Time to Eat the Dog?

  • Meredith Mull loves dogs. She owns five and works as a groomer. She's not getting rid of any of her pets to help the environment. (Photo by Julie Grant)

We’ve all heard about the
environmental problems our
gas-guzzling cars and trucks
cause. But some researchers
say our vehicles aren’t the
biggest energy hogs. The biggest
energy users actually live
in our homes. Julie Grant
reports about the new book
‘Time To Eat The Dog?’ about
the wasteful ways of our pets:

Transcript

We’ve all heard about the
environmental problems our
gas-guzzling cars and trucks
cause. But some researchers
say our vehicles aren’t the
biggest energy hogs. The biggest
energy users actually live
in our homes. Julie Grant
reports about the new book
‘Time To Eat The Dog?’ about
the wasteful ways of our pets:

Robert Vale is sorry. He didn’t set out to incriminate Fido. He and his wife Brenda Vale specialize in sustainable living at Victoria University in New Zealand. And they just wanted to see how much of the world’s resources it takes to do things like eat, work, play sports, and own pets.

“The thing that most surprised us, and was the most unexpected was the scale of the impact of pets – which was really, really high.”

Vale says a big dog, like a German Shepard, actually has a bigger ecological footprint than an SUV.

To measure the ecological paw-print of pets, the Vales looked at the ingredients in common brands of dried pet foods. Based on recommended portion sizes, they calculated that a medium sized dog would consume more than 3 ounces of dried meat a day. To get that much dried meat, the Vales found, it takes nearly a pound of fresh meat. Add that up each day, and they concluded a medium sized dog eats about 360 pounds of meat a year!

Robert Vale says raising that meat – beef, lamb and chicken – has an environmental impact.

“And we did the calculation based on a dog eating chicken, which is a fairly low footprint meat, rather than say beef, which is a fairly high footprint meat. So, we tried to bias it in favor of the dog. But it still came out really big. It was a big surprise, really.”

Vale says the dog takes more than 2 and a half times more energy and resources than building and driving an SUV 6000 miles a year.

These numbers aren’t just coming from the Vales.
The New Scientist Magazine asked the Stockholm Environment Institute in England to calculate a dog’s paw-print, and the findings were almost exactly the same.

But none of this really computes with dog-lover Meredith Mull. She doesn’t understand why Robert Vale would even look into this.

“He must not have a pet. He must not know what it’s like to be loved by an animal and take care of it and have it give you nothing but respect and loyalty and love. He must not know what it feels like.”

The Vales don’t have any pets. They used to have cats and other animals. But when they died, Robert Vale says they felt they shouldn’t replace them and use more of the world’s resources just to give themselves a little more comfort.

“We are increasingly pushing up to a question of limits. What can we have, what, everything. I think to some extent, that’s why it’s unpopular. We’ve all been brought up to believe that not only can we have more of everything, but it’s our right to have more of everything.”

But some people think the Vales are barking up the wrong tree.

Chetana Mirle works on global warming issues at the Humane Society of the United States. She says instead of blaming dogs, people should look at what they, themselves are eating – and how that contributes to environmental problems.

“So to me, I felt like, ‘are you kidding me?’ Um, we’re worried about our pets, and what our pets are eating instead of what we’re eating, and what our consumption is about – which has such a huge disproportionately large impact on climate change and the environment in general.”

It’s not that the researchers want people to blame dogs and cats instead of themselves. They say they just want people to understand that each choice we make – right down to whether we have pets – has an environmental impact.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Study: Ethanol Sucking Up Water

  • It can take a lot of water to make ethanol. (Photo courtesy of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory)

The ethanol industry and the government
want more ethanol to be produced. They
say the homegrown biofuel is a good way
to move away from foreign oil. But a new
government report says many ethanol
refineries are putting a strain on another
natural resource – water. Mark Brush has
more:

Transcript

The ethanol industry and the government
want more ethanol to be produced. They
say the homegrown biofuel is a good way
to move away from foreign oil. But a new
government report says many ethanol
refineries are putting a strain on another
natural resource – water. Mark Brush has
more:

When you fuel up at the pump, chances are you’re putting ethanol into your car. Nearly half of the gasoline in the U.S. is blended with ethanol. And that’s likely to increase as they build more refineries.

But the Government Accountability Office says these ethanol refineries should consider local water resources before they build. It can take a lot of water to make ethanol.

Anu Mittel follows water resource issues for the Government Accountability Office:

“Many of them are being built in areas where they are relying on groundwater aquifers for their water supply and that could have a devastating effect on the local community that is also relying on that same water source for all of its other needs.”

Refineries built in those areas often rely on irrigated corn to make ethanol. So it means drawing millions of gallons of water just to make the ethanol at the refinery.

And millions of gallons more to grown the corn.

For The Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

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Keeping It Close to Home

  • Baylor Radtke bags up anemometers for the climbers to carry up the tower. The student crew placed three anemometers at different heights, along with two wind direction indicators. The data is recorded and analyzed to estimate average wind speed. Researcher Mike Mageau is getting detailed information on several towers up and down the North Shore of Lake Superior. (Photo by Stephanie Hemphill)

People concerned about energy are
getting more and more interested
in producing their own. Stephanie
Hemphill reports on an effort to
harvest the wind, and other natural
resources, to power a community:

Transcript

People concerned about energy are
getting more and more interested
in producing their own. Stephanie
Hemphill reports on an effort to
harvest the wind, and other natural
resources, to power a community:

(sound of climbing)

Three students are getting ready to climb a TV tower on Moose
Mountain on the north shore of Lake Superior. They’ll put up three
anemometers – little cups that spin in the wind and measure how fast
it’s blowing.

As they deploy their climbing equipment, their professor, Mike
Mageau, keeps asking if they have enough safety gear. He seems a
little anxious.

“Two of them are mountain climbers. So they seem to think this will
be no big deal.” (laughs)

Mageau teaches at the University of Minnesota Duluth. He’s been
measuring the wind on the high ridge that runs along the Lake
Superior shoreline.

“If you look at the statewide wind maps, they don’t give us credit for
having any wind along the North Shore of Lake Superior. But Grand
Portage was interested in wind, and they did some monitoring and we
helped them. This was years ago.”

That’s the Grand Portage Band of Ojibway Indians. Mageau got a
grant to install monitoring equipment up and down Lake Superior
shoreline.

“And we found 15 to 20 mile-an-hour average wind speeds at the
sites.”

That’s about the same as the best wind sites in Iowa, where huge
wind farms spread across the landscape.

Mageau doesn’t advocate a big wind farm here. Instead, the idea is
to put up one windmill for each community along the shore. One big
turbine could supply roughly half the electricity each town uses.

He knows some people are nervous about this. The North Shore of
Lake Superior is beautiful, and no one wants to ruin the scenery. It’s
also an important route for migrating birds. There’s concern that
birds could fly into the spinning blades. A separate group of
researchers is studying the migration routes.

“Are they flying close to the lake, along the peaks, just inland or
lakeside of the peak, where are they flying? So hopefully when we
pick a wind site we’ll stay away from the birds.”

If a wind tower is ever built here, the power would go to the town of
Grand Marais Minnesota, 20 miles north. And it would fit in with other
projects local folks are working on, to become more energy self-
sufficient.

Buck Benson owns the local hardware store. He says he and his
friends, George and Lonnie, hatched the idea while they were fishing.

“We were grumbling about all this stuff, ‘what can we really do.’ And,
when we came back home, George kept prodding us, ‘you know what
we talked about,’ so we formed a little group. And I think we’ve done
good work since we started this organization.”

The group has been researching various ideas about how to produce
energy locally. One team is pursuing that windmill idea we heard
about. Another project is a little closer to being built: they want to
burn the wood chips from a local sawmill in a central heating system
for the town.

(sound of buzzing)

The chips would come from Hedstrom Lumber mill. Howard
Hedstrom says the mill sells bark chipped off the trees. But he has to
haul it miles away to sell it.

“By the time you pay the freight, there’s not much left. And if it could
be used locally, why not use it locally and save all that transportation
cost.”

The city of Grand Marais has applied for a federal grant to pay for half
the cost of the boiler.

Communities across the country are looking to use what they’ve got
around them, instead of importing energy from a big coal or nuclear
plant miles away.

It helps keep money close to home, and it could be better for the
earth.

For The Environment Report, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.

Related Links

Environmental Review Halts Ferry

  • The Hawaii Superferry service has been suspended until an environmental impact study can be completed. (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

It’s been rough sailing for a Superferry that transports passengers and vehicles around the Hawaiian Islands. A lot of people who live in Hawaii, as well as businesses and tourists, depend on the Superferry. But there’s been a lot of concern about the ferry’s impact on the environment. Heidi Chang reports the Superferry is now suspending its service. The last voyage will take place today:

Transcript

It’s been rough sailing for a Superferry that transports passengers and vehicles around the Hawaiian Islands. A lot of people who live in Hawaii, as well as businesses and tourists, depend on the Superferry. But there’s been a lot of concern about the ferry’s impact on the environment. Heidi Chang reports the Superferry is now suspending its service. The last voyage will take place today:

Back in 2007, Hawaii legislators passed a special law that allowed the Superferry to sail between Oahu and Maui, before an environmental study was completed. The Hawaii Supreme Court has ruled that’s against the law.

Robert Harris is the director of the Sierra Club. It’s one of the groups that challenged the Superferry and the state in court. He’s worried about the impact it might have on traffic and that natural resources could be taken without better oversight.

“One of the first days of operation, some people on Oahu drove a truck over to Maui and loaded up on a bunch of river rocks, and were transporting it back to Oahu, and they were fined, I think significantly for that.”

Harris says the environmental review will also look at whether the ferry might be disturbing whales or transporting invasive species that could endanger native plants and animals.

For The Environment Report, I’m Heidi Chang.

Related Links

Repairing Backyard Rivers

  • The Conservation Resource Alliance works with property-owners to repair their rivers from problems such as erosion (Photo courtesy of the Conservation Resource Alliance)

American rivers have gone
through a lot in the last century.
Their twists and turns have been
turned into straight channels.
Their banks have been washed away.
And pollution is still flowing off
farm fields and city streets. Fixing
these rivers is a big challenge. A lot
of the land that rivers run through is
privately owned. So that means – to
fix a river, you often have to work with
landowners. Rebecca Williams has the story
of one group that thinks they’ve found
the secret to winning people’s trust:

Transcript

American rivers have gone
through a lot in the last century.
Their twists and turns have been
turned into straight channels.
Their banks have been washed away.
And pollution is still flowing off
farm fields and city streets. Fixing
these rivers is a big challenge. A lot
of the land that rivers run through is
privately owned. So that means – to
fix a river, you often have to work with
landowners. Rebecca Williams has the story
of one group that thinks they’ve found
the secret to winning people’s trust:

(bird sound)

Di Rau is the fourth generation of her family to farm this land in Northern
Michigan. Her grandpa homesteaded the land and set up a sawmill.

“It was the primary industry – I mean there was logging camps just
everywheres you turned.”

Back then the rivers were the only way to get those logs downstream. But
years of rolling logs down the bank into the river were causing serious
erosion. Huge trees were crashing into the water.

Rau says she didn’t know any of her family’s legacy until one day, when a
local group gave her a call. The more she learned about the problems, the
more she felt, well…

“Guilt! (laughs) Because of my ancestors. It’s like practicing medicine. It’s
always evolving and you don’t really know lots of times what you’re doing
wrong until another generation comes along and tells you this is what
you’ve created. Then it’s like okay let’s do something about it.”

So Rau let construction workers on her land. And now, ten years later, she
says it’s beautiful.

“Go down and just listen to creatures. You have deer come splashing
through, we have a bear around here, he likes to visit, couple bobcat.
There’s a lot of wildlife – it’s pretty cool.”

The woman who won Di Rau over is Kim Balke. She’s a biologist with the
group Conservation Resource Alliance. She says working with Di Rau was
pretty easy. But not everyone opens their doors so quickly.

There was the divorced couple who still owned land together, the fighting
brothers, the neighbors who nobody liked.

“Other people have said you know don’t go to their house they’ll greet you
with a shotgun!”

So far, no shotguns. Balke says she’s learned not to listen to what neighbors
say about each other. She approaches each person one by one, and talks to
them about what’s at stake. Her sales pitch? We’re just here to help – and
hey, we’ll pay most of the bill.

“You know a lot of our projects are erosion control, when banks are
completely falling into the stream – landowners, it’s not hard for them to
realize they’re losing property.”

But Balke says, still, you can’t just rush in and tell people what to do. She
says it can take months or even years to warm homeowners up to the
project.

That’s because fixing rivers is serious work. If a riverbank is eroding or an
old bridge is falling into the water, we’re talking about heavy construction
equipment. You have to be willing to have bulldozers and port-a-johns on
your lawn for a long time. And you might have to lose a tree.

“Things can look a little rough when you’re doing construction and some
people are a little worried about change.”

Balke says she just takes her time. She sends letters, sits down for coffee,
lets people think it over.

And it’s not just homeowners who Balke’s group needs to win over. There
are road commissions, tribes, sportfishers, and environmentalists. People
who sometimes just don’t trust each other.

Amy Beyer directs Conservation Resource Alliance. She says her group has
gotten all those people together.

“Yes they have been historically mortal enemies and that doesn’t mean all of
the baggage falls away but I can tell you it feels awfully good to go around
the circle when we complete a project and hear all the different voices and
how they’re celebrating that success.”

Beyer says this is not a quick and easy process – it can take years to get
people to actually find some little thing to agree on. But she says you can
fix a river without ever going to court.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

Usps Earth-Friendly Packaging

  • The Postal Service is launching a program to use more recycled and environmentally-friendly materials in its packaging. (photo by Lester Graham)

The US Postal Service says it has made its packaging materials more
environmentally friendly. Rebecca Williams reports the Post Office
says the packaging uses fewer resources and is more easily recyclable:

Transcript

The US Postal Service says it has made its packaging materials more
environmentally friendly. Rebecca Williams reports the Post Office
says the packaging uses fewer resources and is more easily recyclable:


The Postal Service delivers hundreds of millions of boxes and envelopes
a year. The Service worked with a consulting firm to redesign the
packages, down to the inks and adhesives.


Anita Bizzotto is the chief marketing officer for the Postal Service:


“It was actually quite a big undertaking – we worked with 10 vendors,
200 suppliers and we evaluated 1400 individual ingredients and all
component materials of packaging products.”


But some critics of the Postal Service say the agency still has a way
to go. They want the Postal Service to stop promoting advertising
mail… you might call it junk mail. All those flyers and catalogs are
the Service’s second largest source of revenue.


For the Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

Gao Reports Food Safety at High Risk

A government watchdog agency is adding to
its list of high-risk problems that the federal
government is failing to fix. Lester Graham reports
that keeping up with transportation demands and keeping
food safe are issues being added to the high-risk list:

Transcript

A government watchdog agency is adding to
its list of high-risk problems that the federal
government is failing to fix. Lester Graham reports
that keeping up with transportation demands and keeping
food safe are issues being added to the high-risk list:


Every two years the Government Accountability Office
identifies areas where the government is putting people or
tax money at risk.


This time the GAO identified three new high-risk areas.
First is financing transportation needs. Government
funding is eroding as traffic congestion is growing. The
second is protecting defense technologies from espionage.
The report says outmoded methods don’t work in a high-tech
world. The third high-risk area is food safety. The
report says the current fragmented federal system causes
inconsistent oversight, ineffective coordination and
inefficient use of resources.


The GAO says the government needs a better system to detect
and respond to food problems, such as the recent E. coli
bacteria contamination of spinach. Congress and the White
House pay attention to the GAO’s high-risk report, although
solutions to the problems often take years to develop.


For the Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.

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City Debates Use of Urban Park

Big city residents expect a lot out of urban parks. They want open space, things to do there, and literally, a place to breathe. But if the park’s beautiful, it’s bound to attract out of town visitors, who might make it crowded. Shawn Allee meets one man who wants to expand the welcome mat in his park:

Transcript

Big city residents expect a lot out of urban parks. They want open space, things to do
there, and literally, a place to breathe. But if the park’s beautiful, it’s bound to attract out
of town visitors, who might make it crowded. Shawn Allee meets one man who wants to
expand the welcome mat in his park:


Grade-schoolers are busy romping around Chicago’s Grant Park. At first blush,
it doesn’t seem odd at all, but the sight surprises Bob O’Neill, a local parks advocate:


“When you think of a park, a lot of times you do think of children. Grant Park actually is
underrepresented in that demographic.”


But O’Neill wants to change all that and get more children in the park. One way would
be to bring one of the city’s biggest tourist attractions here. The Chicago Children’s
Museum lures half a million children each year, but its success has caused growing pains.
It’s outgrown its space on an isolated, tourist trap on Chicago’s lakefront and O’Neill
wants the museum’s kids in Grant Park.


“As they grow up their memories will be having gone to, and interacted with, and learned
from a premier children’s museum in Chicago’s front yard, surrounded by the high rises,
and using the outdoor space. I think it’s wonderful.”


O’Neill sees it like this: city high rises are an efficient use of land, but museum visitors
from the suburbs never see that. So, if the museum’s in the park, maybe kids will fondly
remember the urban landscape, but when he pitches this idea of moving the Children’s
Museum:


“You might think that a toxic waste dump was proposed for Grant Park on its north end,
not a children’s museum.”


And what’s got him stumped most is who opposes it, namely, local parents.
Vicky Apostolis is one of them. She’s bringing her daughter to a field house for an art
lesson:


(Daughter) “I made a flower…”


Apostolis says, when her neighbors got wind of the museum’s move, they sprung into
action. Before long, they’d gotten the local alderman and civic groups to oppose the plan.


For Apostolis, this park’s enormity is misleading. Developers are building more high
rises here, and each one will house hundreds of additional kids. She says, if you add the
museum’s visitors, the neighborhood will be awash in children and the park will be
overcrowded. Apostolis says people are drawn by the quality of life here, and this quiet
stretch of park is part of it:


“Everyone who has a family who has children, they know the value of going to a safe,
secure location that we can take our children, we can trust the people around there.
And there’s not a lot of car traffic either, that’s safe to get to.”


Apostolis says, if half a million annual visitors arrive, she and her daughter might get
squeezed out:


“We have tourist attractions all over the city of Chicago, which are perfect – we love
tourists. However, we also want our neighborhoods, too.”


But parents groups aren’t the only ones watching this fight. Preservationists and urban
planners are taking note, too. Land-use expert John Crompton says Chicago should take
a hard look at the proposal:


“If these things are good things, and they obviously are, then they should find their own
niche in the world and not take it from parks.”


Crompton says green space is always on the defensive in public parks. There’s pressure
to fill it with something, say, a sports venue or, maybe, a museum:


“They see it as inexpensive land, and since it’s
leisure, we’ll put it there. I think that’s a totally wrong mindset. This is very expensive
land, it’s a very scarce and precious resource downtown, and in a hundred year’s time, what will
people think of us giving this up?”


Bob O’Neill is confident no one has to give up anything. After all, the museum would be
underground. But the parents fear out-of-town kids would still crowd the park, especially
in the summer. Again, O’Neill says it’s worth a try:


“The more that we can have children experience a downtown urban environment and all
the good and even some of the bad that goes with that, the better.”


On the other hand, the park’s high rise neighbors say they’re already living the urban good
life and they resent sacrificing today’s urban garden for a more crowded one in the future.


For the Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Supreme Court to Hear Beach Walking Case?

Shoreline property owners are asking the nation’s highest court to reverse a ruling that says the public has the right to walk along the beaches of the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Rick Pluta reports:

Transcript

Shoreline property owners are asking the nation’s highest court to
reverse a ruling that says the public has the right to walk along the
beaches of the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Rick
Pluta reports:


The property owners are challenging a Michigan Supreme Court
decision. The state court held that the public owns the Great Lakes
beaches from the water to the high water mark. The case was filed by a
woman who was seeking the right to walk along the shoreline of Lake
Huron.


David Powers is an attorney with the property owners group Save Our
Shoreline. He says the Michigan decision rolled back property owners’
rights…


“And so, if the state has taken private property in violation of the
Constitution, the U.S. Supreme Court should be very concerned about
that.”


The other side in the case says the Great Lakes shoreline is such a unique
resource that no one person should be allowed to claim exclusive rights
to it.


There’s no word on when the Supreme Court might make a decision on
taking the case. Lakeshore property rights are being litigated in other
Great Lakes states and whatever the Supreme Court decides to do could
have an effect on those cases.


For the GLRC, this is Rick Pluta.

Related Links

Great Lakes Town Hall Goes Online

A "town hall" type forum on Great Lakes issues is now as
close as your nearest computer. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach reports:

Transcript

A “town hall” type forum on Great Lakes issues is now as
close as your nearest computer. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Chuck Quirmbach reports:


There are forty-two million people in the Great Lakes region and it’s
a little hard getting them all in the same room, but now, you can go to
a computer website for discussions about Great Lakes issues, and to
share your favorite Lakes experience.


The Wisconsin-based Biodiversity Project has set up the interactive site,
great lakes town hall dot org. Jeffery Potter is a spokesperson
for the Project.


“When it came to the Great Lakes Town Hall, we wanted to create a
resource where people across the region could come together, share
their ideas in an inclusive environment, and really talk about and get
more engaged in issues that are vital to protect the Great Lakes as a
resource for all of us.”


Potter says the website features a weekly guest expert, and there’s
a moderator on duty. Anyone can look at the site, but you’ll be asked
to register in order to make comments.


For the GLRC, I’m Chuck Quirmbach.

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