Putting Brakes on Brake Pad Material

  • A new Washington state law bans heavy metals in brakes and requires phasing out copper that's contributing to water pollution and harming fish. (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)

States are considering laws to phase out a material used in brake pads on cars and trucks. Lester Graham reports… it’s contributing to water pollution that’s affecting fish.

Transcript

States are considering laws to phase out a material used in brake pads on cars and trucks. Lester Graham reports… it’s contributing to water pollution that’s affecting fish.

There’s a fair amount of copper in brake pads. Every time you put on the brakes… some of brake pad and the copper in it is worn off. It ends up on the pavement and eventually is washed into a stream or lake. That’s been causing some concern in the state of Washington where too much copper is hurting the salmon. A new state law bans heavy metals in brakes and requires phasing out copper.
Curt Augustine is with the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. He says they worked with lawmakers and environmentalists to come up with the plan. Other states might adopt it.

“Bills have been introduced in California and Rhode Island and likely similar bills will end up in some of the Great Lakes and Chesapeake Bay states.”

The Washington law calls for brakes to contain no more than five percent copper by 2021 and then consider using even less in later years.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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Counting the Fish in the Sea

  • Researchers at the Census for Marine Life have spent the past decade counting fish. (Photo courtesy of NOAA)

You’ve heard there are lots
of fish in the sea, but nobody
knows exactly how many. That’s
what a project has been trying
to find out. Samara Freemark reports the results
will be out soon:

Transcript

You’ve heard there are lots
of fish in the sea, but nobody
knows exactly how many. That’s
what a project has been trying
to find out. Samara Freemark reports the results
will be out soon:

Researchers at the Census for Marine Life have spent the past decade counting fish. They want to get as accurate a count as possible of how many animals are in the sea.

The project is based at the University of Rhode Island, but 2000 scientists around the world are collaborating.

Darlene Crist works with the Marine Census. She says the project used a huge range of tools to sample fish populations: electronic tags, robots, cameras– as well as some pretty unconventional research methods.

“We’ve used old tax records, ship logs, even restaurant menus.”

Now Crist say they’re done counting and they’re starting to crunch numbers.

Researchers say the data will serve as the first baseline measure of life in the ocean. They hope it will help policymakers better manage the fish stocks that remain.

Full results will be available this fall.


For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

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Keeping an Eye on Fish Farming

  • Right now, there are no federal laws regulating offshore fish farming. (Photo by Randolph Fermer, courtesy of the National Biological Information Infrastructure)

Proposed legislation would put
in place the most sweeping
regulations yet on ocean
aquaculture – or offshore fish
farming. Samara Freemark tells us why people
think regulations matter:

Transcript

Proposed legislation would put
in place the most sweeping
regulations yet on ocean
aquaculture – or offshore fish
farming. Samara Freemark tells us why people
think regulations matter:

Critics of aquaculture say the practice can spread disease, introduce invasive species, and pollute the environment.
The Ocean Conservancy’s George Leonard says that’s a problem.

“In the absence of an overarching framework, aquaculture continues to move forward kind of in fits and starts here in the US. And we think if it proceeds that way, many of the environmental concerns will kind of fall through the cracks.”

Legislation introduced last week in Congress could change that. The bill would require fish farmers to apply for federal permits before setting up shop. Those permits would set standards to protect ocean ecosystems.

The bill would also provide money to research how aquaculture is impacting the environment.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

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Heat Island Science

  • A city like Las Vegas is actually cooler than the desert, because of all the lawns and trees inside the city. And a city like Chicago is hotter than the tree-lined suburbs surrounding it. (Photo courtesy of NASA)

Not all heat island effects are
the same. But, Rebecca Williams
reports, NASA scientists have
found there’s one thing all cities
can do to cool things down:

Transcript

Not all heat island effects are
the same. But, Rebecca Williams
reports, NASA scientists have
found there’s one thing all cities
can do to cool things down:

The NASA scientists found the heat island effect is much less intense in hot, dry parts of the country.

A city like Las Vegas is actually cooler than the desert, because of all the lawns and trees inside the city. And a city like Chicago is hotter than the tree-lined suburbs surrounding it.

It’s all about trees. Shady trees cool things down.

Lahouari Bounoua is one of the researchers.

“One of the most simple and natural ways of mitigating the excess heat is to plant trees within the cities.”

He says the key is to make sure the trees you plant are well adapted to the region, so you don’t end up wasting water. He says that’ll be even more important as the climate continues to change.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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Climate Change and Caribou

  • Some want the government to put caribou on the endangered species list. (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)

Santa’s reindeer are not doing
so well. Rebecca Williams reports
one group wants to get them on
the endangered species list:

Transcript

Santa’s reindeer are not doing
so well. Rebecca Williams reports
one group wants to get them on
the endangered species list:

Caribou, also known as reindeer, are declining all over the globe. The group International Fund for Animal Welfare says two subspecies of caribou are in especially bad shape.

Nathan Herschler is with the group. He says these caribou live in the Arctic. And climate change is making their lives miserable.

“Instead of soft snow that’s falling on the ground, we’re getting freezing rain. That’s encasing the land in ice and the caribou are literally starving to death.”

Herschler’s group wants the US government to put the caribou on the endangered species list. Even though the caribou live in Canada, he says the listing would help by banning the import of caribou or caribou meat into the US.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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Recording Elephant Conversations

  • Elephants talk amongst themselves below levels we can hear. (Photo courtesy of the Elephant Listening Project in Dzanga National Park)

Biologists are always trying to
get a good count of the animals
they’re studying. You wouldn’t
think it’d be that hard to find
an elephant for a count, but even
some of the largest animals are
difficult to count in the wild.
So researchers are now trying new
methods. Emma Jacobs reports on
a Cornell University project which
is using audio recordings to learn
more about elephants:

Transcript

Biologists are always trying to
get a good count of the animals
they’re studying. You wouldn’t
think it’d be that hard to find
an elephant for a count, but even
some of the largest animals are
difficult to count in the wild.
So researchers are now trying new
methods. Emma Jacobs reports on
a Cornell University project which
is using audio recordings to learn
more about elephants:

Mya Thompsons sits down in her lab and pulls up a set of recordings on her computer. She helped tape these sounds for the Elephant Listening Project in Dzanga National Park in the Central African Republic. She plays a recording made in the forest, late at night.

(sounds of the forest at night)

“You heard some insects, you heard some sort of the din of a nighttime forest.”

But you probably don’t hear elephants.

Next, Thompson takes the same sound and speeds it up on her computer. Suddenly, you can hear something else.
“This is 4-times normal speed.”

(sound of forest at night, but with rumbles)

Elephants make those low rumbles. When she speeds up the playback, they rise in pitch. It’s kinda of like the voices of Alvin and the Chipmunks.

It turns out elephants talk among themselves below levels we can hear. Biologist Kaity Paine discovered these sounds in the 1980s. She realized that because elephant rumbles are so low, they travel long distances. This should make them useful to track elephants over wide forests, but Thompson remembers that in the field, it was hard to see how.


“We’re collecting all this information and we wanted to know what the calls were like, but because we can’t hear them, we were almost totally in the dark about what was going on.”

When she got back to New York, Thompson and the rest of the research team started combing through all the audio and video collected in Central Africa for elephant calls. It took thousands of hours.

But with time, they could nail down a pattern. The key was a relationship between the audio recordings and the video of elephants they had made in one clearing popular with elephants.

“This is a communication system. There are a lot of other variables other than, ‘Hi I’m here,’ but, overall, the more calling, the more elephants and that was good news for us.”

Now Thompson can monitor elephants over huge areas of this dense forest using these audio recordings.

In the field, the team hoists their recorders into trees attached to truck batteries. They can stay up there a long time, which has real advantages.

“Usually, when you take a survey, you go, you count, and you leave. For acoustics, we’re able to have this recorder up continuously without all this human effort and make repeated estimates over longer periods of time.”

With enough information, Thompson can estimate at the numbers of elephants in a forest with twice the precision she could have before.

Marcella Kelly teaches wildlife field techniques at Virginia Tech. She says, when you can track animal numbers closely, you can see how they respond to changes in their environment. This is a must for conservation.

“We really need effective ways to estimate population size, especially because decisions are made on management based on what those numbers tell us, over time.”

The Elephant Listening Project recently started monitoring elephants in the African nation of Gabon.


“The authorities had allowed gas exploration to see if there’s any petroleum reserves there, and so our project was asked to monitor the forest for elephant calls before, during, and after this exploration.”

Thompson can already say that things have changed. Elephants have started coming out more at night than during the day to avoid people. In the end, hopefully she’ll be able to see just how disruptive changes have been and to pinpoint the human activities causing problems.

She also wants to protect other animals making noise in the forest, and outside it.

“We’re really hoping that these methods that we’ve developed, will be developed for not only forest elephants but for other species that are hard to survey that we really need to know more about before we can protect them.”

For right now though, Thompson is still in her lab, listening for elephants.

For The Environment Report, I’m Emma Jacob

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Interview: Climate Affecting Fish and Game

  • The National Wildlife Federation is concerned about the nation's fish and game species being impacted by climate change. (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)

People are beginning to notice the effects
of climate change – especially people who
get out in nature a lot. Hunters and anglers
with the National Wildlife Federation recently
released a list of some of the game and fish
species that are at risk due to climate change.
Lester Graham talked with one of the members
of the group:

Transcript

People are beginning to notice the effects
of climate change – especially people who
get out in nature a lot. Hunters and anglers
with the National Wildlife Federation recently
released a list of some of the game and fish
species that are at risk due to climate change.
Lester Graham talked with one of the members
of the group:

Lester Graham: Kathleen Law in an angler, a member of the National Wildlife Federation, a former member of the Michigan Legislature, and a retired research scientist. First, what kind of game and fish, besides polar bears and penguins, are at risk because of climate change?

Kathleen Law: Well, everything that nests in the water or tries to have a fishery involved. It is affecting our national and our local bird, deer, the population, the habitat.

Graham: I guess that’s the question, though – how do we know that it’s not something else at work? How do we know that it’s climate change? And, of course, the skeptics will say, ‘how do we know it’s man-caused changes to the climate?’

Law: Well, we can continue being in a state of denial, and wonder where everything went, or we can get ahead. It’s not important to me who’s causing it, it’s, ‘what can I do to help?’

Graham: The US House has passed climate change legislation, the Senate is debating a version. Will the policies in those bills be enough to save some of these fish and game species you’re worried about?

Law: It’ll give us a chance. Without a concerted, willful effort, we have a very limited chance. So, there are things that we can do, that we must do, as a people who want diversity, who want to fish, who want to eat – I like venison. So what do we do to protect that resource and, and in a positive way? Which is the education and resource restoration, I think, is probably the best way to start.

Graham: Opponents of climate change legislation worry a cap-and-trade carbon reduction scheme will cost the economy too much. They don’t want the US to be put at a competitive disadvantage. Will the concerns of hunters and fishers sway any members of Congress to actually support climate legislation, if they believe it’s a jobs killer?

Law: Well, it will certainly be a consideration. The hunters and fishing folk are your constituents, they’re your neighbors, they’re your family. You can look at that, ‘it’s a job killer.’ So is climate disruption a job killer. So, how do we create new jobs? Well let’s get people out planting marsh grass. Let’s, you know, something positive. Something that people can do that makes a difference for them and their neighborhood and their community. That’s positive. That’s hope. We gotta give them hope.

Graham: What is the National Wildlife Federation doing in Washington to affect the debate about climate change?

Law: Well, they have flown in a large contingent of just people who are hunters and fishers and who have represented people in the constituencies to come in and talk to the Senators. Our hunters and fishing people – consider them sentinels. They’re out there in November, hunting ducks. They’re out in April, standing in the water, fishing. These are sentinel people, and to pay attention to what they’re saying is very important, vital, and that’s what we did in Washington DC.

Graham: Kathleen Law is a retired research scientist, a former member of the Michigan legislature, and working with the National Wildlife Federation as part of an effort to save fish and game species the group says is at risk because of climate change. Thanks very much.

Law: Thank you.

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A Bee by Any Other Name

  • Experts say beekeeping is an important line of defense against killer bees. (Photo by Scott Bauer, courtesy of the USDA)

Africanized Honeybees – also known
as killer bees – are moving farther
north. The hybridized bees escaped
from a lab in Brazil in the 1950s.
Mark Brush reports:

Transcript

Africanized Honeybees – also known
as killer bees – are moving farther
north. The hybridized bees escaped
from a lab in Brazil in the 1950s.
Mark Brush reports:

These bees have established themselves in a number of states throughout the southern U.S. They spread naturally and they are spread through trade. The bees can hide out in shipping containers. One swarm was found inside the engine compartment of a new car.

Now, despite the nick name “killer bee” – experts say, yes they’ll defend their nest with more gusto – but the killer bee name is just hype.

Gloria DeGrandi-Hoffman is a bee expert with the USDA. She says it’s likely that the bees will keep spreading – but beekeeping is an important line of defense against Africanized honeybees.

“You know, beekeepers, whether they’re small or large, are really the buffer between African bees and the public, because they keep pure European bees.”

DeGrandi-Hoffman says – Africanized or not – bees are still a critical part of our food system because they pollinate so many of our food crops.

For the Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

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The Bee Man of Brooklyn

  • John Howe keeps bees on the roof of his Brooklyn townhouse. (Photo by Samara Freemark)

Beekeeping is a growing hobby – there
are even a couple of hives on the White
House lawn. And beekeeping is even getting
popular in America’s largest, most urban
city – New York. The only problem is,
beekeeping is actually illegal in New York.
Samara Freemark went to find
out why some New Yorkers are doing it anyway:

Transcript

Beekeeping is a growing hobby – there
are even a couple of hives on the White
House lawn. And beekeeping is even getting
popular in America’s largest, most urban
city – New York. The only problem is,
beekeeping is actually illegal in New York.
Samara Freemark went to find
out why some New Yorkers are doing it anyway:

When I first got in touch with the Gotham City Honey Co-op and told them I wanted to do a story on beekeeping in New York, they were a little nervous about talking with me. They were worried about a New York City health code that makes urban beekeeping illegal. The city’s worried about people getting stung. The Honey Co-op didn’t want to blow anyone’s cover, but eventually they did hook me up with John Howe.

Howe keeps bees on the roof of his Brooklyn townhouse – which means every day – several times a day, actually – he climbs four flights of stairs and one shaky ladder to get up to his hives.

“I gotta go up the ladder. I’m getting tired of it.”

(sound of roof opening)

“Turned out to be a nice day.”

Howe keeps two hives. He says there could be up to 150,000 bees in them.

“You can see them all going in and out. Lot of bees, yeah.”

Honey bees can fly up to three miles from their hives, looking for flowers to pollinate. Howe’s bees probably buzz by thousands of his neighbors every day. I asked him if anyone ever complained about them or called authorities to turn him in for illegal beekeeping. Howe said his neighbors are actually pretty cool with the bees.

“I give them free honey, so that helps. People just raise their eyebrow or shrug and say, ‘that’s neat.’ They call me bee man. I walk down the street, they say, ‘hey bee man, you got any honey?’”

Across town, Roger Repahl raises honeybees in the garden of a church in the South Bronx. He started beekeeping ten years ago, when local gardeners noticed that their vegetables weren’t getting pollinated.

“The community gardeners were complaining that they were getting a lot of flowers but very little fruit. So Greenthumb – that’s the community gardening wing of the parks department – Greenthumb said that’s because you don’t have enough pollinators in the South Bronx.”

So Repahl trucked some hives down from Vermont, and he says the bees pretty much solved the neighborhood’s pollination problem.

Now, this is the kind of story that gets beekeepers like John Howe pretty steamed up about New York’s anti-beekeeping laws. Like a lot of cities, New York is doing just about everything it can to encourage community gardening. But to grow your own food, you need insects to pollinate your plants. John Howe says banning honeybees is like banning local food.

“The best reason for making bees legal is that they pollinate so many plants. The more bees that we can raise and keep, the more chance we have of having food.”

It’s not quite that clear cut. At least, that’s what James Danoff Burg says. He studies insects at Columbia University. He says there are native bugs that do plenty of pollinating. Beetles, for example, and other kinds of bees like honeybees. And those native species are being driven out by honey bees, which are originally from Europe.

“I think it’s a mixed bag. They have benefits to people, for certain. And from a human perspective, if all you’re concerned about is that your plants get pollinated and you can get the fruits that come from that, it’s a pure positive bag. The negative part of that mixed bag comes when you start to think about native biodiversity.”

But Danoff Burg says preserving native biodiversity maybe doesn’t matter so much in a place like New York. The city’s ecosystem has already been changed so much, and there are other, more wild places where native insects can thrive.

So even though NY is America’s biggest city, it might also be the best place in the country to raise bees. As long as you keep them out of sight of the law.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

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Furry Critters and Chanel No.5

  • Jeff Wilson and Dan Haskell are trapping pine martens in Minnesota for relocation to northern Wisconsin. (Photo by Barbara Jean Johnson)

There are places where some wildlife
that once thrived, are now gone. In
Wisconsin, the Pine Marten has been
wiped out. The shy animal looks a bit
like a ferret. Pine Martens are members
of the weasel family. Barbara Jean Johnson
went out with researchers to see how
they’re bringing Pine Martens back to
northern Wisconsin:

Transcript

There are places where some wildlife
that once thrived, are now gone. In
Wisconsin, the Pine Marten has been
wiped out. The shy animal looks a bit
like a ferret. Pine Martens are members
of the weasel family. Barbara Jean Johnson
went out with researchers to see how
they’re bringing Pine Martens back to
northern Wisconsin:

You probably have never seen a pine marten. But I’m spending the day with two guys who spend weeks at a time looking for them. They work for the Wisconsin DNR. We’re actually in a county in northern Minnesota. We’re crammed into a Ford Ranger pickup, driving on the back roads to check trap lines. We’re looking for Pine Martens in Minnesota that will be released in northern Wisconsin.

Pine Marten’s were wiped out or extirpated in Wisconsin over the last hundred years. The Marten’s were in trouble once European settlers moved in. A combination of forest fires reduced animal habitat. Already too many of the animals were trapped for their pelts. But then the Great Depression hit.

“Trapping was a valuable commodity. Fur prices were high and many farmers and farm boys feed their families off their trap lines, and given that there’re weren’t many regulations, or limited regulations, and the high value, I don’t doubt that they over harvested, as well.”

That’s Jeff Wilson. He’s on the frontlines of this varmint capture mission. He and his partner Dan Haskell are seeking to right some of the past wrongs. Dan and Jeff are fun guys. They love the wilderness and they like to chat. The only downside to our little expedition is the smell that permeates the cab. I didn’t say anything, but it smells like skunk.

“Now you do admit, you do smell a little skunk essence in here, do you not? We do our best you know. we shower everyday, but we have been getting a few looks at the grocery stores and the places we’ve been shopping in your Grand Marais community. We hope we haven’t offended anybody.”

These guys us a skunk scent to lure Pine Martens to live-traps. They love the scent. And, they’re not the only ones. Apparently this skunk compound is used in the famous French perfume Chanel No. 5. Some of their colleagues have actually used the perfume as a lure when trapping lynx in Canada.

“However, Chanel No. 5 is like $90 an ounce. (laughs) So we don’t use it.”

Dan and Jeff don’t want just any kind of marten. They already have all the males they need. They want females. As we make our way from trap to trap we catch male after male – seriously, five males – and no females.

“My wife says it’s because they are smarter, but I think it’s because they have a much smaller home range – maybe a half a mile to a mile. In contrast, males cover around two to three miles. You’re just going to get more males. If you set a trap line and spread it out, there’s going to be about two or three times more possibility of a male capture than a female capture.”

(sound of animal screaming)

Catch six, and we’re all hoping it’s a girl. But they have to check to make sure. Marten’s may be small, but they’re certainly not known for being cuddly.

Jeff coaxes the marten head-first into the corner of a laundry bag. He puts a tight hold on its head while Dan peels back the bag to check the genitalia. Once they know they’ve captured a female, they sedate her and run through a series of basic tests to collect data. They also give each animal they take home a name.

“This one is obviously going to be called ‘Barbara’ after you, our colleague. (laughter) You’re a breath of fresh air – literally. (laughter)”

Yeah, they’re a little lonely out in the field. Not a lot of people spend much time with them – smelling a little like skunk and all. And they’re away from home for extended periods of time. But, all in all, they both enjoy what they do and find real meaning in it.

“We can restore what we’ve mismanaged in the past and it’s inspirational for me to see there’s no doubt there’s a niche for this animal there. This animal is a really important part of biological diversity and I’m really happy I can participate in that.” For The Environment Report, I’m Barbara Jean Johnson.

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