Tuesday, 30 Jul 2002

To Make a Lawn Story Short

Drum roll, please. It's time for more environmental advice from Umbra Fisk, Grist Research Assistant II and environmental advice expert extraordinaire. In her latest column, Umbra takes on the topic of pesticides: in clothing, in agriculture, on lawns. She tackles the metaphorically thorny question of why grass has become a suburban social obligation, and the literally thorny question of the most environmentally friendly way to weed your garden. Pick up pearls of wisdom from Our Lady of the Stacks, only on the Grist Magazine website.

Wheezy Riders

Motorcycles and gas-powered recreational boats could become substantially cleaner if emissions cuts proposed by the Bush administration late last week are enacted. The proposals call for halving emissions from motorcycles (which are, on average, 20 times more polluting per mile than a new car) and reducing boat emissions by 80 percent. The new standards would take effect in 2006 and 2008, respectively. Currently, motorcycles and boats account for 12 percent of hydrocarbon emissions and 3 percent of carbon monoxide emissions from mobile sources. According to U.S. EPA Administrator Christie Whitman, the new standards would have clean air gains equivalent to reducing pollution from 9.4 million cars per year. Environmentalists praised the move as a step in the right direction, but had been hoping to see emissions cuts for motorcycles of up to 90 percent.

Charms to Soothe the Savage Breast

Ten years ago, a group of women headed to Washington, D.C., from their homes in Long Island, N.Y., to demand answers from the government about why so many women from their area were afflicted with breast cancer. Ultimately, the energy, dedication, and political savvy of those women rocketed the Long Island breast cancer story into the national spotlight and mobilized a movement to look for environmental causes of the disease. By far their most impressive success was a 1993 federal law securing about $30 million in funding from the National Cancer Institute to study pollution and breast cancer in Nassau and Suffolk counties, through what became known as the Long Island Breast Cancer Study Project. A decade later, according to a three-day series in Newsday, the project is way behind schedule and has yielded little information, leaving scientists, women's health advocates, and environmental activists equally frustrated.

Hanford and Stuns

Oregon officials and anti-nuclear activists are taking aim at the draft assessment of the federal government's plan to ship thousands of truckloads of radioactive nuclear waste through Oregon to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state. The draft environmental impact statement by the U.S. Energy Department estimates that the environmental effects of transporting the waste "are relatively small and would not be expected to contribute substantially to cumulative impacts of other activities at Hanford or in the surrounding region." But Oregon nuclear safety officials beg to differ, saying the agency's report lacked the science to back up those claims. For example, the document does not specify the exact kinds of material that would be shipped to Hanford, nor the exact volumes, and it relies on outdated general estimates of nationwide impacts from shipping nuclear waste, rather than looking at circumstances specific to Oregon, such as trucking waste over treacherous mountain passes.

Space Goes Coast to Coast

Living on the coast is often a lose-lose situation -- beaches erode, and big storms take out pricey homes -- but that hasn't seemed to quench the thirst for development along the Florida shoreline. Rather than discouraging beachfront development to protect property owners and the environment alike, state laws and practices promote such development and leave taxpayers to foot the bill for rebuilding eroded beaches. Since 1978, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection has approved almost 5,000 permits to build on land subject to erosion, and denied just 52. Similar development and spending patterns -- coastal construction approved by the state followed by taxpayer-subsidized beach rebuilding -- appear in virtually every state with a coastline. In the past 79 years, beach replenishment along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts has cost the nation about $3.6 billion in 2002 dollars, or about $1 million per mile of open shore in those regions.