blamed for devouring fish in lakes,
rivers, and fish farms in many parts
of the country. Karen Kelly reports
on the struggle to share resources
with this unpopular bird:
Transcript
The pesticide DDT almost wiped
out the double-crested cormorant.
Now, the bird is thriving, and it’s
blamed for devouring fish in lakes,
rivers, and fish farms in many parts
of the country. Karen Kelly reports
on the struggle to share resources
with this unpopular bird:
(sound of clanking and birds)
Mike Smith eases a boat into the shallow water just off Little Murphy Island. It’s a tiny patch of sand and trees in the middle of the St. Lawrence River. It straddles the New York border with Canada.
Smith is a wildlife technician with New York’s department of environmental conservation. He specializes in cormorant management. That means he knocks down nests, breaks eggs, and – very occasionally – shoots them.
Before he even jumps off the boat, he starts counting the birds that are poking out of nests in the treetops.
“I see a few. I’m looking at their nests. We tried to have a zero percent successful reproduction rate.”
Smith counts maybe ten nests. They started with 150 or so in the spring.
There are tens of thousands of these birds. They spend their summers in the north. And in the winter, they go south where they raid fish farms.
Biologists estimate each bird eats a pound of fish a day. That can make a dent in the local fish population. The birds also strip trees of their leaves to create nests. And their guano ends up killing the trees’ root systems. That ends up driving out other animals that need vegetation.
Some people feel the birds should be eradicated. One group of anglers was even arrested for killing hundreds of them on Lake Ontario.
There are others, like the group Cormorant Defenders International. They feel they should be protected.
It’s up to biologists like Jim Farquhar of New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation to find the balance between human needs and cormorants.
Farquhar: “We have needs too, as people.”
Karen: “And we’re competing with them.”
Farquhar: “And we’re competing with them in some cases. Hopefully, if we can inject good science, we make good decisions as a result.”
The biologists’ biggest effort has been on Lake Ontario. They’ve been destroying nests there — and killing some adults – for ten years. Farquhar says they’re finally seeing results.
They’ve reduced the cormorant population on the lake by about two-thirds, and the fishing’s improved.
Now, the biologists are trying to have the same success on the St. Lawrence River. But they’ve only seen a 13% decrease in the number of cormorant nests and they’ve been doing it for four years.
Part of the challenge is that most of the birds live on Canadian soil where management is left to the landowner.
Local anglers like Steve Sharland of Ogdensburg, New York, are frustrated with the slow progress.
“They should eliminate them. They’re not a Northern New York bird and what they’re doing to our fisheries is a sin.”
That’s a common misconception. Actually, the cormorant is native to the region but few people have seen them in such large numbers.
Sharland says some people are so frustrated, they’ve been shooting the birds illegally. But Jim Farquhar believes those are isolated incidents.
“Mike just mentioned that we’ve got some black-crowned night herons nesting out here. It’s another species we’re concerned about, and one we’ve been trying to actively protect from the cormorants. So that’s a good sign.”
A good sign. But it’s another species trying to live on this small patch of land. And the biologists’ balancing act has become even more delicate.
A company called ArborGen is working on altering Eucalyptus trees, so they can be turned into paper and biofuels more easily. (Photo courtesy of the National Biological Information Infastructure)
There’s already a lot of genetically
modified corn and soybeans out there.
Now, Mark Brush reports, one company
is working on genetically modifying
trees:
Transcript
There’s already a lot of genetically
modified corn and soybeans out there.
Now, Mark Brush reports, one company
is working on genetically modifying
trees:
The company is called ArborGen. And it’s working on altering Eucalyptus trees, so they can be turned into paper and biofuels more easily.
Eucalyptus is native to Australia and New Zealand.
But ArborGen has already got 330 acres of these genetically altered trees planted scattered across the South.
And now it wants the government to allow these trees to flower. And that has people like George Kimbrall worried.
He’s an attorney with the International Center for Technology Assessment. He says if they spread they’ll be bad for the environment.
“They’re water suckers. They don’t allow for much undergrowth. They’re poisonous to most animals. The leaves, the animals can’t eat them. Why would we want the south covered in Eucalyptus trees?”
When eucalyptus was brought over to California – it did become invasive. And there are some reports that it’s invasive in Florida too.
ArborGen says it’s altering these trees so they won’t spread in the wild.
Some suspect that in Copenhagen, rich countries might agree to pay poor countries to stop cutting forests. (Photo by John J. Mosesso, courtesy of the National Biological Information Infrastructure)
