Recently, I had the good fortune to encounter some folks who may well be the next generation of great environmental storytellers: Benjamin Drummond and Sara Joy Steele. They're producing short multimedia pieces that are just riveting.

My favorite is a five minute story about the ways that climate change is affecting reindeer herders in Norway, but there are other gems too that are closer to home: snow-making at Snoqualmie Pass in Washington, fire-fighting in the Cascade Mountains, and sustainable job-training in a Puget Sound prison.

It's not as if Drummond and Steele invented multimedia -- in fact, high-quality multimedia is getting cheaper and easier to produce all the time -- just that they seem to be mastering an art form as it matures. Most importantly, they've got the knack that the best storytellers have for enlivening a scene and fleshing out a character, but not beating you over the head with The Moral Of The Story.

And now, a couple of quibbles. First, I hate it when people younger than me do great work. It makes me feel old, which is not my favorite feeling.

Second, I sort of hate the word "multimedia." For me, it conjures up memories of stultifying PowerPoint presentations in windowless hotel banquet halls.

But regardless of the semantics, it's a good format. Both more web-friendly and less frenetic than video, it manages to convey a degree of gravity and emotional resonance that you just don't get very often, whether in audio alone, written word, static photography, or web animation. You'll see elements of Ken Burns-style documentary-making and maybe even a hint of Al Gore's masterful slideshow that forms the basis of  An Inconvenient Truth. It's not a media form that I'm terribly familiar with, but it will be fascinating to watch it develop over the next couple of years.

Postscript 1: If you want to waste an entire afternoon, go take a look at the "1 in 8 Million" multimedia series at the New York Times. It rocks.

Postscript 2: Thoreau actually is on the Internet; go check out his blog.

This post originally appeared at Sightline's Daily Score blog.

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CHICAGO—The stores of seeds in a “doomsday” vault in the Norwegian Arctic are growing as researchers rush to preserve 100,000 crop varieties from potential extinction.

The imperiled seeds are going to be critical for protecting the global food supply against devastating crop losses as a result of climate change, said Cary Fowler,  executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust.

“These resources stand between us and catastrophic starvation,” Fowler said.  “You can’t imagine a solution to climate change without crop diversity.”

That’s because the crops currently being used by farmers will not be able to evolve quickly enough on their own to adjust to predicted drought, rising temperatures and new pests and diseases, he said.

One recent study found that corn yields in Africa will fall by 30 percent by 2030 unless heat-resistant varieties are developed, Fowler noted.

“Evolution is in our control,” he said in an interview. “It’s in our seed bank.  You take traits form different varieties and make new ones.”

That process currently takes about 10 years. But Fowler said his organization is hoping to speed up the development of new varieties by cataloguing the genetic traits of the seeds that it stores.

Their gene bank —dug into a mountainside near Longyearbyen, in the Svalbard islands in the far north of Norway—will be made public to help spur research, which Fowler says is woefully inadequate.

“Six people in the world are breeding bananas. Ditto for yams, a major crop in Africa,” Fowler said ahead of a presentation Sunday to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Fowler said the Global Crop Diversity Trust has agreements with 49 institutes in 46 countries to rescue some 53,000 of the 100,000 crop samples identified as endangered.

Agreements for preserving the remaining varieties are expected to be completed soon.

They include rare varieties of barley, wheat, rice, banana, plantain, potato, cassava,  chickpea, maize, lentil, bean, sorghum, millet, coconut, breadfruit, cowpea, and yam.

The varieties most at risk are being stored in poorly funded seed banks in Africa and Asia where varieties are being lost due to inadequate refrigeration and the destruction of the facilities as a result of civil strife and natural disasters.

Researchers do not know how many varieties of crops have already been lost.

But the industrialization of farming has had a major impact on crop diversity.

In 1903, U.S.  farmers planted 578 varieties of beans. By 1983 just 32 varieties remained in seedbanks.

“When you lose one of these samples you’re losing something you can’t find in a farmer’s field,” Fowler said.

“We can’t afford to lose this diversity when it’s so easy and cheap to conserve it.”

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OSLO—Norway’s perhaps most famous philosopher Arne Naess, who invented the concept of “deep ecology,” has died at the age of 96, his publisher said Tuesday.

“Arne was a very open-minded person, not very orthodox, and interested in many fields,” his editor Erling Kagge told AFP, confirming that Norway’s foremost philosopher of the 20th century had died in his sleep late Monday.

“In addition to being an internationally respected philosopher, he had become in Norway an important public person concerning how people regarded themselves,” he said.

Born in Oslo in 1912, Naess received his philosophy degree from the University of Oslo in 1933 before continuing his studies in Paris and Vienna.

Naess, who at the age of 27 became the youngest person ever to hold a professorship at the Oslo university, was deeply influenced by 17th century Dutch philosopher Benedict de Spinoza and was drawn to theories grounded in nature and ecology.

He developed the concept of “deep ecology,” according to which humankind is simply considered an integral part of the global environment.

“Deep ecology is a movement where you not only do good for the planet for the sake of humans, but also for the sake of the planet itself,” Naess said in an interview published on the University of Oslo’s website.

Also a famous mountaineer, Naess in 1950 led the first expedition to reach the 7,708-metre (25,288-foot) peak of Tirich Mir in Pakistan.

As a pacifist and activist, Naess did not shy away from direct actions, like the time in 1970 when he joined a group of demonstrators who chained themselves in front of the Mardal waterfall on Norway’s western coast, successfully blocking plans to build a dam there.

Just over a decade later he participated in a similar attempt to stop the planned damming of the Alta river in northern Norway, but the action failed.

Naess, who was the married father of two, was also the uncle of financier, mountaineer and ex-husband of singer Diana Ross, Arne Naess Jr., who died in a climbing accident in 2004.

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Industrialized countries have promised to put more than $6.1 billion in the World Bank's Climate Investment Funds, which aim to boost clean technologies and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in developing countries. On Friday, the United States pledged $2 billion over three years; Britain will chip in $1.47 billion and Japan $1.2 billion, with contributions from Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland making up the rest. Two trust funds will be created under the Climate Investment Fund umbrella: The Clean Technology Fund will invest in projects that "contribute to the demonstration, deployment, and transfer of low-carbon technologies" and "have a significant potential for long-term greenhouse-gas savings"; the Strategic Climate Fund will "serve as an overarching fund for various programs to test innovative approaches to climate change." The World Bank will announce the first beneficiaries of the funds in early 2009.

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Through an osmotic process we don't pretend to understand, the mixing of fresh and salt water at the world's river mouths produces enough energy to feed 20 percent of the world's electricity demand, say Dutch scientists. Could we start running our gadgetry on salt power? Small projects in Norway and the Netherlands are testing out ways to harvest estuary energy, but membranes needed for the process are expensive and energy-intensive to produce, so salt-to-power technology is unlikely to be viable anytime soon. But pass the margaritas anyway.

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Eating whale meat is better for the planet than eating beef, pork, or chicken, according to a comparative carbon-emissions calculation by Norwegian lobbying group the High North Alliance. Says the alliance's Rune Froevik, in what may be a bit of an exaggeration, "Basically it turns out that the best thing you can do for the planet is to eat whale meat compared to other types of meat." Points out Greepeace's Truls Gulowsen, "The survival of a species is more important than lower greenhouse-gas emissions from eating it." Meanwhile, Australian activists clashed yet again with Japanese whalers in the Southern Ocean.

sources:

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Norway has announced it aims to be carbon neutral by 2030, 20 years earlier than its previous goal set last spring. Up to two-thirds of the emissions cuts will be made in Norway itself (though officials aren't sure precisely how yet). The other third will be offset by about $550 million a year in carbon credits, earned through combating deforestation in developing countries. Some green groups called the deal too vague, but officials characterized it as long-range planning. "The agreement gives Norway a farsighted climate policy that can stand independently of shifting governments," said Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg. Norway also committed to a target of reducing its emissions by up to 17 million tons by 2020 and said it would more than quadruple its budget for renewables research next year.

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Come Jan. 1, Norway will completely ban mercury in manufacturing, imports, and exports. "Mercury is among the most dangerous pollutants. Good alternatives to mercury exist already and it is therefore right to introduce this ban," says Environment Minister Erik Solheim, with due formality. Norway's standards exceed that of the European Union, which will ban mercury in thermometers in the first half of 2009 and in exports by 2011.

source:

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Perhaps jealous of the recent oil spills in San Francisco, Russia, and South Korea, Norway has had a spill of its very own. Oil company StatoilHydro says a mistake transferring crude from an offshore oil platform to a tanker resulted in up to a million gallons of black liquid flowing into the North Sea. The spill, likely the second-largest in Norwegian history, occurred 125 miles from shore, and officials don't expect the muck to reach land. Which really isn't much consolation to the sea life.

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We've got a thing for Norway -- really, nothing beats a good fjord. And nobody can literalize like the Norwegians, who next month will begin prohibiting automobile manufacturers from advertising their vehicles as "green," "clean," or "environmentally friendly." Says one national official, "If someone says their car is more 'green' or 'environmentally friendly' than others then they would have to be able to document it in every aspect from production, to emissions, to energy use, to recycling. In practice that can't be done." We completely agree. And did we mention our list of 15 green cars?

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Norway contemplates far-north drilling, melting ice reveals new islands

As climate change alters the landscape of the Arctic, Norwegians are having a rough go of it. They face a more hospitable climate, an even better financial situation, and more land. "It's very challenging for a very wealthy nation, knowing this will be a positive change," said the director of the Norwegian Polar Institute. The oil and gas rich Arctic region has already made Norway the world's third-largest natural-gas exporter and its fifth-largest oil exporter, and now the Arctic's rapid melting could boost output still further by making drilling easier in the far north. Earlier this month, Russia touched off a frenzied scramble for undersea drilling rights near the North Pole that's also seen Denmark, Canada, and the U.S. salivate over underwater geologic potential. Meanwhile, Norwegians are torn between opportunity and responsibility. The record-low sea ice this summer bestowed yet more gifts on Norway. Emerging from the edges of its territory of Svalbard are new islands where glaciers used to be. "They haven't been claimed yet," said one official. Grist claims the islands on behalf of all those poor rich people whose summer homes will be underwater soon.

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Norway reveals design for "doomsday" seed vault

Architecture geeks are salivating over Norway's release of the design of an agricultural "doomsday vault." The structure, which will cost $5 million to build and $125,000 a year to run, will hold seeds for the world's 1.5 million distinct crop varieties. You know, in case the guy who survives the apocalypse gets the nibbles. Lined with three-foot-thick concrete, it will sit nearly 400 feet inside a mountain on the Svalbard archipelago, near the North Pole. "It will be the best freezer in the world by several orders of magnitude," says Cary Fowler of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, a project partner. "The seeds will be safe there for decades." Designers say the vault's entrance will "gleam like a gem in the midnight sun," but sadly, few will ever see that. Scheduled to open in 2008, the ark will require just one annual inspection. "If you design a facility to be used in worst-case scenarios," Fowler points out, "then you cannot actually have too much dependency on human beings."

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Six decades after World War II, Nazi U-boat poses threat to Norway

What's scarier than a Nazi U-boat slinking along your shores? A Nazi U-boat sunk along your shores, with 65 tons of mercury still inside. In coastal Norway, residents are keeping a wary eye on a 62-year-old casualty of war that could pose a whole new danger. With time and seawater causing corrosion in a number of the submarine's 1,857 canisters of mercury -- originally headed to Japan's weapons manufacturers -- the neurotoxin is beginning to leak out, elevating mercury levels in fish and scaring the bejeepers out of the 630 people who live on a nearby island. "If it is not taken care of properly, it could develop into a catastrophe, with corroding canisters beginning to fail one after the other," said Kristian Hall, a Norwegian engineering consultant. To contain the threat, the government plans to dump up to 300,000 tons of sand atop the wreck, then cover the resulting "burial mound" with rocks. Islanders who would rather see the hulk removed entirely plan a torchlight protest parade tonight.

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World leaders like to kick off the year with stirring energy-related pronouncements (see: "addicted to oil"). But this New Year's Day, in a speech peppered with grand statements, Norway Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg made a concrete pledge: the country will begin buying credits to offset the greenhouse-gas emissions of all public employees who fly abroad. Motivated in part by warming trends and the fact that "children are no longer able to make snowmen," Stoltenberg said the program, which a national news agency estimated would cost about $400,000 a year, could set an example. "If only a few do this, it means little," he said. "If many join in, it can mean a great deal." Currently, the only other country with such a program is Britain, which has been offsetting government travel since April. While Norway's plan earned praise from some, others were less effusive, suggesting that as the world's third-largest oil exporter, the nation should focus on home-based emissions first. Maybe next year.

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Construction kicked off yesterday on a high-security vault to be dug into a frozen mountainside on a remote Norwegian island in the Arctic, to protect that most precious of commodities: seeds. The vault will be sized to hold 3 million seed varieties, the source of every known crop on the planet. (Did you know there are 100,000 varieties of rice? Neither did we.) Nicknamed the "doomsday vault," the cavern will provide a starting place for whoever's left after a global catastrophe (or, less apocalyptically, to replenish lost seed stocks after conflicts, accidents, or problems at other seed banks). It will be lined with thick concrete, refrigerated, and guarded by steel doors controlled remotely from Sweden. Says Cary Fowler of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which will manage the site, "we will have the biological foundation for all of agriculture, which is really saying something." Our descendents, living in a Mad-Maxian post-apocalyptic hellscape, will no doubt be appreciative.

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If you're into eating whales, Kouji Shingru's shop is the place for you.

Located on a pedestrian-only street in Tokyo's bustling Asakusa neighborhood, Shingru's compact establishment has it all: deep red whale steaks and fillets in vacuum-sealed packages, cured whale on a stick, snack-sized bags of whale jerky, and a wide selection of canned whale morsels packed in brown sauce. A steady stream of customers -- most of them over 50 -- flows through the Yushi Special Shop in Whales, one of the capital's only retail outlets for whale products.

Whale for sale in Shingru's shop.

Photo: Colin Woodard.

"Almost all those who like whale meat are middle-aged and older," says Shingru, a middle-aged man himself. "Young people have no experience with eating whale. In fact, my shop is one of the only places where young people have a chance to eat it."

The problem, says Shingru, is with the supply. Since 1986, commercial whaling has been banned by the International Whaling Commission, and whale-eating nations have had to make do with the byproducts of their scientific catch. Japan -- whose people once killed and ate thousands of blue, fin, sperm, sei, and humpback whales in a single season -- has in recent years subsisted on an annual supply of 500 to 600 minke whales, each only a third the size of the fin whales that were once the backbone of the country's whaling industry.

"Twenty years ago there was a lot of whale meat, and whale was a popular fish," Shingru explains. "Now there is very little available, and whale meat is very expensive." He holds up a 100-gram package of fresh minke bacon, white and light pink in color, selling for 1,800 yen ($15.30) -- too dear for many consumers, he says. "Twenty years ago, this would have cost one-tenth as much."

That may be about to change. This year Japan has more than doubled its whaling quota to 935 minkes, ostensibly as part of long-term research into the size and health of their population in the frigid waters around Antarctica. Norway has also boosted its quota in the North Atlantic, upsetting anti-whaling activists who note that this will be the world's most deadly whaling season in a generation.

Indeed, 2006 could well be the year that the international whaling moratorium collapses altogether. In a triumph of patient diplomacy, Japan has used aid and trade measures to convince a small army of previously disinterested Caribbean and Pacific nations to join the IWC and vote with Japan. When the IWC meets this June in St. Kitts in the Caribbean, the pro-whaling bloc may well have the votes to overturn the ban. Whale, it seems, is back on the menu.

Many in the West see a resumption of whaling as barbaric, a return to the dark days of the 20th century, when floating factories drove many great whales to the brink of extinction to procure industrial oil and pet food. But people in whale-eating nations see the issue differently, and find some of the criticisms by other countries hypocritical.

In Norway, even leading environmental groups like the Oslo-based Bellona Foundation support the country's whale hunt. "We use small fishing vessels that consume few inputs and cause almost no pollution -- it's very friendly eco-production," says Bellona's Marius Holm. "Our principle is that we should harvest what nature provides, but in a sustainable way regarding the ecosystem as a whole and the specific stocks." As long as it's done sustainably, he adds, "We think whaling is a good thing."

Make way for the minke.

Photo: NOAA.

Using those criteria, it's hard to disagree. Norway's government-sanctioned hunt is controversial -- it's the only country in the world that has a commercial hunt in defiance of the moratorium -- but it does appear to be sustainable. Operating from about 30 small fishing vessels, Norway's whalers are allowed to kill up to 1,052 minkes out of a total estimated North Atlantic population of roughly 100,000. "The hunt we have had along our coast has always been sustainable," says Halvard Johansen of the Norwegian Ministry of Fisheries. "We've been whaling on this coast since the ninth century, and we don't see that big a difference between aboriginal whaling and what we do here." (Native residents in Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines are permitted a limited annual subsistence hunt.)

"We utilize the whole animal -- nothing is thrown away," Icelandic whaler Kristjan Loftsson told me when I visited his country. Loftsson is managing director of Iceland's four-boat whaling fleet, which catches about 40 minkes each year under a science permit. "We feel that we're being hung for mistakes made 80 years ago in the Antarctic."

Our interview started on the deck of one of Loftsson's 150-foot steam-powered boats, which are so small they return from a hunt with one or two minke carcasses strapped to the outside of the hull. (The animals are butchered on shore.) But when my questions turned to the whale's place in Icelandic food culture, Loftsson insisted we adjourn to 3 Frakkar, a nearby Reykjavik restaurant whose deep freezers have kept its tables supplied with whale throughout the moratorium.

The fin whale is served as sashimi, and looks and tastes like a cross between high-grade tuna and beef tenderloin. Despite spending 20 years in 3 Frakkar's freezers, it's subtle and delicious. "It's the best sushi meat you can have," Loftsson proclaims, his beard shaking with enthusiasm, "but here we eat it mostly as grilled meat."

When the small dish is finished, I have some misgivings about having eaten part of a great whale, but the experience can't fail to impress just how many meals a single whale must produce. In terms of food per life taken, it's hard to compete with an 80-ton mammal -- that's 35,000 times the live weight of a chicken.

In Tokyo, Shingru had a back room where customers could eat their whale purchases, but I settled for a portable bag of minke whale jerky. It tasted something like beef jerky, only sweeter, as promised by the text on the package: "This Kuzira Jerky tastes sweet," it read in English, "one's dear old taste."

The last reference was targeted at older Japanese who lived through the famine years at the close of World War II. In those days, whale meat provided a lifeline to a truly starving population, accounting for nearly half of all animal protein consumption, and earning itself a revered position in the nation's food culture. "It is no exaggeration to say that the blood of the whale has flown in each Japanese person who has consumed whale as [an] important gift from the sea," wrote Takeo Koizumi of the Tokyo University of Agriculture in a whaling association newsletter in 2003.

But a generation gap exists, says Hideki Moronuki, chief of the division that oversees whaling at the Japanese Fisheries Agency. "Whale meat is more than twice as expensive as yellowfin tuna, and many people, particularly the younger generation, can't afford it," he notes. "The quantity of whale meat provided by the market has increased because of the expansion of our research" -- the meat from the additional whales captured for science must not be wasted, under IWC rules -- "but still the price is not cheap."

If the IWC moratorium is lifted, prices could go down -- but demand, not supply, may become Japan's problem. Even with an expanded scientific hunt, hundreds of tons of unsold whale meat have been piling up in storage freezers.

A native Alaskan crew at work.

Photo: NOAA.

Now there's even a campaign to introduce whale to Japanese children and teens. Schools in Wakayama, a whaling region, have added the meat to their lunch program. "Whale culture" lessons have been added to elementary-school curricula, and one fast-food chain has started serving whale burgers, to a storm of international criticism.

But Glenn Inwood, a New Zealander who serves as spokesperson for Tokyo's Institute for Cetacean Research, thinks the anti-whaling argument has become philosophical, not scientific. "It has really come down to whether or not you think the whale resource should be used at all, regardless of their abundance," he says. Opposition, he says, is fueled by public revulsion over harpooning and flensing -- the process of removing blubber from the carcass -- two practices that opponents have videotaped for distribution.

In the end, supporters say the whale hunt is not all that different from the mainstream meat industry. "Many of us live in cities and eat meat wrapped in plastic and manage to have our eyes closed to where it came from," Inwood says. "The one thing the meat industry has been successful at is making sure nobody sees what happens inside a slaughterhouse."

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