E-NEWS

Save the Planet

Green Plans for President-Elect Obama November 30, 2008 Reporting by Roddy Scheer Green groups see the Obama presidency as a major opportunity to reverse years of environmental neglect. © www.organic-crafts.com Last week representatives from 29 different environmental, science and conservation groups presented their top policy recommendations to President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team. The groups collaborated on a document laying out recommendations on key federal agencies and issues including land, air, water, oceans and public health, and calling for increased investment in clean, renewable energy as key helping create jobs and stabilizing the economy over the long-term.   Some of the hot button issues the groups addressed include climate (like Obama, they support the establishment of a federal cap-and-trade system which would provide economic incentives for reducing greenhouse gas emissions) and the restoration of scientific integrity at federal agencies (the Bush administration was notorious for putting ideology above science in making various environmental decisions). The groups also called for reinvesting in clean water, clean air and conservation for the sake of protecting human health. “In November, Americans made their preference clear that the federal government has a critical role to play in unleashing homegrown, innovative energy solutions that would create new jobs, reduce global warming pollution and cut our nation’s dependence on oil,” the groups said in a joint statement. “We welcome this opportunity to collaborate with the transition team, and to work with President-elect Obama to move America forward and re-engage with the international community to reverse eight years of environmental neglect.” The following groups participated in the meeting and worked on the joint document: American Rivers, Center For International Environmental Law, Clean Water Action, Defenders Of Wildlife, Earthjustice, Environment America, Environmental Defense Fund, Friends Of The Earth, Greenpeace, Izaak Walton League, League Of Conservation Voters, National Audubon Society,National Parks Conservation Association, National Tribal Environmental Council, National Wildlife Federation, Native American Rights Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, Oceana, Ocean Conservancy, Pew Environment Group, Physicians For Social Responsibility, Population Connection, Population Action International, Rails-To-Trails Conservancy, Sierra Club, The Wilderness Society, The Trust For Public Land, Union Of Concerned Scientists and World Wildlife Fund. Source: NRDC

Troubled Automakers Touting Greener Cars November 30, 2008 Reporting by Roddy Scheer The Nissan Cube was among the green vehicles on display at the L.A. Auto Show. Green was all the rage at last week’s Los Angeles Auto Show. Both foreign and domestic automakers—all hit hard by the recent economic crisis—were touting their new and prototype green cars in hoping to appeal to car buyers looking to save a buck or two both on their rides and at the gas tank.   Among those vehicles taking center stage were Nissan’s asymmetrical Cube, Honda’s new hybrid Insight, and Ford’s midsized Fusion hybrid. South Korea’s Hyundia announced that it would release a new hybrid version of its top selling Sonata midsized sedan for the 2010 model year. Other bright green spots of the show included Toyota showcasing a version of its hybrid technology designed to work with natural gas instead of gasoline, and the U.S. debut of the Mini-E, an all-electric version of the popular new Mini Coopers. GM and Chrysler opted out of participating in the show this year. Source: MSNBC

COMMENTARY: Where the Wild Things Are Why Children Still Need Nature By Christina Sanantonio I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.   ~Henry David Thoreau The creek was child territory. A communal green space. © marytree.blogspot.com As a child, I had a creek in my backyard. My younger brother and I lived at the creek. The minute perfection of a baby crawdad held in my palm elicited one of my earliest moments of wonder. My creek was an ever-changing constant. It could dry to a mere trickle in a dry summer or burst from its bank after a heavy spring rain with a current that begged attempts at rafting. It was a refuge, my chief source of entertainment, an interactive zoological exhibit, a place to play with like-minded adventurous friends, and a great source of snakes. Long after my friends began wrinkling their noses when I suggested creek play, I could still be found ankle deep in silty water, net in hand. The creek was what anthropologists call a “magic circle of play”. A place both real and imagined; it was a world away from adults. Adults were rarely needed or wanted—unless we made an exceptionally interesting find. I remember once, after a time of heavy rain, a huge dogfish had been washed from the Sangamon into our little creek through mysterious channels and my brother and I caught it in a butterfly net. The fish had barreled in an aggressive manner straight for my legs, electrifying the crowd of kids watching. As the large fish flopped in the fragile net, we raced up to find a grownup to show. My grandfather admired the fish and said it was a type of shark. A shark in our creek! The imagined danger was delicious. With surprising wisdom, the adults of my childhood left children to their own devices. They knew that children need the space, solitude and most importantly, unrushed time in nature. I knew that kind neighbors were nearby if true need arose. In the many years of creek play, I can recall only one time that an adult intruded, and injected unwanted interference into my wild world. When I was 4 years old, a neighbor glanced out her window and saw me. I was completely nude, wielding a shiny new hatchet, and making a valiant attempt to chop down a large tree. The startled woman made a hurried call to my grandfather. A child was collected and re-attired (despite my protest that clothing impeded my hatcheting ability). A few admonishments later, I was back at the creek sans hatchet. If the same scenario were to transpire today, I am certain the scanners would be ablaze with calls indicating a naked toddler carrying an ax, running amok and bent on murder and mayhem. Various social service agencies would be notified, schools would be put on lock-down, and well-intentioned interventionists would swoop in and various psychotropic drugs would be recommended. Luckily for me, my neighbors were familiar with children and childhood. The creek was child territory. A communal green space. At twilight, children crouched and flitted along its banks like moths. After my brother died at age 12, the creek was one of the first places I sought comfort in my haze of grief. Nick had written his name on the bridge with a writing rock. It became one of the few tangible traces of him left to me. When my own sons were small, I looked forward to sharing the creek world with them and they were also thrilled with the creek’s offerings. We soon discovered, however, that the climate had changed. The fish and animals were thriving, but the banks had been groomed and planted up to the water’s edge. New neighbors worried about damage children might cause to the plantings and to themselves. One expressed real fear that an injury in the creek might result in a lawsuit. The sidewalk that had connected the creek to several subdivisions was claimed as private property and made forbidden to walkers and children. These actions speak not only to Americans’ growing litigiousness, but also of the pervasive paranoia, creeping isolationism, and culture of fear that is killing American neighborhoods and keeping our children indoors. Rather than quarrel with neighbors, we sadly departed the creek and mourned the loss. Children have always been drawn to wild, natural spaces. Toddlers allowed to explore will seek out mud under a bush or explore the most unkempt area of a backyard. Children come equipped with a natural curiosity toward the wild. The author Valerie Andrews says in her book, A Passion for this Earth, “As a child, one has that magical capacity to move among the many eras of the earth; to see the land as an animal does; to experience the sky from the perspective of a flower or a bee; to feel the earth quiver and breathe beneath us; to know a hundred different smells of mud and listen unselfconsciously to the soughing of the trees.” In much of America, however, children have disappeared from the landscape. Richard Louv in his book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder, writes that a lack of exposure to nature leads to not only a decrease in a child’s sense of wonder, but also an actual loss of senses. Nature is restorative. A recent study from the University of Illinois shows what parents have long known anecdotally: that children suffering from ADHD who are exposed to green spaces show marked improvement. Nature therapy is becoming a popular recommendation among child psychologists. Yet fewer and fewer American children are playing outdoors. It is my sincere hope that we can reawaken within ourselves and in our children the love of green places. I hope we can remember that aesthetics should not take precedence over sharing the natural world with children. We should care less about trampled hostas and more about allowing children to experience wonder. We need to reclaim the creeks and other magic circles for our children. If we fail in reconnecting with nature, we will have millions of children with the constitutions of hothouse flowers. We will have yet another generation of children who collectively echo the fourth grader in Louv’s book who announced, “I like to play indoors better ‘cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are”; a message truly worthy of our fear. CHRISTINA SANTANTONIO is a former teacher and a current family violence council coordinator who blogs at christina-thinkingoutloud.blogspot.com

Taking Our Own Inventory Gus Speth on Capitalism and the Environmental Community By Melinda Tuhus Gus Speth © Peter Otis “The planet cannot sustain capitalism as we know it.” That sentence crops up throughout James Gustave (“Gus”) Speth’s latest book, The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability (Yale University Press). Speth, dean of Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, was a cofounder of both the Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Resources Institute. He also served as top environmental adviser to President Jimmy Carter and as head of the United Nations Development Programme for much of the 1990s.   From his perch as the ultimate insider, Speth delivers a bracing critique of the environmental movement as being too willing to work within a system (“capitalism as we know it”) that is devastating not only to the earth’s environment but to most of its inhabitants as well. E: Could you explain your main position in writing this book? Speth: The essence of socialism is public ownership of the means of production, and I don’t think that’s the answer to the problems I’m raising, but neither is capitalism. We need to move beyond today’s capitalism and find a non-socialist alternative. That’s the door I’m trying to open with this book. It grew out of a sense that we’re approaching a calamitous situation on the environmental front. How could we have this paradox in which the environmental community—which I’ve been part of my whole life—gets stronger and more sophisticated, better funded, more members—and the environment continues to go downhill?” E: What is your message to today’s environmental community? Speth: Mainstream environmentalism is very incremental, it’s very wonkish in the sense that it’s very technical. But the problem is, it’s like swimming upstream—we get stronger and we think we’re going to master the current and make headway against the current, but the truth is the current is getting stronger faster than we are. The economy is growing very rapidly. The issues have outgrown us and we’re not making headway, and my guess is we never will with the current approach. That is, you won’t succeed working within the system when you need to change the system. So my urging to the environmental community is to step outside the system, to develop a more stinging, more in-depth critique and to begin to do some things which the environmental community hasn’t been willing to take on so far. E: Such as…? Speth: To suggest that we don’t need to make any serious lifestyle changes, that we can have our cake and eat it, too. I firmly believe that’s the wrong answer now. I believe we are over-consuming, that we need to downshift, to concentrate on sufficiency rather than always more, and to move away from the consumer society and overcome our bad case of “affluenza.” E: Is the global economy inevitably at odds with environmental conservation? Speth: When the economy grows very rapidly, environmental impacts tend to increase. The global economy has doubled in less than 20 years, but the environmental community isn’t willing to say growth is the problem. And we haven’t been willing to tell the public the truth about prices. We have this idea in our society that everything has to be really cheap, especially energy. But if we had prices that were honest from the point of view of their impact on society, of national security costs, then we would be paying very high prices for a lot of things that are cheap today. And if we don’t have honest prices in our economy, we will never have a market economy that is steered toward environmental objectives. E: Especially given our current eco-nomic state, most people don’t want to contemplate paying more for anything. How do you suggest framing that proposition? Speth: We have to get the markets straightened out and get the prices right. That’s going to take a lot of courage because it means living with higher prices for a lot of things. [But] we ought to be paying for the environmental damage we’re doing. The “polluter pays” principle is fundamental in international law, for example. Second, we need to rethink the basic charter of the modern corporation, which is aimed heavily at maximizing shareholder wealth, and we need to reorder that so the modern corporation is aimed at serving the long-term interest of all its stakeholders. That means the workers and the communities and future generations and the environment. Third, we need to rethink our own behavior. These changes would lead us beyond the capitalism we have today. I can see people coming together to create a new force for change, and [if that happens] I think there’s real hope for the deep changes that are needed. MELINDA TUHUS is a Connecticut-based journalist who has written for The New York Times and public radio.

How Not to Save a Beach Beach Nourishment in the Age of Big Development By Captain Brandon D. Shuler Trying to save an eroding beach is not a new concept. Since the early twentieth century, the desire to live near the sea has driven multi-billion-dollar development and tourism. There were breakwaters built to eliminate wave action, sea walls to stop the creeping ocean rise and perpendicular groins that attempted to slow the erosion created by wave and current action.   A St. Lucie, Florida, beach nourishment project disrupted one of the most important turtle nesting beaches in North America. © Getty Images When these structures either worsened the problem or shifted it along the coast, engineers and coastal developers thought to dredge up and pump in sediment usually strip-mined from the continental shelf. Cleverly, they spun this practice as “beach nourishment,” “beach renourishment” or “beach replenishment.” A diverse cast of environmental activists, sportsmen and independent scientists have called out these phrases as false advertising. If we were honest, they say, we’d call these projects massive dredge-and-fill operations, or land reclamation. Dr. Orrin Pilkey, a renowned marine geologist and professor emeritus at Duke University, is a vocal critic of the Army Corps of Engineers and beach-nourishment promoters. He calls Florida “the outlaw state.” Florida is the scene of the most aggressive beach-fill programs in the U.S. One such proposed $15-18 million project, the Reach 8 project, will add excess beach to a stable shoreline for a few privileged condo owners in Florida’s Lake Worth Pier, home to one of the best fishing areas and oldest surfing communities in the U.S. “The Reach 8 project is one of the most heinous and unfair coastal management decisions I have witnessed in 10 years of my conservation writing career,” says Terry Gibson, fishing editor of Outdoor Life. “The project will bury at least seven acres of nearshore tropical reefs with what is probably mud. It will smother the crabs and surf clams that are vital to the survival of foraging surf fishes and shorebirds. It will change the bottom around the pier and screw up the surf. And it will interfere with sea turtle nesting.” The Surfrider Foundation of Florida has joined forces with Gibson and others to educate the public on alternative ways to slow beach erosion. Florida regional manager, Ericka Davanzo, says the foundation’s major concern is “to help educate local town officials on project repercussions so their communities are not thrust into another renourishment boondoggle.” Davanzo referred to a 2004 St. Lucie nourishment project that went woefully awry. Coastal Planning & Engineering (CP&E), the same firm that designed the Reach 8 project, watched as mud was trucked in and bulldozed onto the second or third most important turtle nesting beach in North America, which is lined with nearshore reefs. Much of it quickly washed onto the reefs, and the remaining mud became as hard as concrete. The project had to be redone—at the taxpayers’ expense—but CP&E suffered few consequences beyond bad press. Determined to stop another St. Lucie-esque disaster, concerned groups like Surfrider, the Snook Foundation and citizen groups sued the Florida Department of Environmental Protection for issuing the permit that will allow the Reach 8 project to go forward. The City Council of Lake Worth voted unanimously to join the lawsuit. Gibson points out that, “The project is going forward to give a few privileged dune-top residents an illusion of shore protection,” and that this constitutes an egregious instance of taxation without representation. In 2007, the citizens of Palm Beach voted “no” on a referendum to fund the Reach 8 project. However, Palm Beach City Councilman David Rosow defends the city’s decision to move forward without the popular support of his constituents. “No rational person wants to waste money,” he says. “Remember, there isn’t a Department of Human Protection or Department of Common Sense, just agencies that spend their days protecting marine life and the environment. However, the town has a responsibility to act—not continue to study, yell, criticize and certainly not cast disparaging remarks.” But the experts working with Surfrider say the beach nourishment program is as wasteful as it is destructive. Scientists at Duke have gathered decades’ worth of independent data showing that beach-fill nourishment sand erodes two to 10 times faster than natural beach sand, because sediment used for the projects is too fine or wrongly shaped to stay in such a dynamic environment. The material slated for fill in Reach 8 is much finer than the native beach sand, and large surf routinely pounds the beach. Engineers rely on a principle called the “Dean overfill quotient,” which basically suggests that if one can only find sand half the grain size of the native material, one just pumps twice as much onto the beach. (The dredger, it should be noted, gets paid by the square yard.) But using incompatible fill leads to a number of environmental problems: Sand finer than the indigenous sands will increase turbidity, blocking needed sunrays that contribute to plant photosynthesis. Moreover, sand that washes out of a replenished beach may pile up on local hard bottoms killing acres of biodiverse coral reefs. Sediments left aloft on the water column may deposit themselves in contrary barring patterns and hinder or destroy coveted surfing areas. Finally, inappropriate fills destroy habitats supporting diverse bait and sport fishes. Most local beachfront communities in Texas and Florida depend on anglers for their active, multibillion-dollar-a-year recreational fishing economies. Beach nourishment, in the end, is driving away more business than it’s protecting.