Biodiesel Gets Lost in the Shuffle

  • Biodiesel is an alternative fuel that isn't getting much love from Congress. (Photo by Lester Graham)

Biofuels made from corn and soybeans have been bi-partisan political favorites in Washington for years, but Shawn Allee reports, one biofuel’s in political trouble right now:

Transcript

Biofuels made from corn and soybeans have been bi-partisan political favorites in Washington for years, but Shawn Allee reports, one biofuel’s in political trouble right now.

Biodiesel’s made from soybean oil.
It usually gets a one-dollar per gallon federal tax credit, but that expired in December.
Since then, biodiesel makers have been laying off workers.
Alan Yoder manages Iowa Renewable Energy.
Yoder says he’s puzzled Congress has not renewed the biodiesel tax credit especially since other alternative energy sources still get help:

“A lot of alternative fuel projects they’re talking about are really still in the research stage. Biodiesel is on main street. It’s working and there’s production, there’s people using it, people employed. This is big stuff.”

A biodiesel trade group claims the industry’s laid off 22,000 workers.

Congressional aides say there’s support for renewing the biodiesel tax credit, but it got lost in the shuffle during debates on health care and new stimulus spending.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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Squeezing More Oil Out of Soybeans

  • Recently, scientists completed a big-picture map of soy's basic genetic make-up. (Photo courtesy of the USDA)

Bio-diesel is supposed to make
big-rigs and trucks run cleaner.
But to make enough biodiesel on
the cheap, we’ll need to get more
oil out of soybeans. Shawn Allee says we could be one step
closer to fixing that:

Transcript

Bio-diesel is supposed to make
big-rigs and trucks run cleaner.
But to make enough biodiesel on
the cheap, we’ll need to get more
oil out of soybeans. Shawn Allee says we could be one step
closer to fixing that:

Tom Clemente is a kind of true-believer in biodiesel. He studies plant biology at the University of Nebraska. Clemente says the problem is, we use pricey soy-bean oil to make biodiesel.

“The downside is there’s just not enough of the oil to really make a dent on petroleum.”

Clemente figures scientists can manipulate genes inside soy beans to boost oil content, but no one knew exactly where the genes are. Recently, though, scientists completed a big-picture map of soy’s basic genetic make-up. Clemente hopes that’ll speed up development of oily soy beans – just for biodiesel.

“Really getting a bio-based sustainable fuel from some sort of cropping system, the production’s going to have be really up there.”

Clemente hopes we get enough biodiesel to clean up the nation’s dirtiest vehicles, such as construction equipment and city buses.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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Follow the Soybean Road

  • A soybean oil sealant is now being tested on roadways (Photo courtesy of BioSpan Technologies)

Asphalt is usually made with oil.
The rising price of oil has made it more
expensive to repave roadways. Now some
cities are starting to give green alternatives
a chance. Julie Grant reports:

Transcript

Asphalt is usually made with oil.
The rising price of oil has made it more
expensive to repave roadways. Now some
cities are starting to give green alternatives
a chance. Julie Grant reports:

Cities use asphalt to reseal old roads. It oozes in and fills
the cracks, extending the life of the pavement.

But the price has gone up 200% in the last two years.

Paul Barnett is director of the Akron, Ohio Public Works
Bureau.

This year he plans to try a soybean-based sealant. Barnett
says now it costs about the same oil-based asphalt, but the
road runoff is better for the environment.

“So you have a soybean oil that’s biodegradable instead of a
petroleum product that’s going into the streams and creeks,
rivers.”

The cost of soybeans has also been increasing – for food,
for fuel, and now for things like pavement.

Barnett figures if soybean oil becomes popular, it will drive
the price higher, but for right now it’s a good alternative to
asphalt on some roadways.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Food Prices on the Rise

  • Produce section of a supermarket in VA. (Photo by Ken Hammond, courtesy of the USDA)

Food prices are going up worldwide. A new survey
by the American Farm Bureau Federation finds supermarket
checkout costs have risen nearly 8% this year.
Julie Grant has more:

Transcript

Food prices are going up worldwide. A new survey
by the American Farm Bureau Federation finds supermarket
checkout costs have risen nearly 8% this year.
Julie Grant has more:

Retail food prices usually increase 3% per year. But over the last year the
cost of flour, cheese, bread, meat, oil, and produce is up – by more than
double the average.

The United Nations has predicted prices will stabilize in the long term. But
that consumers worldwide will face at least 10 more years of rapidly rising
food prices.

Commodity prices for corn, wheat, soybeans and other staples have been
skyrocketing over the past year – to more than double 2006 prices.
The higher costs are due in part to weather affecting crops, and growing
demand in China and India.

Economists also point toward the increased use of grains for ethanol and
other biofuels, putting pressure on food prices.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Searching for New Bio-Diesel Source

The U.S. is looking for ways to depend less on foreign oil and reduce greenhouse
gas emissions. A popular method is so-called bio-fuels. Those are fuels, such as
ethanol or bio-diesel, made from plants. Cleaner burning bio-diesel has been billed
as an environmentally-friendly replacement for our 60 billion gallon a year thirst for
diesel oil. But there aren’t enough crops or land to produce enough bio-diesel to
replace fossil fuel-based diesel. Amy Quinton reports new research is looking at
another way to make bio-diesel: using algae:

Transcript

The U.S. is looking for ways to depend less on foreign oil and reduce greenhouse
gas emissions. A popular method is so-called bio-fuels. Those are fuels, such as
ethanol or bio-diesel, made from plants. Cleaner burning bio-diesel has been billed
as an environmentally-friendly replacement for our 60 billion gallon a year thirst for
diesel oil. But there aren’t enough crops or land to produce enough bio-diesel to
replace fossil fuel-based diesel. Amy Quinton reports new research is looking at
another way to make bio-diesel: using algae:


Bio-diesel is made primarily from plant oils: soybean, canola, rapeseed. Ihab Farag
is a chemical engineering professor at the University of New Hampshire. He climbs
up scaffolding to demonstrate a processor that turns waste oil from the University’s
cafeteria into bio-diesel. Farag says this is more environmentally-friendly than diesel:


“It’s coming from vegetable oil, so therefore it’s cleaner… it doesn’t have the sulfur in it so you
don’t get acid rain issue that you get from diesel, it doesn’t do particulates which are suspect[ed] to be cancer-
causing.”


Almost any diesel engine built in the last 15 years can use bio-diesel, but Farag says
there’s a major drawback: it takes an acre of most crops to produce only 100 gallons
of bio-diesel per year:


“I think it has been estimated that if we are using just something like soybean[s] and want to
produce bio-diesel for the whole country, we need almost an area of land that’s about
two and a half to three times the area of Texas.”


That would be an environmental nightmare because bio-fuels require a lot of fossil
fuels to plant, harvest and process them. They only produce a bit more energy than
the energy needed to make them. It also would put the nation’s fuel needs in conflict
with its food needs. That could drive the price of both sky-high.


So Farag and Master Chemical Engineering student Justin Ferrentino are looking at
another plant. One that’s capable of producing much more oil : algae.
Inside the University’s bio-diesel lab, Ferrentino holds up a glass jar filled with a sea-
green powder:


“This is freeze-dried cells that we’ve grown up in our photo-bioreactor.”


He’s testing different ways of extracting oil from these single-celled algae plants to
produce the most bio-diesel:


“People have projected with micro-algae you can grow somewhere between five and 15,000
gallons per acre per year, so it’s a big difference.”


Compared to 100 gallons per acre of soybeans, it’s a very big difference. Ferrentino
has built a contraption of two small fiberglass tanks, surrounded by florescent lights
and reflectors. It’s called a photo-bioreactor. With the right amount of light, the algae
here grows rapidly:


“When I fill these with growth medium and then add the cells to them and they just
multiply, they divide… they double every ten to 15 hours, when they’re growing
exponentially.”


The more cells, the more oil, and the more bio-diesel. Ferrentino’s photo-bioreactor
is small, producing only a tenth of a gram of bio-diesel. But build one on a larger
scale where there’s lots of sunlight, like the desert Southwest, and it could potentially
produce thousands of gallons on just an acre of land.


And Farag says because carbon is needed to fertilize algae growth, the potential
exists to remove greenhouse gases while simultaneously producing bio-diesel:


“If we can connect it with a wastewater treatment plant, where they have a lot of
waste coming in with lots of carbon in it then you can consume the carbon to grow
the algae and at the same time clean up the wastewater.”


But skeptics say one of the biggest challenges is making algae production
economical. Commercial production would initially yield fuel that could cost between
20 and 50 dollars a gallon. Ferrentino recognizes the drawbacks, but says their
research is worth pursuing:


“I think that our energy needs are not necessarily going to be solved with a magic
bullet, but I think this is certainly one part of it, being that you don’t need arable land
you have the added benefit of maybe being able to use the carbon from flue gases
from power plants, maybe being able to treat wastewater. So, it has some significant
added benefits so it could be one piece of the energy picture.”


But growing algae in the desert or anywhere else doesn’t have the kind of political
appeal that subsidizing farmers to grow soybeans for soy-diesel does. So finding
funding for a commercial-sized algae bio-reactor will face significant obstacles.


For the Environment Report, I’m Amy Quinton.

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Co2 Crops Not Tops

  • Theories that crops, such as the corn in Illinois, will benefit from increases in CO2 might not be as good as predicted. (Photo by Scott Bauer, courtesy of the USDA Agricultural Research Service)

Carbon dioxide emissions from our cars and factories are the number one
cause of global warming. Scientists have long theorized that more of
the gas in the atmosphere could actually help farmers grow bigger
plants. But new research from America’s Breadbasket is challenging
that assumption. David Sommerstein reports:

Transcript

Carbon dioxide emissions from our cars and factories are the number one
cause of global warming. Scientists have long theorized that more of
the gas in the atmosphere could actually help farmers grow bigger
plants. But new research from America’s Breadbasket is challenging
that assumption. David Sommerstein reports:


Lin Warfel’s a fourth generation farmer in east-central Illinois. His
fields are flat and endless, the soil chunky and black and just about
the best in the world. An Interstate highway groans on one side of his
cornfield:


“In my career, early on, there was no Interstate past my farm.”


As traffic increased over the years, Warfel noticed a strange
phenomenon. The crops closer to the Interstate grew bigger than those
further away:


“They respond to the carbon dioxide. They can stay greener longer than
plants out into the field.”


OK… so, here’s a high school biology reminder: carbon dioxide, along
with water and sun, is an ingredient in photosynthesis, which makes
plants grow.


Increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is also the biggest cause
of global warming. So scientists thought, huh, more carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere, bigger crops. They even coined a term: the “carbon
dioxide fertilization effect:”


“The effects of CO2 on crop yields are fairly well-understood.”


The Department of Energy’s Jeff Amthor has studied this stuff since the
1980s:


“We would expect that by the year 2050, that the increase in CO2 alone
would probably increase yields by about 10 to 15% in soybean, wheat and
rice relative to today’s yield, with nothing else changing.”


Other things are changing, like hotter temperatures and more drought.
But the predominant thinking has been that the increased carbon dioxide
will moderate those negative factors, maybe even outweigh them. A
recent study by the American Economic Review concluded U.S. agriculture
profits will grow by more than a billion dollars over the next century,
due to global warming. Most of this is based on experiments done in
controlled, greenhouse conditions, but new research done in real fields
is challenging the assumptions:


“Where you’re standing is what we refer to as our global change
research facility on the south farms of the University of Illinois.”


That’s biologist Steve Long. He runs what’s called the SoyFACE project
at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. Here, Long can
actually pipe carbon dioxide gas out to the fields, and grow real crops
in an atmosphere of the future.


Long strolls out to one of 16 test plots and stop at a white pipe
sticking out of the ground:


“This is one of the pipes where the carbon dioxide actually comes up
and then it will go out into the field here.”


The carbon dioxide pipes circle a plot about the size of a tennis
court. They release the gas over the crops. Computers monitor the air
to keep the concentrations steady:


“And the current atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is about
380 parts per million. We’re raising that to the level which is
expected for the year 2050, which is about 550 parts per million.”


Long has grown the crops of 2050 for 5 years now. His results
shocked him. The plants did grow bigger. They survived longer
into the fall, but the yields were 50% lower than expected. And
pests thrived. The Western corn rootworm, for example, laid
twice as many eggs:


“Japanese beetle, which eats quite a lot of the leaves of soybeans, do
twice as well under these elevated CO2 conditions. They live longer. They
produce many more young. The yield increases we’ve seen could start to be
counteracted by those increased pest problems.”


Long’s results found supporters and critics when published in
Science magazine last summer. Some researchers say extra CO2
could hurt agriculture more than it helps because weeds become more
aggressive.


The Department of Energy’s Jeff Amthor co-wrote a paper challenging the
interpretation of Long’s data. But he agrees more work needs to be
done in real-life conditions:


“The bigger questions that are now before us are the interactions of CO2 with
warming and change in precip, changes in weed communities, changes in
insect communities, changes in disease outbreak. There are a lot more
questions there than there are answers.”


Amthor says what’s at stake is our future food supply.


For The Environment Report, I’m David Sommerstein.

Related Links

Corn Ethanol: Higher Food Prices

Some people are warning there are hidden costs
to the drive for ethanol. The demand for corn-based
ethanol for fuel has pushed the price of corn close
to the highest price it’s been in 10 years. In the
first of our two-part series on ethanol, Rebecca Williams
reports that economists say the push for more ethanol will
mean higher prices at the supermarket:

Transcript

Some people are warning there are hidden costs
to the drive for ethanol. The demand for corn-based
ethanol for fuel has pushed the price of corn close
to the highest price it’s been in 10 years. In the
first of our two-part series on ethanol, Rebecca Williams
reports that economists say the push for more ethanol will
mean higher prices at the supermarket:


(Sound of burger sizzling)


Everything in your classic American meal has one thing in common.


(Sound of soda can opening and fizzing)


The burger, chips, soda, even the ketchup. They all depend on corn.


Cows eat corn. Chips have corn oil in them. And your soda and ketchup
have high fructose corn syrup as a main ingredient. Supermarkets are
loaded with food that has something to do with corn.


And lately, corn’s been near its highest price in ten years. The price
has nearly doubled. Everyone from livestock producers to beverage
companies has been feeling the squeeze of more expensive corn. And
that’s been starting to show up at the grocery store.


The US Department of Agriculture predicts our food is going to get more
expensive this year, and maybe for many years to come.


Ephraim Leibtag is a USDA economist. He says we’ll probably be paying
between two and a half and three and a half percent more this year at
the store:


“That’s on average for your food bill. So if you’re buying an average
basket of products and you spend $100 when you go to the store, now
you’ll be spending $103. But you’ll see it first in products most
related to corn. In addition you’ll see some after-effects because if
more corn is produced that may drive up the price of other commodities
if the tradeoff in land is between, let’s say, corn and other potential farm
products.”


So if farmers plant more corn for ethanol instead of soybeans, that
will drive up the price of soybeans, and in turn, the food that’s made
from them.


It turns out that’s exactly what farmers are planning to do this year.
A recent USDA report says farmers will be planting 12 million more
acres of corn than last year… and less soybeans, and rice.


Leibtag says high corn prices have been great for corn farmers, but he
says it’s been rough on a lot of other people:


“If you use corn as a main ingredient you’ve already noticed your costs
go up quite a bit. Some companies have explored the possibility of
substituting or using other products. But certainly producers of livestock and
poultry have higher feed costs. They have to think about exactly how they’re
going to produce their product when one of their inputs goes up 20, 30,
50, 80 percent in price.”


Ethanol backers say it’s just a matter of time before the market will
adjust to more expensive corn. Bob Dinneen is the president of the
Renewable Fuels Association:


“Corn prices are indeed going up… Our own industry is paying more for feedstock for ethanol today. But
at the end of the day, as the marketplace adjusts, we’ll be able to grow
more than sufficient grain to satisfy the country’s demand for food,
fuel and fiber and rural America will be better for it.”


But others argue it won’t be possible to have it all forever. Lester
Brown is the president of the Earth Policy Institute:


“Usually in the past, rises in food prices come when we have a poor
harvest somewhere in the world as a result of weather and therefore is temporary. It usually
lasts a year or so and weather comes back to normal and we get a good
harvest again. What we’re looking at now is continuous pressure on
prices as far as we can comfortably see in the future, simply because in
agricultural terms, the demand for automotive fuel is insatiable.”


Brown says we’re at risk of trading food for ethanol fuel. And he says
it’s not just going to impact food prices in the US. It’s also going
to affect food supplies worldwide, especially in developing countries.


“The biggest effects are hitting people in other countries who consume
corn more directly, like Mexico for example, which has a corn-based diet and there
the price of tortillas has gone up about 60 percent.”


Brown says many US politicians have what he calls “ethanol euphoria.”
He’s called for a moratorium on licensing new ethanol plants. He wants
the government to think about whether it makes sense to keep
subsidizing ethanol made from corn.


Many people, even some in the ethanol industry, say ethanol from corn
is a limited solution. So researchers are looking for ways to make
ethanol from other sources, such as woody plants like switchgrass.


In the meantime, ethanol from corn is still the most viable option.
Economists say if corn gets diverted into ethanol on a large scale,
that might mean we’ll all be paying higher food prices for the next
several years.


For the Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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First Logs Cut in Roadless Area

The first logging under new Bush administration rules has begun in a National Forest roadless wilderness area. The GLRC’s Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

The first logging under new Bush administration rules has begun in a National Forest
roadless wilderness area. The GLRC’s Lester Graham reports:


This is the first logging since the Bush administration eased a rule put in place by the
Clinton administration. That rule had made tens of millions of acres of wilderness areas
off-limits to logging, mining and development.


Protesters near Grants Pass, Oregon delayed the logging for a few hours by blocking a
bridge, but one person was arrested and the blockade removed to allow loggers to enter.
The logging operation is cutting down trees killed by a fire in 2002. The timber is being
taken from the site by helicopter.


According to an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the logging began after a
federal judge refused to block it pending the outcome of a lawsuit challenging the Bush
administration’s new “roadless rule.” The suit was brought by conservation groups and
the states of Oregon, Washington, California and New Mexico. The court ruling is not
expected before September.


For this GLRC, this is Lester Graham.

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Farmers React to Pesticide Ban

Farmers who use a highly toxic pesticide will have to quickly find an alternative. That’s if the EPA sticks with a
decision to phase it out in four years. But some farmers say
they have no alternative. The GLRC’s Tracy Samilton
reports:

Transcript

Farmers who use a highly toxic pesticide will have to quickly find an alternative. That’s if
the EPA sticks with a decision to phase it out in four years. But some farmers say they
have no alternative. The GLRC’s Tracy Samilton reports:


Carbofuran has been widely used to combat aphids for many crops, including
soybeans, corn, tobacco and wine grapes. Many farmers have been phasing in
crops that are bred to be resistant to aphids. But agriculture industry
officials say in many instances, there’s no replacement for carbofuran.


Dale Huss of artichoke grower Ocean Mist Farms says carbofuran is the only
pesticide known that kills aphids that feed on artichokes. He says it’s
possible his industry will collapse:


“I don’t think we quite understand the full impact it’s gonna have on us. It really has us
concerned.”


Agriculture lobbyists say they’ll press the EPA to reverse the decision.
Environmental groups say the EPA did the right thing. Even small amounts
of carbofuran are lethal to birds, and it’s been blamed for the deaths of
millions of birds over the twenty years it’s been in use.


For the GLRC, I’m Tracy Samilton.

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Restoring Streams in the Heartland

  • Settlers dug ditches and straightened rivers to drain the fields they needed for planting. (photo by Mark Brush)

Today, we wrap up our series on pollution in the heartland.
To farm in the nation’s heartland, people first had to drain the water from the land. In a lot of places, that meant dredging rivers to get them to move along faster and carry water off the fields. But straight, fast rivers aren’t healthy rivers. And the rushing water carries pesticides and fertilizers off of fields and deposits them downstream. But in some places, farmers are starting to repair rivers. The GLRC’s Rebecca Williams has the final story in our week-long series:

Transcript

Today, we wrap up our series on pollution in the heartland. To farm in the nation’s
heartland, people first had to drain the water from the land. In a lot of places, that meant
dredging rivers to get them to move along faster and carry water off the fields. But
straight, fast rivers aren’t healthy rivers. And the rushing water carries pesticides and
fertilizers off of fields and deposits them downstream. But in some places, farmers are
starting to repair rivers. The GLRC’s Rebecca Williams has the final story in our week-long series:


From an airplane, the land below it looks like it was drawn in geometry class. Fields
of corn and soybeans look almost like perfect squares. Rivers seem as straight as a ruler’s
edge.


When rivers have their way, they’re unruly. They have lots of twists and bends, but people have straightened a lot of rivers and streams to make it easier to grow crops
and raise animals. European settlers forging their way West got stuck in huge swamps.
The mosquitoes were terrible. But the settlers’ chances of raising food in the swampland
were even worse.


“In order to reclaim that land, muckland, for raising vegetable crops, they had to drain it.”


Barb Cook owns a farm here in fertile southwest Michigan. Her grandfather farmed here
in the early 1900s, back when the rivers were being straightened.


(sound of river)


Cook’s standing on the bank of the Dowagiac River. Right now it’s as straight as a canal
and it’s moving fast. But it’s about to get some of its curves back.


Barb Cook says she was skeptical when she heard about the plan to coax the river back to
its original path.


“Well, they want to put the wiggles back. Well, why? Were they trying to hoodwink
anyone or were their objectives pure? And I got involved and felt they were really truly
trying to improve things.”


Cook’s now the vice president of the group. It calls itself MEANDRS. It’s made up of
farmers and biologists and fishermen. People who all have a stake in what happens to the
river.


They’re carving out one of the curves the river used to follow.


Jay Wesley is a biologist with the Department of Natural Resources. He says even
though this new meander isn’t connected to the river yet, little springs are bubbling up.


“We’ve actually even seen trout in here since this first part of the project’s been done.
They’ve come up through the culvert from the river and have found their way up here.
So it’s pretty cold, high quality water.”


That’s exciting news for fishermen. A river fed by cold groundwater can be a mecca for
trout. The pools and riffles sculpted into the new meander will give fish places to hide.


These small signs of hope are a pretty big deal. This project is a very long labor of
love 12 years in the making.


That’s because there are lots of hurdles. For one thing, meander restorations are
expensive. Half a million dollars at the low end.


There are piles of paperwork.


And some farmers worry that restoring meanders will flood their fields.


In this project, the MEANDRS group surveyed nearby farmers early on about their
concerns and included them in the planning process. Bill Westraight is the President of
MEANDRS. He’s also a farmer who owns land along the river.


“I think what I say holds more weight with farmers than if somebody had come down and
was mandating that they participate in some way.”


Westraight says they had some major critics in the beginning. But he says they’ve gotten
almost all the neighbors on board. He says it was crucial that they gave everyone a say.
They also commissioned feasibility studies to make sure upstream farmers wouldn’t be
flooded.


All these hurdles mean that projects like these aren’t very common.


Andrew Fahlund is with the nonprofit group American Rivers. He says big projects like
meander restorations almost always need government funding. And that funding’s been
cut dramatically over the past few years. Fahlund says those cuts are short-sighted
because healthier rivers can actually save money in the long run.


“One of the reasons you get such an economic benefit from river restoration is that you
reduce the costs of having to treat water, filter
that water and clean it up for human consumption.”


(river sound up under)


The MEANDRS group says there’s no way they can restore the entire river. But they
hope mending just this small section will help revive the river a bit.


The group points out that this type of restoration won’t work everywhere. They say in
many places, channelized rivers are still crucial for keeping fields drained.


Farmer Barb Cook says even now, she sees this project as an experiment. In a few
months, she’ll get to see whether all her hard work will pan out, when they’ll try to force
water from the straight channel into the new meander.


“As you look at the stream behind us, it’s quite a volume of water. Water has its own
way. Mother Nature has something to say about this too. She may say no.”


Cook says nothing ever runs smoothly. But she says they’ll just be flexible and this time
around, let the river choose its course.


For the GLRC, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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