E-NEWS
U.S. Mercury Turnaround Inspires International AccordFebruary 23, 2009Reporting by Roddy Scheer
“This is great news for reducing mercury pollution around the world, and shows a commitment from the Obama administration to international environmental issues,” said Susan Egan Keane, a policy analyst for the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the nation’s leading environmental groups. “The United States has taken a leadership role that will chart a new course on mercury protections around the world.” A forthcoming legally binding international treaty—slated to be enacted by 2013—will reduce the intentional use of mercury in industrial processes and products and will limit emissions of the neurotoxin from coal-fired power plants and smelters, while also mandating cleanups of mercury waste sites. Environmentalists hope that the American policy change on mercury emissions foreshadows a similar about-face from the U.S. on its willingness to participate in a global treaty to limit emissions of greenhouse gases. The Bush administration staunchly opposed signing onto the Kyoto Protocol aimed at mitigating or forestalling global warming. Sources: NRDC; Zero Mercury Working Group |
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New Green Legal TeamFebruary 23, 2009Reporting by Roddy Scheer
In recognition of the severity of the climate issue, CBD will replace its existing Climate, Air and Energy program with the Climate Law Institute. Kassie Siegel, who ran CBD’s climate program and was instrumental in winning Endangered Species Act protection for the polar bear due to global warming in 2008, will run the new institute. The primary goals of the Climate Law Institute include: establishing legal precedents requiring existing environmental laws to be fully implemented to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, land management and wildlife management; establishing new state and federal laws and policies to rein in global warming; ensuring all new laws and policies are judged against the scientific standard of whether they will lead to a reduction in atmospheric carbon dioxide; preventing the construction of new coal-fired power plants and coal mines while quickly phasing out existing coal-fired power plants; preventing the creation of an oil-shale or tar sands energy sector; reversing the deadly process of ocean acidification; and preventing the loss of Arctic ice cover and the runaway global warming that would likely ensue. The new institute’s board consists of experts from across the legal and environmental worlds, including Luke Cole, Raul Grijalva, Sean Hecht, Cara Horowitz, Pamela Martin, Patrick Parenteau, Cymie Payne and Deborah Sivas. Funding for the initiative has come from the California Community Foundation, The Sandler Foundation and The Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund, among others. Source: Center for Biological Diversity |
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COMMENTARY: Nuclear BreakdownDoing the Numbers in Honor of an Atomic AnniversaryBy Jessica A. Knoblauch
1969. Year the oldest nuclear plant operating in the US, located in Oyster Creek, NJ, was issued its license. 1973. The last year a license was issued for the construction of a new nuclear plant in the U.S. 2,000. Metric tons of radioactive waste produced each year by U.S. nuclear power plants 5. Number of 1,000 MW reactors the U.S. would have to build every year for the next fifty years to make a significant dent in America’s carbon footprint. 19.4. Percentage of total U.S. electricity derived from nuclear technology in 2007. 14.2. Percentage of electricity worldwide derived from nuclear technology in 2007. 73.7. Percentage of electricity that Vermont derives from nuclear technology (the most of any U.S. state) 76.8. Percentage of electricity France derived from nuclear technology in 2007. 90. Percentage of the uranium used in U.S. nuclear power production that is imported; much of it comes from Russia 2025. Year that China is expected to rank among the world’s top five nuclear producers, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration 27 billion. Number of dollars that the India-U.S. nuclear pack signed in 2008 could provide for investment in nuclear plants in India over the next 15 years 996. Metric tons of CO2 emitted from a coal-fired power plant to produce 1 million kWh of electricity 476. Metric tons of CO2 emitted from a natural gas-fired plant to produce 1 million kWh of electricity 0. Metric tons of CO2 emitted from a nuclear plant to produce 1 million kWh of electricity 240,000. Number of years radioactive waste remains hazardous, according to Greenpeace 1987. Year when Congress selected Nevada’s Yucca Mountain to study as the first high-level nuclear waste repository, which has yet to be built 13.5 billion. Number of dollars spent on Yucca Mountain so far 39. Number of states that store spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste above ground 56. Approximate number of deaths directly attributed to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster 7,700. Number of barn swallows studied in the Chernobyl wildlife sanctuary; the study found abnormalities like albinism, unusual coloring, tumors and body deformities 9,000. Number of people who could eventually die from the Chernobyl fallout 24,000. Number of Americans who die each year from diseases related to emissions from coal-fired power plants 14. Number of years required to clean up Three Mile Island, at a cost of $1 billion 342. Number of safety violations to date at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant on The Simpsons 150. Approximate number of nuclear-powered naval vessels worldwide 300-500 million. Estimated cost in dollars of decommissioning a nuclear plant 4. Number of presidents who pronounce (or pronounced) nuclear as “nucular” (George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and Dwight Eisenhower) JESSICA A. KNOBLAUCH is a freelance environmental writer. |
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Saved by the SeaBy David Helvarg
My friends and I used to play in the swamp behind our school and wade around in the sound’s shallows, searching the muddy waters with our feet for the primitive armored shapes of horseshoe crabs, which we would lift up by their spiky tails for closer in- spection. Early on, our boys’ culture was divided between those of us who defended the rights of horseshoe crabs to be played with and skipped across the water and older “hoods” who liked to imprison them in rock corrals and then smash their shells with heavy stones. After one fight in which by dint of numbers we vanquished a group of “hoods,” a gray-haired eel fisherman came over to congratulate us, explaining how sometimes you have to fight for the creatures that can’t fight for themselves. Today there are thousands of grown-up kids defending horseshoe crabs, American eels and other creatures threatened with extinction. Along the Jersey and Delaware shores, where millions of horseshoe crabs have been harvested for eel bait and the loss of their multitudinous eggs threatens migrating shorebirds, marine activists have won new protections for these animals that were ancient when dinosaurs were the coming thing. Others are defending the endangered American eel, whose Homeric journey from the Sargasso Sea along the Gulf Stream to the headwaters of North America’s eastern rivers is now hampered by dams, development and a global seafood market that includes Asian demand for “glass eels” (or baby “elvers”), which once sold for as much as $10 a pound. As a result of industrial over-fishing, 90% of the large predator fish have been eliminated from the world’s oceans since 1950, according to the late Ram Myers and Boris Worm of Dalhousie University. This is only one of a cascading series of disasters confronting our living seas. There’s the nutrient, chemical and plastic poisoning of our coastal and deep waters; the construction boom and sprawl destroying the life-giving habitats needed for marine restoration, including salt marshes and other briny places that act as the filters and nurseries of the sea; and a fossil-fuel-driven climate shift that’s raising sea levels, melting ice shelves, intensifying hurricanes, bleaching corals and making the oceans more acidic. I saw what the future may bring as I traveled the smashed and empty streets of New Orleans, the drowned bayou of Louisiana, and the devastated Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It reminded me of wars I’d covered only with fewer deaths, far wider destruction and a million environmental refugees.
“I remember that. I was surprised you knew all those fish names,” my sister tells me as we sit out on her porch in Brookline, Massachusetts, a week before she passes, the early-winter sun warming our faces, both of us now in our fifties, set in our own ways, comfortable with our common history. As a young kid, I’d looked up at the stars and gotten pissed off, thinking I’d been born a generation too soon to explore other worlds. But that week in Key West I got hold of a mask and snorkel and got into the water and saw live rocks, and vibrant colors, sea cucumbers and a queen conch, a sea turtle and a small hammerhead gliding through a coral canyon amid shoaling fish and realized there was this whole other alien world right beyond the seawall. Sadly, in the blink of an eye that’s been my life, the Keys reef has gone from 90% live coral cover to less than 10%, devastated by pollution, physical impacts from boats, anchors, people and global warming. One night we went to the Kraals Restaurant, which still had big sea turtles in pens, and my mother had the turtle soup and let me order a vodka, and when I swallowed too much and grimaced she turned to my sister and said, “Does he make a face like that when he smokes pot?” We were both shocked.
“I wonder how we would have turned out differently if not for the sixties,” my sister says. “Maybe you wouldn’t have ended up doing all your medical work or being the great mom you are,” I suggest. She looks unconvinced. “Maybe we should just be in the moment,” I say. She gives me an odd look then grins. “Right, that California stuff,” but is quiet and relaxed in the sun, pain-free for a time before getting back to worrying about Adam and Ethan, her boys of 16 and 18.
It looked pretty mean but was personally challenging. It made me better able to understand the axiom that in war, truth is the first casualty. The British–IRA conflict in Ulster also made me realize I had a vocation for writing and reporting. After five months I returned to my flat from the scene of a car bombing and shoot-out only to get word my mother had contracted lung cancer (she was a pack-and-a-half-a-day woman). I sat down by the ruins of the recently bombed Brooke Park Public Library. Someone had a radio on. It was playing Paul Simon’s “Mother and Child Reunion.” I flew home and helped care for her in the few months before she died. I then moved back to the beach in San Diego, where I built a career as a freelance journalist, while also finding time to bodysurf.
Then I moved to the Bay Area, got scuba certified, and met Nancy Ledansky. She was my adventure mate and life’s love. We ended up in a duplex looking down on Richardson Bay in Sausalito. We dove Australia, Mexico, The Caribbean, went to Hawaii and coastal Alaska, hiked Point Reyes National Seashore every other weekend. We got shipwrecked during a storm in Baja before refloating the boat (which was then towed and sunk by the Mexican Navy). Another time she got jealous when I rode a whale shark, which she didn’t know was a vegetarian. “It’s lucky he didn’t mistake you for a veggie burger,” she groused. We broke up, but not cleanly. I moved to D.C., away from her and my other love, the sea. Right after I started writing the ocean book I’d always wanted to, she found a lump in her breast. I was with her through the chemo, which was awful but seemed to work. I finished Blue Frontier (W.H. Freeman) and was on the Deep East Expedition 100 miles off Nantucket when Al Qaeda hit the twin towers. When I got back to land Nancy told me her cancer was back. I was with her for the last few months, in the hospital and home hospice, where we could watch the waters of the bay flowing in and out with the tide. After she died at 43 we had a memorial service on one of her favorite beaches. It was a gusty day, feisty like the gal, with the winds whipping the sand and frothing the cold translucent waves. She used to say I never looked happier than when I was coming out of the water after getting beat up by the waves. But the ocean can also provide solace, give you a sense of being part of something larger, even when large parts of your own soul have torn away.
After a lot of reflection I decided that while we’ll probably always have wars, we may not always have wild fish, living reefs or protective coastal wetlands. I thought about the work of people who had inspired me: David Brower, Rachel Carson, Jacques Cousteau, David Suzuki, Ralph. I decided to go with my surviving love. Plus if I went to war I didn’t know what I’d do with the cat. So the Poose, who hated getting even her paws wet, brought me back to the sea. And there were these other factors, of course. Salt water covers 71% of the earth’s surface and provides 97% of its livable habitat. While the tropical rain forests have been called the lungs of the world, the oceans actually absorb far greater amounts of carbon dioxide. Microscopic phytoplankton in the top layer of the sea acts as a biological pump extracting some 2.5 billion tons of organic carbon out of the atmosphere annually, replacing it with 70% of the life-giving oxygen we need to survive. The top two feet of seawater contains as much heat as the entire atmosphere. Photosynthesis of carbon dioxide by plankton and terrestrial plants was thought to be the basis of all organic life until 1977, when scientists aboard a deep-diving submarine off the Galapagos Islands discovered sulfurous hot-water vents 8,000 feet below the surface colonized by giant tube worms, clams, white crabs and other animals that contain sulfur-burning bacteria, which provide an alternative basis for sustaining life. Now NASA scientists believe similar “chemosynthetic” life-forms may exist around volcanic deep-water ocean vents beneath the icy crust of Jupiter’s moon Europa. Like I said before, whole other alien worlds right here on our own ocean planet, strange worlds both awesome and familiar. Our bodies, like the planet, are 71% salt water, our blood exactly as salty as the sea (when our ancestors emerged from it). This fact may explain why it’s easier to fall asleep to the sound of the ocean. The rhythm of the waves is like our mother’s heartbeat. For seven years I’d lived in that cliff house in San Diego that shook when the storm waves rolled in every winter. I never slept better in my life. And so I followed the rhythm. In December 2002, after talking it over with many seaweed (marine grassroots) activists I’d met and deeply liked, I established the Blue Frontier Campaign. The idea was to strengthen the ocean constituency and help mobilize a blue movement that could change policy from the bottom up. My sister was happy I wasn’t going back to war.
The biggest personal setback was that in trying to save the ocean from a concrete-covered swamp—Washington, D.C.—I had far less water time. And so, recently thinking about the time we’re allotted and the need to do what gives us passion and be where we belong, I moved back to California, a place my nephews also like to visit. And here I am, back in cold water with Captain Jessie Alstatt of the Santa Barbara Channelkeeper. We’re off Anacapa Island, California, where the keepers are tending the first-ever open ocean eel grass restoration project, part of the panoply of solutions that could still help turn the tide. The bottom where we drop in is littered with brittle stars. Closer to the eel grass beds are freestanding stalks of giant kelp, señorita and lizard fish, gobies, sand dabs, orange-throat blennys peeking out from abandoned worm tubes, and a big bat ray just hanging out. And because each dive’s unique, I get to meet my first sarcastic fringe-head, a mottled shovel-mouthed fish that, if it were nine feet instead of nine inches, would be the terror of the sea. Back on board we watch leaping dolphins, sea lions and diving pelicans feeding on a live bait ball. I am cold, wet, salty and grinning like a fool. At moments like this, enveloped by the wonder of the everlasting sea, it’s hard, despite the best available science, not to be optimistic. DAVID HELVARG is the founder and president of the Blue Frontier Campaign (www.bluefront.org). A version of this essay appears in A Passion for This Earth (Greystone Books). “Saved by the Sea” will be published as a book-length memoir by St. Martin’s Press and Greystone (Canada) in 2009. Helvarg’s next book, Rescue Warriors, will also be published by St. Martin’s in 2009.
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ACTIVISM: The Giving GalleryBy Astrid M. Krogstad
From January 6 to February 15, 2009, the traveling exhibit “Irreplaceable: Wildlife in a Warming World” heads to the gallery. Images of endangered and extinct wildlife will be shown, captured through the lenses of Frans Lanting, Galen Rowell, Art Wolfe and Michele Westmorland, among others. The mission of the “Irreplaceable” artists parallels that of Dan and Susan Gottlieb: “…to educate the public about how climate change is threatening species—and to show our policymakers we care deeply about the fate of irreplaceable wildlife.”
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