A scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, Bill McKibben is the author of The End of Nature, the first book for a general audience on climate change, and, most recently, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. He serves on Grist's board of directors.

Thursday, 2 Aug 2007

LITCHFIELD, N.H.

The climate movement is on the move again.

Eleven months after a march across Vermont inaugurated a new, grassroots protest phase of the movement to slow global warming, two new parades are snaking across the nation's most significant political battlegrounds, thanks to student leaders who have been organizing for months.

A New Hampshire procession left Nashua Wednesday morning, bound for Concord 50 miles away. In Iowa, students left Ames on Thursday, bound for Des Moines. Both processions will conclude Sunday afternoon at their respective state capitols.

"We've been getting such a good reception," said David Sievers, a student at the College of William and Mary who's been leading the Iowa campaign. "People can see the impacts already from climate change -- they can see the changes, and that makes a big difference." Sievers said tax laws governing nonprofits prevented the marchers from engaging presidential candidates directly, but that "they all know we're here, I think. We've made a lot of noise."

In New Hampshire, Nashua Mayor Bernie Streeter sent the line of 150 marchers off on the first leg of the march with a call to "shake up New Hampshire, and the nation, and the world." The walkers stepped into one of the hottest days of the summer, traveling the first day to the nearby town of Litchfield. Jared Duval, director of the Sierra Student Coalition and a New Hampshire native, walked with the group, which has been working to build participation in the march since early summer. "It's all I could have hoped for," he said, as he watched the group cool off in the tepid waters of the Merrimack River at day's end.

The students chanted as they walked, and the tone was more cerebral than angry. "Coal stinks -- it's not as cost-effective as you think" was one favorite. But as the blazing Granite State sun set on the first day's events, the students were camped at the Nesenkeag organic farm and listening to an emotional Eero Ruuttila describe the increasing trials of farming in an unstable climate, where flooding has become routine and crop pests appear months earlier than usual. "I surf biology -- that's what a farmer does," said Ruuttila. "I ride the wave of the weather. But I prefer to be on a five-foot wave. Sometimes now they're like the hundred-foot waves off the North Shore of Oahu and I'm too old for that."

In Iowa, marchers listened to Carolyn Raffensperger of the Science & Environmental Health Network, as well as a spokesperson for Iowa's chapter of Interfaith Power and Light, the chief religious organization battling climate change. When that march concludes on Sunday, the main speaker will be NASA scientist James Hansen, the world's most famous climatologist, who has become increasingly outspoken in his calls for citizen action to slow climate change.

Related Links:

Bill McKibben says time is running out on climate delays

Is Bill McKibben right to be angry with Obama?

Mr. President: Time to quit fibbing and spinning

A scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, Bill McKibben is the author of The End of Nature, the first book for a general audience on climate change, and, most recently, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. He serves on Grist's board of directors.

Thursday, 7 Jun 2007

LEBANON, New Hampshire

If you're worried -- and who isn't? -- that the pressure for action on global warming will crest and fade after the last six months of steady growth, you should have been on the town green of this small western New Hampshire burg on Wednesday night.

Twenty-five college students, the advance phalanx of a Climate Summer that will pull kids from all over to the Granite State in the next 10 weeks, put on a rousing display of Frisbee-tossing and petition-passing -- and for the large, mostly older crowd that came to watch the kickoff of the organizing drive, it was special in part because it recalled the activism of an earlier day.

You can't call your website Climate Summer without rousing memories of one of the most powerful chapters in American dissident history: the Freedom Summer of 1964, which drew college kids from across the country to Mississippi. Nothing about that history is easy -- not the violence that took the lives of three volunteers in the first week, nor the tensions between well-meaning, privileged, often clueless white northerners and the people they were, sometimes patronizingly, "trying to help." But four decades later, it stands for the idea that creativity and commitment can work real change.

There's no threat of peril hanging over this summer's work, but there is more than a whiff of the same creativity. Students on the Lebanon Green were busy talking up plans for a "Red, White, and Green" Fourth of July parade in Amherst, N.H., and a webcast with organizers on top of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and the rest of the state's "presidential" high peaks. Much of the work will build toward a grand march across the state August 1-5, a procession that organizer Jared Duval, who runs the Sierra Student Coalition, predicts will be the largest climate demonstration in the country's history.

No one, of course, is under any illusions about why New Hampshire and why this summer. The odd process of choosing an American leader means that only citizens in Iowa and here in this small slice of New England actually get to meet their presidential candidates. And so it's here that raising local consciousness can also affect presidential platforms.

In 1999, a much smaller crew of students followed the contenders as they made their pre-primary rounds, and in the process managed to convert at least one -- John McCain -- into a born-again climate convert. He came home from his losing campaign, convened a Senate hearing, and before too long had introduced the first serious piece of climate legislation the Senate had ever taken up.

Thanks to IRS laws, these kids (many from nearby Middlebury College in Vermont) won't be primarily bird-dogging presidential candidates -- though on their off hours, it seems likely they'll be making their presence felt. But simply by raising the issue in every possible forum, simply by knocking on doors and passing out fliers, they'll be doing crucial work: making the campaigns understand that climate is no longer a second-tier issue, something you can throw in the laundry list of idle promises at the end of a speech.

By now, most observers think that the fate of the U.S. climate effort may be decided in the first few months of 2009, when we find out whether the new president will take it on as an incremental issue or a transforming one. Here in New Hampshire, anyway, the battle for the second outcome is underway.

Related Links:

MTV-approved advice on reaching those who aren’t paying attention

Climate and dirty-energy groups were busy over summer vacation

Push is on to strengthen climate bill

Michael Levitin is a freelance journalist living in Berlin. He has written for Newsweek, Slate, and the Los Angeles Times, among others.

Tuesday, 5 Jun 2007

ROSTOCK, Germany

If you dress head to foot in black, set cars on fire, launch stones and beer bottles at police, and brave hand-to-hand scuffles amid clouds of tear gas with choppers thundering overhead, best bet is you'll make the evening news. Which is too bad, because in the case of Saturday's late-afternoon riots in Rostock, the images of unrest have obscured and altered what most of us adults would have called the real story.

Menace or blessing?

Photo: Irene Pascual

I say adults because the couple of thousand sullen-eyed, peach-fuzz-faced rabble-rousers who formed the Black Bloc averaged, say, 20 years old. Middle-class adolescents still living at home with mom and dad, the young anarchists weren't the ones who'd spent thousands of hours organizing the Alternative Summit that's running counter to the official G8 meeting, which starts Wednesday in nearby Heiligendamm. They didn't arrange Bono's concert here; nor did they coordinate the peaceful blockades against G8 delegates arriving at Rostock airport; nor set up large-scale encampments around the city; nor promote dozens of lectures and workshops on subjects ranging from immigration and agriculture to militarism, feminism, and global energy strategy.

In short, the Black Bloc lacked the legitimacy to turn a peaceful, well-planned protest into mayhem -- yet that's exactly what they did. But let's look at it another way; by admitting, for example, that some of us -- OK, many of us -- go to demonstrations like these nursing the secret hope that things might turn a little rowdy. The hope of feeling, beyond all the costumes, music, and speeches, a greater whiff of excitement. Of being somehow in the fray.

I went to Rostock, I confess, with some pretty big expectations. The media had so fixated on the G8 Summit -- from criticism of the seven-mile-long fence built to keep out protesters to speculation about Chancellor Angela Merkel's standoff with President George Bush over his last-minute climate policy proposal -- that the demonstration against it had to be sensational, right?

I had arrived (with my own little global retinue of amigos, which included a Spaniard, a Brazilian, an Englishman, a Mexican, a Colombian, and myself, an American) packed body to body with other protesters on the morning train from Berlin. Chartered buses and trains were pouring in from cities across northern and central Europe, like Zurich and Cologne, Vienna and Munich, Stockholm and Copenhagen. Base camps had materialized around the Rostock region as demonstrators carrying rucksacks and tents and a week's worth of supplies flooded in.

Putting a face on politics.

Photo: Irene Pascual

A whole cross-section of the continent appeared to have shown up: old men calling for just labor laws, young mothers with strollers marching against climate change, students appealing for fair trade and an end to the Iraq war. Actors dressed in elaborate costumes hoisted masks parodying the G8 leaders. Trumpeters blew horns, drummers beat out rhythms, and trance-music revelers danced as thousands of bodies kept rolling past.

All the big NGO players were represented -- WWF, Oxfam, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth -- as were the vast array of antis: anti-racists, anti-capitalists, anti-fascists, anti-G8s, anti-about everything you could get your hands on. The wavy, rainbow-colored sea of signs, balloons, and placards -- "Down with the G8," "Stop Privatization," "International Solidarity" -- reflected the position stated simply on one flier: "The world shaped by the dominance of the G8 is a world of war, hunger, social divisions, environmental destruction, and barriers against migrants and refugees."

Despite the tensions and global concerns prompting the march, up until 3 p.m. the mood was still bright. Heading toward the harbor where concerts were already under way, the protesters continued their relaxed march, by the tens of thousands, in what looked from a distance like a slow, musical, serpentine dance. But the anxious buzz of helicopters overhead was mounting. The green-clad cops were encroaching. Then suddenly, somewhere out of view, a provocation occurred. Instants later, acrid, dense, gray gas filled the streets.

Bodies started running. Police units multiplied, emerging from all corners of the city and sprinting in neat lines toward the harbor where the flare-ups were taking place. There was something epic about the scene: on the waterfront, under the port's looming cranes, with sirens wailing, music blaring, giant banners and balloons bobbing, the sky threatening rain, and the authorities with their armored vehicles threatening injury.

It didn't take long for the mainstream crowd to disperse, leaving several thousand young guys and girls clothed in black to engage in the fight. They hurled bottles and fireworks and chunks of concrete that they'd pried up from the street. They smashed bank and car windows, destroyed parking-ticket machines, and lit several cars on fire in what the German magazine Der Spiegel called "an orgy of violence." Only after many hours and injuries and arrests -- after the air became choked with smoke and gas, and after the Black Bloc tired of their showdown with water cannons -- did the police restore order.

Close to 1,000 people, nearly half of them police, were reported injured, 50 of them seriously, before the day was through. Some 125 arrests were made. Sunday brought a rest for both sides, but on Monday and Tuesday they were back at it, with street skirmishes and armed conflicts between youth and authorities that led right up to President Bush's arrival with his entourage. Needless to say, the Alternative Summit's well-planned schedule -- of concerts and lectures, seminars, marches, and non-violence training workshops -- was vastly overshadowed by the more media-grabbing conflict.

Give peace a chance.

Photo: Irene Pascual

The Alternative Summit organizers had tried very hard, and almost with success, to show the orderly and thoughtful face of the anti-globalization movement. But what they, and what we all, now have to ask ourselves might be this: If those late-afternoon images of chaos and confrontation hadn't occurred -- if the estimated 80,000 protesters had marched peacefully, vocally, and jubilantly to the demonstration's conclusion as planned -- would the world have even noticed?

It may be, in fact, that the anarchic, violent spirit is already so embedded in the anti-globalization movement that it has become unthinkable for a G8 protest to conclude otherwise.

This spring, in recent weeks especially, the German government seemed to be almost purposefully stoking the public's anger in the build-up to the summit. After police raided many activists' homes and offices for information last month, it became known that the collection and use of "scent samples" to track down suspected agitators, a method practiced by the secret police in the former East Germany, was suddenly back in vogue.

Fanning the public's paranoia, an administrative court ruled last Thursday that demonstrators would not be allowed to come within a four-mile zone of the razor-wire-topped fence that has been erected around Heiligendamm. "The German government has militarized security levels as though they wanted to build a new wall and close themselves in," said an indignant Renate Künast, Germany's Green Party chair. The decision overturned a lower court's ruling that protests could be banned within 200 meters of the security fence, which was built specifically to protect the Kempinski Grand Hotel, where the G8 leaders are scheduled to meet, but not around the entire town. Noting that security costs for the event topped $130 million and that more than 16,000 police officers have been engaged (the largest deployment in Germany since World War II), lawyer Carsten Gericke said the court's unconstitutional ruling marked "a black day for freedom of assembly in Germany."

Now I am wondering, as I think back to the cramped train ride Saturday morning when the energy in the air was so palpable but also so peaceful, whether the violence that day might have been foreseen -- and if so, how it could have been prevented. When tens of thousands of people are able peacefully to amass and speak, sing and dance with many voices -- and ultimately with one -- it is a testament to the power and the potential of democracy. But unless we decide clearly, and discover a way to steer our fellow black-clad protesters into the non-violent fold, their actions will continue to define the anti-G8 agenda: fighting, rather than talking about the issues that matter to us most. After all, our heads of state and their policies may still pose our best chance of staving off the serious long-term effects of climate change.

Then again, maybe negotiating calmly with our leaders, on their terms -- which is to say, voicing our complaints about poverty and our concerns about global warming, and being virtually ignored -- is not what many of us secretly want. In that case, so much for the days of peaceful protest.

Friday, 8 Jun 2007

CAMP ROSTOCK, Germany

The Real Gains

Klaus had tromped through forests and across fields, marching 15 miles back here to his ramshackle tent at 3:00 in the morning, so it's understandable that he was too beat to be euphoric. He'd taken whacks from billy clubs and swallowed pepper spray as he and more than 10,000 demonstrators -- who employed a kamikaze-like "five finger" tactic, in which their groups split abruptly and individuals sprinted in all directions -- broke through police lines, blockaded roads and railways, and claimed victory in their bid to disrupt the G8 summit.

The face of a new movement?

Photo: Marc-Steffen Unger

Today, as rich-nation leaders wrapped up their Baltic coast vacation -- in which posturing about fighting climate change and poverty in Africa replaced any of the nuts-and-bolts strategies required for doing so -- the image of those celebratory masses of young people parading by the thousands across Germany's rolling farmland, with hundreds of slender white wind-turbine blades spinning symbolically in the background, has somehow overtaken the official debate in its seriousness and importance. In a not-yet-quantifiable way, the anti-globalization movement has been reignited in Rostock. Reinjected with passion. Reinforced with solidarity; with organization, with clear-marked acts of bravery, and with what author and activist Susan George called the public's "invincible" will to bring a more socially just world into being.

George, the former vice president of Attac and current chair of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, encouraged the direction the anti-globalization movement is taking alongside author John Holloway in one of several hundred panel workshops that took place at the Alternative Summit in Rostock. "Everyone knows that capitalism is raping the planet, this is absolutely clear," said the 73-year-old American-turned-French citizen. The public's first task, then, is "to denounce, to challenge, and expose [those in power] through detailed arguments, and to find spectacular, persuasive ways" to put issues like climate change and debt cancellation at the top of the agenda. "This movement is still very young and it has its best days ahead of it," she said.

Using a more blunt -- and in America, it would seem, unthinkable -- language of revolution, Holloway, who has been described as the poetic voice of the anti-globalization movement, spoke about "a moment of rupture," describing a vision of global social struggle filled with hope. We need "to think of revolution -- of the possibility of creating another world -- not in terms of a breakdown, but as a breakthrough," he said. He likened the weeklong events of protest in Rostock, and in Seattle and Genoa before it, as a "crack through which the seeds of a new society are pushing. We [the anti-globalization movement] represent a force that is pushing through and, like cracks in an ice floe, can spread with incredible and unpredictable speed."

Sound like over-the-top anarchic Euro-speak? Well maybe, coming from the intensely capitalist system we in America have embraced since our inception as an all-or-nothing option. But the point is that change is afoot, and that Klaus and his army of merry pranksters who lit up the Rostock region this week -- proving themselves unrelenting in their blockades and peaceful demonstrations despite the violence of tear gas, water cannons, and beatings police waged against them -- are the latest incarnation.

Protesters on parade.

Photo: Marc-Steffen Unger

Look also, if you haven't already, at Thursday's jaw-dropping, made-for-Hollywood high-speed boat chase that occurred a few hundred yards offshore from Heiligendamm, providing the biggest drama of the summit. Three rubber speedboats operated by Greenpeace succeeded in breaching the Navy-patrolled security zone. They intended to carry a petition demanding substantial carbon cuts to the heads of state, but instead got engaged in a 15-minute, hair-raising adventure at sea. Dwarfed and out-horsepowered by the armored German military vessels that pursued them, the maverick pilots made risky maneuvers at top speed that could have easily lost them their lives; when the chase was over, in the moments before they were gathered into custody, they hoisted the banner "G8 Act Now" defiantly into the air, facing the helicopter cameras as their tiny boat rocked on the waves. It was bravest act of idealism -- putting the planet over their lives -- that I have ever seen.

As for the ways the G8 leaders did not act -- specifically, the way George Bush once again bucked scientific consensus and global political and public pressure in failing to come on board with specific targets to cut carbon emissions -- it's nothing we haven't heard. Merely agreeing to begin discussions in Bali in December on the road toward creating an international climate framework that can work as a successor to Kyoto was, apparently, enough a concession by the U.S. for embattled Chancellor Merkel to herald the "deal" a success. Depressing stuff.

But wait, there's an upside to the last six and a half years of criminal, irresponsible Bush leadership: the world, in the meantime, has gotten busy. At the Alternative Summit in Rostock, which went under the slogan "Another World Is Possible," I saw numerous examples of movements and initiatives that have sprung up virtually in direct response to American actions -- and may now be leading the rest of us with their progressive vision.

One is the modern peace movement in Europe, which Jan Tamas, chair of the Humanist Party in the Czech Republic, announced at a panel session on the G8 and war is "just being born." The cause: America's aggressive approach to installing anti-missile bases in Eastern Europe, rekindling what many perceive here as old Cold War rhetoric. Tamas helped found the No To The Bases initiative last July; in February, his party ushered the Europe for Peace Declaration into being; and on Tuesday, he demonstrated with some 2,000 people during Bush's visit to Prague to protest the proposed missile defense sites.

"Everything was going fine after the Berlin Wall fell," he said, "and now [they're saying] we should be stuck again in the armament race? The perception of the U.S.," he added, a country that formerly championed his people's right to freedom, "has definitely changed among Czechs in the last five years." (A note: After Bush's tummy-ache at the summit on Friday morning kept him out of meetings with China, India, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa, he flew off to Poland to further his calls for a missile base in that country. But not before hearing out Russian Premier Vladimir Putin's proposal to form a joint U.S./Russian anti-missile platform in Azerbaijan instead, an offer that surprisingly perked up his ears.)

If peace campaigning is on an upswing thanks to aggressive U.S. policies, so is economic planning in countries where U.S. and World Bank strategies have failed, or have been absent altogether. In Latin America, for example, a transnational finance initiative known as the Bank of the South has been worked on by the Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt, a Belgian NGO, along with the Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chavez, and could go online as an institution as early as this month. Speaking to an audience of about 40 crammed into a stuffy room on the third floor of Rostock's Nikolai Church, the group's spokesperson, Virginie de Romanet, described the mega-cooperative as a Latin American counter to heavy hitters like the World Bank and IMF. The Bank of the South will give grants for social projects, housing, education, and health care in the poorest countries, she said, with the intention of "paying off the social debt the governments have toward their peoples. We talk about financial debts, but not about the social needs that have been abandoned in Latin America since neo-liberal plans have been imposed there [by the North] in the last 20 years."

And then, of course, there were the workshops on the topic of the day, which the U.S. administration has disregarded, to the world's detriment, more than any other: climate. At a discussion called "Mobilization for Global Climate Action," activists, city council leaders, and students from around Europe brainstormed strategies to raise awareness for an international demonstration for climate to be staged December 8 during the talks in Bali. Given the mushrooming in recent years of so many groups focused on the one game in town -- Climate Alliance, Climate Action Network, Stop Climate Chaos, and Climate Forum, to name a few -- the issue confronting these NGOs now is how to "be concrete" with their message.

"We must be explicit in our goals" as groups and as a movement, said Klaus Milke of the research institute Germanwatch. For example, he said, Europe needs to turn its attention toward its less developed members like Poland and Romania, reaching out with something akin to "climate ambassadors" who will help bring those countries up to speed with carbon reductions and renewable technologies.

The climate movement, without question, has become a global driver bringing people and communities together. But some are worried that too much emphasis is going toward organizing protests for climate awareness and accumulating followers, rather than working on the hard-and-fast science and policy aimed at solving the crisis. "The strategy is to get bigger climate demonstrations every year. 'We'll have a demo, we'll make it bigger than the last one.' But I don't see a plan," says James Lloyd of the U.K. student environmental group People and Planet. "I think there needs to be a debate on what strategies for public awareness have the most impact. It's not a campaign we can fuck up -- and I'd hate to think five years on we're still organizing rallies."

Neither rallies nor blockades nor conferences among the world's elites will be enough to save us from the impending climate disaster. It will take, as Greenpeace said so simply from its boat at sea, Action Now. Already next week, a "Midnight Sun Dialogue" in Riksgransen, Sweden, among environment ministers from 20 countries will pick up in the area where Heiligendamm left off: by beginning to lay the groundwork to launch formal climate negotiations in Bali at the end of the year. Clearly, global leaders have heard the call and are now hustling to put one foot after the next in the glacial process toward writing a sound climate policy for the future.

Americans should learn from this week's large-scale, peaceful, and professionally organized turnout against the G8 in Rostock. They should be emboldened by European activists' efforts and should pick up where the blockaders on the Baltic left off. "We got sprayed, we got hit, but they didn't stop us," Klaus told me as he sat with sunburnt face, rolling a cigarette the morning after the all-night blockades. He was one of 6,000 who'd made Camp Rostock his home for the week, and who walked away feeling that "with this political message, we made protest history in Germany. We said we'd block them and we blocked them. The rest is details."

As Tycho Boender, a Dutch activist and founder of the climate awareness group Inside Collective, told me, a lot about his and his country's future is riding on our world leaders' decisions about cutting carbon levels and developing renewables -- namely, in the kind of legislation they write and how quickly it can be made into law and enforced. Some parts of his country already sit six meters below sea level, he said. "I might need a snorkel to sit in my house soon."

Related Links:

Copenhagen climate summit (part 1): the expectations

Fair, Ambitious & Binding: Essentials for a Successful Climate Deal

City preps and countries posture ahead of Copenhagen talks

Wayne Curtis is a freelance writer who's written for The New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, American Scholar, Preservation, and American Heritage, and is the author of And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails. He recently traded Maine winters for New Orleans summers.

Thursday, 24 May 2007

NEW ORLEANS, La

Someone once wrote that eating a tomato grown on a fire escape demonstrated the highest order of faith in civilization and technology.

To hell with the tomato. If you really want to show your faith, move to New Orleans.

My wife and I did just that, buying a house about a year after Hurricane Katrina knocked holes in shoddy levees and left the city to stew for weeks in an unsavory broth of salt water and toxic sludge. (Our faith was not without limits: we bought a house that was unflooded and sat on high ground.)

We moved from Maine, where we had lived on a coastal island for nearly a decade, and where we had structured our life around the ferry and learned to accommodate the moods of the ocean. I thought I had a pretty good grasp on the concept of being surrounded by water.

I didn't know the half of it. New Orleans is an island, and then some. The Mississippi River wraps in a wide arc around one side of the city, and two saltwater lakes border much of the rest of it. But the city also literally sits atop water: we learned that houses here don't have basements because water lurks just below the surface. Digging down evidently provokes it.

Perhaps most surprising to me was the discovery of how much water the skies can hold. Torrential rains are quite literally part of the ebb and flow of city life, often producing what New Orleanians dismiss with a shrug as "street flooding." Storms stalled over the city have dumped 14 inches (1927), 12 inches (1995), and nine inches (1978), amounts that still are inconceivable to me. Earlier this month, on May 4, a storm released more than five inches of rain in a matter of hours. One of my neighbors, apparently quite at peace with it all, hauled out a canoe and paddled down Prytania Street, a minor artery overarched with live oaks and lined with elaborate homes.

A freighter at rest.

Photo: iStockphoto

New Orleanians deal with street floods the way people in Maine deal with two-foot snowfalls: they prepare for it, then wait it out. Many older houses, including ours, sit atop brick piers designed to let the water in, and then let it out just as easily.

But getting the water out of the city is where that great faith comes in. Left to its own devices, water will loiter here, pooling in the lowest neighborhoods, like Broadmoor and Gentilly. About half of the city sits below sea level, so there's nowhere for water to flow without human intervention. The lower neighborhoods were mostly developed in the early and mid-20th century, when they were carved out of drained cypress swamps. Stout levees of earth and grass -- the pinnacle of medieval technology -- and more reliable mechanical pumps had made widespread flooding seemingly a thing of the past. The city is still dependent on the descendants of these pumps, although they're rather less revered since Katrina stormed the gates and overwhelmed them.

When watery incursions do occur -- such as on May 4 this year -- 21 brawny pumping stations and a network of massive pipes nearly large enough to race a Mini Cooper through give water the bum's rush, ushering it to the far side of the levees that encase the city like a 15th-century wall. Along the riverfront near the French Quarter, the Mississippi River levee is augmented with a concrete and steel floodwall with gates that slide into place when the river threatens, like a portcullis ready to shut out the Visigoths.

Fire up your Mini.

Photo: Wayne Curtis

Of all the water around New Orleans, the Mississippi River is most closely linked to the city, and for an obvious reason: without the Big Muddy, the Big Easy wouldn't exist.

The French laid out the original network of swampy streets here in 1718, putting it as close to the mouth of the river as feasible in order to control this critical avenue into the middle of the continent both militarily and commercially. The gamble paid off: the French, the Spanish, and, finally, the Americans oversaw a New Orleans that in the 19th century would become one of the greatest and most prosperous of American cities.

Given the rich history of city and river, I'll admit I felt a bit cheated when I first moved here. The river is not terrifically impressive as it flows past downtown. It's actually quite narrow between the French Quarter and Algiers Point, a historic part of the city connected by ferry and bridge. (It is, however, massively deep -- about 200 feet.)

And with the levees flanking it on either side, the Mississippi lacks a certain nobility -- the cafe au lait color, the plastic flotsam floating by, the rundown industries flanking the river, the rusty barges yawing past. It lacks the thick forests and tumbling falls of the Potomac above Washington, D.C., or the heroic Palisades along the Hudson above Manhattan. The Mississippi feels captive and underappreciated, like an old lion kept too long in an ill-tended zoo.

"We live in an engineered environment, there's no doubt about it," said Matt Rota, water resources program director at the Gulf Restoration Network.

Rota was one of the people I spoke with over the past few weeks in trying to get my arms around New Orleans' relationship with all this water. And over the next several months, I'll be reporting back on what I've learned about my soggy new home.

But I already know this: I've been here long enough to view New Orleans as the New Atlantis. As is often the case here, the city got things turned upside down and inside out. Because this isn't a mythological place that slipped beneath the waters, but a nearly mythological place that has improbably emerged from the waters, more than once, and has always bounced back.

At least so far.

Drink Me

Tuesday, 26 Jun 2007

NEW ORLEANS, La.

I was hiding out from New Orleans' early summer heat in a Magazine Street bar last week, when a woman walked up and asked for a cocktail and a water. "Bottled or tap?" the bartender inquired.

"Tap," she answered.

"Wow, you're brave," he said.

"It's not for me," the woman said theatrically, and everyone along the bar laughed.

Sort of.

New Orleans has long been estranged from its own water. Having just moved to the city, I feel like I've wandered into a complicated domestic dispute. I figured I should try to sort it out before I develop any unfortunate drinking habits.

The first thing I learned was that the city gets its water from the Mississippi River. Now let me repeat that: The city gets its drinking water from the big brown thing that flows past the city.

Muddy, may I?

Photo: iStockphoto

The Big Muddy rolls past at the rate of some 600,000 cubic feet per second -- that's about 8 million six-packs every second. Even by New Orleans standards, that's a lot of liquid. Some of it gets diverted just a few miles upriver of my house at an intake plant. The famous mud is settled out, and the water filtered, treated, and sent on its way to my kitchen faucet. (Much of it goes elsewhere.)

The best thing about having tap water from the river is that when visiting friends ask to see the Mighty Mississippi, I can walk over to the sink, turn the spigot with a flourish, and say, "With ice or without?" The worst thing about getting drinking water from the Mississippi is ... well, where to begin?

How about with the fact that the river drains some 40 percent of the continental United States. That's home to many millions of people, and all of them pee and poop in the river daily. OK, perhaps not directly in it, but in the watersheds whose rivers run into it.

Granted, New Orleans is not alone -- some 18 million people in the 2,500-mile valley get their drinking water out of the Mississippi. But we're very nearly at the end. If you view the serpentine river as the nation's digestive tract, that's us way down in the lower intestine. We can almost see daylight.

Furthermore, upriver of the intake station is one of the world's greatest collections of chemical plants, oil refineries, smelters, sewage treatment plants, and other impressive human-made structures that constantly flare and belch with great toxic eructations -- about 350 such facilities in all. Half have federal or state discharge permits to dump things in the river.

A few years ago the state set something up called the Early Warning Organic Compound Detection System to let us know if a problem has surfaced upriver. I don't know if it involves sirens or what, but in any event it's not very comforting. Nor is this sentence from the FAQ page of the city's water authority: "Very infrequently, tap water has had a taste or odor due to industrial discharges in the river." No further elucidation is offered.

Well-off New Orleanians have bottled water delivered to their houses; the Kentwood water trucks making their rounds are a part of the landscape in the better neighborhoods. "Uptown they get Kentwood," a local aphorism goes. "Downtown they get cancer."

I've taken to asking everyone I meet, especially those involved in water issues, whether they drink the city's tap water. Surprisingly, many say they do, and none of these people, to my eye, is visibly afflicted with cancer. Often, they issue a caveat of one sort or another -- they only cook with the water, for instance -- or they employ some sort of voodoo. "I use a Brita filter to make me feel better about it," Matt Rota, water resources program director at the Gulf Restoration Network, told me. "But I recognize that it doesn't do anything."

The water, of course, is regularly tested by the state and by the city's Sewage and Water Board. The city says the water is perfectly fine when it leaves the plant. Strikingly, nobody seems to argue otherwise. Chalk it up to the mighty powers of dilution of the Mississippi and modern cleansing technology.

But still, you have to wonder, particularly in the wake of Katrina. After all, billions of gallons of putrid, brackish water poured into the city and sat there for weeks. The flood swept up automobiles and their fluids; paint thinner that had been stored in sheds; and the sewage that backed up when power was knocked out to the 82 pumping stations that keep effluvia moving up and out of this bowl-shaped city.

No surprise: the sediment the flood left behind is proving a bit nasty. A study recently published in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported that fecal microbes of the sort commonly found in sewage have turned up in much of the sediment. The "good news" -- and New Orleanians are always looking for good news -- is that the authors think this may have been an issue prior to the storm. Anyway, no problem. Don't drink storm runoff, I say to myself. The city's water pipes are below ground and sealed up, safe from contamination.

Or not.

It turns out that Katrina's winds and waters ruptured an estimated 20,000 water pipes. As trees blew over, their roots acted like great levers, prying open underground pipes. Then the spongy New Orleans soil settled erratically after the floodwaters were pumped out, causing still more water pipes to burst.

By some estimates, about 100 million gallons of water per day were leaking out in the months after the storm. By late 2006, the loss had been reduced to about 40 million gallons per day -- but that's still a lot of six-packs.

New Orleans is full of unpredictable sights, and among these today is the abrupt appearance of great chasms in the city streets as errant water washes away the soil beneath. In my neighborhood, a concerned citizen deposited an old queen-sized mattress in one fissure as a marker, like a flag in a golf hole. It was scarcely visible.

If the system's integrity was that compromised, might one worry that stuff -- like that nasty flood sediment -- was getting back into the pipes?

One might, but the news here is surprisingly upbeat. The most recent testing at the kitchen taps was performed last September by the Natural Resources Defense Council, which tested tap water from 30 sites around the city. Only one produced signs of coliform bacteria, and that happened on a retest. The bad news? It was the site seven blocks from my house.

The good news: That tap didn't produce any evidence of E. coli, which, the report reassures, "means any coliform present were a non-fecal type." And while Non-Fecal Drinking Water lacks a certain allure as a brand name, I have to say at this point it sounds pretty good to me.

So do I drink the tap water?

Sure. Sometimes you just gotta have faith.

Death Wish

Tuesday, 7 Aug 2007

NEW ORLEANS, La.

It's summertime in New Orleans. Time slows. Backyard gardens demand to be weeded nearly hourly. The smell of a passing garbage truck seems to linger in the heavy air for hours, an olfactory postcard tacked to an invisible street corner bulletin board.

And the dead come back to life.

Well, technically, it's the "dead zone" that comes back to life.

Corn fed, but still dead.

Image: usda.gov

"It varies, but it's basically the size of Rhode Island or Connecticut," says Matt Rota, water resources program director at the Gulf Restoration Network, which is based in New Orleans. "Every summer nutrient pollution gets washed down from the breadbasket, and when it hits the warm, salty gulf waters, it basically creates a dead zone where the oxygen is so low that the critters either need to swim away or they die."

The mighty Mississippi transports a lot of soil and silt as it flows down to the Gulf of Mexico. And plenty more, including about a million metric tons of nitrates and 137,000 metric tons of phosphorus, which are flushed into the gulf each year. Much of that comes from agricultural lands well-lavished with fertilizers.

Where exactly do those substances go? About 70 percent of the Mississippi's volume flows past New Orleans and into the Gulf of Mexico through what's poetically called the birdfoot delta. (Look at a map to see why.) Nearly a third of the river flows out through the Atchafalaya Basin, thanks to a vast diversion dam built for flood control. Between the two outflows, the nitrates and phosphorus end up lingering along the broad, shallow coastal shelf that runs from New Orleans hundreds of miles to the west.

These nutrients promote a boom in algae growth. And as the algae blooms and dies, the dead cells drift to the bottom, where they decay and voraciously consume oxygen in the process.

The effect is amplified during the summer months for a couple of reasons. For one, the prevailing gulf currents during warmer months tend to hug the coast while moving slowly westward toward Texas. And seasonal wind conditions contribute to increased stratification in the water column -- not much vertical mixing of the gulf occurs during the summer to bring oxygen down from the surface, so the hypoxia (the technical name for oxygen depletion) grows and grows at the lower levels.

Thus the dead zone comes to life; and fish, eels, and crabs either die or migrate away.

Zone of contention.

Photo: noaa.gov

While hypoxia can occur anywhere that nutrients promote algae growth, the dead zone in the northwest gulf is the largest known in U.S. waters. And researchers report that this summer's dead zone is among the top three ever mapped in the Gulf of Mexico.

It doesn't have to be this way. The federal government some years ago embraced a goal of shrinking the dead zone, with the idea of reducing it about two-thirds from its current size. A formal plan, the result of meetings among dozens of government officials, environmentalists, farmers, and other stakeholders along the Mississippi, was developed in 2001.

So what happened? The plan spawned some conferences and further discussions and elaborate organizational charts, but it never received the promised federal funding to move from page to process. "No money has been given to this project, and the dead zone has not been reduced," Rota says. "And the feds are now revisiting the plan with the idea of trimming it back."

Rota notes that solutions are especially difficult in this case, since the pollution is mostly the result of nonpoint sources -- thousands of farmers, sewage treatment plants, and other small-scale contributors create this nutrient overload. In comparison, coping with industrial plant pollution is in many ways much simpler, since the source is clear and any sort of regulation can be narrowly targeted.

But efforts to coordinate among the different states and jurisdictions along the river to develop consistent guidelines for runoff have been, Rota says, "a bureaucratic nightmare."

And future prospects don't look much better.

While ethanol produced from corn has been widely heralded as a way to move the country away from its dependence on oil, the unintended consequences have cast a dark shadow over the Gulf of Mexico.

"It's really frightening to us from a nutrient pollution standpoint," Rota says, "because they're taking all these areas that were in less fertilizer-intensive products -- like soybeans and cotton -- and they're shifting it all into corn production."

"Ethanol is not the be all and end all," adds Dan Favre, campaign organizer with the Gulf Restoration Network.

What's more, Rota says Louisiana's shuttered fertilizer plants -- closed when demand fell off in previous years -- are looking at reopening to supply the booming demand among corn producers. And Louisiana may be looking at a large-scale shift from sugar to corn production to meet the demand. (Ethanol can be made from sugar, but federal tax incentives encourage the production of ethanol from corn.) All of this portends the dumping of even more fertilizer into the Mississippi.

"So we're going to be producing more fertilizer that we ship up into the breadbasket, and then those nutrients are going to wash right back down here and create even more dead-zone problems," he says.

The Mississippi has always been famous for its grand loops and oxbows, whose uncontrollable whims defined the meandering river in the 19th century. Today the river appears increasingly famous for another sort of loop -- the feedback loop. Build a levee here, and flooding gets worse there. Move away from oil here to encourage a more sustainable energy future, and the dead zone grows over there.

"Without policies to reduce and capture this fertilizer runoff," Rota says, "I fear that this trend toward larger dead zones is going to continue."

The Best Defense Is a Good ... Marsh

Wednesday, 29 Aug 2007

NEW ORLEANS, La.

A couple of weeks ago, the Army Corps of Engineers made available a downloadable set of Google Earth overlays that depict post-2011 flooding forecasts for New Orleans. By then, the Corps will have improved the city's levees -- making them taller, better anchoring them to the ground, and partially armoring some against erosion with concrete. (Strategy for the next four years: Pray. Or cross your fingers if you're a Christopher Hitchens reader.)

Naturally, I downloaded the set, then occupied what could have been an otherwise productive afternoon by clicking the toggles and soaring like Superman across the city while watching the water rise and fall. It was more fun than anything by Nintendo.

Of course, this all seemed a little less fun when I zoomed in on my own block and found our house under six to eight feet of water. Yikes! After a few moments of harried mouse clicking, I realized I had forgotten to untoggle the pre-Katrina, one-in-500-year-storm forecast, the scenario in which basically the whole city gets the full Atlantis treatment.

So I clicked off the offending toggle, and discovered that not only was our neighborhood going to be high and dry through pretty much any future storm, but that the whole city looked pretty safe. Just a little puddle or two, really, would form here or there during a post-2011, once-a-century hurricane. (For the record, Katrina was a once-in-397-year storm. My advice: don't live here in 2402.)

This was all very heartening. But then it occurred to me: this compelling bit of computer wizardry was constructed by the same people who constructed the levees. The levees that, you may recall, overtopped, eroded, and breached during Katrina two years ago this week -- despite repeated assurances that they were safe.

Fortunately, the levees that surround the city are our second line of defense. Unfortunately, the first line of defense is the marshland that has historically served as a buffer between the city and the Gulf of Mexico. And the marshes are in even worse shape than the levees.

Drive across one of the bridges over the Mississippi from the city center and, after some cursory cruising through suburbs, you'll find yourself in the marshes. To a newcomer like me, there's not much difference between one marsh and another, any more than there is between one Iowa cornfield and the next. The chief impression is that they're endless and flat.

Flat as they may seem, though, the marshes are, in effect, New Orleans' version of elevation. They protect this low-lying city from storm surges and hurricane winds by absorbing much of the energy of the wind and water. Having more marsh is like setting the city on a small hill. Having less marsh is functionally lowering it into the water.

Concern about the decline of Gulf of Mexico wetlands was a topic without much urgency around New Orleans prior to Katrina. After the storm, it attracted attention among a wider cadre. But it took a series on the coastal wetlands in the Times Picayune last March to really focus public attention. Suddenly, "marshes" was more commonly overheard in city coffee shops than "levees."

The three-part series contained a deluge of disheartening information about the pace of coastal erosion. Perhaps the one thing that cast it into sharpest relief was the large color photograph that led the series. It was an aerial shot looking south from just north of the central business district. It showed the instantly recognizable roof of the Superdome in the foreground, then the river, then a bit of marsh, and then the dappled Gulf of Mexico glistening in the spring sun.

To which everyone wondered: what the hell what was the gulf doing there?

New Orleanians have grown accustomed to telling people that the city lies about 60 miles from the sea. But here were those faraway waters, knocking at the back door.

Why the gulf has come visiting has little to do with global warming and rising seas -- at least not yet. It has everything to do with our efforts to control and exploit nature, and the blowback that's resulted.

Another aerial view puts in perspective not only the problem, but the cause. Each time I fly in or out of the city I peer out the jet window and see marshes extending to the encroaching gulf. But it's not an unmarred sea of grass. The marsh looks like a chessboard here, a gridiron there. Indeed, some 20,000 miles of canals have been sliced and diced to facilitate oil and gas vessels that cruise the marshes looking for deposits, and that want easier access to lay pipelines between the oil-rich gulf and fuel-processing facilities along the river.

This reckless network of canals, built over decades, caused a major breach in our defense, just as if someone had carved little ditches through the levees. The canals allowed salt water to invade freshwater marshes, killing the vegetation that had been keeping the alluvial silt in place. And the silt is the land here -- 10,000 years ago this was all sea; the soil-heavy Mississippi has been building up the delta ever since, and it's still pretty fragile. When the plants die, the mucky swamp soils rapidly erode into the gulf. Louisiana loses the equivalent of a football field about every 38 minutes. Between the hurricanes Katrina and Rita -- the disagreeable sisters of 2005 -- some 200 square miles of marsh washed away.

Gulf hurricanes are nothing new, of course. They have washed away marshes for centuries. But historically, the marshes would have replenished with silt carried by the Mississippi when it overflowed its banks. Today, the river sits straitjacketed by the levees that encase it for much of its length. Instead of spreading out across the wetlands during flood times, the Mississippi River dumps its great load of silt off the continental shelf and into the depths of the Gulf of Mexico, benefiting no one.

The map of Louisiana in that atlas on your shelf? It's likely drawn from data compiled more than a half century ago. Much of that marshland depicted on maps at the mouth of the Mississippi -- it's poetically called the birdfoot delta -- is gone. Your atlas is like an old family album showing ghosts of the past.

Among the more stunning points in the newspaper series was this: scientists say we've got just one decade -- a scant 10 years -- to reverse coastal erosion or it will be too late. Too late meaning that the ocean will be flowing into the backyards of New Orleans suburbs, and levees designed to keep out the infrequent flood will be employed full-time to keep out a permanent gulf intrusion.

It's not that the fix couldn't be achieved more than a decade from now. But the erosion would be so advanced that the cost of rebuilding the coastal wetlands would be prohibitive by almost any measure. As it stands, it's uncertain how much tolerance taxpayers have to fund the many billions already needed to undertake the massive diversion projects that would get the alluvial silt where it needs to be.

The city can't do this alone, and the state can't do it alone. It will require a major effort on the part of the federal government to fix what the oil and gas companies and eager-beaver levee builders have wrought.

A map of the Atchafalaya Basin shows recovered wetlands (in green).

There is some good news. Success has been marked in the Atchafalaya Basin to the west of New Orleans, where about one-third of the Mississippi River flows into the gulf. In the past 20 years, thanks to river diversion projects that allow the outflow of the Mississippi to rebuild eroding wetlands, the landmass is growing, and the landscape is healing. It can be done.

As I wrote in the first dispatch, to move to New Orleans post-Katrina is to show your faith in technology. Actually, that's not wholly correct. The technology is there, and it's looking pretty good. It's the political will that's more of concern. Getting the ideas from the drafting table to the bulldozers takes cash and political influence -- things our city doesn't have in much surplus these days.

The second anniversary of Katrina is being marked this week with a great flurry of stories in newspapers, magazines, and television about the recovery, both good and bad -- and there's plenty each to report. Next week, the hordes will leave and a late summer silence will fall upon the city as the media chases the next story. (What has Lindsay Lohan been up to the last month, anyway?)

But the slow process of healing and protecting this extraordinary city will push on, one day at a time. The ultimate destination? Unknown.

Related Links:

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Emily Gertz is an environmental journalist based in Brooklyn, N.Y., who has contributed to Grist, Plenty, WorldChanging, and other independent publications, and blogs at OneAtlantic.net.

Emily Gertz.

Thursday, 16 Nov 2006

New York, N.Y.

I want to believe.

I want to believe that we can create an ecologically sustainable and socio-economically just future for the billions of biologically distinct individuals who comprise humanity -- and other-living-thingity -- by going to sleep at night swaddled in soft organic-cotton sheets, waking up in the morning to garb ourselves in chic eco-fashions, and living out our days surrounded by beautiful, nontoxic furniture in our handsomely designed, LEED-certified homes.

Eco-designer Linda Loudermilk is a believer.

Photos: Emily Gertz

Lexus wants us to believe it, too -- especially those of us (or those of you, I should say) in the market for the company's mega-pricey LS hybrid luxury sedan, billed as "the ultimate in guilt-free pampering." So the company hosted an "eco-showroom" in New York City featuring five high-end green-design entrepreneurs and an impressive selection of slow-food nibbles, to underscore the idea that being green doesn't mean giving up the good life.

The shindig presented another opportunity to ponder the eco-culture questions of 2006: When policy and policymakers are missing in action, can the greening of business save the planet? And is there such a thing as conscientious consumption?

Once, a long time ago, I would have rejected anything that had to do with a car company, no matter how hybrid their sedan. But last night, while I rode the subway into Manhattan, I was reading Elizabeth Kolbert's latest climate-change dispatch in The New Yorker, about the accelerating acidification of the oceans. Does it matter so much, I began to wonder, if eco-salvation comes in the form of luxury -- so long as we get there?

The evening's green-minded and fashionable guests gathered at the furniture and materials showroom of Q Collection, in Manhattan's Lower Broadway interior-design district. I'd first met Q founders Anthony Cochran and Jesse Johnson in early 2005 at the Verdopolis conference, and had been impressed with their approach to greening decor: find or develop sustainably sourced and health-safe materials, and use them to create frankly gorgeous furnishings that will appeal to high-end designers and their clients (think Interior Design magazine, not Mother Earth News). It had struck me at the time as a potentially effective mechanism for funding research and development for nontoxic home furnishing materials, which could then trickle down to goods sold at more modest price points.

Sure enough, Johnson told me that Q Collection is developing a line of fabrics made from recycled polyesters and safe dyes that will cost around $30 a yard, less than half the price of Q's original textile line -- as well as a collection of baby furniture and bedding. (Both will be introduced in spring 2007.) Q Collection has added key creative staff -- the new director of furniture design and development jumped over from Martha Stewart -- and has done well enough that it's now directing 1 percent of its revenue to organizations raising awareness about indoor air quality, especially as it impacts the health of children and infants.

Johnson felt the goal of the evening, from the Lexus point of view, could be summed up in two words: no sacrifice. "Their hybrid buyer is not the Prius buyer," he said. "It's someone who would prefer to have better mileage and lower their ecological footprint, but without giving up the luxury features."

On to Linda Loudermilk, a fashion designer out of Los Angeles with a punk-inflected, Stevie Nicks leather-and-lace air, and an eco-evangelical intensity. "I had an experience with nature that turned my life around," said Loudermilk, adding that the story was too long to convey right then. "I was doing couture in Paris, but five years ago I picked up and moved to L.A. and started R&D on sustainable fabrics." Her collection melds green-sourced materials, including "Ingeo," a fiber made from non-GMO corn; sasawashi, a naturally anti-microbial leaf traditionally used for Japanese shoji screens; and lace made from wood pulp and nontoxic dye by a company in France that it took the designer three years to find.

Alexis and Jessica prove that green really is the new black.

All evening, two models outfitted in Loudermilk's designs circulated around the showroom with the slightly detached air of aliens visiting from Planet Ectomorph. Alexis wore a floaty white halter top made from wood pulp and organic mousseline silk, and modeled Loudermilk's recycled silver jewelry for me; Jessica's skirt was a slim-cut number in shimmering gray Ingeo, her black top an elegant combination of silky-looking wood-pulp fabric and sustainable lace.

Loudermilk is developing a pan-fashion industry "luxury eco-certification" to help the public pick out the truly green goods; she expects to unveil it in December. The designer said she welcomed the Lexus connection. "The U.S. is the last country to accept high-style sustainable clothing," said Loudermilk, whose clothes are carried in boutiques from the U.S. to Paris to Saudi Arabia, "but the first to give corporate support to sustainable designs."

Other companies at the Lexus event included Kenneth Cobonpue, which offers modern furniture with organic shapes that company executive Christopher Reiter described as "alternatives to cold, clinical definitions of modern design." Each piece is made in the company's 300-person factory in the Philippines from locally sourced, rapidly renewable organic materials like bamboo, abaca, and rattan. Reiter emphasized that despite the absence of strong labor protections in the Philippines, the company employs only adults, who work an eight-hour day and get a fair wage. The designs draw on traditional weaving techniques to create what he called "functional art," which also contributes to keeping the skills alive in the community.

Also present: LivingHomes, creator of prefabricated green homes designed by world-class modern architects. CEO Steve Glenn noted that they're the first residences to attain LEED Platinum certification, the highest possible rating from the U.S. Green Building Council. The homes come in modules that can be constructed quickly -- last April, Glenn's own LivingHome in Santa Monica, Calif., was erected from 11 modules in about eight hours. (Finish work took another three months, according to Dwell magazine.) People who care about sustainability and design "have trouble finding homes that reflect their values," said Glenn, explaining the company's market. Right now, those people better have quite a lot to spend -- but like Q Collection, LivingHomes hopes that as its market expands, it can begin to offer kits in a middle-class price range.

Jill Fehrenbacher, founder of the green design blog Inhabitat and architect-in-training at Columbia University, was enthusiastic about the LivingHomes approach: "It's the most beautiful and eco-friendly pre-fab there is." She didn't discount the high cost of sustainable living represented at the party, however, or the dissonance of merging eco with luxe. "There could be a conflict between green and luxury," she said. "Luxury is about consumption, which is essentially not green."

Fehrenbacher didn't see a problem with green products being targeted at the affluent, but advocated a thoughtful stance. "People need to constantly rein in the hype angle and refocus on the reason behind everything," she said.

After grabbing a snack from the buffet, I chatted with long-time New York City eco-preneur Katherine Tiddens, who was there to cheer on designer Christine Nelson as well as the ascendance of green design. Nelson's company, Coyuchi, creates embroidered organic baby linens, just the sort of thing Tiddens featured at her now-defunct Soho green boutique, Terra Verde. When Tiddens opened the store in 1991, she "wanted it to be the most radical and most seductive green store in the country," she said -- that is, one that didn't look all hemp and patchouli oil. So she's been happy to see the groundswell of interest in beautifully designed eco-friendly products.

But business can only do so much in a policy void, Tiddens said. A few businesses using nontoxic dyes won't improve the lives or health of most consumers, but if the government bans a dye as too dangerous, then it will be gone. "Some things have to come from government," Tiddens said. "There's no time anymore to screw around." (A post-Sept. 11 double whammy of lost business and tripled rent led Tiddens to shutter her Soho store a few years ago, but she says she's still busy consulting on other projects, including an eco-resort on an as-yet-undisclosed warm island.)

As the evening wound down, I had come to no conclusions about business saving the world. My green roots are of a shade just deep enough that exhortations to buy more stuff -- even eco-conscious, healthy stuff -- ring a bit tinny. But then again, as Bruce Sterling writes in the Viridian Manifesto, "Civil society does not respond at all well to moralistic scolding ... However, contemporary civil society can be led anywhere that looks attractive, glamorous, and seductive. The task at hand is therefore basically an act of social engineering. Society must become Green, and it must be a variety of Green that society will eagerly consume."

The goods I'd seen this evening (including, I must admit, a lovely bag of swag) were damn seductive indeed. And I have to say, over the past two years, as more designers have started getting hip to environmentalism, the food at parties like this one has gotten a lot healthier and more tasty.

On the way out, I got another perspective from Chuck Heckman of the Delano Collection, one of the green entrepreneurs behind last winter's ICI party. Delano spoke of that effort wistfully, as if it were from another era. "The first half of 2006 was like our 1990s period," he said. "We all just said, 'Hey, let's have a party!'" But now it's the 21st century. "Green business is no different from any other business," said Delano. "We care more about issues. But it takes a lot of work. And in the end, it's still about making dollars."

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Michael Levitin is a freelance writer based in Germany. Last week, he attended KyotoPlus: Escaping the Climate Trap, an international conference held in Berlin.

Monday, 2 Oct 2006

Berlin, Germany

Imagine a trans-European "super grid" of renewable energy connecting solar parks in northern Africa to wind farms in Scandinavia. Consider the millions in savings -- in miles, in dollars, in tons of CO2 injected into the atmosphere -- if once a week, one out of every 10 Americans telecommuted to work using state-of-the-art conference screens at home.

Or how about picturing the alternative: a world in which our continued burning of fossil fuels forces global temperatures over the 2 degree Celsius threshold (we're currently 0.7 degrees C above pre-Industrial levels) believed to be the tipping point that will lead to long-term, devastating atmospheric changes.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the G8 summit in July.

Photo: www.g8russia.ru

These were a few of the starkly opposing scenarios laid out by scientists, politicians, activists, and businesspeople at last week's international conference held in Berlin, called "KyotoPlus: Escaping the Climate Trap." With the original Kyoto Protocol and its modest rules on carbon cuts set to expire in 2012, energy and policy experts across the developed world are hustling to lay out conditions for a new, comprehensive climate-protection policy. It's fitting that the gathering took place in Germany, the country scheduled to take over the rotating seats of both the European Union and the G8 nations in 2007 -- and where Chancellor Angela Merkel last Thursday vowed to make tackling climate change a top priority of her European chairmanship.

"[The future] is about making sharp cuts. It's about restructuring our lives, re-steering investment, shifting our modes of transportation and production," Renate Künast, a Green Party politician and former agriculture minister, told the 600-strong crowd packed into the glass, solar-powered Energy Forum building located on the Spree River, just yards from the longest standing stretch of the Berlin Wall. Young, charismatic, and a shrewd politician, Künast is the kind of firebrand leader the environmental movement needs, here and elsewhere. Damning the EU's failed cap-and-trade system within the Kyoto Protocol, whose loopholes allowed industrial carbon emissions to keep soaring, she called on her country to much more aggressively lead the way in Europe. "Germany must be a pioneer. We need a green market economy where only sustainable use is an acceptable use. Count on technological change," Künast warned, "because by the middle of the century, we'll need an economy that runs carbon-free."

How we reach that carbon-zero goal, though, is where the Germans and other Europeans differ decidedly from the Americans in their approach to climate change. It's as though, at a conference like this one, two opposing strategies are simultaneously at play: there's the European camp, attempting to centralize a common energy policy (such as a follow-up treaty to Kyoto) based on universally agreed-upon emission cuts and a continent-wide plan for renewable fuel distribution, versus the American one, where energy policy is driven by a fragmented, state-by-state patchwork of strategies and no unifying law.

"At the end of the day, climate is about energy technology, and in the U.S. it's the states who are taking the lead on energy policies," Lewis Milford, president of the Vermont-based Clean Energy Group, said at a panel he chaired with California Energy Commissioner John Geesman, Massachusetts Rep. Jim Marzilli (D), and other clean-fuel advocates from the U.S., who shared some surprising results of their regional energy plans. In Connecticut, for example, an NGO called SmartPower is marketing clean energy through competitive community programs; in Oregon, energy efficiency saves the state 1 million megawatt hours per year; in the Northeast, nine states have signed on to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, agreeing to cut CO2 emissions by 10 percent. And in California, according to Geesman, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's aim to increase renewable-electricity generation to 20 percent of the state's total by 2010 -- and, even more ambitious, to possibly 33 percent by 2020 -- backs up a recent poll that found 85 percent of Californians want the state to double its reliance on clean energy over the next decade.

"Germany has become complacent as a leader in climate change," said Marc Berthold of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, one of a handful of NGOs that helped organize KyotoPlus. It was Germany, after all, that in 2001 established the Renewable Energy Sources Act, whose successful feed-in tariff model has been adopted by countries from China to Spain. Germany is still the world's largest wind power producer, the second largest solar producer, and it is planning to subsidize its renewables industry to the tune of $60 billion to $70 billion over the next decade -- a figure that dwarfs U.S. renewable energy subsidy plans per capita by comparison. Nevertheless, "Germany needs to learn from and be encouraged by policies elsewhere," Berthold added. "If the U.S. said, 'We want to be better than Germany by reducing emissions, say, 30 percent by 2030,' that would be great. The competition would help us."

One thing people in Europe seem to agree on is that the growth and trade of renewable forms of energy, including their spread to the developing world, must not be seen as a national resource with national boundaries but as a continental -- even a transcontinental -- resource whose widest expansion benefits us all. In Germany alone, the signs of ecological decline are all too obvious: rainfall deficits, soils suffocating in nitrogen, swaths of forest killed off by the bark beetle, vast tracts of fruit trees withering from disease. So, as the world receives the fourth report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change early next year, Germany will take charge of the European Union and the Group of Eight with the chance to lead the effort to make the most binding commitments to cutting carbon emissions ever, speculated to be as high as 40 percent by 2020.

Then, of course, comes the other big question: will America and the industrialized nations -- not to mention China, India, Brazil, and others -- follow? According to Jerome Ringo, president of the 22 million-member Apollo Alliance, who spoke with a resounding, preacher-like intensity at the conference, the answer is a simple "yes."

"The people of America want to see an answer to climate change. The people of America want to see a reduction in CO2," he said, his voice bellowing through the bright, sunlit conference hall. "I challenge you: help us save the planet. It is not a question of should we. We must."

Related Links:

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Oliver Bernstein is the deputy press secretary for diversity programs for the Sierra Club. He represented the Sierra Club at the Latino Congreso in Los Angeles.

Friday, 8 Sep 2006

LOS ANGELES, Calif.

"The environment? What's up with that?" This used to be the reaction of many Latinos to hearing about environmental issues, says Roger Rivera, president of the National Hispanic Environmental Council. They considered the environment a concern "for rich white folks with time on their hands."

But this perception is changing, as evidenced at the Latino Congreso in Los Angeles on Friday. More than 1,300 Latino leaders, public officials, and activists came together at the Congreso, the most comprehensive gathering of its kind in nearly 30 years. Issues like voting power, migration policy, and education reform were high on the agenda, but there was also an entire day dedicated to the environment, with well-attended sessions on such topics as climate change, community parks, and environmental justice.

The response from the attendees -- most of whom could tell stories about neighborhood sewage spills, dwindling fish supplies, unprecedented heat waves, and other problems they had experienced -- suggested that the country's largest "minority" group certainly understands the importance of environmental issues. While the environment still does not rank as highly for many Latinos as immigration or other issues, Latinos affected by the air they breathe, the fish they catch, or the water they drink are paying more attention than ever.

"We don't always talk about the environment, but we should," John Trasviña, interim president and general counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told the assembled crowd. Rep. Hilda Solis (D-Calif.), Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (D), and numerous others echoed this sentiment, imploring fellow Latinos to become leaders on the environment.

Rivera called the environment "the single biggest issue frontier that remains for Latinos." Having applied significant pressure nationally on issues like immigration reform, voting rights, and affirmative action, Latinos are now in a position to use their collective power to demand better environmental protections for their communities.

Why should Latinos in particular talk about the environment? Because, like other communities of color in the United States, Latino communities get picked as sites for polluting factories while wealthier, predominately white communities are left alone.

According to a 2004 report [PDF] by the League of United Latin American Citizens, more than half of Latinos in the U.S. live in areas that violate federal air-pollution standards for ozone. This ozone pollution contributes to the 2.5-to-1 ratio of asthma incidence in Latino children compared to non-Latino white children. Environmental-health issues like these can affect other aspects of children's lives, such as their education. According to Luis Arteaga, executive director of the Latino Issues Forum, a California-based nonprofit policy and advocacy institute, asthma is the leading cause of absenteeism for schoolkids in California's heavily Latino Central Valley.

Just down the road from the site of the Congreso is another example of disproportionate environmental burdens on Latinos. The enormous Port of Los Angeles is the entryway for about 42 percent of U.S. imports, and the neighboring community of Wilmington is home to the largest port and refinery cluster in the United States. Wilmington is 85 percent Latino, and its residents are five times more likely to develop cancer than the average American.

The theme of the Congreso was "Marcha Hoy; Vota Mañana" (March Today; Vote Tomorrow). Indeed, one of the questions for this election season and those that follow is whether the record numbers of immigrant-rights marchers earlier this year will translate into record numbers of voters in November and beyond.

With approximately 43 million Latinos in the United States and a projected 100 million by 2050, the potential for nationwide Latino political dominance is certainly there. As several experts at the Latino Congreso pointed out, however, many Latinos are not registered to vote, and turnout can be a big problem. California Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante (D) lamented that there are 4 million Latinos in the state who are eligible to vote but are not registered.

Sustained energy from the massive immigration rallies earlier this year has led to a spike in citizenship applications this summer, according to Antonio González, president of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project and the main organizer of the Congreso. This is a good sign leading up to September and October, typically the busiest times for voter registration. González projects that 6.5 million Latinos will vote in November 2006, an increase of 1 million over 2002 levels. González added that Latinos are younger on average than the overall U.S. population, and that Latino students will play an important role in voter registration and turnout this fall.

Assuming that more Latinos do turn out, however, the environment is not necessarily going to be the top issue on their minds. Rivera of the National Hispanic Environmental Council admits that Latino leaders "have had challenges getting our community to understand that the environment is not a backburner issue." According to a 2004 exit poll by the William C. Velazquez Institute, only 1.2 percent of Latino voters in Florida rated the environment as the most important issue in deciding on candidates. More pressing issues were the economy and jobs (22.2 percent), the war in Iraq (20.8), and abortion (14.7), among others.

The Latino Congreso sought to elevate voter concern for environmental issues by broadening the notion of "environment" to include health care, safe and healthy jobs, drinking water, and more. It also highlighted the importance of climate change with a showing of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and a speech by California Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez, cosponsor of the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006.

"If nothing is done on global warming and climate change," Rivera cautioned, "then look at your familia and figure out what you are going to do." Many Latinos in coastal areas will not be able to run to their second homes in the mountains or retrofit their houses, he half-joked. The message at the Congreso was that climate change -- like air pollution -- may affect Latinos even more than non-Latinos, and that they must work together to protect themselves.

The lofty goal of the environmental section of the Latino Congreso, according to organizers, was to develop a broad-based, accepted Latino agenda on the environment. This was perhaps asking too much, but the attendees did pass several resolutions, including ones calling for action on climate change, increased green space, and a focus on environmental health.

As Celeste Cantú, executive director of the California State Water Resources Control Board, said, "The United States is a Latino community." For this reason, we all have a stake in how Latino leaders, public officials, and activists confront environmental challenges, and we must all stand together to achieve success. ¡Sí se puede! Yes we can.

Related Links:

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Bill McKibben is the author of The End of Nature, published in 1989, the first book for a general audience on climate change. A scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, his forthcoming book is titled Deep Economy. He's participating in a five-day walk calling for action to fight global warming -- From the Road Less Traveled: Vermonters Walking Toward a Clean Energy Future.

Wednesday, 30 Aug 2006

MIDDLEBURY, Vt.

Why would anyone spend their Labor Day weekend wandering the shoulder of a highway? It's possible no one will -- but if they do, it may signal the next wave in the global-warming fight. And not a moment too soon.

By now, after almost 20 years, there's an amazing array of people working on global warming. The environmental movement has largely become the climate-change movement (the leaders of its major organizations, the Green Group, chose the issue as a top priority at least through 2008). There are committed engineers building the next generation of windmills, and economists figuring out a thousand schemes for trading carbon emissions, and pollsters running focus groups, and documentarians trying to follow up on Al Gore's success, and vice presidents for campus facilities installing new light bulbs in every dorm, and on and on and on.

On the long road to a cooler planet.

Photo: iStockphoto

What there haven't been, oddly, are any people in the streets. That's about to change. The end of this summer will see the first few mass demonstrations in U.S. history about climate change. The Chesapeake Climate Action Network gathered supporters outside the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration over the weekend, for instance, to demand that its bureaucrats own up to the link between climate change and hurricanes.

Later this week, meanwhile, a large group of us will step off from the spine of the Green Mountains in central Vermont for a five-day march into the state's major city, Burlington. We'll be walking the main roads on the west side of the state, rallying on town greens in the evening, holding a special church service on Sunday, and then, on Labor Day afternoon on the banks of Lake Champlain, demanding that our Senate and House candidates pledge to support not some lukewarm McCain-Lieberman silliness, but instead the relatively stiff proposals that our retiring independent senator, Jim Jeffords, recently introduced in the Senate.

Those proposals call for a number of things, including 20 percent renewable energy by 2020 and 80 percent carbon reductions by 2050 -- not deep or fast enough to solve the problem, but perhaps sufficient to really spur both technological and social change. The hope (against hope) is that once the ball starts rolling, it will go faster than we now imagine, fast enough to catch up with the momentum of the warming itself.

But we're not going to take those kinds of big steps unless and until our political leaders perceive that their constituents really want something new to happen. The problem with fighting global warming is that it's almost never the absolute No. 1 problem on anyone's list, the single most timely issue that will really bring people out to protest. For people who care about peace and human rights, there's always something like the situation in Darfur or in Lebanon -- an immediate crisis demanding immediate reaction. Never mind that over the long run it's painfully clear that global warming will produce unprecedented waves of refugees and hence unprecedented levels of conflict. For people moved by social-justice issues, the poverty of the moment motivates more than the hunger that's clearly coming as we unhinge the operation of the climate, inundate the coastal plants, and hence make marginal lives twice as shaky as before. Even for environmentalists, it's easier to understand in your gut, and hence take real action to prevent, the threat posed by chainsaws to a grove of redwoods or by a new smokestack to the air quality of your neighborhood.

Q&A WITH MCKIBBEN

And so climate change has increasingly been left to the technocrats, to the voices of reason. The problem is, they're losing. They haven't been able to outshout the voices of the special interests, which is why there's been no action on Capitol Hill, nothing at all.

Which in turn is why the rest of us need to speak up. Still rational (we have, after all, mountains of science on our side) but not so reasonable. Not willing to understand why nothing much can be done; not willing to seek the mildest possible compromises; above all, not willing to wait. We can speak the calm language of parts per million and insulation R-value and tradeable permit -- but we can also speak the charged language of our children's future and our planet's glory and our Creator's commandments.

If you live anywhere near Vermont, we hope you can join us for some part of our journey. And if you don't, we hope even more fervently that you'll start something similar in your neighborhood. Because the time has come.

The Road Less Traveled

Bill McKibben (in blue shirt) leads fellow Vermonters in calling for action on climate change.

Photos: Jon Orlando/ Greenpeace

 
Ripton, Vt., is the definition of New England mountain hamlet: stuck along the spine of the Green Mountains, a tiny burg with a general store and a town hall and a white church. And, this morning, a line of 300 people marching in the bright sunshine, a snaking line alongside the Middlebury River as it descends to the Champlain Valley below.

It's the opposite in every way of Sacramento, where the announcement just came that California would embark on its landmark effort to control carbon dioxide. But today they were linked, the two most important places in America in the fight against global warming, each illustrating both the potential for progress and the daunting obstacles ahead.

If you think about it, of course, neither one should be the place where we're making global-warming progress. The legislating should be done in Washington, and in New York at the United Nations -- climate change is the quintessential global problem. But because of the Beltway roadblock that's prevented progress for 15 years now, the pressure to deal with the planet's first civilization-scale challenge has built up and begun to find new and unexpected outlets. The action has shifted to city halls and state capitols, with the announcement of California's carbon deal the apex of this strategy.

But even California can't really do it alone. The state's attempts to raise automobile mileage are in court, under challenge from the federal government. The new law imposing carbon caps will face constant pressure because the state lacks the ability to really change the price of energy, which is the sine qua non for rapid progress. So at the same time, we need to figure out how finally to remove the (bipartisan) logjam that has blocked action in the nation's capitol.

Hence our walk. For five days we're trekking to Burlington, Vermont's biggest city, building momentum as we go until, on Labor Day afternoon, we assemble all the state's candidates for federal office and demand that they endorse strong action -- the legislation introduced earlier this year by our retiring senator, Jim Jeffords (I), which calls for an 85 percent reduction in CO2 by 2050.

One of the things we've discovered along the way is how eager people are to speak out on this question. It's just that they've never been given much of a chance -- talk about climate change has been largely confined to lecture halls, symposia, hearing rooms. Somehow the first civilization-scale challenge the planet has faced has yet to produce a movement; in fact, it's arguable that our band of strong-legged Vermonters setting out in the cool of the morning was one of the largest demonstrations about climate change yet held in this country.

One of its best features was the speed with which a collection of diverse groups put it together. Many were local -- the Vermont Natural Resources Council, VPIRG. But some of the big boys helped too, especially Greenpeace, which dispatched a crew of competent-beyond-belief traffic experts and sound-system wranglers. The cooperation was easy and deep, and institutional ego was almost nonexistent. It makes me think that just like the people who showed up to walk, an awful lot of organizers are eager for the chance to finally get some traction with this cause.

Which leaves the question: why start a march against global warming in an insignificant mountain town? Because this is where Robert Frost spent most of the summers of his life, and wrote many of his greatest poems. John Elder, a Frost scholar and a maple-syrup maker whose forest is just a few towns away, launched the march by reading Frost's most famous poem, "The Road Not Taken," with its invocation of the less-traveled path. And then we set off on that path, into a future that's still ours to make. The news from either end of the country today is that we're actually, really, finally trying.

Thursday, 31 Aug 2006

MIDDLEBURY, Vt.

Friday, 1 Sep 2006

VERGENNES, Vt.

Thirteen miles across the backroads today, with one near collision with a speeding milk truck. But walking across Vermont has plenty of consolations.

A setting that defines bucolic, for one thing. Early in the morning, leaving the town of Middlebury, our line of climate marchers passed the farm of a horse breeder specializing in dark brown Morgans. Forty stood in the field solemnly watching, and then turned and galloped as one across the field for half a mile, with the Green Mountains arrayed as a backdrop. Think "beer commercial," then think "real."

Good food, too. We pulled into Bound Brook farm outside Vergennes as the sun was setting, and pitched our tents in the pasture. Eric and Erica Anders were baking pizza and bread from their wheat harvest in a new cob oven out by the barn; when they finished feeding us, they started playing lilting bluegrass, a concert that lasted well into the night.

The biggest local pleasure, however, was seeing Middlebury College students begin to arrive back in the state, catching up with our walk on bikes or via the local bus service. College doesn't begin for a week, but many had headed up early to join our march -- which in a sense was inspired by their own increasing activism.

Those who despair that today's college students aren't involved, spend their time with video games, name your geezer complaint, should visit Middlebury for a little while. In the last four years, students at the rural college have organized the campus like no other in the country. A collective called the Sunday Night Group meets each ... Sunday night, often with a hundred or more students on hand to plan climate-change activism. They've helped change the campus (turned the thermostats down in winter, persuaded the administration to rethink its heating plant), the town (ran light-bulb exchanges that have passed out tens of thousands of CFL bulbs), the state (an annual bike to Montpelier has become one of the year's big lobbying events), even the world (they sent busloads up to Montreal for last year's international climate-change negotiations, by far the largest and loudest American delegation).

And they've done it all in exemplary fashion -- dedicated and firm in their convictions, but also open to dialogue, willing to work with authority instead of simply challenge it. The college president, Ron Liebowitz, greeted marchers one day last week by calling the Sunday Night Group one of the college's most important highlights; as we walked yesterday, the provost of one of Vermont's state colleges was talking with the Middlebury students, seeing how his campus could import some of their energy.

What's most interesting is how many of these kids are in it for the long haul. I walked yesterday with May Boeve and Claire Polfus, just returned from summer in Pennsylvania organizing the "Climate in the House" campaign to pressure candidates in congressional races. Boeve, who will graduate soon, was describing plans to move out West and organize in the coal states along the Rocky Mountains. I was writing yesterday from the office of another recent graduate, hard at work producing a carbon-offset credit card. And on and on. You can see some of their future possibilities in the Greenpeace activists helping make this march work -- they're a few years older, but no more cynical. And you can see it too in many of the 50-, 60-, 70-somethings who've joined in along the way, people who remember the last real burst of activism in this country (and remember it with the affection it deserves, not the contempt that "the '60s" now seem to inspire in so many memories).

At any rate, when your feet are tired and you're a little sad about the state of the world, it's incredibly reassuring for all of us with graying hair to realize someone younger is there to carry on the joyful burden of feeling the planet's sweetness and guarding it with the intelligence and compassion it requires.

Bright Young Things

Sunday, 3 Sep 2006

SHELBURNE, Vt.

We're camped tonight in a broad field at Shelburne Farms, eight miles from our goal in Burlington, after 24 hours of such constant activity that it's hard to remember exactly what's happened. The main impression: incredible support.

We've been marching up Route 7, western Vermont's main thoroughfare, and according to our fairly scientific survey, 80 percent of Vermonters will wave and honk when they see a long line of people marching against global warming. Five percent will wave and honk so wildly that their Priuses almost veer off the road, wiping out said march. Two percent of people apparently think global warming should be accelerated, and 13 percent are looking for a new station on the radio dial.

Marchers at church.

Photo: Jon Orlando/ Greenpeace

Saturday night, after a long haul, we pulled into a senior center in the town of Charlotte, to be greeted with a big spread of food and a not-at-all-senior rock-and-roll band. After a night camped by the lake (a swim! with biodegradable soap!), we reassembled the next morning at the Charlotte Congregational Church for a morning service devoted to caring for Creation. People from around the region crowded in, spilling out onto the front steps. The hardworking deacons ran out of Communion wine. But the hymn-singing was intense; we left with a lilt in our step.

By dusk, we'd reached this enormous farmstead, now a nonprofit center for environmental education. We gathered in what once had been the horse-breeding barn -- the largest single-span wooden structure in the world -- for hours of music and talk. We heard from the Buddhist environmentalist Stephanie Kaza, the enlightened entrepreneur Jeffrey Hollender of Seventh Generation, the folk-singing preacher Fred Small, and, perhaps best of all, the wailing jazz clarinet of Bud Leeds, sounding a pure, clear note in the enormous space.

And tomorrow we're on to the final stop -- the gathering of politicians on the lakefront in Burlington, where we hope to win agreement from all our candidates to make the Jeffords-Waxman climate-change legislation a strong priority if they're elected. We have no real idea what's going to happen: Will they sign our pledge or won't they? Will they even show up?

But in some sense it feels like we've already succeeded. This is no longer a second-tier issue in Vermont politics; it's now firmly on the agenda. All it took was a few hundred blisters.

Honk If You Care About the Climate

Monday, 4 Sep 2006

BURLINGTON, Vt.

No matter what any organizer -- even a pretend one like me -- says, the greatest fear is always numbers. What if you call a rally and no one comes?

Today, by early in the morning, it was clear that wasn't going to be a problem. By the time we headed out of Shelburne Farms toward Burlington, our line numbered over 500. Over the next 10 miles we added hundreds more, the line stretching half a mile along the shoulder of the highway as we snaked past the car dealerships and burger joints on the southern edge of the state's largest city. When we finally got to the rally site on the Lake Champlain waterfront, there were more than a thousand people protesting global warming -- the largest political rally in the state in recent memory, and perhaps the largest demonstration against climate change yet in the country.

And the numbers mattered. We weren't sure till the last minute exactly which politicians would appear, but as word spread over the five days of the march that it was a powerful success, the promises from the various camps grew firmer and firmer. By the time we got to the rally, all the federal candidates were waiting, and one by one they took the stage.

But not, crucially, until we explained the terms of the deal. We didn't want their vague expressions of concern and promises of action -- we wanted their signatures on the giant global-warming pledge we'd written based on the Jeffords-Waxman legislation. As each came on stage for their allotted three minutes, Schuyler Klein -- the youngest of the walkers who had managed the whole 50 miles -- handed them a giant Sharpie and asked them to sign. Bernie Sanders -- our sitting congressional representative, now running for Senate -- was first; no surprise that he signed in a flowing scrawl and then brought the walkers to their tired feet by promising to reintroduce the Jeffords bill on his first day as a senator. But he was followed by the Republican candidate, Rich Tarrant, a gazillionaire who's been running such a negative campaign that one local columnist has started calling him Tarrantula. He signed, he pledged his fealty, and the crowd applauded with real warmth.

The congressional candidates came next. Again, Peter Welch was no great surprise. The Democratic candidate has championed renewable-energy legislation as president of the state Senate; he's made global warming a centerpiece of his campaign. Martha Rainville, his GOP opponent, came next. Two months ago, early in her campaign, she'd said it wasn't clear if humans were even causing global warming and called for more research; today, driven by the obvious passion in the state, she marched right over, grabbed the pen, and inked her signature.

With that, all the candidates for the state's federal offices had signed on to a plan for halting global warming far more radical than anything else proposed in Congress. We had managed to almost literally raise the bar in Vermont politics to the point where anyone wishing to be taken seriously needs to champion an 85 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050, the rapid phase-in of 40-mile-per-gallon cars, and a national plan to get 20 percent of our power from renewables by 2020. In other words, the same kind of plan that the European nations have endorsed. More to the point, we'd demonstrated that at least for Vermont voters this was not a second- or third-tier issue -- it was as crucial to getting elected as your position on jobs or the economy or all the things the political pros always call the real issues.

After that, there was nothing but singing and dancing -- Anais Mitchell, a local folksinger with a national following, led everyone in "This Land is Your Land," and John Elder, writer and professor, finished off with the same Frost poem that had launched the march, "The Road Not Taken."

And there were questions, too. Was this success unique to Vermont, or could it be replicated elsewhere? Already people from other states were talking about marches of their own in the coming year. My sense, from helping to organize this one, is that people are simply waiting for someone to give them an opportunity to demonstrate their despair and their hope. I know for me the sheer act of getting out and walking was cathartic -- and to see how many others came along was sheer bliss.

In almost 20 years of working on global warming, I've never had a day when I felt as hopeful.

Hope and Glory

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Eric Wagner is a graduate student in biology at the University of Washington. He reports from China, where a group of students and faculty from UW and Sichuan University is working to help create a management plan for a popular national park.

Saturday, 22 Apr 2006

On the road, Sichuan Province, China

"It's weird," Yuh-Chi Niou says to me as our bus bounces and rattles its way across the Chinese countryside. "The words they use to describe Jiuzhaigou come out in English as 'fairyland' or 'heaven.' They do sound kind of silly."

A little slice of heaven.

Photos: Eric Wagner.

An undergraduate at the University of Washington, Niou is talking about her recent feat of translating an introduction to Jiuzhaigou National Nature Reserve, where we are headed. I've just flipped through it, and am asking about the verbal excess. "Fairyland" seems just too, oh, Tony Robbins trying to make the park feel good about itself. ("You're a fairyland! Believe it and it'll be true!") Nothing could be that amazing.

But when we arrive at the park six hours later and I stumble out of the bus and see what everyone has been trying to describe, I forgive the hyperbole.

Jiuzhaigou Reserve, in Sichuan province, is one of the best-known national parks in China. It encompasses about 280 square miles of mountains and waterfalls, lakes and forests, with elevations that range from 6,000 to nearly 16,000 feet. This results in a suite of habitats, and the park is home to an impressive collection of biota. It is one of the last places to see a giant panda in the wild, as well as the golden monkey -- two of China's more high-profile endangered species.

The Chinese government created the park in 1978. After it opened to the public in the early 1980s, about 5,000 people visited annually. Today, about 7,000 come in a single day. The increase is due to a series of designations starting in the 1990s, when the park caught the world's keen green eye. It was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992, a World Biosphere Reserve in 1997, and is certified as sustainable by Green Globe 21. (Jiuzhaigou is China's only park to have all three designations.)

Will tourists crowd out views like this?

These accolades have had a marked impact. Last year, more than 2 million people passed through the entrance gates. This year, the park aims to raise that number by half a million more. And those people will want places to sleep and eat. They'll want to see the amazing views that travel agents promise with their colorful brochures. And they'll want to do all of this in a fragile landscape that isn't especially suited to handling so much sustained human traffic.

This is where Niou and I (and several others) come in. We're part of a contingent of students and faculty from the University of Washington and Sichuan University in Chengdu, China. Pitching along with us on the bus was a crew of engineers, chemists, ecologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists. We're all here because of UW Worldwide, a program sponsored by UW that's designed to foster multinational collaborations in research, education, and service.

Over the next nine days, we'll work with the park's science staff on projects ranging from wastewater management to environmental monitoring. Our goal is to help the park develop a more comprehensive management plan for its natural and cultural resources.

And on that note, one small bit of trivia: "Jiuzhaigou" literally means "Valley of Nine Villages." All of those villages, some of which are still inhabited, were Tibetan, and speak to the uneasy relationship between the park's conservation goals and the area's original residents.

But that's a story for tomorrow. My stomach is still recovering from the bus ride, and I want to play tourist for a couple more minutes. I'll test my camera's robust promise to capture "the unique essence of your chosen image," or something like that. Most of my photos will turn out to be some variation on two ridges converging into a valley with an awesome peak towering behind. At slide shows to come, conscripted family and friends may wonder why I took the same picture 800 times. But I will remember that each shot was, at the time, both singular and spectacular.

Watch Your Yak

Officially, there are no yaks in the Jiuzhaigou National Nature Reserve. They haven't been allowed within park boundaries for several years now. Even so, when I stepped in a large pile of yak slop on the first day of a backpacking trip, I was not terribly surprised.

I was on the trip as part of Shengtai Yi ("Ecology 1"), along with Gus Jespersen, Erin Hagen, and Kimberly Sheldon. We're grad students at UW -- they in alpine, avian, and physiological ecology, respectively; I'm the estuarine ecologist of the group. (The estuaries at 13,000 feet being so amazing, after all.) Tom Hinckley was also with us. A professor of forest ecology at UW, he's perhaps the fittest sexagenarian I know.

We were paced by Andrew Scanlon, an Irish fellow working for the German government in a Chinese park. He, Erin, and Tom would hike in with us to lighten our early load of food and gear. Gus, Kimberly, and I would then continue into the backcountry for three or four more days.

Our trek would take us through the northeastern portion of the park, currently off-limits to visitors. That is about to change: the park plans to open an ecotourism trail next July. Most Chinese tourists, Andrew says, are content to "ride a bus, take a picture, buy a souvenir, and go home." This new attraction will take those who want to get off the bus and around the mountains on a guided trek.

Park managers want to pack in as many as 500 people per kilometer, which will no doubt have an impact on a place that some visitors are asked to pay more than 1,000 RMB (about $125) per day to see. Currently, the park doesn't have a standardized protocol to monitor the impacts of its visitors. Gus, Kimberly, and I were to hike the proposed trail, marking GPS waypoints and habitat boundaries. We would also document whatever plants and wildlife we could. When we returned, we would work with park staff to develop a rigorous monitoring protocol.

This area of the park is supposed to be uninhabited, but it wasn't long before signs started to appear. The yak poop, for instance, and the yaks themselves. Lean-tos surrounded by a debris field of plastic bottles. A large, temporarily abandoned hut on a slope.

According to park policy, none of this exists. But try telling that to the Tibetans who regularly use the mountain. Make sure to mention to the people scouring the hillside that collection of natural resources is not allowed, and that it's illegal to come into the park through unsanctioned entrances like the high ridge where we saw them.

An unexpected encounter.

Photo: Eric Wagner.

As often happens with fieldwork, external forces changed our plans. Gus, Kimberly, and I had just hit the ridge one late afternoon when a couple of the Tibetans we'd seen spirited over to say hello. One looked to be in his mid-20s; the other couldn't have been more than 15. They flopped on the grass next to us, offered their disk of bread, and showed us the medicinal roots they had dug up that morning, stuffed in a cigarette pack. (Andrew later told me that a kilo of the root nets close to $200 -- a good monthly salary in this part of the country.)

They gestured at mountains that stretched for miles and flashed a thumbs-up. We nodded back. The view was indeed spectacular. Because our shared vocabulary consisted of "hello," "let's go," "bye," and "Jiuzhaigou," we focused on the last one, trying to tell them where we'd come from. I'm still not entirely certain, but I think they thought we were lost. "Jiuzhaigou!" they said, pointing over a mountain and grinning. We smiled back wanly -- we'd been hiking for six hours at high altitude and were tired. Of course, our new companions had been up both far longer and far higher.

A third Tibetan loped over, and they motioned for us to follow. They hiked fast, but their leisurely steps made it seem as if they were out for a casual stroll, which did little for morale. I was soon panting and heaving and showing especial interest in stopping to photograph a yellow flower.

Eventually, our companions decided we were going too slowly. They mimed for us to take off our packs, which they shouldered. They pointed down an impossibly steep slope. They would take us to their village, where we could camp and be fed, if we liked.

I'll be curious to see how the park and the Tibetans reconcile their disparate land ethics, or if they can. So far, the government has contented itself with paying the Tibetans up to 7,000 RMB a year to phase out their poaching practices -- a program that is expected to end next year.

But as I scrambled down the slope, watching the Tibetans carry my pack and chain-smoke and search for roots and still easily outstrip me, conservation wasn't my first concern. I'm growing more accustomed to these delicate contradictions -- between what I read and what I see, between what is said and what is stuck in the treads of my boot.

All Good Things Must Come to an End

Wednesday, 3 May 2006

Jiuzhaigou National Nature Reserve

I felt a strange melancholy when I woke up this morning, my next-to-last in Jiuzhaigou National Nature Reserve. I suppose it was inevitable, given the intensity of the past nine days. Still, it seemed that the day was intent on preventing happiness. Clouds hung over the mountains and drifted among the trees. Usually, they have the decency to wait until evening. Also, it was raining. We'd been told we'd miss the rainy season, but apparently it started early to make sure we'd get a taste, no matter how fleeting. (An uncanny condition of my last day anywhere is that it always rains.)

Abandoned Tibetan village.

Yesterday was Teaching and Training Day. All the students went for a hike with park staff into the Hai Jaei valley. James Taylor, a UW archaeology grad student, and Chen Shi, an undergrad anthropologist from Sichuan University, had spent much of their week in an abandoned Tibetan village up in the valley. The village has one inhabitant, an old half-deaf, half-mute Tibetan man. "You should see how he can talk with his hands," James told us. "It's amazing -- any little tool I show him, he can demonstrate exactly what it does through sign language, and how it's made. He built the house he lives in."

Our ecology group had hiked up at 7 a.m. to set up vegetation plots. In our days here, we've found that while the park monitors a lot of environmental parameters, they sometimes do so in helter-skelter fashion. Having a database of standardized observations would be helpful. Although the park was started in 1978, they've only begun monitoring things such as forest health within the past few years. Sometimes that data goes unanalyzed for a while. We thought we'd give them some additional quick, easy ways to determine the state of their forests, among other things.

The science staff arrived around 10 a.m. Amanda Henck, a geology grad student, started the day with a show of some GPS tricks; James talked about the importance of preserving cultural resources; and our group talked about things like fuel moisture indices (which determine forest fire risk); forest basal area monitoring (a measure of stand health); belt transects (which help monitor human impacts on vegetation); and tree coring (to find stand age). Then we all picked up litter, and then it was time to go home.

We spent most of our last full day in the Jiuzhaigou with the science staff, talking about what we'd learned this year and what could make next year more successful. And then it was off to our last formal dinner. (We knew it was formal because our Irish guide, Andrew Scanlon, wore a sport jacket -- his father's father's -- over his usual sweatshirt and hiking pants.)

Prof. Tom Hinckley (left) demonstrates the use of a fuels moisture monitor.

As much as I appreciate the food here, I'm now wary of Chinese formal dinners. They're great fun, but they quickly dissolve into rather straightforward drinking rituals under the guise of toasts. Through a set of rules that I still don't understand, you're not allowed to drink liquid of any sort unless you raise a glass to someone or they raise one to you. So you'll be picking at something with chopsticks, and suddenly someone taps you on the shoulder. (The strength of the tap correlates strongly with the lateness of the evening.) Turning around, you'll see someone you may or may not know who may or may not be able to focus on you. "To you!" they'll say if they can't think of another reason, and they drain their glass, and you do, too, because that's how it's done. And then off they go to find someone else. And you return to the chopsticks, which have been getting harder and harder to use as the night goes on.

Especially pernicious is when a table decides to "target" someone, sending a stream of people one after another to toast a victim to the floor. The UW students tried to do this to forest ecology professor Tom Hinckley, but he outmaneuvered us by drinking tasty yogurt-milk. I guess that's why he has tenure.

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Wednesday, 19 Apr 2006

New York, N.Y.

Why was last night different from all other nights on which people have gathered to party for an environmental crusade? Because it was the launch party for the first green issue of Vanity Fair -- a glossy, celebrity-drenched cry to mainstream America that global warming is "a threat graver than terrorism." About 450 people -- from friends of the magazine to a cross-section of New York City's green activists -- packed the swanky second floor of event co-sponsor ABC Home, a retailer of domestic luxe. They schmoozed, strategized, and even got a rousing bit of environmental gospel from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The sum of the evening's message? Denial of denial is the new environmentalism. It's OK to live well, as long as you live smart.

The guest of honor.

The badge of entry was a tiny pink peace-sign button, distributed to attendees as they were checked off the guest list. Co-hosts Paulette Cole, CEO and creative director of ABC Home, and Graydon Carter, editor in chief of Vanity Fair, circulated with smiles and handshakes. Guests in satin dresses and sharp suits snacked on raw-food treats and washed them down with organic cocktails. They kissed cheeks and traded business cards amid a pricey assortment of sustainable-sourced wood-top tables and organic-upholstered couches. "It's the green people meet the beautiful people," quipped Andrew Shapiro, founder and CEO of Green Order, the sustainable business consultancy that helped strategize GE's Ecomagination initiative. Despite this arch observation, Shapiro was enjoying the union, seeing it as a "directionally correct" manifestation of environmental concern beyond a narrow niche and into America at large.

Brian Howard, managing editor of E Magazine, agreed -- if from a slightly different angle. "E got a ton of negative feedback when it ran a cover featuring the Simpsons in the late 1990s," he said. "People said, 'These issues are serious. You can't run a cartoon on the front of the magazine!'" Taking a sip of his cu-tini -- a concoction of fresh cucumber juice, mint, agave nectar, grapefruit juice, and vodka, with a jaunty cucumber slice as garnish -- Howard wondered if the visibility of environmental issues on the Vanity Fair cover might help eco-activists lighten up a little. "Perhaps we're in the post-greenwashing stage," he said, "and now it's OK to be hip."

Olga Sasplugas and Graham Hill of Treehugger, Remy Chevalier of ICInyc.

Photos: Emily Gertz.

But at least one advocate was eyeing these hip doings with a bit of good-natured reserve. Wendy Brawer, founder and director of the Green Map System, was clearly enjoying herself (and her cu-tini), chatting with friends and colleagues like Remy Chevalier of ICInyc, Graham Hill of Treehugger, and Starre Vartan, founder and editor of the green blog Eco-Chick. As she surveyed the furniture selection, she wondered if there wasn't an inherent contradiction in the mix of materialism and environmentalism. "I hope when people walk into ABC, they'll also realize that things they already own just need a little twist to be made new again," she said.

Introducing speaker Kennedy, Cole referred to her inventory as "products that serve the planet, and allow consumers to vote with their dollars." Randy Hayes agrees that economics is an inescapable part of the picture. The Rainforest Action Network founder now directs the International Forum on Globalization, a think tank developing ideas and strategies for what he calls "ecologizing" capitalism. "An event like this has utility" for moving environmentalism beyond its niche status, he said. And so does far-reaching journalism like Vanity Fair's: "We need the hard-hitting stories that reach outside the choir."

Asked what he thinks has led to the rush of global-warming reporting in the glossies, Hayes had a one-word answer: "Katrina." The storm was "an eco-spasm that hit people in the solar plexus," he said. "Katrina's real name is climate disruption -- which will likely turn into climate chaos." Hayes feels Katrina has "triggered people to address the critical issue of our time: saving the life-support system of the earth."

The place to be scene.

So after all these years of environmentalists and scientists sounding the alarm and the press largely ignoring it, why is now the moment when Vanity Fair readers are ready for an issue about climate meltdown -- albeit one graced with an image of Julia Roberts as an eco-sprite? "At Vanity Fair, we cover all aspects of the national conversation -- and this is the subject not only of the moment, but of the decade and the century," said Carter after the event. "It should be on the cover of every magazine right now."

While researching his 2004 book What We've Lost, an indictment of the Bush administration, Carter got up to speed on the administration's crimes against the environment, especially its "gross negligence" on global warming. "That really got me going," he said, "and caused me to expand the magazine's coverage of the environment and to devote an entire issue to it."

Is this the flavor of the month? Will the memory of the cu-tini fade with the next glossy cover? Vanity Fair did earn jeers in some circles for backing away from printing the issue on recycled paper. But Carter says the magazine will continue to bolster its environmental journalism, and may put out a green issue every year.

For his part, Hayes sees the surge in green coverage as just one sign that despite the dire times, there's reason for hope. "We used to talk about the mainstream press -- now we talk about the media," he said. "This is mass media turning back into the free press."

Emily Gertz reports on environmental issues from her home base in Brooklyn, N.Y. She has written for Grist, BushGreenwatch, The Bear Deluxe, and other independent publications. She contributes to Worldchanging.com, and recently launched OneAtlantic.net.

Emily Gertz.

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Eric Pallant is a professor of environmental science at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pa., and codirector of the NATO Advanced Study Institute on Integrated Water Resources Management.

Monday, 13 Feb 2006

Kibbutz Ketura, Israel

A Moldovan, two Bulgarians, and three Canadians walk into the desert. It's like the start of a bad joke, but this is a specific desert -- an extreme one, according to local hydrologists. The Arava, in the southern Negev of Israel, is one of the driest deserts in the world, with an average amount of annual precipitation that would barely breach the soles on a pair of sandals.

The Moldovan, Bulgarians, and Canadians are in the company of 41 colleagues, who have come from 14 countries and the Palestinian Authority for a 10-day institute on water resources management. The event is sponsored by NATO, which understands that a future conflict in the Middle East -- heck, in many places on the planet -- could arise over natural resources. And water is the most embattled liquid, after oil.

I organized this institute with Clive Lipchin of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies. The organization is a liberal survivor of the 1990s, when peace between Israel and its neighbors seemed imminent and environment and peace groups sprouted like spring flowers. Arava is located on Kibbutz Ketura, a small communal village generating income from growing voluptuous medjool dates, farming fish in cages floating in the Red Sea about 35 miles from here, and raising cows that produce the best chocolate milk in Israel. On many mornings, before the desert winds flow down the Syrio-African rift valley, the aroma of desiccating cow manure blankets the kibbutz.

To kick things off, NATO sent its program director for Scientific and Environmental Affairs, Professor F. Carvalho Rodrigues, to explain why an organization formed during the Cold War to protect Europe from the Warsaw Pact had become a funder of a conference in Israel on water use in the Middle East. Carvalho, built like Luciano Pavarotti, sported a black suit and floral bowtie beneath a coal-black beard. He said the challenges to NATO's core countries and partners (there are 56 nations now) "have been transformed from national security to broadly defined social security." NATO now worries about failures in transportation, energy, communications, and what Carvalho calls "life support systems": water, air, soil, and climate.

Immediately after Carvalho sat down, we heard "good news and bad news" from David Brooks, a Canadian septuagenarian who is the closest thing to a globally recognized, impartial expert on Middle Eastern water. Brooks said the good news is that water wars aren't imminent, thanks to reasonably good cooperation among erstwhile enemies. The bad news is that water scarcity is pronounced, and getting worse. The overwhelming majority of surface water in the region is polluted, mostly by raw sewage. Inappropriate disposal of industrial and chemical waste is widespread. Farmers receive water for irrigation at absurdly subsidized prices, and groundwater is being extracted at unsustainable rates.

Brooks predicted that as Middle Eastern populations continue to expand, water shortages would be felt first in food production, nearly all of which depends on irrigation. There wouldn't be a shortage of drinking water; humans can survive on mere gallons per day. In fact, the average Palestinian consumes just 15 gallons a day -- half as much as a Jordanian, a fifth as much as an Israeli, and about one-twentieth as much as a Californian.

We got a hint of things to come when Dr. Samir Hijazin, from the Jordanian Ministry of Water and Irrigation, asked, "How can Israel grow vegetables [and raise cows] in the middle of the desert, when Jordanians and Palestinians have to wait for sporadic water deliveries during the middle of the summer?" To paraphrase David Brooks, water shouldn't be a cause for war in the Middle East -- but it could become an excuse.

Tapped Out

Tuesday, 14 Feb 2006

Kibbutz Ketura, Israel

Nader El Khatib is the Palestinian director of Friends of the Earth Middle East. During most of the year, he meets with his Israeli and Jordanian counterparts to promote environmental protection of the region. During the summer, however, he is a dictator.

Nader lives with his two brothers in a house on the West Bank. There are 35 water tanks on the roof, but inside there is no running water. Speaking softly, he told the participants at this week's NATO institute, "I become a dictator in my family during the summer, when no rain falls for six or seven months. I am constantly checking that no one in the household is wasting water."

Nader El Khatib.

Photo: Eric Pallant.

In Amman, Jordan, there are water shortages, but at least there is a schedule: water comes every Wednesday. "But in Palestine," continued Nader, "it could be weeks or months, because Israel controls water allocations to Palestinians on the West Bank. When we were under curfew for 40 days in Bethlehem [during the worst of the intifada], we were constantly worried about water supplies." The only predictable increase in water provisions on the West Bank comes on Saturday, when religious Jews observe the Sabbath in their West Bank settlement communities and do no work.

To Nader and his fellow citizens, this is the reality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. During the peaceful 1990s, Palestinian children were out in the street handing olive branches to Israeli soldiers. After seeing their hopes for an independent Palestine dashed, Nader says it is very hard to tell kids to conserve. "They tell me to get lost, because they do not have enough water to use."

Nader once participated in a study of water supply to Palestinian cities on the West Bank. In 1997 in Hebron, a city of approximately 110,000, he found most people got water from the piped system only once a week from May to October. This was only enough for 27 liters per day -- a little more than six gallons. Picture that many Coke bottles, and imagine using just that amount for cooking, cleaning, washing, and toilet activities. "People have to buy water from suppliers, tanker trucks, and this is an economic burden," Nader says.

Evgeni Levner, a gray-haired Israeli scientist from the Holon Academic Institute of Technology, listened to Nader's stories with quiet intensity before finally speaking up. "First of all, I want to say that I never knew any of what Nader just told us. I also want to say that I don't think we should generalize, we should not create an image of a monster of Israel, nor should we aim to praise it. We should do our very best to find a solution."

Susana Neto, an urban and regional planner from the Technical University of Lisbon, could not believe Israelis were unaware of Palestinian water shortages. Other Israeli participants confirmed Evgeni's observation. Israelis don't know how hard it is. The same can be said for most residents of the developed world.

The participants produced one example of "consciousness raising" from Jordan. A few months ago, there was a campaign in Jordan called "Right to Water." It was designed to raise awareness among the privileged part of the country's population about scarcity and lack of water experienced by its poor residents. Participants wondered why there couldn't be something similar throughout the Middle East.

Jonathon Chenowith from the Center for Environmental Strategy, University of Surrey, England, put his finger on the problem of conferences like these. "The thing is, we are sitting in a small room in a small kibbutz in the middle of the Arava Desert. How can we get the message out beyond our bubble to the rest of the world?"

Now you know.

Dead on Arrival

Wednesday, 15 Feb 2006

Dead Sea, Israel

The public beach on the Dead Sea is filled with gleeful voices: Russian, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, Turkish, heavily accented English, German, and Armenian. Chris Bowser, a graduate student from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., laughs as he paddles on his back, his feet in the air, his head, shoulders, and half his chest well above the surface.

Frolickers like us can still walk to the public beach, but the walk has gotten longer every year. And reaching the fancy beach at the Ein Gedi Spa now requires a mile tram ride. The snake-like road from spa to beach must be extended annually in order to reach the edge of the Dead -- a shrinking body of water that has lost about one-third of its surface area over time.

Dead Sea salt.

Photos: Eric Pallant.

The famed sea is actually a terminal lake. Water flows into this, the lowest point on the earth's surface, from the River Jordan. Its only way out is evaporation. But the last time any fresh water from the Jordan reached this point was in 2005.

As Gidon Bromberg, Israeli director of Friends of the Earth Middle East, puts it, the one-meter-per-year drop in the level of the lake is the best example of international cooperation in the Middle East: "Syria, Israel, Lebanon, and Jordan have all worked together to drain it."

The Jordan River flows through the Sea of Galilee on its way to the Dead Sea in a nearly straight line from north to south, along the border between Jordan and Israel. North of the Galilee, its tributaries in Syria and Lebanon are dammed. Farther downstream, it is piped to farms in southern Israel. Water is extracted from the Sea of Galilee to supply Israel and Jordan. By the time the river exits the Sea of Galilee to continue south, it consists of brackish water and sewage.

To compound matters, an enormous industrial complex at the southern end of the Dead Sea -- known as the Arab Potash Company in Jordan and the Dead Sea Works in Israel -- has established evaporation ponds to extract commercially important salts. The factories produce magnesium, bromide, potash, and phosphorus fertilizers for export. Through evaporation, the two companies are responsible for approximately 30 percent of the Dead Sea's demise.

In the last decade, 800 sinkholes have opened on the Israeli side of the lake. The holes have absorbed highways, bridges, and date orchards. When rainwater or fresh springwater washes away salts in the soil, craters 30 feet deep and wide enough to swallow a bus open without warning.

Sinkholes forming on the former lake bottom.

Eduard Interweis, a German ecologist at the Institute for International and European Policy, said it best -- while standing next to a sinkhole the size of a condo. "How can I make it clear to my mother? She goes to the store to buy peppers. They come from Israel. Those peppers contain water that once flowed into the Dead Sea and fertilizers manufactured by the Dead Sea Works. How do I explain to her that the salad she prepares for me is killing the Dead Sea?"

The water exported in those vegetables could have been used to support people in Jordan, foster agricultural development in Palestine, preserve endangered riparian species in the Jordan River Valley, or prevent the Dead Sea from drying up.

The Dead Sea won't disappear. Springs on its floor supply some water that can't be tapped by surrounding countries. Furthermore, as the lake shrinks, salt concentrations will get so high the rate of evaporation will eventually decline. Nevertheless, in just a few decades, one of the world's most unique resources -- a lake known for millennia for its ability to buoy bodies and spirits -- will become a tiny, painfully salty, human-made puddle.

A Sight for Besor Eyes

Thursday, 16 Feb 2006

Kibbutz Ketura, Israel

The Besor River is just like the 14 other streams that begin in the mountains of the West Bank and flow west toward the Mediterranean Sea across the border between the Palestinian territory and Israel. Like the other streams, the Besor is utterly polluted.

The Besor looking sickly.

Photo: Lior Assaf

Raw sewage from 200,000 people in the Palestinian city of Hebron and the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba is dumped into the Besor. At its start, the stream is a milky white slurry, but 60 percent of this sewage will seep into the ground before the stream reaches the sea. On its 70 mile trip, the Besor picks up sewage from the Israeli industrial city of Dimona, turns velvety brown, collects agricultural chemicals from Israeli farms in the northern Negev, gathers solid waste, leaves Israeli territory for the Gaza Strip, and finally empties into the Mediterranean. The Besor is the largest watershed in Israel. In Gaza, it is the only flowing water.

Lior Assaf, an Israeli staff hydrologist at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, is part of a team of Palestinians and Israelis working together to model the hydrology and chemistry of the Besor. As happens at meetings like these, he presented a PowerPoint profile of the stream: "Biological Oxygen Demand," "Index of Biological Integrity," "Nitrate Concentrations," and so on. Every measure indicates the stream is deadly. Lior summed up his presentation in Israeli-accented English. "If it smells like sewage and it looks like sewage, then guess what: it's sewage."

When he finished his presentation he was attacked. Jordanians, Canadians, and Europeans felt certain he was laying the blame inside the bathrooms of Palestinians for dumping their sewage into the Besor's headwaters. First, Lior insisted he was only presenting data; the city of Hebron was simply the first to dump its waste. Second, he tried to remind the countries of NATO that Israel also added chemical, agricultural, and human waste. He could not assuage the audience. In the Middle East, even feces (this is a polite publication) is political.

A troubled river helps bring people together.

Photo: Lior Assaf.

Nevertheless, hidden in Lior's message is a news story bubbling below the line of sight of the world's television cameras: Palestinian and Israeli scientists are working together. While their leaders hurl vitriol at one another and their armed forces launch missiles, people who care about the environment have steadfastly continued to call, email, and meet.

The Besor River study is not the only cooperative venture in the region to cross borders. The last formal talk of our NATO Advanced Study Institute was delivered by David Lehrer, director of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies and host for the meeting. David said the goal of the Arava Institute is to bring Jewish and Arab citizens together to protect the environment, "because nature knows no boundaries."

In one example, college-level students attending the Arava Institute will prepare curricula on transboundary environmental issues during the upcoming semester. They will discuss the religion of birds in high-school classrooms in Eilat, Israel, and Aqaba, Jordan.

The cities of Aqaba and Eilat, which sit side by side on the Red Sea, separated only by the Israeli/Jordanian border, present the first food and rest for nearly a billion migrating birds a year, making it the busiest flyway in the world. The high-school students will be asked to decide whether squacco herons, white storks, little crakes, or tawny pipits choose Judaism or Islam before selecting which side of the border to land on, or whether the quality of the habitat and resources are more important. It proves David's point. Migrating birds know no boundaries and only cooperative efforts between Jordanians and Israelis will ensure that open space is protected from developers.

There are dozens of cooperative environmental projects in the Middle East, each one rather tiny in the grand scheme of Middle Eastern politics. What they have in common is recognition that everyone here depends on the same dwindling aquifers and breathes the same polluted air. The Middle East is a densely populated, small, dry place, but seen from a bird's eye view, environmentalists are defying politicians, building bridges across religious, ethnic, and political borders that separate people, but not nature.

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Tuesday, 31 Jan 2006

Seattle, Wash.

Seattle is for fish-lovers.

Photo: iStockphoto.

This week, 235 hardy soles braved the rains of Seattle to attend the 2006 Seafood Summit, a gathering of sustainable-seafood advocates. On Sunday, at a reception that transformed the city's aquarium into an otherworldly nightclub, they sampled West Coast delicacies, schmoozed with each other, and learned how to pronounce the name of the Northwest's notorious giant clam, the geoduck (that would be "gooeyduck"). They spent the next two days at a waterfront hotel, chewing over topics from certification to carnivorous finfish aquaculture. Such a prospect no doubt brings untold questions to mind, so I'll do my best to answer them.

Why are you making me read a story about a conference?

That's an excellent question. It would have to be because I had the chance to eat free food, and because it wasn't far from the office. Also, of course, because environmentalism is about more than just land, and sustainable fisheries are an issue deserving our attention. After all, you can't talk peak oil all the time.

Well, OK. So who was there -- and why?

For the first time in the five-year history of the summit -- initially created by the Seafood Choices Alliance as a conservation-community brainstorming session -- the crowd was evenly split between corporate types and enviros (with a few foundation reps sprinkled in). They came from all over the world to attend a meeting that has become, to poorly paraphrase SCA's communications associate, "a venue for partnerships and synergies between business and conservation."

What kind of partnerships and synergies did you see?

Well, there was that really tall guy checking out the octopus tank.

Was there any news to be had at this thing?

Yes, there was. The crowd was all abuzz about the fresh announcement that Wal-Mart will start selling eco-certified fish. The mega-retailer will stock its coolers with the help of the Marine Stewardship Council, which certifies fisheries around the world, and will also partner with Conservation International and the World Wildlife Fund to help non-certified suppliers get up to snuff. In short, huge news on the fish front.

Sounds like corporate greenwashing.

It's not.

How do you know?

Because Rupert Howes, the CEO of MSC, told me so.

What else did Rupert Howes tell you?

That he was incredibly jet-lagged, that it was 4:30 a.m. in England, and that he hadn't had a bite to eat all night.

Speaking of eating -- how was that free food?

Darn good. Several West Coast suppliers donated products that Seattle-area chefs whipped up into astonishing appetizers. There was the geoduck sashimi, which tasted about like you'd expect a raw slice of gigantic clam to taste (hooray for wasabi). Then there was the Washington oyster bar, manned in part by a fourth-generation oysterman gleefully explaining the aphrodisiacal effects of his wares. There were mussels in lime-tequila sauce, clams with chorizo sausage, and a mind-boggling, Iron Chef-worthy snack of potato galettes topped with smoked sturgeon, quail egg, crème fraîche, and caviar. Then, of course, there was the chicken.

Chicken?

Oh yeah. Servers wandered through the entire time with trays of the stuff (um, paging Jessica Simpson). I asked one of them if people were eating much of it, and she said yes, it was her third tray -- then made me try a piece. When I asked the chef responsible for the caviar concoction what he thought of the decision to serve fowl, he laughed and said it was odd. "But it's tasty," he admitted.

So it sounds like you consumed, what, 16.6 pounds of seafood?

I didn't, but it's funny you should toss that number out. That's the average amount of seafood Americans ate in 2004, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Which would add up to about ...

Yup, 4.8 billion pounds, a record-setter. It's no wonder there's concern about cleaning out the oceans. Sustainable seafood advocates worry about overfishing and disease, about the damage to ocean health caused by practices like bottom trawling, about mercury and other pollutants, about the role of aquaculture, and about getting the word out to consumers.

A lot of worrying goes on, actually, but there's hope too. As one WWF presenter put it, the movement really is progressing toward "those four magic words: safe, legal, accountable, and sustainable." I think she forgot tasty, but you get the idea.

Speaking of forgetting things, which George Bush malapropism best applies to this event?

That would have to be, as quoted by SeaWeb's Dawn Martin, "I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully." When Martin said this, I nodded sagely, but it was only as I listened to another woman nearby that its delicious irony hit. That woman was slicing into a thick, wet geoduck with a cleaver, proclaiming that the monstrous bivalve was "so fresh it was alive at 3 o'clock this afternoon." The best thing about sustainable-seafood advocates and their peaceful coexistence? When all is said and done -- and done well -- they just want to chow down.

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Emily Gertz is a regular contributor to WorldChanging.com, and an internet content and strategy consultant for nonprofits. She has written on environmental policy for BushGreenwatch, and on the intersections of environment, culture, art, and activism for The Bear Deluxe and other independent alternative publications.

Thursday, 26 Jan 2006

New York, N.Y.

I have seen the future of the environmental movement, and it isn't street demonstrators wearing polar-bear costumes. No, it is the Green Fairy: a very attractive brunette clothed in an outfit more reminiscent of a Playboy bunny than an Arctic animal, serving up tidbits of organic chocolate to a bar packed with urban hipsters.

The Green Fairy was dispensing her delicious wares Wednesday night at ICInyc, an event that billed itself as the first-ever gathering of "New York's eco-conscious elite" -- or at least environmentally aware somebodies from the worlds of media, fashion, arts, and design. These eco-modistes flowed in and out of up-to-the-minute hotspot Libation on Manhattan's trendy Lower East Side over several hours, sipping organic vodka and wines while networking like crazy.

The party's atmosphere was green meets scene: cross the average Green Drinks with the Vogue holiday party (or at least what you imagine the Vogue holiday party would look like), add the booming stylings of a guest DJ, mix in the roaming presence of an environmental-activist, fashion-model host clad in a revealing bustier-cum-minidress, and stir liberally with a sustainably grown bamboo swizzle stick. That was the ambiance at ICInyc, where the talk was of fashion-forwardly saving the planet.

Chuck Heckman and Josh Dorfman flank Summer Rayne Oakes.

Photos: Emily Gertz.

"We want people to experience sustainability in a new way," said Chuck Heckman, who dreamed up ICInyc with four fellow eco-entrepreneurs: Summer Rayne Oakes (she of the astonishing bustier), Remy Chevalier, Josh Dorfman, and Graham Hill of Treehugger fame. "People want to have every facet of their lives reflect sustainability," including their nightlife, said Heckman, whose company, Delano Collection, promotes high-style apparel and home furnishings made from sustainably sourced materials. And the wildfire growth of ICInyc's guest list in the days leading up to the schmoozefest seemed to bear that out: as news of the party spread, sign-ups surged from about 400 on Monday to over 1,000 by the day of the party. By Wednesday night, the organizers were expecting around 1,400 people.

Oakes, a model intent on combining sexiness, sustainability, and style, spent the evening weaving her way around the animated crowd, posing for photos and talking up the ICInyc message: designers can mix their passion for cutting-edge aesthetics with ecological soundness -- and there's a consumer market ready to purchase the goods that result, and read about them in their glossy fashion and home magazines.

"We want to bring this to the level that the people at Elle and Vogue will listen to us," confirmed Chevalier, who is editor at large and web editor for Electrifying Times, an electric-car zine. (Chevalier pioneered the mixing of hot New York nightlife and environmental consciousness, founding the "Eco-Saloon" series at the legendary Tribeca nightclub Wetlands in 1989.)

Dorfman, whose Vivavi company also retails sustainable furnishings, said his staff jokes about the "Burlap Sack Theory," namely that "ecologically sound products have to suck." He hoped ICInyc would show that "being fabulous and easy on the earth can be the same thing." That the five presenters might generate some business for themselves in the process -- they've been receiving inquiries about putting on similar events in other cities -- seems perfectly in step with their eco-entrepreneurial approaches to changing the world.

Not a polar-bear costume in sight.

So were the "eco-elite" trying to be heard over the music at ICInyc talking about the latest in cradle-to-cradle materials, the rise of eco-fashion, or even the ecologically correct vodka? It was hard to tell over the thumping bass. But the place was packed; the party was a success, and its hosts had clearly tapped into something. After all, who wouldn't want to save the world by drinking a great glass of wine and networking into a cool design job while surrounded by fabulously dressed people, instead of standing outside yelling at a protest rally?

Kazuki Kozuru seemed like just the kind of person the ICInyc organizers hoped to attract: a fashion designer living and freelancing in New York City who had never before "come to something environmental." Standing above the thick of the action on Libation's upper-level balcony, trying to spot the friend who'd invited her to the party, she said (yelled, actually) that she was interested in using sustainably produced fabrics, but "always thought that organic cottons were all sort of granola, sort of hippie." If she had to choose between style and eco-correctness, she said, she'd opt for style every time. "But if you can make it pretty but also sustainable, why not?"

Had she made any good contacts yet at the party? "I'm waiting for something to happen," Kozuru replied. "We'll see."

Related Links:

Why Does Oklahoma Want To Drown New York?

N.Y. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand answers Grist’s questions on the Kerry-Boxer bill

Paterson’s Bold Carbon Gamble

Lynn Henning (left) is a farmer whose family grows corn and soy on 300 acres in Hudson, Mich. She is an organizer with the Sierra Club's Water Sentinels program, testing local rivers and creeks for contamination from factory farms.

Rhonda Anderson (right) is a single mother and longtime community activist in Detroit. She is an environmental-justice organizer for the Sierra Club.

Saturday, 5 Nov 2005

Detroit and Hudson, Mich.

What could a white farmer from rural Michigan possibly have in common with a black inner-city resident of Detroit? We think the answer begins with two words: environmental justice.

For years, the two of us have worked for the Sierra Club in very different communities. At first glance, it would seem that the groups we work with have little in common -- on the one side, family farmers who are fighting the massive CAFOs (concentrated animal-feeding operations) that have turned the countryside into pits of untreated animal waste; on the other side, African-American residents living near Detroit's only oil refinery, an area that has been dubbed Detroit's "Cancer Alley." Urban vs. rural, black vs. white, liberal "blue" vs. conservative "red" -- it seems that all of the categories you can think of would place us at the opposite ends of the spectrum.

And yet, when the two of us first met in the halls of the Michigan statehouse, we were both there to lobby about one thing: environmental justice. And the more we talked about our struggles, the more surprised we were to find how similar they are.

Our communities are only an hour and a half away from each other, but they might as well be different countries. No one from Detroit ever goes to Hudson, Mich., and most Hudson residents have never even interacted with an African-American person from the city. So we decided to organize a tour -- which we called the "Common Justice Tour" -- so that our groups could meet and see with their own eyes what it was like to live on the other side.

Think of it as a school exchange program, except the "school" is a different community of pissed-off neighbors whose backyard is also being treated like a dumping ground by powerful people. You don't have to learn a new language to visit the next county over, but in a state as segregated as Michigan, you do go through a sort of culture shock.

So we rented a bus and planned a day-long tour that would pick up the residents of Detroit and bring them to Hudson, then trade places and bring the Hudson folks into Detroit.

Here are some of our impressions and thoughts from the trip.

We were passing by the Vreba-Hoff Dairy operation when Robert Jackson, one of the folks from Detroit, yelled out from the back of the bus, "I thought we were coming to the country. Where are all the birds at?"

Well, we don't have many birds left around here. What we do have is a nasty stench from the untreated animal waste that they spray all over the ground. In terms of wildlife, we have sick coyotes and raccoons who just sit in the road. On days when they dump animal carcasses, we have hundreds of vultures that circle. And a lot of the trees that line the road are dead.

Lillian Leonard looks at untreated animal waste being discharged into a creek in Hudson, Mich.

Dolores Leonard, one of the women from Detroit, told me that she has been to Africa and China, but she has never been to Hudson. I wanted to help bring them out here so they can see what we are going through. My husband and I are farmers, and our family has been on this land for four generations. Now, our house is surrounded by 12 industrial dairies that spread untreated animal feces and urine all over the fields, and the emissions get so bad we can't even go outside or open our windows. People think, "oh, manure is good for the plants," but they don't understand: this is no longer manure -- it contains chemicals, growth hormones, antibiotics, milk-house waste, and silage leachate. And we're talking about massive quantities of waste -- thousands and thousands of gallons daily, more than the amount produced by a small city -- and more than enough to run off the fields and through the tile piping systems that discharge right into lakes, streams, and rivers.

Ever since I started speaking up against the CAFOs, I've had to deal with harassment from the companies. We've had dead animals in our mailbox. We've been chased by semis, had them come after us trying to play chicken on the dirt road. We've dealt with combine damage.

Many of the homes have dropped in value, but most of the homes around these facilities have been sold or abandoned.

I'm pretty tough, but I have to admit I was nervous about going into the city after we finished the Hudson part of the tour. I have lived in Michigan my whole life, but I've only been to Detroit twice, and never to the places we visited today. I'm a country girl, and I never quite feel right in the city, but when I saw the factories I told Rhonda, they're all CAFOs to me. Whether it's a tile or a pipe that takes the animal feces and urine right into the creek, or the Marathon oil refinery dumping stuff into the river, they're all the same -- they're dumping, and some community is going to have to deal with the mess. I can't believe our government would allow companies to build factories on the river like that, knowing it's people's drinking water. You must have a healthy, sustainable environment to work and live or there won't be a sustainable community with jobs for tomorrow.

When I first saw the CAFOs spraying all that sewage, I just couldn't believe it. It may look like a different thing out here in the country, but really we're dealing with the same situation. It isn't agriculture; it's dumping. The thing that struck me was when we got to the place where the pavement ended, and we're there on dirt roads with all these empty houses where people have been forced to move out from the pollution.

Lynn kept talking about how our government subsidizes these big animal factories, so we are basically paying for them to pollute the land and cause the community to deteriorate, just like in Detroit. It's kind of like they are on welfare, but you never hear anyone refer to it that way. Two of the biggest polluting facilities were flying another flag next to the American flag, and Lynn told us it was a Dutch flag since the CAFO owners are from the Netherlands. They moved here because environmental laws are a lot weaker here than they are at home. To me, that's no different than a foreign oil company making money off my community in Detroit while our neighbors are stuck dealing with the consequences. I'm sick and tired of the powers that be taking advantage of communities, sucking away the resources and leaving the local people with nothing. There has to be a better way to do this so that kids' health isn't being put at risk and the money isn't all going outside of our communities.

Anne Woiwode checks out the Marathon oil refinery in Detroit.

I've lived in the city my whole life, and I think if I had driven through Hudson on my own, it would have just looked like a pretty rural scene. I wouldn't even have realized what I was looking at if I didn't see this tour through Lynn's eyes. Now I realize that the creeks I am passing are contaminated, and those brown fields used to be green. I realized the problems of industrial pollution aren't just limited to Detroit -- agriculture is industrial too and can have all of the same problems if people don't treat the earth and the community with respect.

All in all, I thought the tour was extremely successful. You have to put it in perspective -- we are not going to dismantle years of racism and segregation and fear and environmental injustice in a day. But for me, to even get these people talking to each other is a huge step. One of the best moments for me was when Dean, a white farmer from Hudson, was sitting up front next to the bus driver from Detroit and giving him directions around Hudson. The two of them were talking and laughing, and every time I looked at them, I just smiled to myself. It was something about the simpleness of these two people who never would have met and are from such different areas, but who began to open up to each other and help each other out.

We wrapped up the day with a discussion in a local church here in Detroit, and we left with some ideas for concrete actions that we are going to take together -- like a joint lobby day for our two communities to go together to our public officials to talk about these issues. I think it's going to be very powerful when a white farmer is accompanying a black community leader into a meeting with a legislator to say, "Their issues are our issues too, and we're going to keep coming back here with them until you start listening to the people instead of the polluters."

Related Links:

Chuck Norris on Copenhagen

Lawsuit accuses Virginia power company of poisoning Dominican community with toxic coal ash

Carl Levin (D-Mich.) [UPDATED]

David Helvarg is president of the Blue Frontier Campaign, which originally published this article. He is also author of the forthcoming, revised Blue Frontier: Dispatches from America's Ocean Wilderness (Sierra Club, 2006) and 50 Simple Ways to Save the Ocean (Inner Ocean, 2006).

Thursday, 29 Sep 2005

NEW ORLEANS, La.

The smell of New Orleans is mostly not of dead bodies, but of a dead city. It's lost both its color -- it looks sepia toned, all mud-brown, russet, and gray -- and its people, a million environmental refugees from the city and the coast. The smell you often encounter is like dried cow pies and mildew, with a strong chemical aftertaste. When I spent some time there recently, I tried not to breathe too deeply or get my feet too wet where oily stagnant waters remained.

The banner yet waves.

Photo: David Helvarg.

The first day I passed through the police roadblocks, I found myself in Lakeview, one of the communities that sat under water for two weeks. Young soldiers talked about it being like a sci-fi or zombie movie. Older residents of the gulf compared Katrina to Hurricane Camille in '69, and agreed this was worse. Driving for hours through the debris-strewn city, I was forced into my own frames of reference. I was reminded of wars I'd covered, scenes of destruction after heavy street battles -- trees and power poles down, electric lines hanging, metal sheets, smashed cars, and torn-open houses -- only on a far grander scale. Here, there were more regional incongruities, like shrimp boats on roads, barges on highways, houses blown into swamps.

Without its resident population, New Orleans has become a Woodstock for first responders. It's been occupied by thousands of troops, cops, reporters, rescue workers, and contractors from every part of the country and the world: New York firemen, Detroit cops, AP photographers, Oklahoma National Guard troops (a third of Louisiana's Guard was deployed in Iraq when the storm struck and the flood walls failed), Salvation Army volunteers, Dutch engineers. Driving around, I'd share the empty streets with big Army HEMTT trucks, Humvees, and SUVs. Aside from my rental, one of the only other compacts I encountered belonged to an animal-rescue group.

Overhead, Blackhawks and Chinooks flew about, while contract helicopters dropped 3,000- and 7,000-pound sandbags on the Industrial Canal break that let Rita reflood the Ninth Ward. In the city, thousands of acres and tens of thousands of homes, malls, schools, banks, and churches may have to be bulldozed. Despite the losses, the spirit of many of the survivors I interviewed was surprisingly hopeful and philosophical.

While I was in the gulf, I also traveled through the geographically varied forms of devastation Hurricane Katrina wrought. I visited Plaquemines Parish on the banks of the Mississippi; Waveland, Ocean Springs, and Biloxi, Miss.; and Dauphin Island, Ala. A few quick observations culled from my nine days in the gulf, and from talking with survivors, relief workers, sheriffs, the military, scientists, fishers, and local activists:

There is opportunity here as vast as the devastation. Things can be done right in terms of building wisely, creating social and environmental equity, and addressing big issues like wetlands protection, federal subsidies for destructive development, and the role of climate change in extreme weather events like Katrina. But right now everyone is anxious to make money and generate jobs, re-creating the same patterns as before.

"The rush to rebuild is understandable. It's based on human sympathy, but we have to rebuild in a different way," says George Crozier, executive director of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab. "What happened here is no longer the exception -- it's the new rule."

Related Links:

As the land disappears, an Indian tribe plans to abandon its ancestral Louisiana home

White House announces Gulf restoration task force amid criticism of Army Corps

Army Corps urged to honor Obama’s priority of restoring New Orleans area wetlands

The Road to Detroit campaign is run by 11 student organizers from around the U.S., one big, beautiful biodiesel and veggie-oil bus, and many friends and allies. Road to Detroit is a campaign of Energy Action, a student and youth clean-energy and global-warming coalition.

Friday, 19 Aug 2005

DETROIT, Mich.

We know you know about fuel-efficient cars. You may even own one. Peak oil, the rising price at the pump, and new car technology have made headlines from coast to coast and back again; you've probably even considered naming your first born "Prius." This summer, a group of student organizers have taken to the road in an attempt to build and strengthen the growing clean-car movement around a word that you probably don't often think of: Detroit.

The Road to Detroit campaign's beginning is reminiscent of a French film: a dark café, snow falling outside, a group of students huddled around a map suddenly point to the same spot and with a wild look in their eyes whisper, "Detroit!" The idea was simple. Cars are the major contributor to global warming. Cars are made in Detroit. We're going to go there.

And then it all got a little more complicated. How? Who? We don't have any money. My parents told me to get a job. Etc., etc. "Don't get so caught up in the details!" someone said. So we didn't; we got right down to the vision. It goes like this:

We see America's dependence on foreign oil costing us jobs, polluting our air and water, and making our country less secure. We also see an incredible opportunity. By dramatically increasing the efficiency of our vehicles, moving toward alternative transportation fuels, and investing in a transportation system for the 21st century, we can put the city of Detroit and all of America on a more stable and prosperous path through a new national energy vision.

After a few months, about a hundred conference calls, tremendous help from the student clean-energy coalition Energy Action, and many missed homework assignments (sorry, Professor Dry), we got Road to Detroit moving ... literally. In early June, our biodiesel and veggie-oil tour bus was on the road with the ambitious goal of logging 12,000 miles before the summer's end.

We're happy to say the bus and its brave crew of eight student organizers -- despite a few breakdowns (of both the bus and the organizers) -- have achieved that goal with flying colors. In their journey crisscrossing the country, the Road to Detroit bus activists educated citizens about state clean-car bills, supported the Jumpstart Ford coalition, and talked to people in more than 35 cities and 26 states about the need to revitalize the auto industry with a more sustainable and socially responsible energy vision.

Throughout, they remained focused on the key task at hand: gathering signatures on Road to Detroit's Clean Car Pledge. The pledge asks people to agree that the next car or truck they buy will get at least 40 miles to the gallon, meet California's superior air-pollution standards, and be union-made. We've collected 12,000 signatures so far and are hoping to hit 15,000 by Aug. 22. Make sure to sign!

The bus finished its final leg last night, from Chicago to Detroit. For the last two weeks, another group of Road to Detroit organizers has been working in the Motor City, preparing for this weekend's "Drive the Future" events and getting to know the lay of the land here in Motown.

The Supremes, race riots, Henry Ford, urban decay, Eminem: these are the things that most people tend to associate with the city of Detroit. Today, the auto industry that made the city great has all but left the most isolated pockets of downtown, its factories relocated throughout the Midwest and the wealthier suburbs where its executives live. The signs of post-industrial decay are everywhere: abandoned homes and factories, men and women without work slowly ambling up and down Woodward and Cass Avenues, and tired business fronts revealing mostly empty shelves. Just to give you an idea, the "Natural Foods Co-op" here in the city is nothing more than two metal tables with a few bottles of organic vitamins and granola bars in the front room of an otherwise empty building.

But in the midst of it all, there is an incredible amount of hope, activism, and commitment, and a sense that big changes are coming. Grace Boggs, a 90-year-old activist, sharp as a tack, is pulling youth together to revitalize their community of western Detroit. Over on Cass Ave., Back Alley Bikes gives free bike-repair lessons to youngsters, educating them about further possibilities in the community. A few blocks away, the Trumbleplex lights up at night with anarchist and youth gatherings, sharing music and information about upcoming events, like an environmental-justice poetry slam happening this month. Across the city, hundreds of abandoned lots are being transformed into community gardens and children's centers, while plans have been drawn up to create a self-sustained urban farming community in one part of town.

As we pressure the Big Three to change their ways, we must remember this city and its potential. The auto industry is the enemy du jour for many environmentalists, yet, while San Francisco, Seattle, and other coastal meccas are havens for visionary urban planning and sustainability efforts (and the funding and support they require), Detroit is often forgotten.

This weekend, Road to Detroit will begin to bridge that gap. On Saturday, our biodiesel and veggie-oil bus will make its victory drive in the Woodward Dream Cruise surrounded by 60,000 muscle cars and almost 2 million spectators. Sunday, we will bring together car experts, environmental-justice advocates, musicians, and students from around the country to dialogue about both the city of Detroit and the growing movement for fuel-efficient and zero-emissions cars. On Monday, we are expecting close to a hundred people to join us at our Drive the Future Signature-Delivery Rally. There, in partnership with the UAW Local 600, which represents the majority of Ford workers at the River Rouge Plant and many others, we will deliver our thousands of signatures to representatives from Ford, the biggest gas guzzler of them all.

Over the summer we've learned many important lessons and are looking forward to learning many more in the coming days. Remember to sign our Clean Car Pledge -- and next time you're looking for a vacation spot, think of Detroit.

What's All the Bus About?

Monday, 22 Aug 2005

DETROIT, Mich.

In the madness of classic cars and signs reading "Burn Out," "Light Her Up," and "Drive It Like You've Got a Pair," a big and beautiful solution emerged onto Woodward Ave. on Saturday. A '91 Blue Bird school bus, bedecked with a cornfield paint job and a banner reading "Cruisin' Ain't Easy at $3 per Gallon," coasted by millions of Detroit spectators, spreading the gospel of alternative energy and biofuels. It was 40 feet of dreams for the future in a sea of more than 70,000 classic cars of the past. Dream Cruise onlookers shouted with excitement and disbelief, the word of our veggie-oil propulsion traveling down Woodward Ave. faster than our bus.

All aboard!

At 2 miles per hour, the Road to Detroit bus cruised up and down Woodward Ave. throughout the day, finally getting a rest after an entire summer of road tripping with the pedal to the floor. It is, after all, a school bus. We kept our door open to allow interested spectators the chance to jump on and chat as we cruised. Onlookers became participants as they stood up from their lawn chairs and hopped on board, some hanging out with us for a good two hours or more. One older man, eager to help preach the good word, took his own concise approach to it. To those we drove by, he would hand a flier, saying simply, "These kids are great. Save gas money. Check out their site."

Our crew was set up at the epicenter of the Cruise in Memorial Park, tossing around hot dogs and burgers on the grill, Frisbees and soccer balls on the fields, and ideas for clean transportation to each other and anyone else who would listen. We lured passers-by in with witty signs and whiffs of our cooking to spend some time talking about oil independence, fuel efficiency, and revitalizing the big "313." (Detroit. It's the area code. We're hip to the city.) The sky periodically opened up, dumping rain on the crowds, but car buffs are cars buffs rain or shine and still came out about 1.7 million strong.

And of course, with the Dream Cruise crowd being gear-heads, we had record numbers of questions about the specifics of the dual-fuel system. Answers ran the gamut from "No, no modifications are necessary for biodiesel," to "Well you see, what we did to run straight vegetable oil was redirect excess heat from the radiator through the alternate fuel tank, dropping the viscosity of the veg to the point where it becomes thin enough to run through the engine normally."

Then came Sunday, the real nitty-gritty of our Drive the Future weekend. For entertainment, Joe Riley, a Michigan activist and musician, kicked off the day by teaching us our de facto theme song -- "Where you goin'? Michigan, man I can't even wait!" -- and belting out melodies concerning the cultural devastation of suburbanization and corporate takeovers. He's awesome.

The gathering also witnessed an environmental fashion show from the Matrix Youth Theatre Group, in which one young actor came out wearing a human scarf, his younger cast mate sprawled across his shoulders. (Yes, this skit was satiric.) We were finally graced by the incredible brilliance of the Raging Grannies, complete with their colored straw hats, instructing us in the art of environmental song derived from the likes of "Clementine" and "Give Me That Old-Time Religion."

Our group of eight bus members shared personal stories from the road: the process of gaining a feeling of ownership and responsibility for the campaign; the funny and sometimes fairly awkward experiences of collecting veggie oil; the open and inspiring communities all over the country such as Asheville, N.C., and Butte, Mont.; the overcoming of mechanical hurdles and mountains (those two being related); and the diverse people to whom we conveyed the idea of more fuel-efficient vehicles. We also got edification on some of the finer points of the auto industry from Jen Krill of Rainforest Action Network, the viewpoint of the United Auto Workers from UAW organizer Rich Feldman, and info on scientific studies from professor Walter McManus of the University of Michigan.

Our final activity was a sort of eco-justice tour of Detroit, highlighting some of the sights of hope for this downtrodden community -- places where passionate activists are doing amazing things to rebuild and organize a more sustainable Detroit for the people of the Motor City.

We wound down with a final musical set in a city garden, with locals joining people from California to Maine, Canada to Australia, living it up in the 313.

The Pledge of Reason

Tuesday, 23 Aug 2005

DETROIT, Mich.

Yesterday evening, the Road to Detroit team of organizers joined up with our brave Drive the Future weekend attendees to deliver the tens of thousands of signatures that we had collected on our Clean Car Pledge to representatives of the United Auto Workers, and, in turn, received their commitment that they would take the message straight to Ford management.

Signatures and promises change hands.

If you recall, our organizers have been traveling the country this summer on a big, weird biodiesel bus. Thanks to 3 Phases Energy, our entire bus tour was carbon-neutral, and thanks to NativeEnergy, our events here in Detroit were offset as well. But don't let all that fool you: this bus is dirty. After two trips around the country on smoggy highways, gallons of spilled vegetable grease, and weeks of ferrying around eight sweaty organizers, no matter how clean the bus gets, there is a pervading feeling of grit. Even when you're off the bus, the bus is still on you.

We wanted our culminating events to have that same sticking power. Most people we talked to assumed that our signature delivery would take place at Ford headquarters. It seemed like the obvious place, but all along we felt it wasn't quite right. It was too much on their turf, too corporate and polished, the clean interior of a truck, not the dirty tailpipe.

Back in June, we thought we had found the perfect spot: the old, now abandoned Piquette Model-T plant complex. We called up the caretaker and pitched our idea as a sort of historical revival. I think the exact words were, "We want to summon Henry Ford's spirit of innovation!" They ate it up and we thought we were in. The next day we got a call from an "outside consultant" for Piquette. The consultant said that he had been curious about our campaign so he had emailed his cousin who works closely with Ford CEO Bill Ford Jr. In response, his cousin forwarded him a chain of about 20 emails back and forth between "higher-ups" at Ford discussing our project. Bill read these emails and made a quick decision: he and the Piquette plant could not be involved.

Aha! Now we're getting somewhere, we thought. After many congratulations about the stink we were making over at Ford and a few worries that corporate thugs were going to meet us at the airport, we went on to find ourselves an even better, grittier, and more abandoned location where we could deliver the signatures: the factory where the Model-T was first mass-produced, Highland Park.

The Highland Park Model-T factory is the most important factory in the history of this country. It was here where Henry Ford implemented the assembly line, where the $5 workday began, and where millions of Model-Ts were produced in the early 1920s. Thousands of families migrated to Detroit in that era to work at Highland Park and take part in the new American Dream of prosperity and consumptive living. In one day, the factory produced over 9,000 Model-Ts -- more than the total number of hybrids Ford has ever produced.

Now, the place is in complete disrepair. The only way for us to direct people to the site was to tell them to look for the CVS billboard at the corner of the Model-T Plaza, a glorified name for an exceedingly average strip mall. The plant's windows are boarded up, broken bottles are strewn on the lawn out front, and the only other foot traffic past the plant, besides ours, was a construction worker from a project down the street relieving himself by the front door as we drove up. The polish and charm of the suburban Ford headquarters was distinctly absent from this site in downtown Detroit. For Ford the place was a publicity nightmare. For us: perfect.

One of the major goals of our campaign was to work with the United Auto Workers. All of us were incredibly inspired by the recent work of the Apollo Alliance and wanted to emulate that in our campaign. We liked the idea of giving our signatures not to corporate executives, but to the people who would be making the hybrids and zero-emissions vehicles we so desperately need. We also wanted to have a chance to dialogue with them about how these changes were going to affect their lives and the potential that we saw for job creation from an investment in fuel efficiency and green technologies.

Many people questioned our involvement with the UAW, while some refused to sign our Clean Car Pledge because of its third requirement that new clean cars we're calling for be "made by union workers." The union had opposed CAFE standards and has not been supportive of other environmental initiatives in the past. At the same time, they had been some of the strongest voices in this country against apartheid in South Africa. When Nelson Mandela first visited the U.S., the only industrial site he visited was the River Rouge Plant, whose workers are members of the local union chapter which we chose to approach, the 30,000-member UAW Local 600.

As usual, we were in a bit over our heads. The president of the local, Jerry Sullivan, opened up our meeting by asking, "So, you kids on break from high school?" Ouch, we thought -- high school was over two years ago. In the end, it was our youthful appearances and general goodwill that secured the union's participation. Jerry knew just as much about the importance of hybrids as we did, and with gas prices so high and increasing public interest in fuel efficiency, he said he could work with us.

A banner day.

The delivery itself was a major success. With our Road to Detroit banners and one that said, "Ford: Innovate! Green cars now," behind us, we spoke about the history of the plant and its current state of disrepair. We demanded that Ford (which had declined our numerous invitations to come to the event) reclaim the innovation that made the company great and start producing more than a token thousand cleaner cars, but an entire fleet of fuel-efficient and eventually zero-emission vehicles. Sarah Connolly, from the Jumpstart Ford Coalition, talked about their accomplishments of the summer and continuing work.

To conclude, the vice president of UAW Local 600, Bernie Ricke, gave an excellent speech that clearly demonstrated his grasp of the issues at hand and commitment to bring our message straight to Ford. "What you guys are doing just makes sense," Bernie said. "No one can argue with clean air, more jobs, and a safer future for our communities."

Now, it's back to school for many of us. The classrooms and libraries of our respective college campuses will be a big change from the cramped interior of our bus or the abandoned lots of Detroit.

Yet, no matter the societal scrubbing and polishing we are put through to try and prepare us for corporate jobs and cubicle futures, we are confident that some of that grit and grime will remain. This fall, Energy Action is gearing up for the Campus Climate Challenge, with the goal that Energy Action and 500 campuses across the U.S. and Canada will leverage 8 million metric tons of global-warming pollution reduction measured in equivalent CO2 by Sept. 27, 2008. We have a feeling a certain biodiesel and veggie oil bus might be involved. Hit the road!

Related Links:

Why buying cheap energy certificates worsens climate change

Capturing the massive social benefits of fuel efficiency requires regulation

Is there a tradeoff between economics and the environment?

David B. Williams is a freelance natural-history writer based in Seattle. He is the author of The Street-Smart Naturalist: Field Notes from Seattle and has written for Smithsonian, Popular Mechanics, National Parks, and The Seattle Times.

Friday, 29 Jul 2005

SEATTLE, Wash.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is at the center of one of the most contentious environmental and political debates of our time. Yet few people know much beyond the rhetoric, and far fewer will actually visit the Arctic Refuge.

The most hotly disputed chunk of land in the U.S. of A.

Photo: U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

The University of Washington, however, is trying to remedy this situation, at least for one group of students. Twelve graduate and undergraduate students are taking part in an intensive, five-week class ("Choices and Change in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge") offered for the first time ever in summer 2005 by the Program on the Environment (POE), an interdisciplinary program on environmental studies.

"Environmental issues are uniquely interdisciplinary in that they draw upon the physical, biological, and social sciences, as well as the arts and humanities, in almost equal measure," says POE co-director and course co-instructor David Secord. "The past, present, and future of the controversy over oil drilling in the refuge forms a perfectly packaged microcosm of critical regional and global sustainability issues."

Central to this interdisciplinary approach is giving students the opportunity to become unusually well-informed about an issue and then providing them an opportunity to share the information. At the end of this course, students will develop a public exhibit to interpret their experiences and share their insights.

We're spending the first week of the class in Seattle, learning about the politics and natural and cultural history of the refuge. Students and faculty will then fly to Alaska and spend a week rafting on either the Jago or Aichilik rivers, which flow out of the Brooks Range across the controversial 1002 area (where drilling would occur in the refuge) to the Beaufort Sea. The class will also meet with members of the two Native groups most affected by potential drilling, the Inupiat and Gwich'in, as well with biologists, geologists, and staff from the offices of Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R) and Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell (D).

As part of the course, they also decided to ask a journalist to tag along -- me.

(One quick note: I will not use the term ANWR throughout these Dispatches. As several people who are deeply involved with the issue told me, ANWR is a term coined by industry, and it sounds too much like war. More important, the acronym ANWR conceals the fact that this landscape is a national wildlife refuge, federally protected "for the purpose of preserving unique wildlife, wilderness, and recreational values.")

"This course is probably unlike any you have taken and is unlike any I have taught," says Nate Mantua in his class introduction. Lead instructor and a research scientist at the NOAA/UW Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean, Mantua's specialty is long-term climate patterns, such as El Niño and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. "Our goal is to attempt to tackle many difficult issues and wrap them into one package. This is going to be an exciting experiment."

Mantua asks the students to share their backgrounds and state their top issues for the refuge. "Caribou, jobs, native peoples, and energy independence," says Dustin Andres, a senior in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. Others add tourism, ecosystem balance, drilling impacts, climate change, plant and animal sustainability, and wilderness values. The 12 men and women include students in programs as diverse as marine affairs, conservation biology, geology, environmental science and resource management, political science, and economics.

Two nonstudents also sit in on the class and will join the group in the refuge. Ned Backus and Phil Stoller are board members of the Seattle-based Lucky Seven Foundation, which supports social services around Puget Sound. Although the foundation was approached for $5,000, the Lucky Seven ended up providing $13,500 for scholarships for students to participate in the class. "We were already supporting the Subhankar Banerjee show at the Burke [Museum of Natural History and Culture] and this was a logical extension," says Backus. "Plus, we wanted to make sure that students of need could attend." In addition, the UW Earth Initiative, the UW Summer School, and Tom Campion, cofounder of Zumiez, provided funding for the course.

Arctic Village, where life is all about caribou.

For the next six classes, we delve into the issues. Each day revolves around a single subject, beginning with culture. Only 7,500 people live in the North Slope region of Alaska, the area north of the Brooks Range and equal roughly in size to the state of Minnesota. Two towns dominate the issues in the refuge, maritime-oriented Kaktovik, which is on Barter Island in the Beaufort Sea, and caribou-focused Arctic Village, at the southern edge of the Brooks Range. Kaktovik has a little over 250 residents, 85 percent of whom are Inupiat. It is the only community in the refuge. Arctic Village's 150-plus residents are Gwich'in Indians, more closely related to Navajo than Inupiat.

Tuesday we turn to geology. Drilling in the refuge can only occur on the coastal plain, the land between the Beaufort Sea and Brooks Range and commonly referred to as the 1002 ("ten-oh-two") area, because it was designated by section 1002 of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which created the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

In the words of Bob Swenson, deputy director of research for Alaska's Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys, "Things really get complicated" in the 1002 area, in part because two very different geologic systems -- a rift and a convergence zone -- collide along the coastal plain. At least nine studies have been done with estimates of between 100 million and 49.5 billion barrels of oil, not all of which would be economically recoverable. The most recent study, by the U.S. Geological Survey in 1998, estimated a 50/50 chance of 7.7 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil.

Part of the estimation challenge is that only one well has been drilled inside the 1002 boundaries and the information obtained from it is a closely held secret. (Intriguingly, the two companies who do know what came up in that well, ConocoPhillips and BP, have pulled out of funding Arctic Power, an industry financed group that promotes oil development in the refuge.)

The highlight of the first week is a class led by Gordon Orians, UW emeritus professor of biology and chair of an 18-member National Research Council panel that in 2003 assessed the cumulative effects of oil extraction on Alaska's North Slope. In a quiet yet passionate voice, Orians describes how the panel developed an unbiased, rigorously reviewed, scientifically based report. And then he launches into his concerns:

He concludes by saying, "One would wish that the debate wasn't about the nutty stuff and would be about the real issues."

Three days from now, 17 of us will be heading to Alaska to continue learning about these "real issues."

Monday, 8 Aug 2005

FAIRBANKS and AICHILIK RIVER, Alaska

The Alaskan part of the trip begins at 12:30 a.m. on Aug. 1, when we arrive at the Fairbanks Airport. We are met by Karen Jettmar, who owns and runs Equinox Expeditions, our guide company. Karen gives us dry bags for our gear and tells us to be back at the airport at 7:30. We catch several cabs to the dorms at the University of Alaska and try to fall asleep. I toss and turn for an hour, keyed up about our adventure. The next morning with the group in near revolt, we make a panic stop at a coffee shop before driving to the airport. (This is a group of Seattleites, after all.)

To get to our put-in on the Aichilik River, we fly north out of Fairbanks. I am amazed at how quickly we lose sight of anything human. The last large feature I see is the oil pipeline from Prudhoe Bay, and then trees disappear and we begin to climb over the Brooks Range, with stark, sharp peaks occasionally higher than us. After three hours of flying, we land on a barely visible airstrip, cleared out of the tundra, next to the Aichilik. Before Ken the pilot leaves, he shows me how to use the shotgun, but we find no shells. "In that case, I'd just try and hit the bear with this end," Ken says, as he thrusts the handle toward me. And then he is gone and I am alone. (Because of logistics, the rest of the group flew to Arctic Village to talk with members of the Gwich'in community.)

On the right track.

Photo: Nate Mantua.

At first, I am nervous. I have never been in grizzly country, moreover by myself, 45 miles from the nearest sign of people. At first, I stay close to the gear and the shotgun, not that it would help, but as I start to walk and notice the landscape, I begin to drop my trepidation. I find wolf and caribou tracks in the soft mud by the river. A dab of yellow flies by, a sulfur butterfly, and lands on a purple Oxytropis. Small purple gentians, yellow cinquefoils, bluish harebells, pinkish valerians, and white louseworts dot the low-growing willow and cotton grass. My first bird is a glaucous gull, one of the refuge's 180 bird species, many of which overwinter in the Lower 48.

The rest of the group arrives over the next six hours. We put up our tents, chat about logistics, eat dinner, and hang out, quickly adapting to life without darkness. Throughout our week on the river, we don't eat breakfast until 10 a.m. or lunch until 4 p.m. Dinner occurs at 10 p.m. or later. People go on walks at 1 a.m. As with so many aspects of the Arctic, we discover something special in this new landscape at the north edge of the continent.

The following day, we cross the Aichilik, hike across tundra, and climb up to 2,500 feet, along a ridge of tear-pants limestone. The Aichilik flows in a wide, braided channel north across the coastal plain to the Beaufort Sea, where sea ice appears to butt up against the barrier islands that lie just off the coastline. Through my binoculars I pick out Kaktovik, where a fire burns, sending a plume of smoke high above the horizon. From 1,400 feet above the coastal plain, the land looks eternal and limitless.

When I was flying into our put-in, one initial thought was that I understood the pro-drilling argument that development would only mar a small part of this huge landscape, but when I stand atop these final foothills of the Brooks Range and look across the horizontal and seemingly featureless coastal plain, I realize that this vastness also means that any development would significantly and negatively affect the experience of being in this place. The vastness is not just a visual vastness but a mental one, where knowing that humans have had and still have a microscopic effect is central to the experience and magic of the landscape.

We start our float trip on our third day in the refuge. We have two four-person paddle rafts and one two-person inflatable canoe. Like everyone else, I wear rubber boots, rain pants, long underwear, rain coat, and a hat. We climb into the boats and paddle away from shore. The water moves us swiftly for perhaps 200 yards, then we run aground. We hop out, pull the boat to deeper water, clamber in, and begin to paddle. Again we only go a short ways before bottoming out.

Don't fall in!

Paddle, pull, paddle, pull will be a constant throughout our 40 miles on the Aichilik. Like all the rivers on the coastal plain, the Aichilik flows across a flat, wide bottom in many small channels. Known as a braided river system, this type of flow pattern results from rapid and frequent changes in water volume, often in flat areas associated with glacier-derived runoff. The pattern makes navigation challenging but fun, as we try to follow the dark emerald line of deeper water.

Over the next few days, we begin to be swallowed by the vastness of the coastal plain. I find myself powerfully attracted to the land. I do not completely understand what specifically is so seductive, but in part I cannot get over the amazement I find standing on the coastal plain and looking out over cotton grass tussocks in all directions and seeing the horizon at exactly the same level everywhere. And yet, this vastness is complemented by the incredible complexity of what is at my feet. On a low mound, I find numerous snowy-owl pellets, several vole skulls, long-tailed jaeger poop, and caribou hair, in addition to a host of yellow, purple, and white flowers. I am humbled by the life that survives in such a harsh landscape, by the austere beauty of tussock and sky, and by the fact that we have the opportunity to protect this landscape for future generations.

Our most exciting day is No. 6, when we see a grizzly bear. We can only see it through our 45x spotting scope, but I can feel the palpable energy in the group. The most common comment as we look through the scope is a simple "Wow," punctuated by the occasional "I think it's getting closer." I am surprised by how blond the bear is and how it digs up the tundra looking for food. Since we do not want to surprise the bear, we build a small fire, hoping that our scent will drift down toward it. When I go to bed around midnight, the bear is still out there.

On our final day on the river, we paddle out to an unnamed barrier island, about a quarter mile from shore. It is mostly barren but covered in driftwood. We build a huge fire and celebrate our adventure by diving into the Beaufort Sea. We run back to the fire, clean and exhilarated. Again, I sense an energy in the group, but now it is an energy of joy, a joy to be alive in this stunning landscape of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Tuesday, 9 Aug 2005

FAIRBANKS, Alaska

We arrive back in Fairbanks early in the evening on Aug. 8. Everyone takes showers and we all eat Thai food a few blocks from campus. The conversation centers on our trip, with everyone sharing stories of what they saw, heard, smelled, and felt, particularly mosquitoes. None of us had ever experienced such biblical bug swarms. (They were so bad that when I was in the tent their inexhaustible crashing into the walls sounded like rain drops.) We laugh often and bask in a post-trip glow.

A river runs through it.

The next day we return to in-class discussions. We are at the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks (UAF). What a change it is to sit inside in a tan conference room. Our first talk is from Roger Kaye, longtime wilderness specialist and pilot for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He recently completed a Ph.D. at UAF titled The Campaign to Establish a Last Great Wilderness: The Arctic National Wildlife Range.

"My main interest is the underlying values that led to the establishment of the refuge. Why is wilderness important?" begins Kaye. "It's not the number of caribou or number of species that is important, but wilderness values." He then launches into a thought-provoking discussion of the history of the refuge. Five people were central to the original idea of preservation: Wilderness Society cofounder Bob Marshall; National Park Service planner George Collins ("the agency's dreamer of the biggest dreams"); NPS "maverick biologist" Lowell Sumner; and naturalist-conservationists Olaus and Mardy Murie.

Marshall was the first to call for protection, writing, "In the name of a balanced use of American resources, let's keep Alaska largely a wilderness!" In 1938, three years after founding The Wilderness Society and one year before he died, Marshall recommended that all of Alaska north of the Yukon River, with the exception of an area near Nome, be permanently set aside. His proposal attracted little interest with world war on the horizon, and in 1943 in Public Land Order No. 82, the federal government declared that all land north of the crest of the Brooks Range be set aside for national defense.

Collins and Sumner emerged on the scene in 1949 when NPS assistant director Conrad Wirth told Collins, "Go to Alaska and see that great piece of the world." At the suggestion of a U.S. Geological Service official, they focused on the north, particularly the land east of the Canning River, now the boundary of the refuge. In 1953, in what Kaye calls the article that launched the campaign for protection, Collins and Lowell wrote, "The northeast Arctic wilderness offers an ideal chance to preserve an undisturbed natural area large enough to be biologically self-sufficient."

A central impetus to Collins' and Lowell's thinking was Aldo Leopold. Collins required all of his planners to read A Sand County Almanac, with Leopold's vision of the land ethic. In Sand County, he writes, "A land ethic of course cannot prevent the alteration, management, and use of these 'resources,' but it does affirm their right to continued existence, and, at least in spots, their continued existence in a natural state."

Three years after the NPS pair made their proposal for wilderness, the Muries led a scientific party into the Sheenjek River valley. (This was not their first trip into the Brooks Range. In 1924, they explored the Arctic on a 550-mile-long honeymoon journey by boat and dogsled.) The Sheenjek expedition became a catalyst for protecting what became known as the Arctic National Wildlife Range. Olaus Murie called it "a little portion of our planet left alone" where one has "the opportunity to study the interrelationships of plants and animals, to see how Nature proceeds with evolutionary processes."

For three years, the Muries and the nascent environmental movement lobbied to protect what Collins and Lowell had dubbed the "Last Great Wilderness." At the end of President Eisenhower's administration, on Dec. 6, 1960, Interior Secretary Fred Seaton signed Public Land Order 2214. It established the 8.9-million-acre Arctic Range "for the purpose of preserving unique wildlife, wilderness, and recreational values." It was a radical idea.

Kaye reminds us that in the 1950s there was no Clean Air Act, no Clean Water Act, no Endangered Species Act. The post-war boom was drastically altering the landscape and the range represented what Kaye calls a "legacy of restraint." Never before had a refuge been created for preserving wilderness values. Kaye adds that it was no coincidence that the same people who lobbied for the range were pivotal in the establishment of the Wilderness Act in 1964. "The Arctic Range was the very ideal of the Wilderness Act," says Kaye.

Kaye's ideas on wilderness are a powerful argument for us all. Throughout our time on the river, we had talked about restraint and wilderness. Following one discussion, my notes read, "Perhaps we can be the people who say No to development. No to our urge to consume. No to affecting the lives of 120,000 caribou. We can say Yes to needing less. Yes, to developing a stronger relationship to the countries that provide us petroleum. What kind of world is it when all the sacred places are no more, when we had the opportunity to show restraint but lacked the courage or imagination to do so?"

When I talk to students and instructors in the days following Kaye's presentation, everyone mentions how it helped to clarify their thoughts. Many of them have come to the same conclusion: that the debate over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is ultimately about values, about morals, about protecting the land for future generations. Furthermore, they are impressed that what we considered to be such an amazing example of wilderness has been the symbol for wilderness for the past 50 years.

One student concludes, "I liked getting the historical perspective. I didn't know the battle had been going on for so long. It gives me even more resolve to protect it."

Wednesday, 10 Aug 2005

FAIRBANKS, Alaska

For the two days following Roger Kaye's talk, we remain in Fairbanks meeting with scientists, activists, and pro-development representatives who talk to us about wildlife, Native issues, politics, and geology in the refuge. Throughout the talks, one subject dominates: caribou. Depending on which reports you read and who you hear speak, caribou will either thrive or suffer if the refuge is opened to drilling.

Handle with caribou.

On the pro-development side, people observe that the Central Arctic caribou population, which primarily uses the region around the Prudhoe Bay oil fields, has grown more than sevenfold since Prudhoe Bay development began in the mid-1970s. The herd has now reached its highest level ever recorded. Furthermore, the herd benefits from the microclimate of gravel pads and roads. A handout from Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski's (R) office, titled "Arctic Oil: Fact Versus Fiction," contains this line: "There is absolutely no indication that environmentally responsible exploration will harm the 123,000-member Porcupine caribou herd."

Anti-development people, instead, observe that petroleum infrastructure, such as roads, pads, and pipelines, have pushed pregnant caribou and nursing mothers away from preferred habitat. They say the rise in the Central Arctic caribou population is attributable to several years of mild weather, and that in the mid-1990s, the Central Arctic population dropped, mostly because of cumulative effects and high insect numbers. In addition, they cite reports that a small reduction in the number of surviving calves -- less than 5 percent in a single year -- could reduce the size of the herd.

One aspect of the arguments that stands out is who the opponents and proponents cite. When Murkowski's environmental liaison, Chuck Kleeschulte, spoke to the group, he handed out a sheaf of reports and citations on caribou. Of the 17 papers on Kleeschulte's reference list, 16 were written or co-written by one person, Matthew Cronin. In contrast, those opposed to drilling generally cite papers by Raymond Cameron. Who to believe? Some of Cronin's work has been funded by BP Exploration, and he has written many articles on caribou for libertarian and private-property-rights groups. Cameron formerly worked for the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and his work is generally cited more often in the scientific literature.

"It is a hard jump to make from a comparison of the Central Arctic caribou to the Porcupine caribou herd in the 1002," says Patricia Reynolds, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, getting to the heart of the debate. The Porcupine caribou migrate much farther, 400-plus miles versus 120 miles, and number 123,000 versus 27,000. In addition, the coastal plain section of the refuge, which is the most critical calving and nursing area for the Porcupine caribou, is only 40 miles deep between water and the mountains, as opposed to the Prudhoe Bay area used by the Central Arctic caribou, which is up to 100 miles deep.

Although the comparison may be hard to make, Fran Mauer, a recently retired U.S. FWS wildlife biologist who worked for 21 years in the Arctic Refuge, raises several key points about caribou. The first is that the narrowness of the refuge's coastal plain means that if drilling forces the Porcupine caribou away from the coastal plain, they will be forced into areas of more predators and more insects. Second is that all of the caribou on the North Slope have experienced population growth since the 1970s, most likely due to mild weather, but the Porcupine herd did not grow as fast as others and thus is less resilient. Combine these biological concerns with the large herd size, long-distance migration, and changes in climate, and Mauer concludes that the Porcupine caribou will be negatively affected by drilling in the 1002.

He adds one final point, which may be the most important for this debate. "It's not just the caribou, stupid," says Mauer, whose primary field of research was the Porcupine caribou herd. The refuge is home to 36 species of land mammal, ranging in size from the common shrew (weight equal to a dime) to polar bears, which can peak at 1,700 pounds. Nine marine mammals, including four whale species and three seal species, live in or visit the refuge, in addition to 36 species of fish. Birds make up the largest group, both in terms of numbers and diversity, with 180 migrant and resident species.

Among the most abundant visitors to the refuge are snow geese. Some years, in the fall, up to 300,000 snow geese arrive on the coastal plain to feed on cotton grass and fatten up for their 1,200-mile, nonstop migration to northern Alberta. Mauer observes that the 1002 is the only caribou calving area that overlaps with snow geese. "How much has caribou nutrient enhancement affected this area?" asks Mauer.

Both Mauer and Reynolds also discuss the importance of the 1002 to polar bears, many of which den in the area. A secondary concern is how global warming affects polar bears, which suffer decreased body condition and reproductive performance with earlier breakup of sea ice. Nor are the effects limited to land. Bowhead whales, which are central to the Inupiat way of life, are at risk from offshore drilling and seismic exploration. During the bowhead migration in the summer and fall, the whales will avoid loud sounds coming from 20 or more miles away. Recognition of the potential effects of offshore drilling has contributed to the growing number of Inupiat in Kaktovik who oppose development of the refuge.

After Mauer's talk, which is the final scientific one we hear, I ask some of the students for their thoughts. "I think Mauer's comment is right on," says Ben Brigham, a graduate student in marine affairs with an undergraduate degree in wildlife science. "The caribou issue is so contentious, we have to look at other issues and species as well, and see the cumulative effects. I think that is one of the central points missing from this debate."

Thursday, 11 Aug 2005

KAKTOVIK, Alaska, and SEATTLE, Wash.

"For us, this is a human-rights stand," says Luci Beach, executive director of the Gwich'in Steering Committee.

We are back in the classroom at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, for our final talk about the refuge. Beach tells us how in 1988, the elders of the Gwich'in community called a gathering to discuss the proposal to drill in the 1002, which they call Ishik Gwats'an Gwandaii Goodlit, "the sacred place where life began." "Since time immemorial, we have made decisions by our elders gathering. After much discussion and prayers, we chose to protect this area," says Beach. "There would be no compromise on the caribou nursing grounds."

Two days earlier we had heard a similar message from Robert Thompson, a community leader in Kaktovik. He explained how he was circulating a petition against drilling in the 1002, which we could see from where we stood on the runway at the Kaktovik Airport on Barter Island. "We now have 59 signatures of the 173 registered voters. I expect to get the 60th soon," he says, pointing out that of registered voters in town, only 98 voted in the 2004 general election. "We recognize that the refuge is a stepping stone to offshore drilling." (Although they live just across a small lagoon from the coastal plain, and do hunt caribou and other animals in the refuge, the Inupiat culture centers on bowhead whale hunting.)

What is surprising about Thompson's discussion is that until recently pro-development forces justified their argument by claiming that the people of Kaktovik supported drilling. (In the critical March 2005 Senate vote on the Arctic Refuge, Hawaii Sen. Daniel Akaka [D] supported drilling because of the reported support of the Inupiat for development.) "That data is three years old," says Thompson.

As we talked with Thompson, he offered several reasons for his stand against drilling that we had not heard. Promises to Native peoples were not kept. For example, he describes how developers said that the footprint around the new Alpine fields west of the 1002 would be so small one wouldn't even notice it, but now the town of Nuiqsut is completely surrounded by Alpine infrastructure. He is also concerned about pollution from Prudhoe, which can lead to a yellow smoke smothering Kaktovik during inversions.

Two other talks in Fairbanks shed light on the situation in Kaktovik. When one student questioned Sen. Lisa Murkowski's (R) aide, Chuck Kleeschulte, about the Thompson petition, Kleeschulte said that Thompson was not from the village, did not speak the language well, and had misled petition signers. We also heard from Debbie Miller, a naturalist and writer who has spent the last two decades exploring the refuge. Miller told us that when there was a recent town meeting on drilling organized by Alaska senators, they could not categorically deny that there was a plan for offshore drilling. She said that that lack of protection for the offshore environment seemed to be the turning point for the Inupiat.

For the Gwich'in, the debate about the Arctic Refuge is simple. Every aspect of Gwich'in life revolves around caribou. They rely on caribou for as much as 80 percent of their diet, plus tools, clothing, and spiritual guidance. "Caribou retain part of the Gwich'in heart, and Gwich'in retain part of the caribou heart," says Beach. The "place where life began" is such sacred land that few if any Gwich'in even go there. "My family has been through three famines and still never went to the coastal plain," she says.

Beach also tells us that the Gwich'in are leading a six-week vigil in Washington, D.C., timed to coincide with an upcoming congressional vote on a budget bill that contains a provision to open the refuge to drilling. The demonstration will take place across the street from the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, every day from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and include Gwich'in singing, dancing, and drumming. It will culminate during the week of Sept. 20 with a large Rally for the Refuge.

Although the opinions and actions of Native people are critical in the battle over the refuge, one additional cultural group keeps coming up in our talks in Fairbanks. For the past 23 years, every Alaska citizen has received a check directly tied to oil revenue, from what's known as the Permanent Fund. Checks have ranged from $331.29 in 1984 to $1,963.86 in 2000, when oil royalties made up 82 percent of the state's revenue. Payments dropped to $919.84 in 2004. As Fran Mauer puts it, "We are like a family with one member who has an addiction, who takes down the family masterpiece and sells it to pay for his addiction."

This dependence helps explain an odd little conundrum in North Slope oil development. When we were still in Seattle, we heard about the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. In 1923, the federal government set aside 23 million acres west of Prudhoe Bay for oil for the military. Recent reports estimate that between 6.7 billion and 15 billion barrels of oil are under the NPRA, and yet little development has occurred on this land.

We kept asking people why NPRA had not been developed. We finally gained an insight when Bob Swenson talked to us about geology. He made the observation that NPRA is federal land, as opposed to state-owned Prudhoe Bay, which means that Alaskans would receive less money from development in NPRA. The Arctic Refuge is also federal land, but has different provisions governing oil use and would lead to more money going directly to Alaska citizens.

This information ties directly into a statement made to the group by Fran Mauer. He told us that polls show 60 to 70 percent support among Alaskans for drilling in the refuge, while in the Lower 48, 60 to 70 percent support protection. "With dropping oil revenue from Prudhoe, Alaskans can't wait to bring the refuge online," says Mauer.

In floating through the coastal plain, I kept thinking about sacred lands and Native people's rights. How many times in our past have we trampled the rights and history of indigenous people? We cannot correct the past, but perhaps with "the sacred place where life began," we can begin to turn toward a new path and respect and honor the Native people and their wishes.

We arrive back in Seattle on Thursday, Aug. 11, tired and transformed. My feeling is that most of us who went up there were either anti-drilling or leaning that way. We are still opposed to drilling, but we realize that the scientific and cultural issues are far more numerous, complex, and nuanced than we had ever imagined. We can see that both sides use rhetoric and well-chosen facts to make their arguments.

We know how lucky we have been to travel to the refuge, to delve deeply and thoroughly into a topic, and to learn so much from those who are so knowledgeable and passionate. But perhaps the most important parts of the trip were the discovery of the power of the refuge landscape and the recognition that the issue ultimately comes down to a moral decision.

Related Links:

Environmental education in Guinea Bissau

Home Economics of the JP Green House, Part 1

The Wind Kids: How high school students helped bring a wind farm to Milford, Utah

Emily Gertz is a regular contributor to WorldChanging.com, and an internet content and strategy consultant for nonprofits. She has written on environmental policy for BushGreenwatch, and on the intersections of environment, culture, art, and activism for The Bear Deluxe and other independent alternative publications.

Wednesday, 11 May 2005

NEW YORK, N.Y.

Yesterday, nearly 400 people met at the United Nations headquarters to talk about changing the world. They were upbeat and enthusiastic about their power to get corporate America's attention, and to demand that it take climate change seriously. And not just take it seriously, but do something about it.

Who were these people? Global activists? International diplomats? No. They were American state treasurers, city and state comptrollers, and managers of pension and mutual funds, joined by a smattering of their European colleagues. They gathered for the second Institutional Investor Summit on Climate Risk, cosponsored by the United Nations Foundation -- established by billionaire Ted Turner in 1998 to support U.N. causes -- and Ceres, a Boston-based investor-environmentalist coalition.

These financial managers collectively control trillions of dollars in investments in U.S. public corporations, and are responsible for seeing to it that millions of retired steelworkers, teachers, state employees, and others do not wake up one day and find themselves not just elderly, but poor. As far as these professionals are concerned, climate change is creating huge investment risks -- but it also holds the potential for enormous financial rewards. It is their professional responsibility to see to it that U.S. corporations deal with both.

The world makes money go 'round.

And the world, to some extent, seems to be counting on them. "You are essential to our ability to slow climate change and mitigate its worst effects," U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the summit via a taped greeting in the morning. "You are accustomed to thinking big, and thinking long term," he said, perhaps implying that these were qualities not shared by U.S. policy makers.

"Climate change will impact our investments," said Denise Nappier, treasurer of Connecticut, who cochaired the summit with Tim Wirth, the green-leaning former Colorado senator who is now president of the U.N. Foundation. Eventually, said Nappier, climate risk will join the many traditional measures financial managers like her consider when looking at an investment, but right now, it's a risk factor that most American corporations are ignoring, making it hard to evaluate how much they may be affected.

Although concern about the environment seemed to unite many of the summiteers, "this is not an environmental conference," Nappier declared. "Today is not about our planet's well-being. It's about our economic health. We're learning that they're intertwined, but today, it's all about the money." She added that "climate change is already presenting intriguing and attractive opportunities for those of us in the investment business."

This is language that fund managers and the corporations they invest in are professionally required to give serious attention to, whatever their green sympathies: the language of financial risk and return.

In the morning's first session, Harvard scientist John Holdren outlined basic climate-change anxieties with brevity and lucidity: glacier melt, sea-level rise, extreme weather, baking cities, disappearing species, etc. Subsequent speakers translated these phenomena into the language of ethical and profitable business, touching on topics like price-earnings ratios for companies exposed to risk from the changing climate and returns on investment in clean technology and carbon credits.

The message, in short: market forces are stepping forward to break the policy-making impasse on global climate in the United States. The message underneath: sober financial professionals in very well-tailored suits are taking on actions and initiatives that make them more akin to -- and perhaps ultimately more effective than -- the last couple generations of tree-huggers in setting the U.S. on a course toward sane climate policy. The excitement and energy at yesterday's meeting -- the sure knowledge that change was happening and those present were part of it -- was unlike anything one might experience these days at a gathering of eco-activists.

Paul O'Neill, secretary of the treasury during President Bush's first two years in office, followed Holdren by drawing lessons from his years as an industrialist to illustrate how climate risk could become investment opportunity. O'Neill was chair and CEO of Alcoa, the world's biggest producer of aluminum, from 1987 to 1999, and led the company in major reductions in its greenhouse-gas emissions while boosting efficiency and productivity, reducing worker injuries to near-zero, and instituting fully transparent reporting to investors and the public on these and a host of other factors. His words set a tone of enlightened corporate leadership that the summit attendees seemed hungry for: "I think responsible leaders in this country will respond to the idea of a sustainability template ... there are billions of people today who are born into a life of no hope, and have no hope. Our generation should be the one that makes sure that changes."

During follow-up comments, Robert Monks*, a pioneering shareholder activist, expressed his frustration at the lack of leadership from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in getting corporations to report on and respond to climate risk. "I am a corporate governance enthusiast," he said, "but when I listen to John Holdren speak, I'm filled with frustration, because what he says has the ring of truth, and I cannot get [his] speech put in to the prospectus of the publicly traded American company. I cannot bring it to the attention of the shareholder."

David Hawkins, a climate specialist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, wondered how much progress could be made without the managers of corporations in the room agreeing to report fully on climate risks.

However, the investors felt they could bring both corporations and the SEC into line without waiting for action from above. Richard Moore, the treasurer of North Carolina, disagreed directly with Hawkins. "The management of those companies are not here, but the owners are," he said, generating applause. "I think if there's anything we've learned over the last few years, it's that if we're asking for disclosure, if we as owners, if we as customers demand a level of service from the people that we do business with, we will get attention. One of the things we've learned over the last few years is we don't have to depend on the SEC. We don't have to wait on the SEC. If we are selective in the targets that we pick, if we are reasonable in the information that we are asking for, I dare people to tell us no."

Is he right? Very recent history seems to say: yes.

Nearly every presenter yesterday intoned the words "GE announcement," referring to General Electric's "ecomagination" initiative, unveiled just a day earlier. GE's public, voluntary commitment to effect a 1 percent reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions (as opposed to a 40 percent increase under business as usual) and a 30 percent improvement in energy efficiency by 2012, to double its investments and returns in clean-energy technologies by 2010, and to report publicly on its progress toward these goals seemed to uphold the idea that, ratification of Kyoto or no, U.S. corporations are going to have to deal with climate risk if they want to stay in business.

GE's step certainly buoyed Ceres' own report on its progress in pricking up the ears of corporate boards. Walking its own talk on transparency, the group distributed a 22-page report on "Investor Progress on Climate Risk." In the 18 months since the first Investor Summit in 2003, this group of institutional investors has:

The day's centerpiece was the announcement of a joint U.S.-European investor call to action on "managing climate risk and capturing the opportunities." Over two dozen institutional investors representing four continents, 15 countries, and a collective $3 trillion-plus in assets have signed on to a 10-point action plan that calls for U.S. companies and Wall Street firms to make assessment of climate-change risk an integral part of their asset assessment and reporting, and to work with investors on reducing those risks.

For their part, the institutional investors intend to put $1 billion of their collective assets into solid clean-technology investments, pursue shareholder resolutions with U.S. corporations on better reporting and management of climate risk, develop reporting standards, and continue to build their international network. Their mantra is engagement with corporate America, not divestment from it.

The plan doesn't ignore government completely. One point calls on the SEC to require that companies disclose their climate-change risks as part of their filings with the commission. Asked about this, Ceres President Mindy Lubber (who during the morning session had described how the company insuring her Cape Cod cottage had unilaterally cancelled the policy, saying that it would no longer handle any properties at sea level), noted that the SEC says it already requires disclosure of material risk. In a meeting with Ceres, the SEC stated that if investors informed it that companies were not doing this, the commission would look at the situation. Not exactly a resounding commitment, but the fact that the meeting happened at all seems encouraging.

When Al Gore presented the afternoon keynote, the crowd's good mood bubbled over into a standing ovation. The former U.S. vice president is now chair of Generation Investment Management, an investment firm formed late in 2004. Generation has set out to merge traditional financial analysis with social, environmental, and geopolitical factors, to establish the competitive advantages of sustainability.

"We're all here because there is an enormous policy vacuum," said Gore. "The business community, the insurance companies, the pension funds, the institutional investors are stepping forward with leadership from you all, because those who should be stepping forward have not."

Citing "short-termism" -- the intense pressure to generate quick results -- as the biggest problem facing investors, Gore called the institutional investor summit "audacious" for taking on this entrenched system. "This really needs to be done," he said. "And if nobody else is going to do it, then those who find themselves as stewards of assets that have to be invested over the long term, in order to safeguard the responsibility that comes from long-term liability, you have to step up to the plate and say, 'I'll do this.'"

"It's hard, because the instruments and the tools that you naturally have at your disposal are not necessarily the ideal instruments and tools for solving this problem," he said. "But don't underestimate how powerful your instruments and tools and your abilities can be in actually solving this problem."

"John Holdren's presentation talked about some tipping points in the environment," Gore continued. "I know there are tipping points in the political system also, globally and nationally." When a company like GE reorganizes itself around "ecomagination," Gore suggested, we're nearly at that point. "It is time to take the businesslike, common-sense, difficult but necessary steps to shift the perspective and integrate the data, and start acting in ways that are fully in step with your fiduciary responsibilities," he said. "And don't let anybody suggest that it cannot be done."

*[Correction, 13 May 2005: This article originally misattributed Robert Monks' quote to David Hawkins.]

Related Links:

Prelude to COP15: Climate Justice actions sweep the US before Copenhagen talks

U.N. deputy says Copenhagen deal may take two stage approach

Rich countries halt Barcelona climate talks with inaction; Africa walks out

When Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus delivered the talk that has everyone talking, they chose an influential audience: environmental grantmakers. Although the now (in)famous pair focused on mainstream advocacy organizations in their discussion of the death of environmentalism, others have contended that new thinking by the folks who write the checks is key to revitalizing the movement. We've invited four representatives from foundations around the U.S. to discuss the issue. Most recent post of the day.

From: Hooper Brooks
To: Stuart Clarke, Enrique Salmón, Rhea Suh
Subject: Not dead, just different
Monday, March 28, 2005, 9:30 a.m. PST

The "Death of Environmentalism" has started a welcome dialogue in the "environmental" community. The authors have put their fingers on an important concern -- that the environmental movement seems to be faltering and needing a new platform of values and a new profile. But for me, the piece is out-of-tune and overstated.

More and more, the environmentalism that we support at Surdna is not "dead"; rather, it's different and more expansive than that of Shellenberger and Nordhaus. Some of it lives in large and diverse coalitions, stakeholder groups, and community-based natural-resource management projects at the state and local levels around the country that are driving significant changes in the way development happens; transportation is planned and funded (e.g., $40 billion for transit approved in state ballot measures in the last election); fisheries and forests are managed; and greenhouse gases are controlled. Some of it is emerging within major institutions and special-interest groups -- business, religious communities, hunters and fishers, and so forth. It often doesn't go by the name environment -- rather, community vitality, economic development and competitiveness, equity and fairness.

Granted, we still do not always gain the ground we would like to, and we can unquestionably do a better job on the big issues like climate change. But we must acknowledge and embrace the multiple voices and interests and local innovations that are emerging around the country. They are a significant part of the base that we need to underpin success on the bigger issues -- and their reach is often bipartisan, their label broader than "progressive." While we surely need a reinvigorated and reframed progressive movement, let's not conclude that "environmentalism" can live only inside that box.

From: Rhea Suh
To: Hooper Brooks, Stuart Clarke, Enrique Salmón
Subject: Re: Not dead, just different
Monday, March 28, 2005 10:37 a.m. PST

I agree with Hooper's comments: Environmentalism must speak to a broader sector of our communities than just the progressive/liberal set. The portfolio of grants that I manage is located within the West (of the U.S. and Canada), and like Hooper, we do a great deal on the state and local levels. While the Democrats have seen gains in many of these states, it is clear that for broader progress to be made on our issues we must reach out to and connect with broader coalitions. We've invested in some remarkable work organizing ranchers, hunters and anglers, Native Americans, and business leaders to speak for things like responsible energy development, accountable land management, even wilderness. As such, I think we are beginning to see the politics of these issues shift. Ranchers supporting wilderness? I think it is pretty exciting stuff. And I think we would have been wholly unsuccessful if, once again, we had walked into their communities with an all-or-nothing political stance.

Many of these constituents are longtime environmentalists who either haven't had to or haven't been organized to speak about these values. And many of them characterize themselves as lifelong Republicans. Ultimately, I think we all strive for (re)establishing strong environmental/conservation values to the point where they are seen as the "political third rail." But until we have a stronger, committed, well-organized base that we truly represent, I think we'd be really remiss in passing on people just because they don't fall into a "progressive" box.

From: Enrique Salmón
To: Hooper Brooks, Stuart Clarke, Rhea Suh
Subject: Re: Not dead, just different
Monday, March 28, 2005 11:01 a.m. PST

Thanks, Hooper and Rhea, for getting the boat floating with this conversation. My feelings and thoughts surrounding the "Death of Environmentalism" debate reflect what has been stated already. I have always had difficulty referring to myself as an environmentalist. The Christensen Fund approaches environmental grantmaking through a bio-cultural lens. In a nutshell, we suggest with our grants that "what is good for traditionally sustainable land-based communities is good for the land." As a result, I am always considering the human element when it comes to environmental issues.

As a Native person, I reflect some of the tension that has existed and continues to exist between the "enviros" and "Indians." The enviros have traditionally been perceived as elitists who enter our communities telling us how we should go about protecting our lands, with little regard for the political, social, and economic complexities involved in land management on Indian and other non-Indian lands. For these reasons, I welcomed the Shellenberger and Nordhaus essay. Often it is good to shake things up a little and remind members of any movement to take a look at their complacency. The frame of environmentalism needs to become increasingly inclusive, and requires a strategy that compels the American populace to see how environmental values match their own.

From: Stuart Clarke
To: Hooper Brooks, Enrique Salmón, Rhea Suh
Subject: Re: Not dead, just different
Monday, March 28, 2005 1:28 p.m. PST

I am interested in the theme that I think I see in Hooper's and Rhea's responses -- the theme of an environmentalism that transcends ideological divisions. An environmentalism that "can speak to a broader sector of our communities than just the progressive/liberal set" and that can live outside of the "progressive box."

I confess that I am a little uneasy with an ideologically transcendent environmentalism. First of all, I think that it will become very difficult for the "frame" of environmentalism to become "increasingly inclusive" (a development that Enrique endorses and with which I agree) while also sitting out the broad ideological battles that frame distributive contests in this society. Second, explicitly demarcating an "environmentalism" that can live outside of a progressive box is demarcating an environmentalism that will no longer feel like home to some of our current family. Finally, I am just not so certain that there exists the broad values consensus (at anything other than a discursive or rhetorical level) upon which an ideologically transcendent environmentalism would feed.

I am not suggesting that the kinds of "unlikely alliances" that I hear so much about are unimportant. With respect to the contestation of this or that battle, I certainly agree that we should take our lead from the inclinations of the groups on the ground, as in the examples that each of you presents. What I am suggesting is that we are well positioned, I like to think, to also address ourselves to the relationship that environmentalism has with the broad ideological frameworks whose contestation will always provide the context for this or that political battle. Those ideological battles aren't going to go away, and I think that we need to find our place within them. To put maybe too fine a point on it, is ideological transcendence a strategy or a tactic?

From: Enrique Salmón
To: Hooper Brooks, Stuart Clarke, Rhea Suh
Subject: Re: Not dead, just different
Monday, March 28, 2005 5:28 p.m. PST

Stuart ended his dispatch with a question: whether or not environmental ideological transcendence should be a strategy or a tactic. I suggest that it should be a priority. I feel this way because when we, as funders, support projects that only reflect strategies and tactics, we are also supporting changes to the status quo for the community that will be affected by the project. A change in the status quo is what often scares people who may or may not identify themselves as environmentalists. In addition, environmental strategies and tactics are often perceived by people as only win-or-lose propositions. There is rarely any middle ground when it comes to a battle over new proposed logging, a dam, or a mine. It is at that middle ground where the environmental movement's potential allies lie.

Shellenberger and Nordhaus suggest in their essay that the environmental movement should return to the offensive partly by attacking industry when it opposes proposals that would create new jobs. In order to accomplish this, however, ideological transcendence will be a crucial element. It requires allies from all segments of society -- including advertising, labor, and health workers, to name only three -- as well as from the traditional environmental establishment.

- - - - - - - - - -

Hooper Brooks is the program director for the environment at the Surdna Foundation in New York City, a family foundation with assets over $700 million and an 80-year history. The foundation's environment program makes more than $7 million in grants annually to organizations working on transportation, energy, biological diversity, and urban/suburban land-use issues throughout the U.S.

Stuart Clarke is the executive director of the Town Creek Foundation in Easton, Md. For nearly 25 years, Town Creek has supported public education, citizen action, and advocacy to achieve a healthy environment, an informed society, and a peaceful world.

Enrique Salmón, Ph.D., is a program officer for The Christensen Fund, an independent private foundation that supports bio-cultural projects worldwide. His primary funding region is the greater Southwest of the United States and northwest Mexico. He is a Tarahumara Indian.

Rhea Suh is a program officer with the environment program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, where she manages the Western grants portfolio. She currently serves on the Environmental Grantmakers Association board, and has been its chair and vice chair.

A Transcendental Meditation

From: Hooper Brooks
To: Stuart Clarke, Enrique Salmón, Rhea Suh
Subject: A new ideology
Tuesday, March 29, 2005 12:12 p.m. PST

Stuart makes a good point when he says that "ideological battles aren't going to go away" -- that it will be difficult to sit these battles out in order for the frame of environmentalism to become increasingly inclusive. Yet Enrique makes a good point when he suggests, if I understand it correctly, that we have to transcend ideology if we are going to find new allies in the "middle ground" and from "all segments of society." The challenge is how to bring the two together (especially in the face of daily ideological onslaughts that are clearly anti-environmental).

That will probably be a function of time. As broader, wider-ranging coalitions and collaborations engage, as environmental issues get reframed, there is sure to be a recognition of shared values (not all the values of a traditional environmentalist, perhaps, but I'm more optimistic than Stuart on this score). From that may flow a new ideology -- one that has more of a mainstream image. For example, as good jobs, economic vitality, or improved personal health begin to be more clearly synonymous with a good environment, it will be hard to peel people away from supporting better environmental stewardship.

From: Rhea Suh
To: Hooper Brooks, Stuart Clarke, Enrique Salmón
Subject: Shifting the conversation
Tuesday, March 29, 2005 2:39 p.m. PST

I share Stuart's uneasiness around the implications of ideologically transcendent environmentalism. I'm not sure any of us know with any certainty where these conversations and relationships may take us. However, I suppose I am open to exploring these new, unknown frontiers. If we are truly interested in breaking out of our safety zone and finding common cause with different allies, we must be open to what this can or should mean.

For example, there are enormous efforts being made to attract the attention of religious communities on a variety of environmental issues, including climate change and endangered species. But too often, we've approached this as "renting a congregation." Go out, get some religious people, sign them on to our letters! I fear it is just this type of superficial organizing that has led to the characterizations of our community as arrogant elitists. What does environmentalism mean for different faiths, and how can we best support them? As Paul Gorman, the head of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, likes to say, "The question should go two ways; it isn't just what the environmental community can do for the religious communities, but what religious communities can do for the environmental community." If the point of building relationships with the religious community is a hope that we can influence them around our issues, can we not expect that they might influence us as well?

I'm not calling for a wholesale shift in values or in ideology. Rather, I think we need to be genuinely open to having conversations with different constituencies in an honest and equitable manner. While we may not need or want to be aligned with each other on many things, we shouldn't pass up the areas where there may be opportunities out of fear that we are losing touch with our ideological underpinnings. After all, should ideologies be static? Can't and don't they evolve and adapt to ever-changing circumstances?

I'm really interested in your comments on the above, but I'd also like to shift the conversation to foundations. I think there is a lot of interest in trying to get some insight into how foundations work and what we perceive our role to be in the movement. I think that the environmental funding community is an obviously important part of the movement. We not only support the field, but we also play a role in shaping the strategies and activities of environmental organizations. Just as there is a spectrum of approaches to environmental preservation and policy in the field, there is diversity among foundations. As my old boss Michael Fischer liked to say, "You've seen one foundation, you've seen one foundation."

I think that we can simultaneously be facilitators of change (e.g., providing general support grants to organizations) and engineers of change (e.g., developing a specific initiative around a particular policy goal). I have seen and done both, and believe that both strategies have their merits. However, I do recognize that the latter -- engineering a particular strategy or initiative with a particular goal in mind -- is much more controversial. The tension may really be about who the decision-maker is; is it the grantee or grantor? Are we facilitators of environmental change or engineers of it? Are we to blame for the failings of the field? How do we view our role and our responsibilities?

From: Stuart Clarke
To: Hooper Brooks, Enrique Salmón, Rhea Suh
Subject: Re: Shifting the conversation
Tuesday, March 29, 2005 3:40 p.m. PST

Rhea, I'd like to take one last (I promise!) swing at the ideology question before moving on to the important issues that you raise regarding the specific role of foundations in the environmental movement. Two quick points: first, the issue that I am concerned about has less to do with "losing touch with our ideological underpinnings" and more to do with the question of whether it is either necessary or desirable for environmentalism to even have clear ideological underpinnings. When I use the term "ideologically transcendent" environmentalism, I am referring to an environmentalism that does not see value in clear ideological underpinnings. Second, while developing divergent alliances with folks who do not share our ideological underpinnings can certainly be important, sometimes I wish we were more focused on and capable of developing convergent alliances with folks who do share our ideological underpinnings (!).

With respect to your comments about the roles and responsibilities of funders, my view is that if funders are clear about their intentions and clearly communicate those intentions, then they can contribute value in all sorts of different ways. I recognize that some folks get bent out of shape when they think that foundations are trying to "engineer" change, but I think foundations have just as much right to operate in that space as anyone else, so long as they aren't pretending to be doing something else. (I've just finished a nine-hour board meeting, so I am going to give myself permission to sign off on that considerably less-than-profound note and try to come back tomorrow with renewed vigor.)

From: Enrique Salmón
To: Hooper Brooks, Stuart Clarke, Rhea Suh
Subject: Re: Shifting the conversation
Tuesday, March 29, 2005 4:44 p.m. PST

Stuart, Rhea, and Hooper,

Today's conversation has been an interesting one. I feel aligned to what everyone is adding. I especially agree with Rhea's comment that suggests that ideologies should be allowed to be dynamic and "ever-changing" to adapt to circumstances. Environmentalism needs to be adaptive, or suffer the fate of past movements that fizzled out over time and became subjects in history books. And indeed, I think the environmental movement has adapted to changing political, social, and economic shifts. " The Death of Environmentalism" can be perceived as a bell-tone that more change is needed.

Speaking of which, foundations that support environmental projects have also been agents of, and affected by, change. We might not be having this conversation if a program officer at a foundation had not supported efforts by Shellenberger and Nordhaus to write and disseminate their essay. As funders, we reflect the various moods and facets of environmentalism -- even those like me, who have difficulty placing ourselves within the category of environmentalism. I feel it is our responsibility to continue to push the field's envelope, and even sometimes take chances with some grants in order to see what the possibilities are when it comes to positive change. At the same time, we can't neglect the core values and the purveyors of those values: the numerous hardworking NGOs that have brought the environmental movement to its current state. This raises an important question: should funders continue to support the NGOs that are so entrenched that change is virtually impossible, and how do we identify the current and new NGOs that could become tomorrow's environmental leaders?

- - - - - - - - - -

Hooper Brooks is the program director for the environment at the Surdna Foundation in New York City, a family foundation with assets over $700 million and an 80-year history. The foundation's environment program makes more than $7 million in grants annually to organizations working on transportation, energy, biological diversity, and urban/suburban land-use issues throughout the U.S.

Stuart Clarke is the executive director of the Town Creek Foundation in Easton, Md. For nearly 25 years, Town Creek has supported public education, citizen action, and advocacy to achieve a healthy environment, an informed society, and a peaceful world.

Enrique Salmón, Ph.D., is a program officer for The Christensen Fund, an independent private foundation that supports bio-cultural projects worldwide. His primary funding region is the greater Southwest of the United States and northwest Mexico. He is a Tarahumara Indian.

Rhea Suh is a program officer with the environment program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, where she manages the Western grants portfolio. She currently serves on the Environmental Grantmakers Association board, and has been its chair and vice chair.

Risky Business

From: Rhea Suh
To: Hooper Brooks, Stuart Clarke, Enrique Salmón
Subject: In search of new strategies
Wednesday, March 30, 2005 10:32 a.m. PST

Stuart, thanks for the clarification! Sorry, got it now! Yes, I am in agreement. I wish we were better at building broader collaborations within the progressive movement, and while it drives me crazy that we can't seem to figure out better ways of doing that, I understand the challenges. How many true funder collaboratives have you seen? It's hard for us to do it, even within our own communities.

Enrique raises an important question that speaks to risk tolerance in our grantmaking. Before I expand, let me put a caveat in that I'm making generalizations about our sector from the perspective of one foundation. I'm eager to hear all of your perspectives on this.

How do we classify "risk," and how far are we willing to go to take it? I think there may be some tensions for foundations, all of which presumably look for solid investments from which they can expect some sort of social return. For this, we look at things like organizational health, capacity, capability, strength of leadership, strength of budget, and a track record. I'd say that most of the large environmental NGOs fall into this category. They, in some ways, are "safe" investments, but as Enrique points out, they can also be entrenched. The whole inside-the-Beltway game has its obvious drawbacks right now. However, to be fair, I think that even though things are bleak, we have to continue to put up a fight in D.C. There will be huge battles over the Clean Air Act, Endangered Species Act ... and as we saw from the Arctic debate, we need to make a strong showing, even if we ultimately fail. Nevertheless, I think we are beginning to understand that even when we may be winning some battles on the Hill, we are losing the war. How can you turn something like the politics of environmental protection in Alaska around? Ultimately, I don't think it is going to be by getting more people to walk the halls of Congress -- perhaps more people to walk the roads of Fairbanks?

So here is where I think the risk element comes in. We have to try new strategies and new organizations. And many of these groups may be smaller, newer, less experienced, thus perhaps more "risky" investments. And we may need to expand our time horizons for expecting the "return." It may not be a one-year, two-year, or even three-year horizon, but rather a 10-year frame. That being said, I think for foundations to be able to manage that risk, there still has to be some measure of progress in the intervening period. Indicators of progress might not be the passage of a new bill to protect the Tongass (to use the Alaska analogy again), but rather indicators of social and/or political change that are meaningful.

This brings me to another point that I wanted to raise: theory of change. It may seem like the latest buzzword or obstacle course that foundations force grantees to scramble their way through, but I think it gets to the core of what any organization is trying to achieve. What is the problem? What is the proposed solution, and why do you think your strategies will actually get you there? I sometimes see a disconnect between the stated goal/solution and the strategies, and I think it might get back to the point about entrenchment. For example, on many federal policies we have relied on the public-comment process to have our voices heard. Organizing people to sign letters or send faxes (through an increasingly automated system) worked pretty effectively for a while. Now, however, we are seeing that public comments don't really seem to hold the weight they once did. Thus, the question really is whether the strategy is actually going to move you toward the solution you seek.

I do think organizations are becoming a lot more clever about refining these strategies. Given the current politics, for example, 10,000 letters from New Yorkers or San Franciscans on a given issue might not hold as much weight as 100 letters from local businesses or 1,000 letters from hunters and anglers (as a former and current resident of the stated cities, my apologies!). What I still think we are struggling with as a movement is how to move beyond the one-touch signature process to organizing in a much more meaningful and longer-term manner. Back to our previous conversations, I think this has to be a truly transformative process for our movement.

Foundations need to work with grantees to figure out how to make the short-term and longer-term strategies more effective. This not only requires more creativity on the part of the grantees, but also flexibility on the part of foundations.

From: Hooper Brooks
To: Stuart Clarke, Enrique Salmón, Rhea Suh
Subject: Re: In search of new strategies
Wednesday, March 30, 2005 1:56 PST

I have had a day of back-to-back meetings, and in that time this discussion has covered quite well just about everything I would have to say about the role of funders. I would add only a few thoughts about how funders can help accelerate adaptive change (in strategies, organizations, coalitions, etc.). They include: investing more time to communicate (succinctly and accessibly) about what funders are supporting and what they are learning from it; developing an open and honest dialogue between funders and grantees about what is working and what isn't; maintaining (to support the first two ideas) a streamlined measurement process to help program officers, boards, and grantees keep track of what actually happens with a grant; and developing collaborations of funders, practitioners, community leaders, elected officials, etc., to clarify challenges and design strategies to address them (this has happened recently with great success in a couple of states that are grappling with the intertwined challenges of smart growth, regional equity, economic competitiveness, and public health).

From: Enrique Salmón
To: Hooper Brooks, Stuart Clarke, Rhea Suh
Subject: Re: In search of new strategies
Wednesday, March 30, 2005 6:13 p.m. PST

As I read Rhea's and Hooper's comments, I can't help but think about an article in The New York Times I read earlier today by former Democratic Sen. Bill Bradley (N.J.). In the article, Senator Bradley discusses how the Democratic Party needs to begin the long-term process of building a strong coalition of support that resembles a pyramid. The base is made of strong and consistent donors and foundations that support research centers and think tanks. The next levels are occupied by policy matters and politics, and then the media. At the top is the president. This pyramid is in opposition to what he suggests the current Democratic Party resembles, which is a pyramid resting on its point. At the point is usually a charismatic president whom everyone can rally around -- but once the president is out of office, the pyramid collapses.

I think the environmental movement is not that different from the Democratic Party's pyramid. We rally around the latest noun that requires saving or protecting. But once the thing has been declared safe, the pyramid of support falters. This reminds me of Rhea's and Hooper's comments, because both suggest that the environmental movement needs to begin to invest in a long-term approach toward changing how environmentalism and environmentalists are perceived by the general public. Rhea suggests developing a theory of change that requires funders and grantees to really assess what the problems are and what it is going to take to solve them, including a real look at funder collaborations. And then Hooper mentions that funders need to invest more time communicating their strategies and assessing the needs of grantees. Both suggestions reflect long-term goals, and perhaps the need for environmentalism to begin building a solid base of support for its own pyramid -- one that can be woven throughout the social fabric of modern industrialized people.

In this way, perhaps, support for environmentalism becomes transcendent across ideologies. This means, of course, that funders need to start to support seemingly non-environmental projects such as political think tanks, media collaborations, and social-justice issues. Some of this is happening already, but it needs to steadily grow.

- - - - - - - - - -

Hooper Brooks is the program director for the environment at the Surdna Foundation in New York City, a family foundation with assets over $700 million and an 80-year history. The foundation's environment program makes more than $7 million in grants annually to organizations working on transportation, energy, biological diversity, and urban/suburban land-use issues throughout the U.S.

Stuart Clarke is the executive director of the Town Creek Foundation in Easton, Md. For nearly 25 years, Town Creek has supported public education, citizen action, and advocacy to achieve a healthy environment, an informed society, and a peaceful world.

Enrique Salmón, Ph.D., is a program officer for The Christensen Fund, an independent private foundation that supports bio-cultural projects worldwide. His primary funding region is the greater Southwest of the United States and northwest Mexico. He is a Tarahumara Indian.

Rhea Suh is a program officer with the environment program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, where she manages the Western grants portfolio. She currently serves on the Environmental Grantmakers Association board, and has been its chair and vice chair.

At Play in the Fields of the Board

From: Hooper Brooks
To: Stuart Clarke, Enrique Salmón, Rhea Suh
Subject: The next steps
Thursday, March 31, 2005 2:53 p.m. PST

Enrique's points are well taken, but I doubt that we will go successfully down that path unless we find an intentional way to do it. Beyond exchanges like this, do we need a "big," organized conversation, or series of conversations, between interested funders (and even skeptical funders) and leading organizations (large and small, national and local) to reexamine and think about how we might retune the whole field and avoid diffusion and fragmentation -- which political think tanks, media collaborations, and social-justice issues? Given the widely differing nature of private foundations (going back to Michael Fisher's observation quoted by Rhea early in this exchange), would that be an impossible task?

There may be some lessons to be harvested from emerging network theory, and some tools from our ever-improving communications technologies that would allow something productive to happen. Much of this exchange suggests a rich diversity of new approaches and foundation-NGO collaborations, but we haven't really had the space or time to go into detail. Can we deliberately harvest the lessons we are learning and make something that is better than the sum of its parts, or do we have to hope that something will emerge more organically? Thoughts?

From: Stuart Clarke
To: Hooper Brooks, Enrique Salmón, Rhea Suh
Subject: Responsibility for change
Thursday, March 31, 2005 3:24 p.m. PST

I think Rhea's comments analogizing social investing to financial investing are right on point. Sometimes I fear that too many funders do not think nearly often or carefully enough about risk, time horizon, or theories and models of social change. The only thing I would want to add to Rhea's comments is that I think there is a critical role for funders to play (perhaps through institutions like the Environmental Grantmakers Association and the Consultative Group on Biological Diversity, and also in cross-sectoral collaboration with the Neighborhood Funders Group and the Funders Committee for Civic Participation, etc.) in helping to develop, test, refine, and disseminate sociopolitical theories of environmental change. As she suggests, such theories should provide the context for informing strategy and for conceptualizing and measuring risk and progress. We certainly have a strong vested interest in clarity and credibility in these areas.

I have tried to avoid mentioning the "Death of Environmentalism" essay in these exchanges because I think the attention it is receiving is far out of proportion to the analytic contribution it makes. But I am going to break my little self-imposed rule to point out that, aside from the sensationalism of its "slaying the fathers" rhetoric, much of the essay's traction comes from the fact that it was dropped into a discursive vacuum. No one is performing, on a large enough scale and in a consistent enough way, the function of establishing, sustaining, and communicating persuasive analytical frameworks relative to which the health, vitality, and progress of the environmental movement can be charted. Were someone (like us!) to perform this function, it would be much more difficult for folks to construct "environmental movement" strawmen and to curry favor with the media by running around pointing out that those strawmen have no clothes.

So I fully agree with you, Rhea, that foundations "need to work with grantees to figure out how to make the short-term and longer-term strategies more effective." I'm inclined to emphasize the role that foundations, working together, might play in generating the knowledge that would inform more effective short- and long-term strategies. It is certainly appropriate for us to expect grantees to be deliberate and reflective in their work. But I also think foundations are better positioned to be in the knowledge-generation business than are most NGOs. We certainly have the resources to be about that work in a sustained, systematic, and collaborative way, if we felt (as I think we should) that it was essential to our effectiveness in helping to advance the movement. So in the funder-grantee partnership in this work, I'd probably allocate a much larger share of responsibility to the funders.

This comes back for me, in a way, to my preoccupation in this exchange with ideology (I suppose that it is characteristic of preoccupations, that all roads will eventually lead home). I understand the inclination to believe that environmentalism will get farther by blunting its ideological elbows than by sharpening them. It is just not clear to me that that is an effective strategy for social change of the magnitude that we think we need. Ideological contestation is a component of social change, and in the absence of clear, grounded frameworks for thinking through and apprehending the meaning and meaningfulness of change, it is too easy to substitute metaphors like "pendulum's swinging" and "seeking middle ground" for historically grounded analysis that encompasses the processes by which ideologies are produced and reproduced, as well as their relationships to the production and reproduction of social relationships. George Lakoff's work seems to me to be grounded in a particular interpretation of these processes, and focused on strengthening the progressive hand in ideological contests. I have some doubts about Lakoff's methods, but I believe that this basic strategy -- strengthening the progressive hand in ideological contests -- is a strategy that the environmental movement ought to explore in a serious way.

From: Rhea Suh
To: Hooper Brooks, Stuart Clarke, Enrique Salmón
Subject: Where do we go from here
Thursday, March 31, 2005 5:59 p.m. PST

I couldn't agree more with Stuart: the funding community needs to do more to build and disseminate the knowledge base around theories of change. Every day, program officers read proposals, reports, and evaluations. Every day, they engage in strategy discussions with grantees. What have we learned? What are the lessons, and are they broadly applicable? Have interesting patterns emerged? Where are the models? Think about the cumulative body of knowledge about social change that exists within each of our foundations. How can we distill that and, as Stuart points out, disseminate it?

I think the huge challenge here, however, is how we then evaluate these theories against each other. There is no commonly agreed-upon metric for how progress is measured, and there are real value differences around the definition of success. For example, what is more successful: a project that creates a collaborative, community-based coalition in a local watershed designed to help restore flows for native fish populations, or a lawsuit that forces the agencies to restore rivers for the same native fish? Is it possible or even desirable to have a standard? Nevertheless, there are clearly fundamentals that are translatable to a variety of issues and problems, and there is clearly a need and an ability to be smarter about how we craft our strategies.

I want to address some of the questions that Hooper raised in his email, regarding the need for "big" conversations. I think we do need to have these conversations, and I think they are actually already happening (or just about to happen). For example, with respect to foundations, the Environmental Grantmakers Association is planning a series of five regional gatherings for its members to brainstorm positive visions and concrete ideas for how our funding, and the field in general, could be more effective. The idea is that the regional "salons" will bring in speakers from the field to share their visions about how our movement can have greater impact in achieving change. This will be followed up by discussion around questions just like the ones posed by Hooper. How do we define success? How can we improve collaboration? How can we avoid diffusion or fragmentation? And to pick up on Stuart's contribution, how can we work together to build knowledge around social/environmental change?

I have to say I'm inspired by this dialogue over the last few days. And I'm inspired by the conversations I'm having with grantees these days as well. The movement is faced with overwhelming issues and challenges. But I believe we are responding, and we are responding with discipline, creativity, and excitement. Examples: in the face of "Healthy Forests," funders and NGOs met in Santa Fe to exchange new ideas about forest protection involving a decentralized, community-based, and tailored approach to restoration; in the wake of Kyoto implementation, funders and NGOs met with religious leaders in D.C. to discuss the amazing organizing efforts in congregations throughout the country on climate change; in the boomtowns of the West, environmentalists, ranchers, and hunters pile into public meetings to fight irresponsible energy development, talking about the value of "clean water, wildlife, and a Western way of life." We may not be winning legislative victories in Congress, but we are making progress on the ground in ways we would not have dreamed of five years ago.

As this is my last post, I wanted to thank Grist for hosting this forum and all of you -- Hooper, Stuart, and Enrique -- for a great conversation these past few days. While there are many things I feel fortunate about with respect to my job as an environmental grantmaker, having smart, caring, and dedicated colleagues at other foundations definitely is at the top of my list.

- - - - - - - - - -

Hooper Brooks is the program director for the environment at the Surdna Foundation in New York City, a family foundation with assets over $700 million and an 80-year history. The foundation's environment program makes more than $7 million in grants annually to organizations working on transportation, energy, biological diversity, and urban/suburban land-use issues throughout the U.S.

Stuart Clarke is the executive director of the Town Creek Foundation in Easton, Md. For nearly 25 years, Town Creek has supported public education, citizen action, and advocacy to achieve a healthy environment, an informed society, and a peaceful world.

Enrique Salmón, Ph.D., is a program officer for The Christensen Fund, an independent private foundation that supports bio-cultural projects worldwide. His primary funding region is the greater Southwest of the United States and northwest Mexico. He is a Tarahumara Indian.

Rhea Suh is a program officer with the environment program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, where she manages the Western grants portfolio. She currently serves on the Environmental Grantmakers Association board, and has been its chair and vice chair.

Related Links:

Chuck Norris on Copenhagen

Lawsuit accuses Virginia power company of poisoning Dominican community with toxic coal ash

Climate Citizen: Majora Carter

Thursday, 3 Mar 2005

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.

The Asian Pacific Environmental Network was invited to speak on a panel yesterday with "Death of Environmentalism" coauthor Michael Shellenberger, Taj James, executive director of the Movement Strategy Center, and Adam Werbach, past president of the Sierra Club. The goal was to broaden the debate about the future of the environmental movement that was ignited by Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus' recent paper. The room at the World Affairs Council was packed with a couple hundred people, primarily activists, organizers, and funders whose question was, "Now what?"

In contrast to the eruption at the Environmental Grantmakers Association conference where the Shellenberger-Nordhaus paper was first presented, there was little argument about the shortcomings of the national environmental establishment and the weak state of the movement. Adam Werbach asked, "Who here thinks the environmental movement needs to change dramatically over the next years?" Every hand in the room shot up.

We all know things are terribly wrong, that the frameworks of liberalism and environmentalism have failed, and that no social movement -- environmental, labor, racial justice, women, LGBT -- is being spared from the right's consolidation of power. People were hungry to hear new ideas and new approaches to solving environmental problems and building broad-based progressive alliances.

The questions Shellenberger is asking are the right ones. But the solutions he and other progressive environmentalists are offering -- progressives taking over the Democratic Party and groups like the Sierra Club, values-based messaging that focuses on jobs and health care, and Shellenberger's Apollo Project, meeting environmental and economic objectives through business development of a clean-energy industry -- still lack an adequate race or class analysis. "Who's going to benefit from the new green industry? Will the hierarchy stay the same when the change comes?" asked Ibrahim Abdul-Matin of the Movement Strategy Center.

If we are in agreement that things need to dramatically change, it can't just involve the usual suspects. Taj James noted that while Shellenberger managed to piss off a lot of mainstream environmentalists by declaring their irrelevance, he pissed off a bunch of other groups for not even acknowledging their existence. Michael Gelobter, executive director of Redefining Progress, and recent pieces in Grist have been noting, in particular, the absence of communities of color and environmental-justice (EJ) groups. Diverse constituencies must be involved to help define a new progressive agenda.

And for communities of color and the environmental-justice movement, the critique Shellenberger offers of the mainstream national environmental movement is nothing new. As an EJ organization, APEN has been asking and responding to these questions for more than 10 years, among our members and with local, national, and international allies working in grassroots communities of color and indigenous nations. We believe that those most affected -- people of color and poor people nationally and internationally -- are critical to shaping the vision and strategies to achieve true sustainability and equity.

Shellenberger's call to "bury the word environment" had white folks taking notice, if not quite listening to each other. Ironically, the EJ movement has been leading the call to expand the definition and place people squarely back into the environment since the First People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991. In the best-case scenario, this controversial debate will open new spaces for diverse leadership and vision, and progressive environmentalists will see the opportunity for EJ groups to apply their alliance-building experience with labor and faith-based groups. But this new movement will require a shared vision and leadership that does not replicate former power dynamics.

So where do we go from here? While we start to redefine our movement's vision and strategy -- whether we are an environmental organization with a $50 million budget, a community-based organization with a $300,000 budget, an individual activist, or a foundation -- we need to ask ourselves what our role has been in this collective "stuckness."

We start where we're at, and build from there. There are very real material reasons for the state of progressive movements, and while they shouldn't keep us from moving forward, they need to be factored into new approaches.

And as much as the new strategy has to appeal to values that speak to average people, we also need to be concerned about transforming worldview. Why should someone care about eviction if they're a homeowner? Why should you care about another community's toxic exposure if you're not living there? Political education and leadership development to get beyond self-interest is essential for the long-term. Building relationships with people and communities will allow for principled political struggle and real alliances. And we need long-term investment of resources to build this progressive infrastructure.

We hope that this series of earthquakes, culminating in the Big One -- the loss of the 2004 election -- has created a new opening in the landscape. Folks want to figure out where to go from here, as the long lines at the mikes throughout the discussion attested.

APEN has always operated within a movement-building context. None of us can go it alone if we're talking about transforming the world. And we're ready to build from here.

Related Links:

Chuck Norris on Copenhagen

What Do Coal and Dirty Dorm Rooms Have in Common?

Toward a medically defensible energy policy