NRDC: OnEarth Podcasts

Food writer Frederick Kaufman isn’t shy about attacking the role of big business in food production. His July cover story for Harper's was subtitled “How Goldman Sachs and Wall Street Starved Millions and Got Away With It” (tell us what you really think, Fred). So when he penned a feature story for OnEarth’s Fall 2010 issue that demonstrates how megafarms could help lead the way to global sustainability (see “What’s New for Dinner”), people who care about food and farming took notice -- although some of them had a hard time stomaching the idea.

“This is greenwashed bull____,” commenter Bert Harvey opined at TreeHugger, pulling no punches. “Monoculture, large-scale agribusiness ... no matter how 'green' ... by it's very definition does quite a bit of harm to the environment.” The TreeHugger article itself was more open to the idea, saying that “with climate change, peak oil, overpopulation and overtaxed aquifers posing serious threats to our civilization, we need to be tackling these issues from every angle possible.”

Others were optimistic -- cautiously so -- about the Walmarts, PepsiCos, and Unilevers of the world participating in an ambitious consortium called the Stewardship Index for Specialty Crops. Kaufman’s account of the initiative “restores faith in big agriculture,” writes Stacey Slate at the Civil Eats blog. “If megafarms take measures to calculate and reduce their costs (in efficiency, water waste, electricity, nitrogen-use), their cash concerns will simultaneously support sustainable gains for food production.”

Leon Kaye at TriplePundit emphasizes a point from Kaufman’s piece about the reach of industrial agriculture: “Organic foods are becoming more popular -- (by) some estimate their sales have tripled or quadrupled over the past decade -- but only about 1% of the farms in the US -- and 0.5% of pastureland -- is certified organic. Will the remaining 99% of farmland really switch to organic?”

On a personal note, as a recent refugee to the cheaper housing prices across the Hudson River, I give a hearty “hear hear!” to business writer Heather Clancy at SmartPlanet, who starts her appraisal of Kaufman’s piece thusly: “My husband swears that New Jersey corn -- harvested in August and shucked and eaten as quickly as possible off the stalk -- is the sweetest that money can buy.” Finally, a legitimate reason to call my new home the Garden State.

The federal government's mortgage regulator has re-affirmed its opposition to a federally funded program designed to help homeowners lower their energy costs.

In an August 26 letter addressed to Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-Colo.) and four other House members, acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency Edward DeMarco stated that despite "diligently" working to find a solution with Congress, as well as with state and local governments, the agency remains convinced that the "Property Assessed Clean Energy" (PACE) loans create too much risk for the two government-backed agencies it regulates, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which buy and resell over half the nation's home mortgages.

FHFA has said it believes that because a PACE loan is typically attached to a home as a property assessment, it would have a "first lien" status that put it ahead of a defaulted mortgage for payoff.

"No satisfactory conclusion has been reached to address problems associated with liens created after a mortgage is in place, thereby transferring credit risk to banks, secondary market parties and investors in mortgage-backed securities," reads the August 26 letter in part. "FHFA, therefore, has determined that its guidance to its regulated entities must remain in place."

FHFA in early July issued a "guidance" to mortgage lenders around the country, telling them to avoid municipalities issuing PACE loans. Its effect was to halt PACE programs nationwide, and with them the creation of scores of new green jobs.  (See "Long Island Town Fights To Keep Energy Efficiency Program.")

PACE supporters say these "cash for caulkers" loans would simply need to be brought up to date, not paid off completely, creating minimal risk for Fannie and Freddie.  And there is some evidence that homeowners using PACE loans have a lower risk of foreclosure. According to a 2009 analysis for a major financial institution (not made public, but reported in July by Grist), homes built to federal Energy Star standards for energy efficiency had default and delinquency rates that were 11 percent lower than other homes.

Although the Obama administration funded PACE with $150 million in federal stimulus dollars, it has not stepped forward overtly to save it from FHFA's de facto termination of the program. Congressman Steve Israel (D-NY) told Grist in July that he had proposed a 300,000-home pilot project to FHFA, to test whether the agency's financial fears would hold up.  FHFA's latest missive suggests that this idea wasn't acceptable to the agency.

PACE was designed to cut energy use, lower utility bills for homeowners, reduce global warming pollution, and create green jobs. (See the Spring 2010 OnEarth story, "Home Energy Makeover.")  PACE loans financed the significant up-front costs of conservation retrofits and installation of clean energy systems. They were paid off over time by homeowners -- who meanwhile reaped immediate benefits of lower energy bills and more comfortable homes.

Follow the PACE story with OnEarth's continuing coverage.

Sounds like one of those only-in-New York ideas: the clay tennis courts at Riverside Park are about to get carbon-neutral, composting toilets.

The thing is, they sound like really nice toilets, especially for athletic facilities. The deluxe, eco-friendly restrooms were proposed by Cook + Fox Architects, the firm responsible for the just-opened Bank of America building, the city’s first skyscraper to receive LEED-platinum certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.

PV solar panels will power the bathrooms at the Upper West Side courts, and a flush will send waste into underground tanks, where it will be treated and converted to compost -- meaning there's no city sewer line required. (Which is good, because the sewer system doesn’t extend beyond the West Side Highway, where the courts overlook the Hudson River.)

The -- ahem -- results will help fertilize surrounding gardens, as well as a wildflower meadow that would replace an unused, adjacent parking lot, said Melanie Bean, president of the Riverside Clay Tennis Association. Her group ordered a feasibility study for the toilets and hopes to fund the project with a mix of public and private contributions.

It could take a couple of years to raise the money and build the facility -- or rather, facilities. If all goes well, the bathrooms, like Bank of America's building, would qualify as LEED-platinum.

Environmentalists were naturally excited to hear about the conservation-oriented details of the plan, but what do the park’s tennis players think about their future accommodations?

“I’ll be thrilled," said Upper West Side resident Charlie Mueller while waiting for his court time this weekend. "It’s great that they’ll be making compost and using sustainable agriculture. I’ll definitely contribute ... money, that is. Later on, I guess I’ll, uh, contribute.”

“Anything would be an improvement over those” says Paula Leone, a frequent court user, pointing to the current portable potty station nearby. “And if we take into account the environmental impact of toilets, or anything really, on future generations -- then all the better.”

Not everyone bought into the idea, though. One court user called it "a little disgusting" until his partner, Mitch Wood, tried to convince him. “But it’s all natural,” Wood said. “The design is ingenious, the way it blends in with the park, and the philosophy fits so well with the ideals of these user-built courts. The courts themselves are built with member sweat, member labor -- so this is really appropriate.”

“It will be pretty cool if it’s done right,” said Lynn Bruch, a visitor from Lake Forest, Illinois, as she waited to try the courts. “And if you’re properly hydrated, you’ll need them within 20 minutes."

So maybe it's an idea that can spread outside of New York City after all.

Michigan, historical home to America's auto industry, is known for cars. And traffic jams, potholes, and urban sprawl that practically forces people to drive. But the power of the Detroit Three major automakers must be slipping, because the state is planning for more passenger rail service.

One example is WALLY, short for the Washtenaw and Livingston Line, a proposed 28-mile commuter rail line that would connect Ann Arbor and Howell.

Projections are that 1,300 people would ride each weekday, averting 50,000 miles of driving and tons of greenhouse gas emissions daily. Their commute would take 37 minutes at 60 mph, without the hassles of filling the gas tank, fighting traffic, finding parking and -- in the winter -- worrying about getting stuck or in a car crash.

A study done for the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority found that 75 percent of area residents support the WALLY project. However, WALLY may not even go as far as a Ford Festiva in the snow, unless the Transportation Authority rounds up funding for the line.

Initial estimates by a Virginia rail consultant suggest that WALLY would cost $32 million to build, and $7 million a year to operate. It's a lot of money, but less than the state-estimated $500 million it would cost to add a third lane to U.S. 23, the current auto route for an Ann Arbor to Howell trip.

State Seeks Federal Railroad Dollars

The Michigan Department of Transportation is drafting a State Rail Plan to guide future investments, and scoop up some of the billions in federal funding available for railroad upgrades.

Official comments are being taken by the Michigan DOT, and the Michigan Environmental Council and Michigan Association of Railroad Passengers are holding forums across the state to gather public input.  The plan is due to be completed by June 2011, according to michiganbyrail.org.

Tim Fischer, deputy policy director for the Michigan Environmental Council, says the interest in expanded passenger rail here is more about transit diversity than the waning of the automobile.

"Cars, buses, airplanes and trains are all part of an integrated transportation system ... We've worked very hard at trying not to make more passenger rail an anti-car proposition.  And I don't think it is."

 

Here's a video of an Amtrak train ride to a forum earlier this year in Traverse City:

This video from the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments suggests what an Ann Arbor-Detroit commuter rail line might look like:

 

Photo Credit: J.R. Valderas

Last fall, I travelled to the Klamath River to see the wild salmon that are clinging to existence in that troubled watershed.  In days of searching, I saw two salmon returning to their spawning grounds.  Two fish.  On different days.  Considering that tens of thousands of wild salmon and steelhead once filled this river -- enough to keep people awake at night with their splashing-- this was a depressing result.  Even more depressing is that populations are near extinction in many other watersheds of the western U.S., including the San Joaquin, Sacramento, Columbia, and Snake Rivers.  All told, twenty-six unique populations of wild Pacific salmon are endangered in the United States.

Pacific salmon, including Chinook, pink, sockeye, coho, and chum salmon and their close relatives, steelhead, spawn in fresh water where their juveniles grow for a weeks to a few years before migrating to the ocean.  After a few more years and swimming for hundreds to thousands of miles in the ocean, adult salmon find their home streams and migrate long distances upstream to spawn.  After spawning, they die.

As they travel on these long-distance migrations, wild salmon weave together a variety of natural and human communities.  In the ocean, Orca pods specialize in hunting salmon.  In the rivers where they spawn and die, salmon flesh feeds a great variety of birds, mammals, and insects.  These fish-eaters rely on and distribute the energy and nutrients the salmon carry with them from the ocean.  With the right tools, you can find nutrients from the ocean far inland, in spruce trees, redwoods, and even in the wine from grapes grown near salmon spawning grounds.

Salmon support human communities as well.  From the native tribes of the Pacific coast, to the first European settlers, to the fishermen who once sold their catch in the west's storied ports from Monterey to Seattle and beyond, wild salmon have always been a fundamental part of the culture and cuisine of the Pacific coast.  But those cultures are disappearing along with our wild salmon stocks and the return of fresh salmon, formerly an important marker of the seasons, is being supplanted by the ubiquitous "farmed" Atlantic salmon -- a fatty creature of dubious nutritional value.

The communities of the Pacific coast have formed the SalmonAID coalition to restore the rivers of the west coast and recover their wild salmon populations.  SalmonAID brings together commercial fishermen, anglers, conservation organizations, tribes, and fine chefs to convey the magnificence and plight of our salmon.

At first, this coalition seems unlikely - commercial fishermen and conservationists are often at odds.  People reflexively blame commercial fishing for declining fish populations.  But unlike some fisheries, commercial salmon fishing is a well-regulated endeavor; salmon are caught using hook and line, not giant indiscriminate nets.  Conservation groups like The Bay Institute and NRDC have long collaborated with fishing organizations such as the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations to protect our rivers and our fisheries.  Commercial fishermen and conservationists, tribes, chefs, and food safety organizations share the understanding that recovery of wild Pacific salmon requires restoration of our rivers and estuaries.  And, whether we think about it daily or not, we all rely on the natural flow of rivers.

During September, the SalmonAID coalition will host Salmon Month at Aquarium of the Bay in San Francisco.  Exhibits, events and activities will engage Aquarium visitors with the many threads of connection between us and our rivers and the amazing wild salmon that weave those threads together.  We hope to see you there.

When a real estate survey released last week sparked a slew of news stories trumpeting "The Death of the McMansion," it sounded like great news for the environment. After all, smaller homes are more efficient to live in and less resource-intensive to build.

But on second thought, what will become of all those foreclosed-upon faux chateaus sitting unoccupied? Sure, a handful might be repurposed, but aren’t the rest doomed to demolition -- adding tons of debris to the waste stream, not to mention the materials and energy used to rebuild and redevelop those subdivisions?

Which really would be better for the environment: building smaller new homes or sticking it out with the existing starter castles, however oversized?

“The death of the McMansion is probably a good thing in the long run,” says Justin Horner, a smart growth expert and transportation policy analyst for NRDC. "Though there is a significant environmental impact to demolition and rebuilding, it’s not such a big impact that we have an environmental interest in keeping people living in these things."

Though it obviously would have been better to have gotten it right the first time, it will eventually pay off to try to do better moving forward. That way, hopefully, small homes built in the future will not only run more efficiently, they’ll also still be in-demand (and therefore less likely to be demolished) for years to come. This seems particularly likely since American households are shrinking (smaller families, more singles, and more couples waiting longer to have kids). Demolishing the right way -- with maximum repurposing and recycling of material -- will also tip the scales a little further.

Another point in favor of excising those Hummer-houses: a preference for more petite digs tends to go along with a desire to live in a walk-able community closer to an urban center, which has the advantage in what’s called "location efficiency."

"Large, new homes also tend to be built on the outskirts of towns [where lots are big and zoning restrictions are few]," Horner says. "Not only are you using more water and electricity at home, you’re also driving in from the middle of nowhere to go buy a carton of milk."

So go ahead and feel relieved if you see a wrecking ball heading for an exurban cul-de-sac full of garage Mahals. But keep your fingers crossed, hoping that developers have finally learned their lesson.

A few weeks ago, I flew over the Deepwater Horizon site and saw what looked like the opposite of all the news reports: it looked more like somebody had spilled water into a Gulf filled with oil.

You don't have to make a personal trip to the Gulf of Mexico to realize the BP disaster has blown the cover off a subject some would prefer to keep quiet: the ongoing damage inflicted by our addiction to oil.

When you see images of blackened beaches, grounded fishermen, and toxic dispersants in the water, you can't pretend that it only costs $35 to fill your gas tank.

There are hidden costs in every drop of oil, and that's why I made this PSA for NRDC about the true cost of a gallon of gasoline.

People in the Gulf are paying a steep price right now. Eleven people lost their lives, but the human cost goes far beyond that. The commercial fishing and tourism economies in the Gulf have been gutted, and local families trying to put food on the table don't know where to turn. They've lost their jobs, wages, cultural traditions, beloved beaches, and security. This is the collateral damage of the disaster.

I didn't grow up in Louisiana, and I can imagine those who did are even more passionate about cleaning up this mess than the rest of us. I grew up in Canada, where we have a similar tragedy being carried out right now: the ancient boreal forest in Northern Alberta is being destroyed to collect dirty tar sands oil. Oil that generates three times the global warming pollution as regular crude. As a result, entire ecosystems and indigenous communities are being devastated.

When you see what's happening in the Gulf and the boreal, you realize we're willing to stop at absolutely nothing in order to get our fix. And it seems to me like it's time we recognize we have a problem. A major, major problem.

What we're doing is literally the same thing cave men did: we set things on fire to produce energy. There are so many viable alternatives. Wind farms and solar plants, for instance, don't explode, destroying thousands of miles of marshlands and oceans. That's something worth focusing on.

I started out feeling angry about the spill, and I think a lot of other people did too. Slowly but surely, I've been trying to redirect that anger into something positive. And you start to think, "How can we change this? How can we turn this into an opportunity?"

I see this whole thing as a wakeup call: a chance to shift to cleaner energy and build a greener economy.

It's easy to vilify Big Oil after a tragedy like this, but there are still hard working people in that industry who need to put a roof over their heads. I firmly believe we can pass clean energy and climate legislation and by doing so, put millions of Americans to work.

But we have to ask for it. We have to petition the government to move this kind of legislation forward. The Senate failed to do it this summer, but we should call on them to do it this fall.

If the voices are loud enough, lawmakers will start to listen and (if only in the interests of self preservation) begin to move the country in a new direction.

I think our approach to energy is going to change one way or another. Eventually the Earth will make us change. It would be great if we could get in front of that -- and better still, be here to enjoy it.

People in this village, as I mentioned earlier, are a little suspicious of refrigerators. I offered some day-old refrigerated leftovers to Leela, a local housewife who's helping us with the cooking. She politely declined, explaining, "If I feed that to my children, they'll get sick."

Leela may be wary of refrigerators, but she loves our new blender (they're called "mixies" here). When she grinds coconut and spices for each meal, it can take about an hour when she uses the traditional grinding stone.

I love hearing the sonorous rub-rub-rub of the heavy grinding stone in the morning, but I've now resigned myself to the mixie's high-pitched whine. When she uses the mixie, Leela can whip up coconut chutney for breakfast in about 10 minutes.

About 20 years ago, mixies were a luxury item. Now even in this little fishing village, they're a must-have. Everyone admits that stone-ground chutney tastes best, but in a culture where people routinely cook three fresh meals a day, using a mixie can reduce meal prep time by nearly three hours. Who couldn't use an extra three hours in a day?

The irony is that the mixie sits silent many mornings, because there's no power to run it, and Leela's back to the daily grind. So the power failures work to my advantage sometimes -- whenever the current goes, we get tastier meals.

 

"War is over," sang John Lennon in different times.

"Oil is over," sang The New York Times a week ago Wednesday, heralding those two terrifically reliable sources, NOAA and BP, and letting us know that all was hunky dory down in the Gulf.  "It was too late to get the reactions of environmentalists," the paper added nonchalantly, which meant they basically passed along the government report as fact, propagating the new myth of the not-so-bad oil spill.  Only 25 % of the oil remains!  Um, but isn't that 25% ten times more oil than spilled during the Valdez?  Yes, but this is different, this is oil you can't see!  This oil only seems to be clinging to crab larvae and other out-of-sight stuff at the bottom of the ocean.  And anyway why are you still writing about this: don't you realize that the news cycle is officially over.

In fact everyone outside of the Gulf states is so upbeat that even hurricane season no longer seems the oily nightmare it was once envisioned to be.  Bring it on, we say, since we don't live here.  If there's really no oil out there then it won't be any worse than a normal hurricane season.

Oh yeah, we remember now.  Those normal hurricane seasons can be kind of bad....

 * * *

Ryan Lambert has a plaque for being the first person to return to Buras after Katrina.  He also has a waterline in his lodge up above the stuffed animal heads that shows where the water finally settled, over twenty feet up.  He is one of the people who is not quite ready to buy into the new rosy Gulf narrative.  Recently he refused to organize and participate in the sports fishing tournament (with a free boat as a prize) that BP tried to sponsor as part of its all-is-well campaign.

By the way, here is what Ryan did on the day that Katrina hit.  He had been out fishing a day or two before, back when it looked like just another storm.  That was before it hit Florida and started speeding across the gulf on a beeline, as if it were seeking hasty reservations at Ryan's lodge.  "I've had a bullseye on my back for while now," he said of the oil and Katrina, but never was that bullseye quite as prominent as the day the storm hit, when his home would essentially be the touch-down point.  When this started to become apparent he loaded up his truck with what was most important, his guns and rods.  But as he was about to leave he got a call from a Mr. Bayle, a Vietnamese man who had worked for him for 14 years, who said, "My truck's broken."  When Ryan said that this was the real thing and Bayle had to get himself and his wife out of there, Bayle replied: "We old."  So Ryan drove by and scooped up the Bayles, who only carried a rosary and a picture of Jesus.  "We live now," said Bayle's wife.  They would survive but their house would not.  When they returned, weeks later, it was upside down in the middle of the road. 

"People would come back with trucks and trailers to look for their stuff," said Ryan.  "And they would leave with a baggie." 

This was the start of a very long day.  When Ryan finally made his way back to Lafayette, he got a phone call from his sister who said "Uncle Rich is trapped in the city.  He's got a broken ankle."  All the cell phones were out because the towers were knocked down but the land lines were working even as the water started to rise.  "I'm coming to get you," Ryan said to his uncle.  "I have no idea when I'm going to be there.  It might be midnight or it might be two in the morning.  But just know I'm coming.  Just go upstairs because if you get in that water and drown you're done." 

His wife said you can't do this.  And he said what do you mean?  This is what I do for a living.  I hunt and I guide.  Now I got a license to do it.  So Ryan grabbed four or five guns and hitched up his boat and threw his bicycle in the back of the truck.  He drove down through St. John the Baptist Parish to St. Charles and somehow talked the policemen into escorting him across the 310 bridge into the city.  There was no light once he crossed the bridge and to stay above the water he rode downtown on top of the levee.  He had four wheel drive of course and every time he hit some obstacle on the levee he'd drive down the hill to the river road, driving over and under downed power lines.  It was pitch dark with no lights except those on his truck.  Finally he cut up Causeway Boulevard and started heading into Metairie.  When he got to the water it was really not enough to launch his boat but was too much for his truck.  So he grabbed his flashlight and a couple of guns and waded in.  On the way to his house, he saw nobody except for some National Guard people here and there on some high ground.  When he got to the house he beat on its side until a little flashlight came on and an upstairs window opened.  "Bogale, that you?" his uncle asked.  The old man then threw down the keys to his truck, that was on high ground and Ryan backed it up to the window, where his uncle could climb down along a pipe into the truckbed.  They drove slowly out through the submerged and deserted streets, the truck kicking up a substantial wake, and ditched the old truck for Ryab's once they reached it.  Then it was back up on the Levee.  They made it home about four in the morning.

* * * 

I followed the same general route when I first drove into New Orleans, driving below the Levee on River Road and stopping a few times to walk up over the hump of grass to see the river, which sloshed against the hill with a brown, algal soup of microbial humus and Big Gulp cups.  The next morning I went birdwatching in the lower 9th Ward and saw two yellow crowned night herons on top of the wall that had cracked and flooded the famous, or infamous, neighborhood.  Many places still hadn't been re-built and there was an overgrown green jungle feel to the roads closest to the water, lots lush with tall grass and ferns.  Roofs and doors were still off some of the plywood houses where the water had come rushing through in a great wave.  A black snake with silvery marking crossed the road and marsh grasses grew so high it was hard to see around the corner.  I must have looked funny walking through the neighborhood with my binoculars around my neck.   On the drive out I stopped to talk to two women who appeared to be moving into a new house.  One of the women, Glennis, who had had her house completely destroyed by Katrina, was finally moving back from Texas.  She pointed at a green house that looked like an amphibious boat, which, it turned out, had been paid for by Brad Pitt as part of his project to restore the lower 9th. The Wall that Broke Open (with one yellow-crowned night heron on top)

"I don't like the way it looks," she said.  "But I like having a roof over my head."

            

She also pointed at the wall that still held back the water and speculated on why it had broken during Katrina.

"They say a boat hit it and cracked it open," she said.  "But I think they blew it up on purpose to flood us out."

I nodded and let that one sit.  When I asked about the oil she did not seem overly concerned.  She had other worries. 

 * * *

A storm was coming but the people at French 75 seemed no more worried than Glennis had been about the oil.  I sipped my Daisy on my last night in New Orleans as the customers scoffed at the notion that anything as puny as tropical storm Bonnie could scare people as tough and storm-scarred as themselves.  They turned out to be right, but as the nervousness under their bravado revealed, you never know with storms out in the Gulf.  Especially when you have just come off, as Bill McKibben recently pointed out, the warmest decade, warmest six months, and warmest April, May, and June on record.  (And I can testify that July has been no slouch.)  We all know that this will not be the season's last storm.   And as for a big one it's only a matter of time. 

Over the last few years, before I came down here, I've made a study of sinking cities, including towns on the Outer Banks where the trophy houses seem to be migrating out to sea and the streets of lower Manhattan, that in some areas are only five feet above sea level .  A couple of years ago I drove out to Topsail Island, just twenty miles north of where I live, with the coastal geologist Orrin Pilkey.  Orrin pointed out the multi-story hotels and condos that perched over the eroding beach, dipping their toes over the scarp line, as if ready to dive into the Atlantic.

"These buildings don't have a chance," he said.  "One big storm from the right direction and they're done."

We passed Hot-Diggedy Dogz and a dozen other tacky beach stores-with signs that employed the subtle substitution of "K"s for "C"s, like "Krazy Krabs"-but the sign that really caught my eye was a small hand-painted one that said, with no explanation, "Atlantis."  A mile farther another appeared: "Atlantis" in simple blue letters.  I made a mental note of the signs though their real significance didn't hit until Orrin and I parked at the northernmost public access point and walked down to the beach.   And there it was.  Atlantis.  Or at least the beginnings of Atlantis.

If any place seemed a physical manifestation and confirmation of Orrin's warnings about the coast it was the northern end of Topsail Island.  Far out on the low tide sand, where you might expect to walk picking up shells or sea glass, stood large abandoned homes on stilts.  Below the buildings, hundreds of sandbags leaned against the stilts, though to call them "bags" is to not get the point across. They were enormous, ten feet long and terrifically ugly, great lumpish loaves that transformed the beach into a war zone.  Farther out water washed over the sandbags and waves sloshed in the spaces beneath the houses.  Useless electrical wires and pink insulation hung limp from the buildings' undersides.  The houses themselves, stranded out on the low tide beach, distanced from their usual surroundings of roads and neighboring homes and telephone poles, had the look of sci-fi space stations, floating far away from earth.  Stairs ran down off the houses and hung in the air, hovering above the water, and "Condemned: Do Not Enter" signs shone orange in the windows.  It was a truly wild sight, no less wild for the fact that the structures were manmade.

The sheer incongruity of seeing those water houses was startling, and maybe a little thrilling.  You got the sense of something massively out of place, and maybe knew a little how Charlton Heston's character felt coming upon the Stature of Liberty on the beach at the end of Planet of the Apes. 
"Holy shit," I muttered.
Orrin mentioned that if the more dire predictions for sea level rise came true, all of North Carolina's barrier islands would be underwater by the end of the century.  This was of some concern for me, as I happened to live on a barrier island.  A few months later we traveled together to another island, not a barrier island this time but a chunk of glaciated bedrock, home, not to a few thousand people, but to eight million. 

New York City had never felt as primal as it did that day, touring it with Orrin.  We noted how the grided streets would act as sluiceways leading water from the rivers into and through the city and tried to imagine water cascading down into the subways.  Most primal of all was ground zero, a name that takes on different meaning when you realize how close it is to sea level.  All those years after the attack and the scene still seemed chaotic.  A car ramp led down into a chasm of gray cement walls and Porto-Pottys and erector set bridges and temporary worker trailers and staging and tattered American flags and piles of garbage.  This was just about the lowest elevation in the whole city, land that had once been in the water and might be again.  I imagined describing the particular configuration of land and water to a geographer, while stripping it of its specific over-populated locale.  What, I would ask, would you call a great chasm less than five feet above sea level that is also less than a quarter mile from a rising body of water?  Well, the geographer would answer, I know what I will soon call it: a lake.

In fact geographers and scientists already have a name for this lower tip of Manhattan, a name that graphically suggests how it might fare in the face of sea level rise and a powerful storm.  The Basin, it is officially called.  One of those scientists, Klaus Jacob, a Columbia geophysicist who is working on the city's Climate Change report, has gone even further.  He calls it The Bathtub.  Many New Yorkers used this name for the excavated Ground Zero site itself during the days before re-builidng, due to its tendency to fill up with water after rainstorms, but Jacob believes the name fits the whole of lower Manhattan.

What will happen if the seas rise as many predict they will?  Most obviously the Bathtub will fill to the brim.  Standing there that day I felt an odd conflation of disasters.  9-11 melded with Katrina.  Strange how our modes of apocalypse shift, like styles of clothes.  You rarely hear anxiety about nuclear winter any more, and the fears of terrorism have waned since the attack.  But other worries have filled the void.  Katrina signaled a shift in which nature itself began to play the role of the heavy.  Nature, and of course us, the great manipulators of nature.  And what is sea level rise if not the result of our use of oil and other fossil fuels?  It seems all strangely connected, both natural and un-.  I think of a trip I made to Belize, to a village called Monkey River Town, seven months after the towers fell.  Everywhere people talked about the great tragedy that had struck the fall before, but they weren't talking about September 11th.  The date they kept mentioning was October 9th, the day that Hurricane Iris, a category 4 storm, had slammed into the coast of southern Belize with winds in excess of 140 per hour, killing dozens and leaving 10,000 homeless

Manhattan is safer than Belize, and safer than New Orleans, thanks to the cooler waters off its coasts, giving hurricanes less energy to feed off.  But New York has seen its share of storms.  In 1821 a category 4 hurricane hit New York City directly, raising a storm surge of 13 feet in an hour, cutting the island in half, and flooding the entire city.  In 1938 the famous storm known as the Long Island Express hit the coast with a storm surge 25 to 35 feet high.  Perhaps most relevant to today is Hurricane Donna which struck New York on September 12, 1960 with 90 mile an hour winds and five inches of rain.  The images of Donna help one imagine the storms to come: people in lower Manhattan trudging through waist-deep water, others floating along in rowboats. The U.S. States Landfalling Hurricane Project predicts that there is a 90% probability that the New York/Long Island area will be hit with a category 3 hurricane over the next fifty years.  But the truth is that as sea levels rise it won't even take a hurricane to flood lower Manhattan.  A strong enough Nor'easter will easily do the trick.  That is why hurricane experts see New York,  despite the relatively low odds of a major storm, as the country's second most dangerous major city, behind only the hurricane bulls-eye of Miami and just ahead of New Orleans.  Consider that all three major New York airports, as well as the rail, and most obviously the subway, are less than ten feet above sea level, and storm surge predictions for a category 3 hurricane top twenty feet in most locations.  That puts JFK ten feet under water. 

There are all sorts of plans to prevent this, but they sound a lot like the usual plans to prevent weather and seas and winds.  Boys with Toys again.  One plan involves building three large barriers at the Verrazano Narrows, Arthur Kill, and Throgs Neck, barriers that will theoretically shield Manhattan in the manner of the Eastern Scheldt barrier that protects the Netherlands.  But beyond staggering costs is the question of their potential effectiveness.  One man who questions how much good barriers would do it Klaus Jacob, the same Columbia geophysicist who likes to call Lower Manhattan the Bathtub.  Jacob, playing the Orrin Pilkey role in New York, is deeply skeptical about dikes and barriers; he thinks that barriers or walls will just give people a false sense of security.  "The higher the defense, the deeper the floods," he has written. 

Jacob is one of the few people who has really thought hard about what a major hurricane would do to New York.  Unlike most of us, he has little problem envisioning, and describing, the devastation.  He sees streets like rivers, flooded subways, and little chance for true evacuation, a Katrina but with millions more people.  His only practical solution sounds a lot like the solution that Orrin has suggested for the Outer Banks.  Get the hell out of low-lying areas.

In fact Jacob has already suggested the same to the residents of New Orleans.  Not long after Katrina, he caused a stir by writing one of the first papers that proposed that it was foolish to rebuild New Orleans.  The idea might have been politically controversial, but Jacob argued that it was also innately commonsensical given sea level rise and the fact that parts of New Orleans are actually ten feet under sea level.  Why spend a hundred billion dollars to re-build when the odds are it's going to happen again fairly soon?   He wrote: "Some of New Orleans could be transformed into a ‘floating city' using platforms not unlike the oil platforms off-shore, or, over the short term, a city of boathouses, to allow floods to fill in the ‘bowl' with fresh sediment."  New Orleans, he went on, would soon become an "American Venice."

 * * *

Which sounds nice in theory.  But what if you happen to live here?  

On my last morning in the city I drive out to Chalmette, where the town was completely submerged and the bulb of the giant water tank blew off its great stem and bobbed around like a beach ball.  I stop to fill my tank and then take a break to talk to the guy who is sitting on the bench outside the service station.  His name is Joe and his house was completely destroyed in Katrina.  It wasn't the first time.  His home had been destroyed by a hurricane in 1965.

 

"That was hurricane Betsy and my little daughter was one month old.  I remember it was '65 because the next time my house got wiped out she was forty."

He shakes his head slowly.

"If it happens again I'm leaving and not coming back," he said.

We shake hands and say goodbye.  But then as I start to walk back to my car he adds one more thing.

"Of course that's what I said the last time," he admits.

In Bangalore, the center of India's high-tech industry, bricks and mortar are still very much in evidence. On a single block in a quiet residential neighborhood of this laid back southern Indian city, I spotted four multistory apartment buildings under construction, no doubt replacing single family homes.

In every town I've passed through while visiting India this month, the mania for homebuilding is apparent. Barefoot construction workers perch like birds on bamboo scaffolding, hauling up materials with heavy jute rope and buckets. Even in small cities, every other shop in town sells ceramic tiles, flooring or fancy plumbing fixtures. Highway billboards advertise luxurious new highrises. A lighting store displays huge chandeliers, promising "Light and Lifestyle."

My parents' new home in Kerala is part of this mania. Plans for a simple beach cottage quickly ballooned into a two-story, three bedroom/three bath villa, equipped with an outsize refrigerator and giant multiple air conditioners. When people can suddenly afford to live a comfortable western lifestyle in India, energy-saving ceiling fans and fluorescent lights hold very little appeal.

There's one telling exception, however. The house is equipped with a solar water heater. It's an energy-saver, but it also provides the incomparable luxury of running hot water in the kitchen and all the bathrooms. In older Indian middle-class homes, you have to turn on an electric water heater - called the "geyser" - before you fill a bucket with hot water for your bath (and pray that there's no power outage while you're in mid-soap).

Residential building is so fast and loose here that it seems unlikely for any national building codes to take root anytime soon. But solar water heaters do seem to be taking off. I don't know a soul with a solar water heater in the United States, but the Indian government has made them mandatory in all new government buildings, as part of its national Energy Conservation Building Code, and several cities are considering similar mandates.

India's National Solar Mission targets having 20 million square meters of solar water heater collectors by the year 2022. If our solar water heater allows me to take a hot shower during the cloudy depths of Kerala's drenching monsoon, I can only assume that the program will be a success.

After up to a million gallons of oil spilled into Michigan's Kalamazoo River from an underground pipeline late last month, investigators and local residents focused on concerns about where and when the spill started and what should have been done to prevent it.

But one crucial concern was largely overlooked: What exactly was spilling out of the pipeline and into Michigan waterways? Environmental experts said it was likely tar sands oil -- the controversial asphalt-thick bitumen whose mining and drilling operations are causing major environmental destruction in the forests of Alberta, Canada. (See the OnEarth special report "Canada's Highway to Hell.")

While reporting on the spill, I asked Enbridge Energy Partners CEO Patrick Daniel several times whether his company's pipeline was carrying oil from tar sands -- or "oil sands," as the industry typically calls it. He definitively told me that it was not. I also emailed questions to Enbridge's spokesperson asking for confirmation of Daniel's statements and a definition of what the company believes does or does not constitute oil sands. The messages weren't returned.

In my August 6 OnEarth story, I reported Daniel's denials -- and the evidence that, despite those denials, tar sands oil had indeed spilled into the river. (See "Michigan Oil Spill Increases Concerns Over Tar Sands Pipelines.")

When Michigan Messenger reporter Todd Heywood, following up on the tar sands angle, asked Daniel the same question this week, he got a markedly different answer. He reported on August 12 that Daniel told him:

No, I haven't said it's not tar sand oil. What I indicated is that it was not what we have traditionally referred to as tar sands oil. ... If it is part of the same geological formation, then I bow to that expert opinion. I'm not saying, ‘No, it's not oil sands crude.' It's just not traditionally defined as that and viewed as that.

Josh Mogerman, senior media associate in NRDC's Midwest office, explains on his blog that linguistic gymnastics around the definition of tar sands have a long history. Industry officials have sought to avoid the increasingly negative connotations of tar sands extraction, which has a devastating effect on boreal forests and produces huge carbon emissions. Mogerman notes the irony of a company trying to deny the existence of the product that is its "bread and butter," in the words of Polaris Institute researcher Richard Girard, author of a corporate profile of Enbridge.

Daniel has emphasized that the oil in the pipeline in Michigan was not from the strip-mined deposits in the Athabasca region of Alberta, where forest is literally scooped off to access bitumen within 75 meters of the surface. Daniel said the oil in the Michigan pipeline, from Cold Lake, Alberta, south of the Athabasca area, was extracted through steam injection -- essentially melting the viscous oil underground until it is liquid enough to be pumped up -- and then diluting it by a third in order to send it through pipelines to refineries.

This is the way a large portion of tar sands are extracted -- in fact, when measured by surface area, the vast majority of tar sands deposits are mined through such "in situ" techniques, according to a map from the Canadian energy department. So the mere fact that bitumen is not strip-mined does not by any means make it not "tar sands."

During one interview, Daniel told me the oil that Enbridge was shipping from Cold Lake was not tar sands because those deposits "have never been controversial." The chemical makeup of a petroleum product, of course, would not in any scientific sense be defined by whether or not it is controversial. Daniel's response underscores Mogerman's analysis that, to the industry -- which wants to greatly expand the mining and transportation of fossil fuel from Alberta -- "tar sands" is a label to be avoided and sidestepped through semantics.

But calling bitumen by a different name doesn't remove the sulfur, mercury, and other heavy metals that it contains, which makes it more hazardous in a spill like the one on the Kalamazoo River. And it doesn't change the increased air and water emissions affecting local residents and their drinking water sources when the oil is refined in places like Whiting, Indiana, Detroit and Toledo.

Now the vast majority of the oil has been removed from the Kalamazoo River, and cleanup workers are in the process of scraping the small creek where the oil first spilled and removing contaminated soil. The soil removal process is expected to take months, according to EPA officials -- especially since rising water shortly after the spill spread oil across large swaths of the marshy region.

By August 9, Enbridge had opened storefront offices in Marshall, Michigan, where the spill happened, and nearby Battle Creek, where residents can submit claims for damages. The company has agreed to buy at least two homes and is in discussion with other homeowners.

So far, no contamination has been found in the wells of residents near the spill, but government regulators and scientists warn that groundwater contamination could take months or even years to show up. Such long-term safety concerns will be discussed at a meeting the EPA is holding in Kalamaazoo on August 19. Residents have reported that the once-pervasive sound of frogs from the river has been silenced. This was the kind of thing that Paul Newman, 52, mulled sadly as he watched the thick oil flowing down the river several days after the spill.

"It will look like it used to on the surface before too long," said Newman, who grew up fishing and canoeing the river. "But underneath, it will never be the same."

Photo: Kari Lydersen

Photo:  Subharnab Majumdar/flickr

Whether you call them feral swine, Russian boars, or a porcine equivalent of the Asian carp, wild pigs have invaded Michigan, say state wildlife officials.

A proposal to declare them as an invasive species was raised at a Natural Resources Commission meeting on Thursday, Aug. 12, and could be enacted in coming months, according to Michigan United Conservation Clubs.

Wild pigs are a problem because they carry diseases, as well as making a mess of crops and habitat used by other animals like pheasant, roughed grouse and wild turkey, MLive reports.

Russ Mason, Michigan's wildlife chief, calls the wild pigs "four-legged Asian carp." She says declaring them as invasive would make it illegal to possess the critters in Michigan, including at game preserves offering pig hunts (some of which are blamed for letting the animals loose in the first place). Others states, like Texas, spend millions of dollars per year on pig control.

Who let the hogs out? They escaped years ago from private game reserves, and have been reproducing like rabbits ever since. 

 

 

Michigan already encourages citizens to shoot wild hogs. State statutes allow anyone with a hunting license or a concealed pistol permit to kill "any free-ranging pig running at large" in about 60 of Michigan's 83 counties. Data from 2009 (PDF) shows numerous sightings and almost 50 reported kills in the state's Lower Peninsula.

The wild pigs are reportedly pretty tasty to eat. Michigan pork producers support the invasive species designation, however, because they want consumers to eat "the other white meat" -- the farm-raised variety of pig.

In announcing his new appointments to the U.S. Manufacturing Council on Thursday, Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke singled out his pick as the council's new leader, Bruce Sohn.

"With Bruce as chair," said Locke, "we're sending a message that President Obama and this administration are committed to making renewable energy and efficiency technologies a cornerstone of a revitalized American manufacturing sector."

Sohn is president of First Solar, the world's largest manufacturer of thin-film solar photovoltaic modules (PV). A Commerce Department spokesperson confirmed that Sohn is the first representative from the solar power industry to head the council, which advises the department on competitiveness and other issues facing U.S. manufacturers of all types.

Solar advocates, unsurprisingly, enthusiastically endorsed the selection.

"This is validation of the proposition that renewable energy is where it's at," cheered Adam Browning, head of the Vote Solar Initiative, and a former EPA official in the Clinton administration. "Leadership in developing -- and manufacturing -- the energy sources of the future is a key to our future economic prosperity."

President and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), Rhone Resch, issued a statement saying that Sohn's appointment "has told the world that the solar industry is becoming a backbone for our economy and offers a bright future for U.S. manufacturing." (NB: First Solar sits on SEIA's board of directors.)

But the solar industry isn't the only one applauding the council's new leadership. Having a representative from the clean and renewable energy sector is recognized as a step forward for the environment in general and in the fight against climate change in particular.

Jenny Powers, an NRDC spokesperson, said that by including Sohn, the administration is acknowledging the fact that solar has earned a seat at table. "This really demonstrates the relevancy of renewable energy sources to our economy," Powers said. "They [solar] are scaling up and playing with the big boys."

Sean Garren agrees. A clean energy advocate with the group Environment America, Garren said his organization is "looking forward to working with Mr. Sohn to reap all the manufacturing benefits we will see from the solar revolution in America."

That revolution is coming not a moment too soon in the fight against climate change.

A decade ago, the SEIA's Resch points out, 40 percent of all PV panels were made in the United States. That figure has dropped to less than 10 percent of the global supply today, a trend Resch thinks can be reversed in part by adopting smart manufacturing policies. One example Resch cites is the Advanced Energy Manufacturing program that provided $2.3 billion in tax credits to support U.S. manufacturers of clean energy equipment. The program proved popular with manufactures -- so popular that it ran out of money almost as soon as it began. In July, the U.S. House voted to add funds to keep the program going. Backers still hope to get a similar bill through the Senate.

First Solar has its corporate headquarters in Tempe, Arizona, where in 2009, the state legislature passed its own groundbreaking program, providing tax credits to manufacturers of renewable energy equipment (SB 1403). When PV manufacturer SunTech announced in January that Arizona would be the home of the first Chinese-owned PV plant in the U.S., the company said SB 1403 was a major factor in the choice.

First Solar manufactures thin-film PV at plants in Germany (approximately 700 workers), Malaysia (2,000 workers) and Perrysburg, Ohio (1,000 workers). The company plans to open a new plant in France in the second half of 2011. Manufacturing jobs have followed demand and, until recently, most orders for solar panels have come from Asia and Europe. As demand for PV here at home has jumped, First Solar has increased the size and production of its Ohio plant.

Supporters of renewable energy have often said that as the industry scales up, backed by demand and aided by targeted government incentives, Americans will see many benefits. The air will be cleaner, they say, greenhouse gases will be reduced and job growth -- the key element that's been missing in the U.S. economic recovery -- will rise.

With one of their own now leading the U.S. Manufacturing Council, the odds that the renewable energy industry may get the opportunity to prove those claims just got a little better.

"Current poyo?" asks a man on a bicycle, seeing our house in darkness. Yes, we tell him, the current has gone. Power outages are a frequent occurrence here in this village in Kerala, on India's palm-fringed southwest coast, where I'm spending a month with my family.

In rural areas like this, people aren't too bothered a periodic lack of power. They're mainly fishermen, and they live modestly. They need electricity only to power a few lights at night time, and to charge their mobile phones. Some people have televisions, but not all. The ocean brings fresh fish, and milk comes from the family cow. Refrigerators are viewed with some suspicion.

But even this little village is changing as a result of India's economic boom. One-room thatched roof huts are being replaced with multistory concrete villas. The traditional outdoor kitchen, where spices are ground with a heavy stone, food is cooked on an open wood fire, and water is manually drawn from a well, is being moved indoors and equipped with a blender, gas stove and an electric water pump. And in bigger towns and cities throughout India, kitchens boast microwaves, enormous refrigerators, and even dishwashers -- unheard of just a generation ago.

India is a nation of more than a billion people. When an entire generation suddenly starts buying energy-sucking refrigerators and air conditioners, imagine what that does to electricity demand. India's Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) estimates that it will double or even triple over the next 20 years. As household appliances go from being rare luxury items to the trappings of a happy middle class home, the burden on India's weak power grid will be overwhelming.

One way for India to close its power gap -- and help address the global warming crisis -- is to use energy more efficiently. At last year's UN climate meeting in Copenhagen, India pledged to cut annual energy consumption 5 percent by 2015 through energy efficiency -- at the same time reducing global warming pollution by nearly 100 million tons each year.

As we're helping set up my parents' retirement home here in this village, I can see some of India's energy efficiency policy in action. We bought a Samsung double-door refrigerator in a new store called QRS, in the city of Calicut, just a few miles south of here. In their gleaming showroom, you can get everything from vacuum cleaners and refrigerators to flat screen TVs and digital cameras. (Picture Best Buy meets Sears, but with about a dozen sales people per customer.)

The double-door model we've chosen is clearly a novelty here - yesterday I found an entire bunch of bananas and a beer frozen solid on the freezer side -- but what struck me was the energy efficiency rating sticker slapped prominently on the front, emblazoned with the motto "ENERGY IS LIFE. CONSERVE IT."

This is the work of India's Bureau of Energy Efficiency, which has instituted a 5-star efficiency rating system for household appliances, including refrigerators and air conditioners. The program is expected to save more than 10,000 million kilowatt-hours annually over five years.

If India can save energy and give its people a better life, I say, more power to them.

Though nearly two out of every three American voters say it's time our Congress pass a bill “that will limit pollution, invest in domestic energy sources and encourage companies to use and develop clean energy," the Senate has failed to act. "Just two weeks ago, the Senate shelved plans to vote on clean energy and climate legislation that would have generated millions of jobs and moved America away from dangerous fuels" wrote Peter Lehner, NRDC's executive director here. The dirty fuels energy lobby is so powerful, he adds, that "not even an environmental disaster lasting more than 100 days" could spur action, leaving all Americans vulnerable to the high price of our oil addiction.

Which is why it is so encouraging to read about the initiatives cities and towns across the country are undertaking, often in partnership with the private sector and non-governmental organizations, to become more energy efficient, convert from dirty fuels to clean energy sources and to reduce their emission of climate-altering pollution. Twenty-two were identified by NRDC's Smarter Cities project as beacons of energy innovation. Medium-sized cities like Huntington Beach, CA, "surf city" to most, but now increasingly recognized for its high percentage of EPA-defined green power, low per capita electricity consumption and policies to encourage distributed energy generation.

Or cities like Reno, Nevada which is eager to position itself as a hub of energy research and wind and geothermal power generation. Already Reno has made significant strides that have led to it’s being named a 2010 Smarter City for Energy, including low per capita municipal energy consumption, distributed energy programs, a 17 percent reduction in energy use in the last five years and the provision of 20 percent of municipal energy by geothermal production.

The small city of Denton, TX, "the city with the most wind power per capita in the country" is committed to obtaining 40 percent of the energy it distributes from renewables and cleaner-energy sources.

And Springfield, Il is part of a study to find out whether knowing that your neighbor is spending less on energy sparks you to make energy-saving home improvements? This plus its inventory of and commitment to track its GHG emissions, its energy reduction policies and green power investment make for a city powered up and ready to do what it can to save energy and money.

It inspires hope to see our cities and towns, cash strapped though they all are, tackling our fossil fuel addiction. And to see utilities working to help customers save energy cost effectively, and appliance manufacturers agreeing on new efficiency standards for refrigerators, freezers, clothes washers, dishwashers and room air conditioners. This latter agreement could save enough energy to meet the total energy needs of 40 percent of American homes for 1 year and the amount of water equivalent to the water needs of every customer in the City of Los Angeles for 25 years.  

Imagine the day our policy makers in Washington pass laws that supported these efforts. What we could accomplish then? Thankfully leaders in business, non-profits and city, state and federal governments aren't waiting.

Editor's note: Writer David Gessner, a frequent OnEarth contributor, is visiting the Gulf Coast to report on the BP disaster. Follow his journey.

I knew pelicans before they were famous.  I started studying them when I first moved to the South, seven years ago now, and after a couple of years here I wrote an essay about the birds, and about my daughter and learning to surf, for Orion magazine.  As I observed and read about pelicans, I learned how much water their enormous gular pouches can hold (21 pints or 17 and a half pounds), what they sound like (nothing, they are more or less mute), and even got to see a newborn emerge from its shell (disgusting and beautiful at the same time).  What I didn't and couldn't know was that some years off in the future, pelicans, particularly the oiled variety, would become the media darlings of one of the worst eco disasters in this country's history.   What I didn't know was that, while the egrets and laughing gulls and tricolored herons bristled with resentment, pelicans would claim center stage.

I've got nothing against my old friend, Pelecanus occidentalis.  It's just that the problem with telling the story of the spill in broad and simple strokes, as the national media has almost laughably done, as a kind of adventure story fit for Boy's Life-will they cap the well?  Will they fire the evil BP guy?  Look there's lots of oil!  Oh, now there's not so much oil-- is that once the obvious symbols go away the media can too.  They can say "Look there aren't so many oiled pelicans anymore," and then do exactly what the New York Times did a few days ago, and announce that it turns out the whole oil thing isn't so bad anymore.  Okay, back to business everyone.  Maybe a better, if less sexy, symbol than pelicans would be those periwinkles I saw in Grand Bay with Bill Finch.  They may not look good on the cover of a magazine but they get at the point of what this whole thing is about, what Finch called "connectivity issues."  The latest news on the connectivity front is that oil and dispersant droplets have been found on almost all the blue crab larvae that scientists have studied in the Gulf of Mexico.

* * *

From Buras I headed north to New Orleans, which is kind of an oiled pelican in its own right.  If I was joking about egrets resenting pelicans, then I am deadly serious when I say that Alabamans and Mississippians resent Louisianans for getting most of the media attention, and therefore most of the money, and that within Louisiana itself the rest of the state resents New Orleans for the same reason.  It took me almost two hours of driving north to reach New Orleans, which gets at one of the most common misconceptions about the place.  If you are like me you picture the city as a whole lot closer to the Gulf, and the oil, than it really is, and though I don't want to take anything away from a citizenry that has endured more pain than Job, the consideration of the spill seemed somewhat more theoretical than it did down in Buras, despite the obvious impacts on tourism and seafood.  I stayed at the first hotel I saw after pulling into the French Quarter,  The Maison Dupuy, and soon found myself having a drink at a wonderfully cool (I still wasn't using air conditioning in the car and before I changed my sweat-stained shirt it looked like it had been tie dyed) bar called French 75.   There I discovered a delightful drink, white rum and fruit and herbs, that I would order every night of my stay and then sit back and savor it, imagining myself to be a kind of Hemingway figure, masculine and romantic.  When I asked what it was they said something like "Pisco," which was actually the name of the rum, and it wasn't until the last night of my trip that I learned the real name of drink, a name that quickly burst my macho pretensions.  My drink was called a "Daisy."

My host at the bar was an outgoing and generous man named Kristian Sonnier, who was a regular and was therefore a pal of French 75's renowned bartender, Chris, a bald man with thick black framed glasses who strutted about the place in a white suit coat and black bow tie.  Chris fed me my Daisies and then my delicious Cornish game hen and these perfect little fries (excuse me, pomme frites) that looked like their middles had been inflated with a tiny bicycle pump.  I probably weighed about fifty pounds more than Kristian, but I noticed that as we shifted to beer and I started slowing down, he started picking up the drinking pace, something that I noted in every New Orleanian I encountered.   We took "walking beers" through the French Quarter and headed down to the river in search of the King of the Oiled Pelicans.  Kristian said the King was to be found in his natural spot-lighted habitat by the water, espousing about the spill, which the locals found comical since the oil was nowhere near their city.  But the locals also loved the King, and the attention he shone on their city, and that love was apparent as we closed in on the CNN truck.  Near the truck a small crowd had gathered to watch the white-haired man in the too- tight black T-shirt as he delivered his newscast.

My host the next night, who was somewhat more cantankerous than Kristian, would call Anderson Cooper "the biggest shit stain on the water."  I could see it, the whole phony baloney, superstar, simplistic take on  complicated issues.  But Kristian was more philosophical: "Of course it's kind of funny that he's broadcasting from the river, a hundred miles from the action.  But he gives voice to the people's anger.  He has Billy Nungesser on quite a lot for instance."  And, to his credit, Cooper, when he finished broadcasting, came over to where our small crowd stood and shook hands with the men and hugged the women.  If there was an edge of Beatlemania to it, the man did his best to conduct himself with dignity, signing things and getting his picture taken and when asked about a good place to get a drink suggesting a street outside of the Quarter (which, after all, is the oiled pelican of the city's neighborhoods) that Kristian said was a good, insider's call.  The only truly embarrassing moment was when some college kids began to slather over the poor man.  One particularly enthusiastic (drunken) boy went on and on about how much he loved "Anderson" and how he wanted to be him when/if he grew up, and after he got his picture taken next to his man went skipping off down toward the river, lifted on the wings of celebrity ecstasy.  That's when I saw my chance.   "I can't profess my love for you," I said.  "But how about a picture?"  At which point, just like the college boy, I threw my arm around him.

* * *

I worry about the disconnect between our stories and our realities.  I think of watching TV in the Cajun Lodge in Buras with Ryan, the Ocean Doctor and his brother Alan, and the Cousteau gang.  We were kind of embarrassed to be sitting there, after having spent the day out on the water, but there was also a kind of unacknowledged giddiness: would our story of heading out in the boat and sampling oysters and fish for contaminants, a story that had after all just happened, also be the lead story on the nightly news?  When the first couple of segments passed, and the focus turned to Chelsea's wedding, their was a palpable deflation in the room.  Our story wasn't the story.  We hadn't made it.  Had the whole day been a waste?

It was the only time since I've been down here that I watched a network news show and I did so with fascination.  First of all it was kind of funny, the whole over-the-top primary color thing, as if they were talking to children.  But more than that was the fact that what they were saying bore almost no resemblance to any of the stories I was finding as I explored the place.  In that way it was truly extraordinary.  There is a particular danger right now since the new oiled pelican is that there are no oiled pelicans.  It's dumbfounding to watch the media nod and accept BP's magic trick of disersants, as if oil out of sight means no oil at all. 

But now I must end with a confession.  It's fine and healthy to mock simplistic thinking and all things cliché, but one danger is in building up calluses and no longer recognizing the authentic.  Because, as it turns out, my most authentic moment down in Buras, the moment when I felt the deepest empathy for the animal victims of this tragedy, came when watching none other than oiled pelicans.

It happened on my second to last night in Buras, at the animals hospital not far from where I was staying, an impromptu MASH unit in a large aluminum shed where everything-trash cans, barrels of fish to feed the birds, towels, and the boxes that held the birds themselves-was labeled either "oiled" or "not oiled."  The Cousteau crew was there to film their rescue of a tricolored heron, and they had let me join them, though I soon wandered off on my own down the rows of plywood boxes that held the birds.  On the first box was a sign that said "Escape artist-be careful," though I couldn't see inside to determine who the avian Houdini was.  But it was the second box that stopped me in my tracks.  Inside were five or six pelicans, huddled together, obviously stunned with fear, their great sword-like bills pulled into their chests.  They had come in just that afternoon, it turned out, and they clearly didn't know where they were, though they knew it was terrifying.  Their excrement mixed with oil stains on the white sheet below them and a small tub of fish went untouched.   They were too black for pelicans, and when one stretched out its three foot long wing, it looked more like the wing of an osprey or eagle.  I stared into one bird's black eyes.  I had always seen pelicans as a kind of symbol of imperturbability, since they seemed so much more stolid than the other birds I spent time watching.  But this bird was clearly perturbed.  It made a point to keep contact with another of the enormous birds, its fellow prisoner.  Its expression seemed to say "What the hell has happened to me?"

I stayed with the birds for a while, until one vet, tired of writers and photographers and camera people, decided it was time for us all to leave.  I had been surprised before how accommodating the vets had been when we first arrived, explaining what they were doing and answering questions while cleaning off oiled birds with Q-tips.  But now they, or at least this one vet, had had enough.  The Cousteau crew had been trying to film the triage being performed on the tricolored heron they'D brought in, and they were the most polite and least obtrusive of crews, but they were now being hustled out of there.  And while it would have been nice to film the complete journey of the bird that they had rescued, you couldn't help but empathize with the vets.  By that point everyone in Buras must have been sick of being filmed or written about.  It could be fun at times, energizing, like drinking six cups of coffee and running around in a house of mirrors.  But the vet was right: enough was enough.  It was time, at least temporarily, to expel those of us who were stalking the oiled pelican, and get back to the real work of tending to actual birds.

 

A few weeks ago, I drove about an hour from my home in Upstate New York to Dimock, Pennsylvania. Dimock is a tiny town in the midst of green fields and sloping ridgelines--the kind of bucolic countryside that drew me to this region over a decade ago. But now Dimock represents a future I dread. 

More than 60 natural gas wells have been drilled into Dimock's fields and dozens more are on their way. In the meantime, wells have exploded, drinking water has been contaminated, and radioactive water sits in holding ponds on farmers' land.

This industrialization of Pennsylvania's rural countryside is part of a natural gas gold rush that has descended on the Marcellus Shale-a formation that stretches from West Virginia all the way to New York State.

To get to the natural gas buried in the shale, companies do something called hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking. They drill down and inject fracking fluid--a mixture of water and some of those 590 chemicals--into the well at high pressure to blast the rock apart and release the gas. 

Like most gold rushes, this fracking boom is pretty lawless. A loophole in the Safe Drinking Water Act exempts it from all regulation. This isn't even a case like the Deepwater Horizon disaster in which BP disregarded the rules. There simply aren't any fracking rules for companies to follow. The results speak for themselves.

When I traveled to Dimock--along with some experts from NRDC, Riverkeeper, and Catskill Mountainkeeper--we visited one farmer who had three wells on his property. Each well head had one or more giant pieces of equipment used to bring up fracking fluid, big feeder pipelines, and huge wastewater tanks. I couldn't believe how loud the whole operation was. What used to be a quiet farm was now an industrial site.

I visited one of the residents downhill from one of these wells. His drinking water is now contaminated.  The gas company had to install a huge filtration system in his basement, but still his water isn't safe, so the company trucks it in.

I asked the guy how the deliveries work, and he said, "They come whenever they want to. They open my garage door without asking and fill the tank up." This man has a little boy who is afraid of the methane gas coming from the wells. He asks his father, "Are we going to wake up tomorrow?" 

 

People like this family have nowhere to turn. The state agency supposed to oversee the drilling is what you call a captured agency: the people regulating energy companies are also supposed to promote gas permits. You can't do both at the same time.

We all know how well that worked in the Gulf. 

It would be easy to lose hope. Especially after regulators failed to protect Americans from BP, from mortgage meltdowns, and here in my corner of the world, from fracking. But I am not ready to give up the fight, and here is why. I have traveled to Albany to talk to elected officials. It has taken many trips, many conversations, many citizen activists, but I have seen the tide slowly turning. Some politicians are starting to realize that letting industry run roughshod over the state may not be good for New York. There is increasing support from both political parties for a bill pending in the statehouse that would place a moratorium on natural gas drilling in New York until May 15, 2011. Our representatives must protect New Yorkers and pass it this week while we're in special session. We must learn from what happened to Dimock, and all of us have to keep the pressure on until we get the safeguards we need.

But this fight isn't just about what happens to Dimock or even New York State. It's about how we want to live for the next 30 years. Do we take the dirty-energy money and run and screw the consequences? Or do we build something more sustainable that doesn't hurt the people around us? Which do you choose? 

Today's headlines out of the Gulf are all about measurements -- and no matter what ruler you're using, they're all bad.

Item:  GULF SPILL IS THE LARGEST OF ITS KIND, SCIENTISTS SAY (The New York Times)

Item: DEAD ZONE IN THE GULF ONE OF THE LARGEST EVER (Associated Press)

 Item: BP "CARPET BOMBED" GULF WITH DISPERSANTS (Mother Jones)

Item: DID COAST GUARD ALLOW EXCESSIVE TOXIC DISPERSANTS? (Los Angeles Times)

Item: EPA: OIL-DISPERSANT MIX NO MORE TOXIC THAN OIL ALONE (Reuters)

Somehow that last one doesn't make me feel any better.

Editor's note: Writer David Gessner, a frequent OnEarth contributor, is visiting the Gulf Coast to report on the BP disaster. Follow his journey.

At Table Three, the Louisiana Spirit Coastal Recovery Counseling Program is handing out blue rubber “stress balls,” though I don’t see a lot of fishermen squeezing the little toys. I take one anyway, occasionally tossing it in the air as I walk around the EPA meeting that is being held just around the corner from where I’m staying, in the Buras Auditorium, a place that usually holds high school productions of “the Importance of Being Earnest” but today houses the Surgeon General, hundreds of angry fishermen, and half the reporters in the known world.

I am not acting as a reporter tonight but as a naturalist and, having pocketed my stress ball, I scribble notes and sketches in my journal, noting characteristics in the way of my breed. You can tell the real reporters, even when they are not jamming a microphone in someone’s face, because they are generally better looking than regular humans, and they speak with vaguely English accents, though most just hail (to paraphrase Roth’s Lonoff) from the country of pretentious.

Billy Nungesser, the president of Plaquemines Parish, of which Buras is a part, has become a lead character in the spill drama, in part courtesy of much face time with Anderson Cooper, and has tried to fashion himself as the voice of the people. He kicks off the meeting with a short, actually a very short, introduction. Nungesser has a kind of Colombo affect, disheveled, occasionally apologetic about his own flaws in a way that really carries some charm and effectiveness, with sleeves rolled up in a way that says, “I’m still one of you even if I’ve been on TV a lot lately.” There is a strategy contained in the brevity of his speech, and his quick dispersing of the larger group into smaller ones, each “need” -- counseling, complaints about not being chosen for the Vessel of Opportunity program, compensation questions -- being serviced at different fold-out tables. You get the feeling that if the larger group were to stay large for very long this thing could get out of hand. Already there is some yelling coming from the back of the auditorium, rabble rousing cries of dissent led by one pony-tailed former charter fisherman who seems to be at least partly enjoying the attention.

Nungesser briskly addresses a couple of the pressing issues. The first is BP’s hiring of outsiders, instead of first turning to those with a local address. The second is the word that BP is estimating how long it will be until things are “back to normal,” and beginning to consider offering settlement packages of two years, perhaps, or three. Nungesser assures them that he is on their side and cautions against jumping at these packages, despite their short-term attractiveness. And finally, he addresses a newly emerging fact that sparks more yelling from the back, the fact that any work they have already done for BP will now work against their overall compensation.

Sweating, gesticulating, apologizing, Nungesser quells what, led by another, might have turned into something close to a riot. Then he hands things off to the Surgeon General, Regina Bejamin, who also plays the “I am one of you” card, which is a little harder sell if you are a large African American woman in what looks like a white naval costume out of Gilbert and Sullivan. I have never really understood why our chief doctor is a “General” and now I’m wondering if “Admiral” wouldn’t be more apt. But whatever her rank, she too works the crowd well, and when I hear she is from Bayou la Batre, the fishing village I visited in Alabama, I understand that she really is part of this crowd.

She is unfailingly chipper during her talk, and remains so when I visit with her after we all break up -- jolly even -- and has a talent that may or may not be just political, that of lavishing attention on you when you talk, or at least appearing to, a talent I have seen before in the best politicians. We talk for ten minutes or so and when I say goodbye she says, “Let me get your name -- I’m going to look for your byline.” Of course she doesn’t actually scribble my name down, an assistant in the same silly white costume does that, but I am effectively charmed, it never having occurred to me that I had something called a “byline” before.

Less upbeat is Timmy, the Vietnamese fisherman who is distraught over the news that BP is already talking about full settlements. He stands with his arms crossed, his face stern and thoughtful.

“What worries me is when they talk about this as being over. When they talk about a ‘final’ settlement package and say they will now estimate how long it will take for the waters and fish to be back to normal. But how can they know that now? They say they will pay us for two years. But what if it takes five or ten years until people want to buy our fish again?”

I decide to put Timmy’s question to Nungesser, who is in front of the room, leaning against a table, handling questions from a vociferous group of fishermen and fishermen’s wives. There is no real line, just a spread-out gang, and it takes me a while to slip my question in, but when I do he turns the high beams of his attention on me. He leans closer, looking like an animated and amiable butcher, and, waving his hands to make his points, launches into this answer:

“That’s exactly why you don’t jump at the packages. We can’t have their scientists, their people, tell us when it’s going to be better. We have to have our own studies, our own scientists, and that will take some time. We can’t be rushed into this thing….”

He goes on, sounding pretty reasonable and caring. I have no idea what skeletons are in his closet -- all politicians have them, right? -- and I know he made some real missteps early on in the crisis, and some people say he has continued to make them, but if I were to judge the man just from tonight he would pass with flying colors. 

As the auditorium gradually empties out, I take a seat and sketch those who remain. After a while I call it quits too, and take the short walk over to the Black Pearl, the only restaurant around, which is packed from the meeting. I take a seat at the bar next to a small, intense man with a gold cross dangling from his neck, who is staring hard up at the TV. Soon I am, too, since it proves to be an early documentary (by National Geographic, I think) about the Deepwater explosion and spill. Half the bar is watching, in fact, though most of us are straining to read the captions, since the volume is off. What I notice right away is that the language bristles with military phrases -- with attack, charge, war. In this language, the cropduster spraying the dispersants is a World War I flying ace. It is an action film, that’s for sure, and we are rooting for the good guys, as if there were any. Once again, I think of the little boys who made this mess. And who now insist they are the only ones who can be counted on to respond now that it has happened.

My undercooked steak, comes and between bites I get in a conversation with my neighbor. It turns out he is an ex-professional bullrider who now teaches teenage boys to ride, with an emphasis on the Christian aspects of the sport.

“Any time a kid gets on a bull in the first place it shows they are a man. It is a tremendous act of faith and courage. It’s more than 90% of the people in the world will do. Some people can stay on a bull for eight seconds, but not many can do that and make it look pretty. My job is to help these kids, and if they have a passion and want to do it, to teach them to do it in the safest and best way possible. If they’re doing it for the girls, or for other reasons, then they better not do it. They better do it from the heart.

“I’m interested in building character both inside and outside the ring. I’ve been down some bad roads, and I want to make sure these kids do it different. These are some of the best Christian kids I know. Fear is probably the biggest factor in stopping us from doing what we do. And every time these kids climb on a bull they are fighting fear and showing faith.”

I tell him that it doesn’t sound so different than teaching writing. But while faith is important in my game, too, I admit to my relative godlessness.

“It’s okay,” he says. “God, like you, came from out of town…”

It’s pretty cryptic, and I have no idea what he means really, but I scribble it down in my journal anyway.

It is only when my new friend turns back to the TV that his faith deserts him a little.

“What I seen a couple of years was a grandfather and a son and a grandson, going down a boat in the river, going duck hunting. And right off the bat it struck me that this was something the man had done with his son his whole life and now his son has his son -- the grandson -- and is doing the same thing, and it’s something that they’re going to do every year. Until this. And that way of life could very well end. If we can’t keep this stuff out of our marshes, we’re done.”

We talk a while more and then I finish my steak and say goodbye. I take one last walk down to the river to say goodbye. I’m going to miss this place, I think. I have no true connection to Buras, of course, to this part of the country, and when I leave, after visiting New Orleans for a couple of days, I will be heading home to my wife and daughter and we will buy our first home. So I have every reason to get back, and I’m anxious to do so. But I feel a strange tug in the other direction, too, and I really hate leaving here. Maybe, at this moment in time we are all a part of Plaquemines Parish. Okay, maybe not -- that’s overstatement if not pure bunk. But it is this f___ed up place in this f___ed up time, that I can say, without fear of overstatement, that we are all part of.

Editor's note: Writer David Gessner, a frequent OnEarth contributor, is visiting the Gulf Coast to report on the BP disaster. Follow his journey.

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These days I take a walk by the Mississippi up along the levee almost every evening.  I have the luxury the local fishermen and oilmen do not, the luxury of letting my mind take a break from the oil.  As I stroll, I think about the book I want to write about all this, since I, like so many people down here -- from the fishermen turned oil boomers to the reporters hoping to advance their careers to the politicians seizing the spotlight to the scientists angling for BP money -- have complex and not always altruistic motives.  In fact, you could argue that my potential book is no less of a Vessel of Opportunity than the boats that putter out each morning.  But there is something else going on during these walks, too, something I didn’t expect.  I am growing genuinely and deeply fond of this place.  Who knew it was going to be so beautiful, this fragile green land, more water than earth, caught between river and sea, with, as is always the case in places of such abundance, birds out the wazoo?

Tonight it is the tree swallows that are putting on the show, carving up the air as they swoop after the evening insects (including one breed of dinosaurian dragonfly that looks as big as they are).  From up here on the hump that sometimes struggles to contain it, the river looks muddy, caged-in, powerful.  These swallows -- which are everywhere now -- with their blue backs and orange bodies, appear particularly muscular, though they aren’t likely any different than the ones I see at home.  There is heat and the blare of crickets and sagging willows and reeds as tall as trees.  I stare down from my grassy hump, away from the river, at the homes of the brave souls who are building just on the other side of the levee.  One house is hexagonal and up on stilts, fifteen or sixteen feet off the ground at the base of the first floor.  Not quite high enough if the number that gets thrown around down here is accurate: twenty-two feet the water rose during Katrina.    

As much as anyone or anything, the river has done its part to keep the oil at bay, pushing back against the Gulf’s inward surge, but that might change once its seasonal strength wanes.  The Mississippi, seen from above, from a helicopter with the Cousteau gang, say, looks like a sinuous brown snake, but once it gets down below here, past Venice, it snakes, not through fields and meadows, but through the sinking marsh itself.  Which creates the strange and vivid picture of fresh water, barely hemmed in on each side by green, weaving through salt water.  If it were not hemmed in, it would spread out naturally, like a watery hand, feeding the marshes with nutrients it has gathered during its powerful crawl and sludge from Minnesota down through the country’s middle and finally, to the Gulf.   “Free the Mississippi,” is the rallying cry of Ryan Lambert, my new friend and local lodge owner, though he is not talking radical freedom here, since without the levee his lodge would be underwater, and what he is really looking for is a series of diversions so that the river could feed the marsh at various points, rather than dump all it has to offer in one great slug out in the Gulf.

I hope I have helped you get a sense of the geography in this land almost two hours south of New Orleans, but it’s really hard to picture even when you’re here.  My car has been acting up, the engine light blinking and a noise like breaking glass coming from the exhaust pipe, and when I suggested to Ryan that it might be the salt water I’ve been driving through when I head down for my morning bird-watching at land’s end, he laughed at me.  “There’s no salt water down there,” he said.  “It’s all fresh.”  Which made sense once I thought about the direction the water rushed over the road -- it was spilling from river to Gulf -- though it was hard to get my head around the fact that it wasn’t salt when there were thousands of acres of salt marsh all around me.

During Katrina this little artificial valley got its share of both salt water and fresh, hit from both the river and Gulf sides.  And it will happen again of course.  “What’s wrong with protecting ourselves?” people understandably ask.  That is the same question asked by those folks who are still piling sand in front of their homes back on Dauphin Island.  And the answer is that of course there’s nothing wrong with it, though there was something wrong with building there in the first place, particularly if the place is dependent on artificial barriers.  One problem with false barriers and blockades is that they encourage people to live in places they shouldn’t be living.  And once they live there they want to live the way everyone else is living, thinking, “Hey, it’s this way in suburbia so...it should be this way here too.”  That is when they start to lay their straight-lined grid over whatever individual and varied place they have laid claim to, which is often when the trouble starts, nature having almost no interest in straight lines.  It is in fact straight lines -- canals built for boat travel -- that have helped sink the great marsh that the Mississippi weaves into.  How so?  I think back to when I was a kid on Cape Cod, how I loved to play on the small sandbar islands that revealed themselves at the beach at low tide and how, when the tide started to come back in, I would aid the rising waters by digging lines across the sandbars with my heel, creating canals for the incoming tide to run through.  I would often dig about a dozen of these lines across the sandbar islands, flooding them before their time.  The same thing is going on here on an enormous scale, and of course, the sinking of the marshes means less of a defense from the oil.

But enough with doom.  This place, like so many of our places these days, like Masonboro Island which I often paddle to back in North Carolina, is a temporary one, but that doesn’t make it any less joyous.  We had better not be too strict in our judgments since so few places we love are “natural” in any full sense anymore, and in fact Cape Cod, which I am prone to romanticizing, was transformed from peninsula to island a years ago hundred when someone decided to sever the Cape at the shoulder from the mainland.  And I think of another artificial and temporary place, a place called Pilottown, which can only be reached by boat or plane and is the very last town on this river, a place where the river pilots take over the great boats, only they being capable of navigating the river.  (Which is a place, incidentally, where Anthony, he of the fish camp, dreams of one day living while he awaits his own boat to captain.)    

So I worry about too strict definitions during this mess.  While I find myself growing more “environmental” by the day, I have a problem when environmentalism gets too rigid.  For instance, directly to the south of me, not fifty miles away, is what our president is calling the worst environmental disaster in the history of our country (apparently forgetting about the stripping of the continent of trees or the extensive bombing of the American West with nuclear weapons, and about a hundred other things). But despite this truly depressing event, the great shitting of our national bed, and the fact that what is happening here is bad, truly bad and tragic, I am right now walking along the banks of the Mississippi, something I had never done before this week, which doesn’t feel folkloric just because I’ve read so many books about it but also because these muscular swallows are shooting everywhere and because reeds and small trees are growing out of this old half-sunk barge in the shallows and because the trees are buzzing with insects and the sun is beating down and the wind is blowing along the dirty river and I am watching a fish jump out of the water and splash back down and I, sipping a warm Corona (the most exotic beer in Buras), am feeling something like pure contentment, a temporary animal feeling somehow unrelated to the disaster fifty miles south.  Because there have always been disasters and there has always been death and there’s always been a dark thing lurking right beside the light.  And because even when Whitman was whooping and hollering his way around the country there was a Civil War about to break out and TB killing thousands and god knows what else and everybody dying at 32.  But there was still some joy and still some euphoric moments and why does that matter?  Because that is the heart of what it means to be environmental, or at least half the heart.  Because if you strip the thing of its joy then all there is left is finger wagging and who wants that?   And more importantly there’s this: Why fight for a place if you don’t love it?

I hike down to the levee to a little marina and then down a side path to the surging river, where it looks like someone has set up a lawn chair where they come to have their nightly beer and watch the river and maybe occasionally throw a line in, and I, hoping the owner doesn’t mind, claim a seat in his chair and toast the river with my empty bottle.  I am exhausted and I need a rest from this place and, oddly, the place itself is giving it to me.  And what does it matter that I, one human being from someplace else, am feeling good for the moment and not thinking about the oil which is, of course, bad, so bad?   Not much, I think.  Not much, or, possibly, everything.

Image: NASA

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