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.
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.
Most people think renewable energy is a good idea. It’s better
than burning fossil fuel to create electricity. But “green energy”
alternatives
can be controversial. Windmill farms are springing up all across the
nation.
Some people think the windmills are eyesores. But others say windmill farms
can help preserve the agricultural landscape by supplementing the income of
farmers. In the second of a two-part series on wind energy, the Great Lakes
Radio Consortium’s Linda Stephan reports:
Transcript
Most people think renewable energy is a good idea. It’s better than burning fossil
fuel to create
electricity. But “green energy” alternatives can be controversial. Windmill farms
are springing
up all across the nation. Some people think the windmills are eyesores. But others
say windmill
farms can help preserve the agricultural landscape by supplementing the income of
farmers.
The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Linda Stephan reports:
For 30 years, Matt Mauer raised crops and livestock on his farm about 10 miles from
the Lake
Michigan shoreline. Today, he’s in his backyard looking at the land now farmed by
his daughter
and son-in-law. Standing there, he feels a crop they’re not harvesting.
“The good Lord makes it windy all the time for us, so let’s use it, you know.
Because I’m like
everybody else. When I get up in the morning, I want lights.”
Mauer’s hoping to put four wind turbines on his family’s farm near Ludington,
Michigan. That
would power about 24-hundred homes. Nearby, a renewable energy company’s working with
other farmers to build a hundred turbines in the area. Mauer says many of his
neighbors want in
on the deal because they think wind energy could help save their farms.
“It’s hard to make a living just farming right now. And I consider the wind one of
the crops that
we could harvest. It will help keep farmers on the land. Like if, in this place, if
we could get
seven–thousand dollars a year, six-thousand dollars a year for four of them, that’d
make it a hell
of a lot easier to keep the people here and farm.”
The state government’s backing similar projects. It’s training financial advisors
to show farmers
how they can turn a profit with windmills.
But not everyone likes the idea. Some people who live in the area around the
planned windmills
say they’re worried the towers would destroy the region’s charm. That’s linked to
property values
and to tourism. And they don’t like the size of the proposed windmills. Each one
would be four-
hundred feet tall. The blades would have a diameter nearly as long as a football
field.
It’s a story that’s heard in many places. Cape Cod, Massachusetts, the prairies of
Illinois, and
around the Great Lakes. For example, a Michigan couple who wanted large-scale
turbines on
their property ended up losing a court-battle against local government that opposed
the plan. And
two turbines already in place in Mackinaw City – between Lake Michigan and Lake
Huron –
have some unhappy neighbors as well.
Thomas and Virginia Alexander’s home is about 15-hundred feet away from the windmills.
They’re in their eighties and they both wear hearing aids… but even without them,
they say the
windmills are loud…
Tom Alexander: “There’s things about it we don’t appreciate, at times the noise –
not always –
depending upon the wind and the direction.
Virginia Alexander: “Yesterday. Very noisy yesterday. The wind was high and they,
you could
really hear them.”
Tom Alexander: “Just a continual swish, swish, swish, swish, swish.”
Windmill developers say the sound is no louder than normal speech. But this noise is
different. It
goes beyond the frequencies of normal speech. The sound can travel long distances
through both
the ground and the air. They keep Virginia Alexander awake some nights.
Tom and Virginia Alexander’s son Kelly lives next door with his family. He calls
himself a
windmill victim. He has this advice for others:
“Don’t let them go in your backyard. There are places they can go. You don’t just
put those in
somebody’s backyard. I don’t think it’s right.”
A lot of people agree with the Alexanders. Even wind energy boosters concede that
location is
key to successful projects. David Johnson heads up the program for the state of
Michigan that’s
encouraging farmers to allow windmills on their land. He says turbines should be
constructed
where there’s lots of wind and few neighbors. But he says when people say ‘no’ to
windmills,
they should consider the alternative.
“So, does that mean that you should build another big coal-fired plant? Is that the
preferable way
of doing it with the global warming impacts and the mercury pollution and so on that
go with
that? Is that the choice that the public wants to make?
States across the nation are struggling to find the right balance between clean
energy and the
beauty of an uncluttered landscape. Few regulations are in place right now. More
and more,
communities will be facing the decision of whether clean energy and keeping farmers
on the land
is worth the price of adding wind turbines to the scenery.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Linda Stephan.
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)