Author: Samara Freemark

Where Nothing Can Survive

  • Shrimpers have seen their catches dwindle down from thousands of pounds of shrimp a day to very little due to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. (Photo by Samara Freemark)

Every summer, thousands of
square miles of the Gulf of
Mexico die. The Dead Zone is
caused by pollution that flows
down the Mississippi River. It’s
runoff from factories, sewer
plants, and farms. And it causes
a lot of problems for fishermen
in the area. This year, the Dead
Zone is projected to be huge –
maybe the largest ever. Samara Freemark explains:

Transcript

Every summer, thousands of
square miles of the Gulf of
Mexico die. The Dead Zone is
caused by pollution that flows
down the Mississippi River. It’s
runoff from factories, sewer
plants, and farms. And it causes
a lot of problems for fishermen
in the area. This year, the Dead
Zone is projected to be huge –
maybe the largest ever. Samara Freemark explains:

Imagine for a moment you’re a shrimp fisherman. Every day you send out your fleet to the same waters you’ve fished for decades. And your boats pull in a lot of shrimp- thousands of pounds a day, millions a year. And then one day, a normal summer day, you send the boats out, and they come back empty.

“You go from about 5000 pounds to nothing. It’s dead. That’s why they call it the dead zone.”

That’s Dean Blanchard. He runs the largest shrimp company in America- Dean Blanchard Seafood. 


Blanchard started seeing the dead zone about five years ago, but it’s not a new phenomenon. For a long time, nutrient fertilizer from upstream has run into the Mississippi River and from there, into the Gulf. It fertilizes big algae blooms– and when the algae decays, it sucks oxygen out of the water, making it impossible for fish to live there.

What’s new is how much fertilizer there is now.

“It’s not natural.”

Nancy Rabalais is a marine biologist at LUMCON. That’s Louisiana’s center for marine research. She says that over the past several decades there’s been a surge in fertilizer use in the Corn Belt states. That eventually ends up in the Gulf.

“We’re having 300 times more than we did in the 1950s. And it’s just over loaded the system.”

Rabalais predicts this year’s dead zone will be almost three times as big as it was twenty years ago – more than 8000 square miles.

Of course, the bigger the zone, the further out shrimpers like Dean Blanchard have to send their boats. That means a lot of wasted time, fuel, and wages.

And the zones might mean even bigger problems. Don Scavia is a professor at the School of Natural Resources at the University of Michigan.

“There’s a half a billion dollar shrimp industry in the gulf. And the shrimp depend on that habitat. And what we’re concerned about is that if the dead zone continues or even grows, that fishery may collapse.”

Congress is taking some measures to address the problem. Conservation programs in the Farm Bill work to reduce how much fertilizer farmers use, and how they apply it.

But there’s something else in the Farm Bill too – a lot of subsidy programs. Those pay for ethanol production. Which means more corn. Which means a lot more fertilizer.

“And what is debated every 5 years is how much funding will go into those conservation programs, relative to funding going into subsidy programs. And, by far, the subsidies win.” (laughs)

Scavia says for every $1 spent on conservation programs in the Corn Belt, $500 go to subsidizing crops.


Shrimper Dean Blanchard says he’s not sure how long he can live with that balance, especially as he watches the dead zone grow.

“How big is this thing going to get? If we kill the oceans we have problems. We have serious problems.”

But Don Scavia is hopeful. He says we know exactly how to reduce nutrient runoff – in fact, the basic programs are already in place. It’s just a matter of Congress choosing the right funding priorities.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

Related Links

Taking Down Levees in Louisiana

  • The Mollicy Farms River Forest Levee (Keith Ouchley, Louisiana Nature Conservancy)

Man made levees line the banks
of the Mississippi River and its
tributaries. They protect towns
and they allow farmers to plow
the bottomlands. But levees come
at a price: habitat destruction
and worse flooding downstream.
Now, more people are calling for
taking down levees and returning
floodplain areas to their natural
state. Samara Freemark
reports from Louisiana – the end
of the line for the water that
drains from the middle of the nation:

Transcript

Man made levees line the banks
of the Mississippi River and its
tributaries. They protect towns
and they allow farmers to plow
the bottomlands. But levees come
at a price: habitat destruction
and worse flooding downstream.
Now, more people are calling for
taking down levees and returning
floodplain areas to their natural
state. Samara Freemark
reports from Louisiana – the end
of the line for the water that
drains from the middle of the nation:

The Mollicy Farms site in Northern LA provides a striking example of just how dramatically a levee can remake a landscape.

“Here comes the river down through here.”

Keith Ouchley is with the Nature Conservancy, and he’s showing me an aerial photo of Mollicy Farms. The site is split in half by a river. On the west side, there’s 30000 acres of primeval forest. On the east side, a swath of cleared land.

“Once, it was forest in the lower area of tupelo and in the upper areas of sweet gum. And every year the river would overflow and flood the forest.”

In the late 1960s, soybean farmers cleared the area built levees to hold back the annual floods – giant earthen walls, 150 ft wide at the base and 30 feet tall. Ouchley grew up in the area. He remembers the first time he saw the site after the clearing.

“I thought at the time you could almost see the curvature of the earth, looking across this massive clearing up there.”

Levees protect a lot of land for farming. But some people are starting to wonder if they’re worth the cost – not just the money it takes to build and maintain them, but the damage they do to ecosystems.

Denise Reed is a geologist at the University of New Orleans. She says hundreds of species depend on floodplain habitats- and without flooding, those habitats vanish.

“The river is the lifeblood of floodplain and delta ecosystems. When you build levees and you cut it off, we cut off those habitats from the river. And essentially they just degrade and die. Putting it back would definitely be a good thing.”

Levees might also raise the chances of truly catastrophic flooding downstream. Whenever there’s a lot of water in the river – say, there’s heavy rain upstream – that water shoots straight down the channel with enormous force. And it sometimes breaks through downstream levees that protect homes.

If you take down levees upstream some of that water has somewhere else to go – out into the forest or wetlands, where it spreads out across thousands of acres.

All of which is why Denise Reed says, instead of building more levees, it might be a good idea to take some down.

“Just because we’ve had levees on the river for the last hundred years or so doesn’t mean to say we’re always going to have levees on the river. The challenge for us is letting nature do its thing while still allowing us to navigate on the river and bring ships in, and that kind of things, and for us to live places where we’re not going to be flooded out. We can do that.”

After catastrophic flooding in 1993, the federal government started buying up levee-protected land along the Mississippi and its tributaries with an eye towards restoring floodplains. But the memory of that flood faded and funding for the program fell off.

That left private groups like the Nature Conservancy to take up the effort.

This summer they’ll punch holes in the levee at Mollicy Farms. As the water rises in the spring, it will gradually seep out onto the landscape, restoring the floodplain.

“50 years, 100 years, you’ll be able to take a boat out through nice, mature, bottomland hardwood floodplain forest. You know, see water moccasins and catch bluegill brims and alligators floating on logs and that kind of thing.”

Ouchley says he’d like to see the program replicated in floodplains all over the country.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

Related Links

Native Americans Lose Land to Climate Change

  • Choctaw Chief Albert Naquin has watched his tribe's island - the Isle de Jean Charles - go from four miles across to a quarter mile across. (Photo by Samara Freemark)

Over the next century, rising
sea levels will change coastlines
all over the world. But the impact
might be most dramatic in South
Louisiana. A study out last month
predicts the state will lose up to
5000 square miles in the next
century – a chunk of land the size
of Connecticut. If the report’s
authors are right, that means a
lot of people in Louisiana are
going to have to relocate – become
climate refugees. Samara Freemark has the story of one of
the first communities to be displaced:

Transcript

Over the next century, rising sea levels will change coastlines all over the world. But the impact might be most dramatic in South Louisiana. A study out last month predicts the state will lose up to 5000 square miles in the next century – a chunk of land the size of Connecticut. If the report’s authors are right, that means a lot of people in Louisiana are going to have to relocate – become climate refugees. Samara Freemark has the story of one of the first communities to be displaced:

It was sometime in the mid-1970s that Albert Naquin first realized that Isle de Jean Charles was sinking. Naquin had grown up on the island. He’s the chief of a group of Choctaws who have lived there since the 19th century – and when he was a kid, it was a pretty good community: it had stores, a couple of churches, horse pastures and fields. But those are all gone now.

“Salt water kept coming in, faster and faster, and now it’s basically just beach.”

Isle de Jean Charles is sinking into the Gulf of Mexico.

The list of reasons why is long. There’s subsidence- that’s the natural phenomenon where delta regions kind of settle down on themselves. There are the dams that block the sediment that used to wash down and build the land back up. There are oil company canals that slice through the wetlands, hurricanes that tear up the island’s coastline, and, of course, there’s rising sea levels.

All together they explain why Isle de Jean Charles used to be about 4 miles across and now has shrunk to a quarter mile.

“Now, we see the disaster that is Isle de Jean.”

We’re in Naquin’s pickup truck, and he’s driving me out to the island.

“See this little house moved across the way, this house. These 1, 2, 3 are deserted.”

Naquin himself moved off the island awhile ago. But for years he was happy to support families who chose to stay. In fact, when the US government came to him in 2002 and offered to pay to help people move off the island, he resisted.

“So, I said, ‘what they gonna do, tell us they’re gonna move us there and then next thing send us a bill for the house?’ You know, so I said, ‘no, that’s just a modern day Trail of Tears. We’re not moving.’”

But lately Naquin has just gotten tired. Tired of evacuating people before storms, tired of helping them rebuild after, tired of watching the sea nibble away at the island.

And so he decided – enough. For the past year he’s been on a mission to convince the 25 families still living on the island to abandon it.

“They’re not going to save the island. It’s going to be gone. Either we move now or we move later, ‘cause we will move.”

But not everyone is ready to leave.

(sound of greeting and talking)

Naquin pulls over to talk to Dominique Dardar.

Dardar’s house was leveled by Hurricane Gustav last summer. He’s rebuilding it with pieces of other houses he’s found blowing around the island- bits of roof and siding. Dardar says he’s not moving.

“I ain’t never gonna move. I’m gonna stay over here. That’s my territory.”

Across the street Wenselas Billiot lives in a house raised 13 feet in the air.

Billiot is Naquin’s brother in law. He’s in his 80s and has lived on the island his whole life. I ask him what he’ll do if the island shrinks any more.

“That’s going to be rough. But, as long as I can stay, I’ll stay. I was born and raised on the island. As long as I can stay here I’m going to stay.”

Albert Naquin hasn’t given up. He thinks if he can get everyone to agree, the government will help the tribe get a big piece of land where they can all relocate as a group. He’s already thinking of names for the new town.

“We could say, Island Number Two, or Isle de Jean Charles New Beginning, or something like that. But I think we just name it Isle de Jean Charles 2. I think that has a good sound to it.”

In short, Naquin is trying to figure out how to keep the idea of Isle de Jean Charles alive, even when the island itself no longer exists.

It’s a challenge many Louisiana communities could soon face.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

Related Links

How Green Is the LEED Label?

  • LEED buildings get points for green things like bike racks and good energy use, but it doesn’t actually enforce energy efficiency (Photo by Lester Graham)

The biggest energy users in America are not cars and trucks – they’re buildings. Buildings use about 40% of the nation’s energy. In 2000, the US Green Building Council introduced a program that certifies “green” buildings. It’s called LEED. That stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. A new version of the LEED standards is being released today, April 27. But Samara Freemark reports some critics see serious flaws in the LEED program:

Transcript

The biggest energy users in America are not cars and trucks – they’re buildings. Buildings use about 40% of the nation’s energy. In 2000, the US Green Building Council introduced a program that certifies “green” buildings. It’s called LEED. That stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. A new version of the LEED standards is being released today, April 27. But Samara Freemark reports some critics see serious flaws in the LEED program:

Before LEED came around in 2000, developers didn’t really spend a lot of time worrying about whether their buildings were green. They were designing and constructing buildings they could market. Green just wasn’t a priority.

“It was always the last thing on the agenda for the staff meeting, because nobody really understood what success looked like.”

Brendan Owens is a LEED spokesman. He says the people who came up with LEED wanted to change the culture of building in America. Make building ‘green’ marketable.

And they realized that to do that, they’d have to define what a green building looked like.

So they created a checklist. Install solar panels and you get points. Bike racks: more points. Get a green roof – somewhere you can grow plants — add some points.

Enough points and the developer gets a LEED certification. Certified buildings get a plaque. Developers get the PR boost that comes from building green. The public gets a more sustainable building. That’s the idea, anyway.

The program really caught on. More than 10,000 projects are currently going through the LEED process. And universities, municipalities, even the federal government are writing the standards into their own codes.

But critics say the system might be spreading too fast.

“The people who are writing the LEED Standards are in effect writing our country’s most important laws.”

That’s Henry Gifford. He’s a building engineer in NYC. He’s also one of LEED’s most outspoken critics.

Gifford says it’s possible to earn LEED certification – and cash in on the PR benefits of being green – without actually fixing a building’s biggest environmental problem.

“The 3 most important things to make a building environmentally friendly, are energy use, energy use, energy use. All the other things in the LEED checklist, which I think are wisely chosen and very important, they pale in comparison to the energy use.”

The LEED checklist does give points for good energy use- a lot of them, actually. But it doesn’t enforce energy efficiency.

Instead, developers win points by predicting their buildings will perform well. Developers do have to submit energy use data once their building is up and running. But if the building turns out not to save any energy? Brendan Owens says…

“What we do, is we notify the building that they’re not performing up to their potential.”

But no one’s coming around to unscrew that accreditation plaque. The building gets to keeps its certification.

On average LEED buildings seem to do better than others on energy use. But there are plenty of LEED-certified buildings that do use more energy than comparable non-certified ones.

Gifford says that’s unacceptable. No energy hogs, no matter how many bike racks or green roofs they have – should be allowed to call themselves green.

“It’s a scandal to have any underperforming building win or retain a rating for being green. I’m sorry. Every building labeled as green should have very good energy performance. Until we get there, we’re making believe.”

LEED doesn’t claim that certified buildings are perfect. Instead, Brendan Owens says the standard is meant to provide a holistic measure of greenness.

“I’ve heard LEED certified buildings described as sustainable. And there are a few, but the lions share of those projects haven’t achieved it. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the rating system is flawed. It just means that people are misunderstanding what it’s about.”

In other words, people are reading more into certification than they should. Critics like Henry Gifford worry that will lead to complacency when it comes to truly greening buildings.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

Related Links

Automakers Push a Gas Tax

  • These Suzukis at Ken Butman's dealership, which were in high demand last year, are now sitting unsold (Photo by Samara Freemark)

Chances are, you haven’t bought a new car this year. Auto sales are down across the board – including in the small car and electric-gas hybrid markets. Now some dealers and automakers are proposing a way to move some of those cars: increase the gas tax. Samara Freemark explains why the same people who sell cars might want to make driving them more expensive:

Transcript

Chances are, you haven’t bought a new car this year. Auto sales are down across the board – including in the small car and electric-gas hybrid markets. Now some dealers and automakers are proposing a way to move some of those cars: increase the gas tax. Samara Freemark explains why the same people who sell cars might want to make driving them more expensive:

It was almost exactly this time last year that Ford dealer Ken Butman
traded in his pickup for a Suzuki hatchback.

His Ann Arbor, Michigan
dealership had been selling Suzukis for a couple of years. But they got
really popular last spring when gas prices jumped. Butman ordered a big
shipment to keep up with the demand.

“These are the Suzukis. These little cars get good gas mileage. And
they’re so cute. Look at them. Look at this one here. It’s got a little
rack for your skis. Look at
that.”

But those cars – the ones Butman ordered a year ago – most of them are
still here. They’re still sitting on his lot. Not moving.

“It was strange because they were so hot. For awhile there you couldn’t
give a big car away. And everybody was rushing to the small cars. And then
just as quickly, about when the price of gas came down again, we saw a
complete reversal. Like a light switch. That’s how fast it cut off.”

It’s been like that all over the country. Dealers who last year had
waiting lists for hybrids and small cars suddenly have a lot of extra
inventory. Sales of hybrids are way down from last April, mostly because
gas costs about half what it did last year.

Brett Smith is an auto analyst with the Center for Automotive Research. He
says consumers only really care about fuel economy when gas prices are
high. When gas hits about 4 dollars a gallon, consumers switch to fuel
efficient cars. When prices drop again, so do sales of efficient cars.

“Look at what’s happened every time we’ve had an energy crisis. We’ve
gone to smaller cars for a couple of years, and then the consumer has gone
back to larger cars. Why? Because at that fuel price they can get away with
it, they can justify it.”

It’s a real problem for dealers. It also worries auto manufacturers who
have poured money into developing hybrids and have a lot of new models due
to come out this year.

And that’s why some people who sell cars have begun to push for
increasing the gas tax.

Dealers and auto executives might not seem like the first bunch to line up
behind a tax hike. Traditionally they’ve lobbied hard against anything
that makes driving more expensive.

But a high tax – and therefore, higher gas prices – could get all those extra
hybrids moving again.

Michael Jackson is the CEO at AutoNation. That’s the
nation’s largest chain of dealership.

Jackson wants to see gas at four
dollars a gallon – the figure at which many analysts say consumer behavior
changes. And he thinks the government can keep prices at that magic number
with a floating tax.

Auto makers have been a little more cautious. But some top executives at
American companies have called Jackson’s ideas ‘smart’ and ‘worth
looking into’.

Smith says they believe that higher gas taxes could
stabilize the market for fuel efficient cars – making investment in new
technologies a safer bet.

“The car companies will rarely come out and loudly say, things like, ‘we
think there needs to be a gas tax.’ But almost all of them will say on the
side, if you want people to drive more fuel efficient cars, the best way to
do it is a gas tax.”

For now, though, it might not take a big tax to bring gas prices back up.

Oil trader Anthony Grisanti is the president of GRZ Energy. He says an
economic recovery would do pretty much the same thing.

“Shouldn’t be any doubt about it, once the economy picks up, say,
beginning of next year or year after that, you’re going to start to see oil
prices go higher.”

And that means prices at the pump would go up too.

Proposing higher gas taxes – especially of a couple of dollars a gallon – can
mean career suicide for politicians. So a big hike in the gas tax seems
iffy. But if gas prices rise as the economy recovers, dealers might see
those fuel efficient cars move off the lot again.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

Related Links

Recession Proof Construction

  • One company created a website that acts as kind of a Craigslist just for reclaimed building materials (Photo courtesy of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction)

In the middle of a recession that’s

crippling the construction field,

there’s at least one sector of

industry that’s doing pretty well.

That’s “material reuse.” Taking pieces

of old buildings and using them in

new ones. Advocates say used materials

could save developers a heap of money.

Samara Freemark has the

story of one re-use company that’s both

green and in the black:

Transcript

In the middle of a recession that’s

crippling the construction field,

there’s at least one sector of

industry that’s doing pretty well.

That’s “material reuse.” Taking pieces

of old buildings and using them in

new ones. Advocates say used materials

could save developers a heap of money.

Samara Freemark has the

story of one re-use company that’s both

green and in the black:

You’ve probably heard what’s going on in the construction industry
these days.

(news montage of housing crisis)

But in middle of all that bad news, there might be one bright spot.

“We’ve actually been expanding quite a bit. I guess it’s one of the
only times I’ve heard
of where that’s the case.”

That’s architect Brad Hardin.

He got interested in reusing building materials pretty early in his career.
He likes the way
the old stuff looked. And he likes the idea of saving resources. And
he’s also kind of
horrified by the tens of millions of tons of construction waste that get
tossed into landfills
every year.

But actually getting his hands on used materials, so that he could reuse
them- that turned
out to be a real pain in the butt.

“You know you’ll be literally going out to someone’s yard and getting
rained on, or
sorting through someone’s basement– it was kind of a hit and miss
process.”

A big part of the problem was simple logistics. Imagine you’re knocking
down an old
house to build a new one. You’d like to sell off whatever pieces of the
old building you
can. But how do you find someone to buy all that stuff? Where do you store
it while you
look for a buyer? And how do you ship the materials?

Harry Giles is a professor of green architecture at the University of
Michigan.

He says most developers don’t want to bother with all that hassle. In the
end, they usually
just end up bulldozing everything. Giles says that’s because there’s no
real secondhand
market for used construction materials- not like there is in a lot of other
industries.

“If you take the car industry, a lot of it is geared around the reuse of
materials. Not just
taking the car and crushing it, but taking it apart and finding useful
components on it.”

You know, like a salvage yard.

And that was the problem Brad Hardin wanted to solve – how to create a
secondhand
market for spare building parts. He figured that if he could do that,
reusing building
materials could actually end up profitable.

So last year he started a company called Planet ReUse. The company’s
website acts as
kind of a Craigslist just for reclaimed building materials. Buyers and
sellers can find each
other on the ‘net.

And Planet ReUse tests all material to make sure it’s up to code. That
way the buyer
doesn’t end up with, say, eight tons of rotten planking. And Planet ReUse
arranges all the
shipping- trying to hook up sellers to nearby buyers. That saves money and
fuel.

By removing those basic barriers, Hardin says his buyers save about 20%
compared to
buying new. And Planet ReUse still makes a profit.

And it’s also a start to reducing those millions of tons of landfill
waste.

So, what kind of stuff does he sell on the site?

“How much time do you have? Steel, flooring…”

It turns out there’s money in just about everything you can salvage from
a building.

Harry Giles says that cash is the key to cutting down waste.

“If people see that it’s a lucrative business to actually salvage
materials, that will drive it
much faster than concern for the environment.”

And it’s not just buildings. Remember President Obama’s inauguration
stage? Well, that
got torn down, and Planet ReUse is trying to get the pieces to New Orleans.
They’ll be
used to rebuild houses damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

It’s just one more way for Planet ReUse to prove that you can do good, be
green, and
make a little money too.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

Related Links

Nyc to Turn Yellow Cabs Green?

  • NYC has new incentives to try to get more hybrid taxis, like this one, on the road (Source: Momos at Wikimedia Commons)

When big cities think about putting more fuel efficient, less polluting cars on the road, the first color that comes to mind isn’t green — it’s yellow. There are so many cabs on city streets, they seem like a good place to start environmental initiatives:

Transcript

When big cities think about putting more fuel efficient, less-polluting cars on the road, the first color that comes to mind isn’t green— it’s yellow. There are so many cabs on city streets, they seem like a good place to start environmental initiatives. In New York City, the mayor has a plan to replace conventional cabs with gas-electric hybrids. But not all taxi drivers are thrilled about the plan. Samara Freemark talked to some of them:

Ask a New York city cabbie what kind of car he drives, and chances are, this is what you’ll hear.

“Crown Vic.”

“Crown Vic.”

“Crown Vic.”

Cabbies love this car. It’s this big, solid, safe thing. It’s got a lot of leg room. It’s easy to repair.

But it burns a lot of gas. And that means a lot of pollution, especially when you realize that there are 13,000 cabs in New York City. All that pollution contributes to asthma, heart disease, and a mess of other health problems.

And that is why New York mayor Mike Bloomberg has it in for the Crown Victoria.

Bloomberg has a plan. He wants to use market incentives to encourage cab companies to buy hybrid.

“To turn NY City’s yellow cabs green.”

Cute slogan.

But Bloomberg isn’t messing around. Just ask the reporter who challenged the idea at a press conference.

“The taxi owners who oppose your plan say it’s deeply troubling that the city is…”

“I think it is more deeply troubling that they’re trying to kill our kids.”

Tough talk, right? But here’s how Bloomberg’s plan would actually work.

A lot of cabbies don’t own their own cars – they lease them from cab companies.

Bloomberg wants to lower the fee companies can charge drivers to take out Crown Victorias. So company owners would make less money on conventional cars.

And he wants to let cab companies charge drivers more to take out hybrids. Companies that chose those cars would make more money, giving them a reason to go green.

There’s something in it for the drivers, too. Although have to pay more to rent the hybrid cabs, they’d make up that money, and then some – a big chunk, actually – in gas savings. Bloomberg says hybrid cab drivers could save hundreds of dollars a year under his plan.

It sounded like a win-win-win situation: good for cabbies, good for cab companies, and good for the environment.

So I went out to the curb to ask some cabbies what they thought of the mayor’s idea.

“I wanted to ask you about hybrids.”

“Hybrid taxi? Yes.”

Sukhinder Singh hadn’t heard about Bloomberg’s plan, but he liked it.

“That’s not a bad idea. You’re not spending any extra money. 3, 4 dollars or 10 dollars extra, you know that later on when you go home you get it back because if you spend less on gas. It helps also for the pollution too. Lot of cabs around NYC, so all pollution.”

But a lot of cab drivers – especially veteran drivers – are not that enthusiastic. They are worried that hybrids aren’t safe. They are worried that hybrids are too small. They are worried about the time and money it takes to repair a hybrid. And most of all, cab drivers like Lal Singh are worried about giving up their Crown Victorias.

“Of course we wish not to pay more money for the gas. But I prefer to keep this poor Crown Victoria. This car makes us live. This Crown Victoria is a very big time strong car. These hybrids, they are not for taxi. They are very small, very unsafe, very unfit.”

So you get the idea – he doesn’t like hybrids.

And there’s one more problem with Bloomberg’s plan. It looked pretty good when it came out, when gas was 4 dollars a gallon. But prices now are about half that. That means cabbies don’t save that much money when they pick a hybrid. And so they have even less reason to give up their beloved Crown Vics.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

Related Links

Wildman Forages for Food in Central Park

  • (Photo by Scott Bauer, courtesy of the USDA)

Everyone needs to eat. But
not everyone gets their groceries
at the shopping market. Some
people find their food. They forage
in backyards, forests, even city parks.
It’s free, some of it tastes pretty
good, and as Samara Freemark reports,
sometimes it’s even legal:

Transcript

Everyone needs to eat. But
not everyone gets their groceries
at the shopping market. Some
people find their food. They forage
in backyards, forests, even city parks.
It’s free, some of it tastes pretty
good, and as Samara Freemark reports,
sometimes it’s even legal:

It’s a beautiful fall day in New York’s Central Park, and Steve Brill is looking for
something to eat.

“Everyone come over here, we have another species. Come on over here.”

Steve Brill – I’m sorry, Wildman Steve – leads foraging tours in parks all over the New
York area. And today he says he’s going to prove to me and about thirty others that the
park is full of things to eat.

“Try this.”

But the tour starts off a little rough. At first we find a lot more plants that can kill us than
feed us. Yellow violets will make you vomit. So will pokeberries. And, so will
pokeweed.

“Is this the worst thing you’ve ever smelled? The chemical is called buteric
acid. The name comes from rancid butter. This is a common element in
decaying flesh.”

Foraging isn’t for the faint of heart – or the uneducated. Wildman is very careful to tell
people to study up before they start snacking on the weeds in their backyards. But he says
once you learn to recognize edible plants, it’s pretty easy to tell them apart from the
poisonous ones.

“You have to know what the plant is. If you go into a supermarket, you have
to tell the difference between the apples and the cigarettes. The apples are
good for you, the cigarettes will kill you. Black walnut doesn’t look much
like poison hemlock. They all have their identifying characteristics.”

And it turns out there’s a lot of stuff out there that is edible. Chew some birch bark – it
tastes like wintergreen. Primose has a root like a radish. Garlic mustard tastes like, well,
garlic. Mixed with freshly cut grass. We didn’t really love that one. But the crab apples
were great.

“This is a crab apple tree. And the ripe crab apples, they have a texture of applesauce and
a flavor like tamarind. Tell me if this doesn’t taste like tamarind.”

“Just eat it like this?”

“Yeah, just spit out the seeds. These are really addictive. I like these.”

Ok, but before you start poking around in your neighborhood park, there’s one more thing
you should know. The thing about foraging is, it’s kind of quasi-legal. You’re not really
supposed to pick the plants in most parks. And Wildman Steve himself has gotten in
trouble for this. In 1986 Central Park officials busted him for foraging. They led him off
in handcuffs and charged him with criminal mischief. Wildman eventually got off and he
hadn’t had any run ins with the law since, well, until this year.

A week after I met Wildman Steve he was in court again, this time for harvesting
sassafras.

“Defacing the park. That was my crime. There’s no defacing at all. I didn’t damage or
destroy anything. This is just total nonsense.”

Wildman Steve faces fines of up to $2000. But that hasn’t stopped him from leading
tours. Why would he stop, he asks me. His tours can change how people see the world
around them. And that’s more important than a court date.

Take 12 year old Rory Langan. Rory told me his cousin has a black walnut tree in his
backyard. But it never occurred to him that the walnuts he found on the lawn had any
connection to the nuts you buy in the store.

“I actually never thought you could eat these. I thought it was poisonous. It’s pretty cool
though. It’s actually pretty good.”

He says he can’t wait to go home and show his cousin what to do with all those snacks in
the backyard.

For The Environment Report, this is Samara Freemark.

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Paddling Through Pollution

  • Dredgers, a group that gets together to canoe on the Gowanus, hope that if people see the state of the canal, they'll be inspired to help clean it up (Photo by Samara Freemark)

A group of New Yorkers is trying
to convince people to get out on one of
the most polluted bodies of water in the
country – literally out there, in canoes.
Samara Freemark reports that they hope once
people see the water up close, they’ll
realize just how dirty it is. And maybe
then they’ll help clean it up:

Transcript

A group of New Yorkers is trying to convince people to get out on one of the most
polluted bodies of water in the country- literally out there, in canoes. Samara
Freemark reports that they hope once people see the water up close, they’ll realize
just how dirty it is. And maybe then they’ll help clean it up:

(sound of water, paddling)

You wouldn’t believe the stuff people have pulled out of the Gowanus Canal.
Refrigerators. Bathtubs, rusted cars. A 5000 pound dead whale. A suitcase full of
human body parts. Sewage floods into the canal all the time. So you see everything
people flush down their toilets. The water itself is a sickly, opaque green.

And that’s just the stuff you can see. The canal used to be a dumping ground for the
factories that line it. And the sediment at the bottom is still full of a laundry list of
toxic chemicals: cyanide, mercury, lead, asbestos. Scientists found strains of
gonorrhea in a water sample just last year.

And I’m sitting in a canoe in the middle of it.

(water noise, “Ewww, oh, God, gross. It’s like a subway down here.”)

The Gowanus is a 2 mile long trough of murky water that flows into the New York
Harbor – though the word ‘flowing ‘ is a bit optimistic, since the water mostly just sits
there.

You wouldn’t think anyone would want to canoe in this kind of water – much less
see it as a good way to spend a lazy summer afternoon.

(Laughs.) “ My first day was like, hell no. I knew it was going to be nasty.” (Laughs.)

That’s Alex Kovaleski. She’s a Dredger, a member of a group that gets together to
canoe the Gowanus.

“But I’m always looking for an adventure or a way to see things from a new
perspective, so I went out. And then I started having dreams about it, and it was all
over.”

Kovaleski knew she had to do something.

So almost every summer weekend she and the Dredgers gather at a makeshift pier
and paddle up and down the canal.

They invite others along. Anyone who shows up can jump in a borrowed canoe and
take it for a paddle. They get a lot of first-timers, New Yorkers who have heard about
the trips and come for the novelty or to get a taste of nature in this most urban of
cities.

That’s why Stephen Kline and Beatrice Aranow came. This is their first time at a
Dredgers event. I speak with them on the pier, before they step into a canoe. They
say they came because they love nature, they love being out on the water, and they
want to see their city from a whole new perspective.

Stephen and Beatrice are in for a big surprise. Twenty minutes later, they had their
new perspective.

(talking over each other) “ There were like dead rats, turds. It was a lot worse than I
could have ever imagined. It wasn’t that mysterious. I actually thought I was going
to have a pleasant time going out but it was pretty intense. It was repulsive.”

This doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement of the Dredgers.

But Alex says Stephen and Beatrice’s reaction isn’t that bad – it’s actually kind of the
point.

“Part of it is just being out there with the poop and the trash, like, hah, here it is,
there’s no getting away from it. When you’re in it, you’re naturally longing to see it
restored.”

A week later I came back to the Gowanus canal for another Dredgers event. This
one’s a cleanup day, and volunteers are out with rubber gloves and bags, picking up
trash. It’s kind of a festive scene- there’s music and free pizza. And there’s a group of
high schoolers who came to spend the day canoeing and helping out.

(students talking about canoeing, cleaning)

Alex says those students are who the Dredgers really want to reach. The Gowanus
isn’t going to be clean anytime soon. But those kids are going to grow up, and they’re
going to be tax payers and voters. Soon they’re going to make the decisions that
decide the future of the canal.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

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Paying for Peak Power

  • Advanced, individual meters that calibrate energy prices for each apartment. (Photo by Samara Freemark)

Energy prices are rising, and people are looking
for ways to conserve power. But some rate payers are
saving money without actually cutting their energy use.
Instead they’re changing when they use power. Samara
Freemark reports:

Transcript

Energy prices are rising, and people are looking
for ways to conserve power. But some rate payers are
saving money without actually cutting their energy use.
Instead they’re changing when they use power. Samara
Freemark reports:

It’s Saturday morning, and Ellen and Peter Funk are doing laundry.

The Funks used to do chores when most people do – they would get home from work and
switch on their dishwasher, dryer, and computer. They never really paid attention to
what that meant for their electricity bill.

“I never thought about electricity before. Never, never, never. Except when I got the bill.
But, you didn’t have any control. Because you paid the same price whether you used it at 2 in
the morning or 2 in the afternoon.”

But a couple of years ago the Funks started paying for their electricity differently than the
rest of us. They live in one of only a handful of buildings in New York City that
participate in a Real Time Pricing program.

Real Time Pricing charges consumers a different rate depending on when they use power.

The Funks know that running their dishwasher or turning on a light will cost more at 5
pm than at 10 pm. That’s because they get a color-coded chart every month that breaks
down their energy prices by time block.

“The green here is low. And the green starts at 10 o’clock at night and goes through 1
o’clock the following afternoon. The yellow is medium from 2 to 5 every day. And then
Monday to Friday there’s a high period from 5 to 9. That means stop. I think that’s why
they used red.”

It’s the same concept that makes cell phone minutes cost more during the day. Power
costs more when more people want to use it.

Real Time Pricing can save consumers a lot of money. Peter Funk says his family saves
hundreds of dollars a year by just shifting when they use energy.

“It’s an ongoing savings. We do these things because they make sense economically. We
don’t do it because we’re virtuous, we don’t do it because we’re better than our neighbor.
We just, this is the way we buy electricity because it makes sense.”

Real Time Pricing programs shift around power demand, so fewer people use energy
during peak hours. A Department of Energy study earlier this year estimated that Real
Time Pricing programs could cut peak energy use by about 15%.

That could actually help regions improve air quality and conserve resources by
decommissioning old, polluting power plants. Here’s how.

Most areas have a network of power plants. Usually only a few of those plants – the
newest, cleanest ones – are in use. But when energy demand peaks, the older, less
efficient plants kick in. And those plants spew a lot of carbon dioxide and other
pollutants into the air.

“It’s really not the number of power of power plants, but the ones you have to turn on at
critical times.”

Jim Genarro is a New York City councilman. He also chairs the council’s Committee on
Environmental Protection.

He says the plants that kick in when demand peaks are the worst in the system.

“We have a lot of reserve capacity in the city, but these are the older, dirtier plants, and
when you run those at peak capacity, it really means a lot of pollution.”

And Genarro says those plants cost even when they’re not producing energy. The city
has to maintain them all the time so they can switch on when needed. That wastes energy
and resources. It also means there are power plants that are only used a few weeks, or
even days, a year.

If power companies could cut peak energy demand, rarely-used, polluting plants could
become totally unnecessary. And many could be shut down.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

Related Links