Earth Legacy

A Commitment to Uncovering Local Environmental Issues

2011-12-07T12:04:00.000-08:00

Toxic sites map/North Jersey.com

The headlines in a recent newspaper series unveiled a shocking story: “DEP let poison flow for decades” … “North Jersey riddled with failed cleanups” … “Desperate to move, but bound to stay; Residents say homes in Superfund site are worthless.”

Got your attention? That’s the intent of the “Toxic Landscape” series that The Record, a daily newspaper in northern New Jersey, has instituted as an on-going investigative look at industrial contamination lingering in local communities in its coverage area. Here’s the opening salvo in a three-part expose by Record environmental writer Scott Fallon that burst from the front pages recently:

     A highly toxic industrial chemical has been spreading under a Garfield neighborhood for almost three decades, slowly seeping into homes and threatening the health of thousands.
     Residents live in fear that hexavalent chromium is infiltrating their basements, that their families could get cancer and that their property values have been destroyed.
     And state officials allowed it all to happen.
     What occurred in Garfield over the course of 28 years is a story of an environmental oversight system that failed the people it was supposed to protect. In instance after instance, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection showed poor judgment, lax enforcement and bureaucratic indifference to an emerging public health threat….

After detailing the spreading contamination through groundwater under an urban neighborhood and the startling lack of government action even after a city firehouse was closed in 1993 due to the hazardous substance seeping into the basement, Fallon’s report widened the scope of the problem to encompass many more communities:

“Garfield is one of the more egregious examples of failed environmental oversight. But all over North Jersey there are botched cleanups caused by questionable decisions, bureaucratic indifference or both,” Fallon wrote. "’There are Garfields in literally every corner of this state,’ said Robert Spiegel, head of Edison Wetlands, an environmental advocacy group. ‘The system for cleaning thousands of sites has been dysfunctional, chaotic, and it just doesn’t work,’" Fallon’s report added, after listing a number of failed, incomplete or barely ever started contamination investigations and cleanups in North Jersey towns that have been periodically in and out of the news.

The back story behind this unusual newspaper series—which began last year with a detailed examination of unfinished cleanups at several federal Superfund sites across the region—is a recognition by The Record’s editors and publisher that hazardous waste cleanups habitually stall when there’s no on-going, in depth news coverage.

That realization was crystallized by a previous investigative series in 2005 called “Toxic Legacy,” which showed how the US Environmental Protection Agency allowed Ford Motor Company to claim it had cleaned up a toxic waste dump in the late 1980s in Ringwood, NJ. The newspaper investigation, which I participated in as a reporter, uncovered the fact that the officially approved cleanup barely scratched the surface of buried mounds of lead-based paint sludge and other potentially cancer-causing contamination that local residents, environmental groups and newspaper reporters found and made public.

A far more substantial cleanup has taken place since that investigative series, with every step reported by local newspapers, sometimes bird-dogged by national news organizations and further exposed to a wide television audience by a documentary shown on HBO titled “Mann v. Ford,” after the name of a lawsuit by residents of the affected residential area.

Yet, despite the residents’ lawsuit, the renewed cleanup in Ringwood stalled once the initial flurry of news coverage subsided. Record editors then expanded the “Toxic Legacy” coverage into on-going, frequent update reports published under the same label.

“The [initial] story was about the government’s failure to live up to its promise,” Tim Nostrand, The Record’s editor for investigative projects, told a gathering in September at Columbia University’s Journalism School that honored new and past winners of the Grantham Prize for Excellence in Reporting on the Environment. The “Toxic Legacy” investigative team led by Nostrand won the 2006 Grantham Prize, among a number of other national journalism awards.

Once congratulations on winning major awards are collected, news organizations usually ease off covering that topic and move on. But Record editors found their readers appreciated the “Toxic Legacy” coverage. And they found that government officials slipped back into old habits once that coverage eased off. “We did a five-year look back and found history repeating itself. We’re now staying on top of that,” Nostrand added in his account of how one investigative project morphed into a long-term commitment.

On top of reporting every new twist and turn in the Ringwood Superfund site case, six years after publishing a series that shook up the EPA, Record editors have assigned municipal reporters to dig into environmental contamination issues in the towns they cover, Nostrand told the audience of award-winning journalists, journalism professors and students at Columbia. Previously, as was my experience during a more than 20-year career at The Record, municipal reporters often ignored environmental issues unless they were prepared to wrangle with editors to provide time from the relentless pressure to file daily news stories in order to dig into often complex, hidden contamination problems.

The latest in The Record’s remarkable “Toxic Landscape” local reports rolled out this week. The first day’s headline conveyed a double drum-roll: “DPW cleanup tab put at $200,000; Decades-old pollution ‘ignored’ mayor says.” And thus residents of Dumont, NJ were told about the mounting costs of inaction by local officials and the state environmental protection agency in dealing with contamination from leaking gasoline storage tanks at the municipal Department of Public Works property dating back to the 1980s.

A Dumont Borough Council subcommittee trying to get to the bottom of why nothing was done, despite a DEP order in 1992 to do a cleanup, got some astounding responses, Record reporter Rebecca D. O’Brien found. A former councilman who served in 2004-2009 said “We never discussed any issues of any gasoline spills or any contamination down at that site,” O’Brien reported in her second-day article.

Another former councilman who served in 2003-2008 put this kind of investigative story into glaring perspective, when he testified that “he didn’t even know about the DPW contamination until he read about it in the newspaper,” O’Brien added.

So that readers can follow the newspaper’s probing into the tangled, toxic mess underlying much of the Garden State, The Record offers on its web site a special projects section titled “Toxic Landscape: Tracking contaminated sites in North Jersey,” which provides interactive maps and hotlinks to an extensive list of investigative articles on local contamination sites.

For more information:

http://www.northjersey.com/specialreports/full/toxiclandscape.html

Why Do Superfund Environmental Cleanups Take Decades?

2011-10-01T07:03:00.000-07:00

Tuesday 10/4/11 "Why is Environmental Cleanup So Slow?” Panel Discussion at Ramapo College, Mahwah, NJ

Friends Hall (SC219) in Student Center, 6:30-9 p.m.

The regional head of the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program, Walter Mugdan, will speak Tuesday on a panel with Ramapo College professors. Other panelists are Adjunct Professor Jan Barry Crumb, who teaches environmental writing; Adjunct Professor Chuck Stead, who teaches courses in environmental investigations; and environmental studies Professor Michael Edelstein, the panel chair.

The event, which is open to the public, is sponsored by the Ramapo College Institute of Environmental Studies.The panel will discuss why environmental cleanups at Superfund sites often take decades, with a focus on the Ringwood Mines Superfund site in New Jersey and sites near the Town of Ramapo landfill in Rockland County, New York. These sites were all contaminated by paint sludge and other industrial waste from the former Ford Motor Company plant in Mahwah, NJ.

Panel Chair, Michael R. Edelstein, Ph.D. Professor of Environmental Psychology, Ramapo College of NJ. He is author of Contaminated Communities, 2nd Edition (Westview 2004) and lead editor of Cultures of Contamination (Elsevier, 2007). Edelstein has a perspective on cleanup activities that stretches back to research done at Love Canal in the late 1970s. He has studied Superfund communities and testified in administrative hearings and toxic torts, not only about the consequences of living in contaminated communities which have not been addressed, but also about the impacts of cleanup itself.

Walter Mugdan, Director of the Emergency and Remedial Response Division at the Region 2 office, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), located in New York City. He heads a staff of some 220 employees responsible for the Region’s “Superfund” toxic waste cleanup, emergency response and brownfields programs. Previously he headed the Region’s Division of Environmental Planning & Protection, where his staff of about 180 scientists, engineers and planners managed the Region’s air, water, hazardous waste and environmental review programs. Prior to that appointment, he served as Deputy Regional Counsel and then Regional Counsel for Region 2, where he headed a staff of 80 attorneys. He joined EPA in 1975 as a staff attorney, and subsequently served in various supervisory positions in the Office of Regional Counsel, including Chief of the units responsible for Superfund, RCRA, TSCA and the Clean Air Act.

Jan Barry Crumb, Journalist, Adjunct Professor, Ramapo College. He is the author of A Citizen’s Guide to Grassroots Campaigns (Rutgers 2000). During an award-winning career at The Record of Bergen County, NJ, Jan Barry intensively reported on the Ford contamination issues and their impact on the Ramapough Indians. His work with an investigative team of reporters and editors led EPA to reopen the closed Superfund project in Ringwood. The Record's Website www.toxiclegacy.com documents this effort.

Chuck Stead, Social Ecologist, Adjunct Professor, Ramapo College and Cornell Cooperative Extension. A native of Hillburn, NY, he is a local historian, activist and place scholar who has worked for years on the Ford contamination. Ramapo students, under his supervision, have helped him identify areas of contamination in New York State that have never been addressed previously. These hazardous waste sites are now the subject of cleanup efforts under the New York State DEC. Mr. Stead is in the process of erecting an education center dedicated to the contamination cleanup efforts in the Ramapo Mountains.

Environmental Writing 2011

2011-05-26T22:17:00.000-07:00

From Agent Orange’s insidious grasp out of the past of the war in Vietnam to current health concerns of many residents of Ramapo River communities, to the potential future effects of global climate change, 11 student-reporters at Ramapo College of New Jersey dug into a wide array of ecological issues in the Spring 2011 Environmental Writing class.

Here are some of many insightful passages that summarize topics students chose to research and report in magazine-style final writing projects, all of which are posted on our class website, ramapolookout.blogspot.com, along with their other writing assignments throughout the semester.

“The Earth is as a storm. Violently it crashes and trumpets along its trillion year journey. Like a wildfire burning on a California horizon, the Earth surrounds itself in tapestry of both beauty and terror. In essence our planet is a hospitable destroyer. It will deny life as easily as it fosters it. Often times life will simply die off, a casualty of the constant unseen equation of nature. Still, despite the changes our planet has seen, the existence of life has always remained firmly rooted. However, our modern age has threatened life with a new villain: pollutants.”

--From Destroying our Oceans: Impact of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch by John Clancey

“Beekeepers throughout the Garden State know there is something wrong. Some blame mites and pesticides but others are still puzzled as to what exactly is causing colony collapse disorder.

“’I had beehives that were full of bees and produced a great honey crop, and two weeks later were empty,’ says Joe Triemel, Corresponding Secretary at the Essex Co. Beekeepers.

“Why all the buzz? Bees are very critical to agricultural practices.”

--From New Jersey's Buzz on Colony Collapse Disorder by Courtney Leiva

“When being advised to follow a healthy diet, the one food that is indisputably on the top of the list is fish. Its Omega 3 fatty acids, vitamins and minerals keep our heart pumping and our blood pressure low. It is an easy food to cook, requiring little preparation and, in most cases, done in less than 30 minutes. It is almost impossible to make a bad dish with fish unless, of course, the fish itself has been contaminated.

“With the recent environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, which was formally known to produce quality fish, particularly shellfish, fish lovers now question the safety of the fish coming from the Gulf. Do we believe the government agencies that maintain the fish from the Gulf is safe or do we stop buying, adding to the sorry economic state of the Gulf fishermen’s woes, who are just recovering from Hurricane Katrina?”

--From Is Eating Fish as Healthy as It Used to Be? by Virginia DiBianca

“Climate change, or global warming as it is often referred to, has been a hot button issue in recent years. It has dominated the environmental arena, and has even played a role in the political spectrum, as Democrats and Republicans hold very different ideas about the phenomenon. There is a lot of conflicting information about this so-called global warming and the process of weeding through all of it to separate fact from fiction can seem overwhelming. The truth of the matter is, depending upon who you ask, you will likely get a very different interpretation of climate change, its causes, its effects, and what it ultimately means for you and me. …

“Climate change, or global warming, is certainly a very complex issue with a myriad of facts, data, and evidence from a host of different organizations to take into account. But these are the bare-bone facts of the situation. There is evidence to support hundreds of thousands of years of constantly changing climate situations on our planet. But there is also hard proof that humans have, if nothing else, sped the process up a significant amount. It is really up to each citizen of the planet Earth to make their own decision about climate change and make their day-to-day choices accordingly.”

--From Climate Change: A Complex Issue with Clashing Points of View by Lindsey de Stefan

“Jeff Genser, a Suffern native, pleaded to the council about flood issues. He stated, ‘You're proposing to eliminate 100 acres of flood plain, and turn it from a pervious area to an impervious. And that is unacceptable, in my opinion.’ He went on to propose his own idea for what could be built on the flood plain next to the Ramapo River, a Vertical Farm. ‘A building could be constructed that could supply food to half of Bergen County...use all the water it comes into [from the river], over and over again, and have no pollution and environmental impact.’ The idea seemed to stir no interest by the council.

“Many individuals mentioned how the mall would impact the surrounding community. Some were frustrated over the idea of Stag Hill residents being stranded in an emergency situation, being that the only access road to their community would become a constant point of traffic and congestion. Retired resident Ron Whalberg asked the council, ‘At what point do we stop endangering future generations?’”

--From A Changed Mahwah by Graig Mihok

“It is a race against time for a fading era of American heroes who served their country and feel they were poisoned by their government. It is a race against time for the Vietnamese people suffering from health conditions and birth defects. The U.S. government is left with a choice. It can accept responsibility and dedicate itself to all who suffered from the Agent Orange spraying campaigns, or it can wait for the end of an era. It can hope for the best that history will forget. The natural environment and the lives it gracefully sustains are in serious danger.

“For Agent Orange investigator Fred Wilcox, justice is yet to be done. ‘The government can start by saying sorry,’ he said.”

--From War After the War: The Environmental Assault of Agent Orange by Dan Savino

“Consumers seem to be paying attention to what they eat more and more. It is too soon to prove whether GM seeds, crops and foods will hurt or help us, but staying informed and questioning claims for will help to insure our safety. Big corporations own the rights to a very crucial part of the food chain. Urging others to ask questions, voice opinions and challenge tests is incredibly important. Food and its nutrients are what help us survive. As consumers and as humans we have the right to take control over the products we use daily.”

--From Genetically Modified Food: What Does it Mean for You and Your Kitchen? by Lorraine Metz

“Some say it’s just a coincidence; that it would take years, if not decades, for us to see any change in prices if we started drilling. Experts say that the process of actually obtaining the oil, refining it, dispersing it, and using it takes an extreme amount of time and money, so that we wouldn’t see any relief in the near future. The Energy Information Association found that increased drilling would have a very small, if any, impact before 2030. They also found that even once the oil starts flowing, it would only bring in about 0.2 million barrels per day.

“Others argue that just by lifting a ban on drilling, it would influence the market to lower prices. This is what seemingly happened between 2008 and 2010 with President Bush’s decision. However, other economists argue that the oil industry is part of a global market and since the United States would only be contributing less than one million barrels per day, it wouldn’t do much for the prices. How would one explain what happened after Bush’s decision? The theory of supply and demand seems pretty fitting, which would directly benefit us in this situation.”

--From To Drill or Not to Drill? Offshore Oil Drilling and How it Can Affect You by Brittany Shann

“’Many residents have told me they don't trust DuPont or the NJ DEP. They think DuPont is covering up pollution and DEP is rubber stamping inadequate DuPont cleanup plans,’ says Bill Wolfe, former planner and policy analyst for the state Department of Environmental Protection and former policy director of Sierra Club's New Jersey Chapter.

“’They are frustrated by the slow pace of cleanup, angry for not being told about vapor intrusion, and disgusted by repeated failures by local and state officials to provide full information and allow them to have a meaningful role in cleanup decisions that affect their lives, their family’s health, and their property value,’ he says.”

--From DuPont: Pompton Lakes Site Still a Source of Conflict After 25-Year Clean Up by Deanna Dunsmuir

“Some fluctuations in the Earth's temperature are inevitable regardless of human activity, but centuries of rising temperatures and seas lie ahead if the release of emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation continues unabated, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The panel shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore for alerting the world to warming's risks.

“Over the next decade, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plans to regulate sources of greenhouse gases, imposing efficiency and emissions requirements. Until the UNFCCC starts taking action on a global scale, it seems that countering global warming and climate change is up to the people’s smaller actions and lifestyle changes. Maybe then those with the greater power will see that we are prepared for much bigger, even drastic changes.”

--From Global Warming: Small Steps Towards Conquering a Big Threat by Jessica Vasquez

“A tract of twenty-two acres of forest named after the former Governor of New Jersey, George Brinton McClellan, was purchased a few years ago by Seton Hall Prep School of West Orange, New Jersey. The school’s plan’s to clear the old growth forest rippled through the community and neighboring towns and has caused many concerns. For two years, town residents and students attended zoning board hearings to voice their opinion on the proposed clear cutting. …

“The Mallangas, both active members of the Sierra Club, also brought in Bruce Kershner. Kershner is a field ecologist who is also a national authority on old growth forests and took a survey of the 22 acres of trees. He identified the trees and expressed the historical and biological value of the forest. Board members attacked his testimony claiming that the use of the term ‘old growth forest’ can not be used if he cannot tell the exact age of the trees. They repeatedly interrupted him during his testimony to ask him for credentials and if he had a background in studying and observing old growth forests. Kershner has studied old growth forests for over 30 years all over the country, but that did not seem like a sufficient enough background for the zoning board members.”

--From Seton Hall Prep Clear Cuts Our Future by Amanda Nesheiwat

Environmental Writing: The Next Generation

2010-05-18T07:19:00.000-07:00

My explorations of innovative solutions to environmental problems have been on hold since January, as I focused on teaching journalism courses at two colleges, including launching a revived course at Ramapo College of NJ called Environmental Writing.

The original course was called Environmental Journalism; it was created more than 20 years ago by a persistent student, Bob Hennelly, who talked his way into teaching this topic. It was a brash, self-made stepping stone in Hennelly's career as an investigative journalist whose incisive reporting is a regular feature on WNYC and the National Public Radio network.

I was delighted to be asked to develop a new version of this course at my alma mater, which attracted a good roster of students for the spring semester. To showcase the 15 undergrads' exploratory writings on environmental issues, I created a class website: ramapolookout.blogspot.com.

It includes more than 150 items in various formats, from blog pieces to letters to the editor, news releases and news reports. The work spans weekly assignments on local to international issues we discussed in class--Agent Orange's New Jersey connections to industrial roots of water pollution problems--and magazine-style feature stories on topics of their choosing.

Some of the most thoughtful writing on potential solutions appeared in journal entries on what the students did for the college's required experiential learning outside the classroom. For instance, Amanda Valenti wrote a feature story--"Global Warming: Brew Your Own and Other Things You Can Do at Home"--on everyday things people can do to help lessen the human-made impact that scientists say is a cause of global climate change. Then she summed up what she had learned, in a journal entry titled "Experiental: Learning from Global Warming."

"In addition to doing research for the article, I decided to take my own advice and lessen the impact I am having on the earth," wrote Valenti, a senior. "I stopped buying water bottles and walk where I can. I also eat less red meat and more vegetables. Coffee has always been a weakness of mine, but after many experiments I think I can make a better cup of coffee than Starbucks. I put my coffee in a reusable thermos and brew it at my house now. Not only have I saved a lot of money these past few weeks, I like to think of myself as an experienced barista now.

"It has been a rather hard task to get others to do the same, but I realized I can only change my own ways and encourage others to do the same," she continued. "This was actually a great experience and had a larger impact on my life than I thought it would. At first I was just doing research for a magazine article, but it wound up being much more than that. This was a wonderful experience and I am glad I chose the topic I did."

Fellow senior Sharon Meyer decided to write about various examples of "Corporations Going Green" after noticing how a marketing company where she was doing an internship, EMI Music in Jersey City, switched from using reams of paper to filing transactions on a computer network. She also noticed that UPS envelopes that arrived at EMI were being reused.

"UPS supplies hundreds of companies who do bulk mailing with express envelopes for them to package it in. Those boxes are not easily reusable once they are opened, until now at least," Meyer wrote. "UPS has designed new envelopes that are actually green in color, and have directions on how to use the seal on the box properly, so that it can be re-used by the person receiving the package. This inspires people who are not so keen on re-using the envelopes to use them again because it is showing them the simple easy way to re-use it."

Dave Ragazzo, another senior facing graduation into an unsettling time economically and environmentally, decided to focus on New Jersey's most prominent feature for most residents and visitors: millions of cars on jam-packed highways.

"Being that climate change, or global warming as it is more commonly called, may have a direct correlation to carbon emissions, New Jersey drivers should be concerned that they are possibly causing much of the damage," Ragazzo wrote. "Unfortunately, the American public does not think about this when they are in stand-still traffic. People need cars to travel every day, so what are New Jersey residents to do?

"Electric cars may be the answer," he suggested in his feature article "It's Electric: Can Electric Cars Help New Jersey?"

The students also reflected on what they learned from readings in the course, such as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, and related research.

"I felt I learned just as much in Carson’s book about people's disregard for the environment, as I learned from the criticism she faced after publishing it," Jonathan Madden wrote in an essay titled "Learning from Silent Spring's Critique." "The same attitude where humanity naturally seeks to solve all problems through the easiest solution with no regards to its consequences is what’s harming our environment now. If we all focused on how to solve problems in manners that are both effective and environmentally safe, perhaps we wouldn’t have many of the problems we face today."

Tis the Season

2009-12-22T11:14:00.000-08:00

Swan cygnet,

Monksville Reservoir, Long Pond Iron Works State Park, West Milford, NJ

(Photo from Wild Life

by Jan Barry)

A snowstorm has turned this area of New Jersey into a sparkling winter landscape. The rumble of highway traffic and freight and commuter trains that surround the village of South Bound Brook fades into the background just looking at the spectacular view from my garden apartment. A tree-lined section of the Delaware & Raritan Canal flows by just steps away. The canal is a favorite feeding and rest stop for migratory ducks and geese. Last winter, a flock of Merganser ducks took a liking to the stretch of waterway behind the garden apartments and entertained me for hours as they dove underwater for fish and paddled around in excited circles.

During a bike ride in the fall, a rambunctious doe galloped through an opening in the forest and ran up nearly beside me, cocking her head toward me with a look that clearly conveyed “hey, wanna race?” Last summer, a friend and I were kayaking and lost track of how many turtles we saw sunning themselves on logs, rocks and fallen trees.

I moved here to have a handy place to kayak and ride my bike and walk along the canal towpath, which stretches nearly the width of New Jersey and then runs parallel to one of the most scenic sections of the Delaware River. This 70-mile-long ribbon of state park provides a wonderful wildlife corridor as well as a great getaway for humans. It is also a vivid reminder that in the densely developed Garden State, such corridors are all that’s left in many places for wildlife and close encounters with nature.

A great holiday gift was provided by New Jersey voters in November who approved a $400 million Green Acres bond referendum. It was the 12th time since 1961 that voters approved borrowing millions of dollars to buy forests and farmlands to preserve open space in a state popularly defined by the industrial-strength commercial corridors lining the New Jersey Turnpike and other major highways. In recent years, every county and nearly half of the towns and cities in NJ have created open space trust funds that were approved by voters. Other lands have been preserved by private donations to nonprofit conservation groups and by gifts by families and individuals who deeded their beloved homestead or farm for the public and wildlife to enjoy.

In the spirit of honoring nature’s role in the winter holiday season, I created photo books for family and friends this year that feature wildlife I’ve encountered, usually in parklands in New Jersey and other states, while biking, hiking, kayaking, or just gazing out the window. You can see my Wild Life photos here.

For more information:
http://www.dandrcanal.com/gen_info.html
http://www.nj.gov/dep/greenacres/

Veterans Campaign on Environmental Issues

2009-11-17T11:09:00.000-08:00

Mike Breen speaking
in Scranton, PA
(photo credit:
Operation Free)

After Army tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Captain Mike Breen is on a new mission—seeking to convince fellow Americans that our addiction to fuel from Middle Eastern oil wells is a dire threat to our soldiers in combat and our security at home. Breen, a former infantry platoon leader, contends that the shadowy insurgents our troops have been battling in two military campaigns are largely financed by oil-rich Islamic groups that profit from America’s insatiable demand for gasoline but oppose our military actions in Islamic nations.

“When you pay at the pump… we are literally putting the bullets in the magazines that are being fired back at our guys in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Breen said recently during a bus tour sponsored by Operation Free, a coalition of veterans and national security groups working to counter what they see as a growing threat from dependence on foreign oil supplies. Citing military experiences, Breen and his buddies are determined to add red, white and blue to the green banner of the environmental movement.

“We don’t have to make a choice between our lifestyle and an independent energy policy that promotes a clean energy environment and keeps us safe,” he added, in comments reported by the Times Leader of Scranton, PA.

Breen, an ROTC graduate who is now a law student at Yale University, was part of the Veterans for American Power bus tour that traveled to dozens of communities in 21 states last month.

“As we spoke in Pennsylvania’s steel towns and rolled through the wooded hills of New Hampshire, I began to realize just how ready most people were to hear what we had to say,” Breen reflected in a blog on the Operation Free web site. “In small towns and state capitols, Americans young and old seemed to intuitively understand that dependence on foreign oil and pollution that threatens our climate both pose a danger to our security and way of life. More importantly, they seemed ready and eager to stand up and do something about it.

“In Pittsburg, the leaders of a local union showed us a training program that prepares workers for a renewable energy economy. In New Hampshire, state legislators explained how weatherizing homes in the state could create jobs. In Maine, Bowdoin College was packed with a new generation of student leaders ready to commit to putting America’s energy future back in American hands,” he continued.

“As the bus rolled on, I watched with humility and excitement as my fellow veterans mastered the skills of a new kind of service. Glenn Kunkel, a decorated Marine rifleman, spoke eloquently of wind farms as the victory gardens of a new greatest generation. Robin Eckstein told hushed town meetings of the perils of logistical convoys in Iraq, dodging insurgent attacks to supply petroleum for Army generators. Andrew Campbell brought a crowd of his fellow Mainers to their feet at our last event, with a call to stop funding both sides of the war through foreign oil.”

Meanwhile, a second bus-load of energized vets was touring Midwestern and Southern states. Rolling into Florida, the group’s “first stop was in the American Legion Hall Post 6 in Deland, FL,” noted Rocky Kistner on a campaign blog. “In a room appointed with military memorabilia and a wall-mounted M16, the vets mingled with fellow veterans of wars dating back to World War II. Many in the room agreed with their message: we need to find other sources of clean energy here at home to keep American armed service members from having to deploy and fight in wars over oil and other energy sources. It’s the best way to avoid future conflicts fueled by the increasing threats of climate change.”

Besides public education, a major focus of the bus tour was to build support for a bill in Congress, the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act. That bill was released by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee earlier this month for consideration by the full Senate. Introduced by Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, the bill aims to “cut carbon pollution and stimulate the economy by creating millions of jobs in the clean energy sector,” according to a Senate press release. A companion House bill was approved in June.

"This is a security bill that puts Americans back in charge of our energy future and makes it clear that we will combat global climate change with American ingenuity," said Kerry, the former presidential candidate and a Vietnam veteran long active on environmental issues. "Our health, our security, our economy, our environment, all demand we reinvent the way America uses energy. Our addiction to foreign oil hurts our economy, helps our enemies and risks our security.”

Fueling this bill and the concerns of vets on the bus tour were national security issues raised in federally funded studies and Congressional testimony by retired senior military officers.

“Global climate change presents a serious national security threat which could impact Americans at home, impact United States military operations and heighten global tensions, according to a new study released by a blue-ribbon panel of retired admirals and generals from all branches of the armed services,” states a summary of “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change,” a 2007 study by the Center for Naval Analyses, based on research by nearly a dozen admirals and generals.

“Climate change is occurring at a much faster pace than the scientists previously thought it could,” noted General Gordon Sullivan, a former Army Chief of Staff. “Military professionals are accustomed to making decisions during times of uncertainty… Even if you don’t have complete information, you still need to take action. Waiting for 100 percent certainty during a crisis can be disastrous… The US has the responsibility to lead [on global climate change]. If we don’t make changes, then others won’t.”

Noting these concerns, support for addressing these issues has come from some Republicans as well as Democrats.

“As a conservative S.C. senator, a Marine and former chairman of President Ronald Reagan’s campaigns in South Carolina, I have always regarded national defense and economic development as top priorities,” state Senator John Courson wrote in a recent guest column in the Orangeburg (SC) Times and Democrat. “America’s dependence on foreign oil hurts our economy, helps our enemies and puts our security at risk. Together, we can protect our national security, keep our brave men and women out of harm’s way, strengthen our economy and take control of our energy future.”

Changing ingrained attitudes, and countering powerful economic interests, remains an uphill struggle. Courson was coming to the defense of U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC), who is under fierce attack by power utility groups for backing proposed legislative changes on energy use. Yet Captain Breen remains upbeat. “The bus tour may be over, but the mission continues,” he wrote. “I’m looking forward to reuniting with my fellow Operation Free veterans, and working together to meet the great challenge of our generation.”

For more information:
Mike Brean: Why I'm Fighting for Clean Energy
Vets have energy message
National Security and the Threat of Climate Change
Kerry, Boxer Introduce Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act
Foreign oil puts our security at risk

Think Green, Go Green

2009-11-05T17:18:00.000-08:00

America is in the midst of massive change as sweeping as the transformation in daily life from horse-drawn wagons to horseless carriages, candle light to electric lights, and farm work to factory work that swirled through the nation a century ago.

A cutting edge of 21st century change is the spiraling use of computers and cell phones, which have morphed from curiosities for techies to hugely popular gadgets for instant communication among people in far flung places. Amid the flurries of texting and emailing, a sea change is also taking place in what Americans do for a living. This is a transformation—slowed down, but also highlighted by the worst economic downturn since World War II—from fast fading industrial jobs and stagnant service jobs to a rising wave of green jobs.

Wary of the boom and bust cycles of previous eras, advocates of the sustainability movement are trying to direct the energy of the trendy green wave to safer shores.

“Something that’s unsustainable undermines the very system on which it depends,” notes Jaimie Cloud, head of the Cloud Institute for Sustainability in New York City. She cites the example of overhavesting popular seafood—such as the long gone oysters that once thrived in New York waters—to the point of extinction. She often challenges school groups and other audiences to come up with a long-range plan for sustainable fishing. “If we want different results,” Cloud argues, “it begins with a change in thinking.”

Cloud was keynote speaker at a “Think Green…Teach Green Conference” this week in the epicenter of New Jersey’s most populous county. More than a million people live in Bergen County amid remnants of farmland that during the past 50 years was turned into wall-to-wall housing subdivisions, sprawling but now abandoned or struggling factories, and infamous traffic jams amid gleaming signs advertising luxurious pleasures at hard-sell, high-turnover shopping malls.

For Kathleen Sawryt, the key to doing things in a sustainable way is “adding green skills sets in all jobs.” Sawryt heads the Green Career Pathways program at Bergen Community College. The conference was sponsored by the college, The Record of Bergen County and several large industries including Konica Minolta and Verizon. The college, Sawryt said, is developing a training center for students, workers, homeowners and business owners to learn the latest techniques in construction and renovation with recycled materials and energy-efficient elements that incorporate solar, wind or geothermal heating and energy devices.

A nearby example is the state of the art Center for Scientific and Environmental Education at the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission headquarters, constructed on the side of a massive trash landfill that looms beside a sparkling expanse of tidal marshes. When it opened in 2008 to host environmental education programs run by Ramapo College of New Jersey, the $5.8-million center was the first public building in the state to meet the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) platinum standards. It offers a working model for school groups and businesses in the region to study. Visitors “get to see and feel what a green building is like,” Meadowlands Commission Executive Director Robert Ceberio said at the conference at Bergen Community College.

So what’s the wave of the future look like out beyond the buzz on campus? According to a recent issue of Time magazine, a “report by the RAND Corporation and University of Tennessee found that if 25% of all American energy were produced from renewable sources by 2025, we would generate at least 5 million new green jobs.”

For example, Time continued, “hundreds of employees … now work for the Spanish wind company Gamesa at its new plant in Fairless Hills, Pa. — a plant built on the site of an old U.S. Steel manufacturing facility. If you make wind turbines or solar panels, your job is reliably green.” Looked at more broadly, “a green-collar job can be anything that helps put America on the path to a cleaner, more energy efficient future. That means jobs in the public transit sector, jobs in green building, jobs in energy efficiency — even traditional, blue-collar manufacturing jobs, provided what you're making is more or less green. (Building an SUV? Blue-collar. Building a hybrid? Green-collar.)”

I’d add another green collar category—farming. There are good models of turning abandoned city lots into community gardens in New York, Detroit and other cities. The pay’s not great, but sustained gardening can help cut grocery bills. And as older farmers retire, there’s a chance to turn gardening skills into a farming career, furnishing food to city farmers’ markets. Or perhaps launch a career as a designer of rooftop gardens. At the conference at Bergen Community College, student Nirva Singh described how the Environmental Club and the Green Team turned cafeteria leftovers into compost used on a community garden on campus. Another project they want to tackle next, he said, is to create a rain garden on the roof of the student center.

For more information:
www.cloudinstitute.org/
www.njmeadowlands.gov/environment/cese.html
www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1809506,00.html
www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-06-02-urbangardens_N.htm

Back to the Future: Wind Power

2009-10-27T21:06:00.001-07:00

Sometimes a good innovation comes from an old idea—such as windmills. Invented more than 1,000 years ago in Persia, their whirling sails and spinning blades harnessed wind power to draw water and grind grain from China to Holland to farms across America. Replaced by electric motors powered by high-voltage electric grids, the ancient windmill is making a comeback as a 21st century source of energy.

Enormous windmill farms generating megawatts of electricity have popped up in California, Texas, New York and several other states, as well as in Europe, China, India and many other countries. Innovative uses of small scale windmills have also grown.

My favorite is a farm-type windmill that spins atop a cell phone relay tower next to an interstate highway in New Jersey. Imagine if every cell phone tower sprouted a windmill to generate electricity to run its relay equipment. That could be the very model of modern energy self-sufficiency.

Another innovative use of wind power caught my eye on a trip this summer: At a newly renovated rest stop on an interstate highway in Missouri, the state highway agency is using a Windspire—a lattice-work cylinder that reminded me of the efficient tines of an electric eggbeater—to power the lights for the visitors center.

Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, some quick Internet research found, is installing 25 of these wind generators to power outdoor lights around the campus. “We have designed many state of the art initiatives on this new seminal ‘green’ campus for Quinnipiac University, but the wind turbine terrace will be the most prominent and exciting statement about the University’s commitment to sustainable practices,” said Jeff Riley of Centerbrook Architects, which is lining the main walkway with the spinning aluminum devices. “The technology and vertical axis design of the Windspire allowed us to place wind power right in the center of campus."

The compact size of these wind-catchers, created by Mariah Power of Reno, Nevada, could make them an appealing alternative to lining every scenic ridge and ocean front with humongous arrays of giant windmill propellers.

“Some green energy advocates say the Windspire, a power turbine that spins in an upright position in a confined space, could represent a major breakthrough for wind energy. Instead of using towers 100 feet tall or higher for conventional windmills, the Windspire is just 30 feet tall,” Raleigh, North Carolina News and Observer reporter John Murawski noted in a recent feature story. “The Windspire—with its comparatively low price tag and a design that works on office rooftops and in suburban open spaces—also offers a potential solution for those who just want to supplement their power supply.”

Besides contributing to the replacement of more expensive, environmentally hazardous sources of electric power such as burning coal and oil, coming up with new windmill designs must be fun.

For more information:
http://www.mariahpower.com/
http://www.heraldtimesonline.com/stories/2009/08/01/homes.qp-1518126.sto

Reuse as Art

2009-09-21T14:41:00.000-07:00

Recycling bottles and cans and other stuff can be darn boring. Yet a new use for an old building took an exciting turn in Amarillo, Texas. A former shopping mall, sitting forlornly in a sea of cracked asphalt, was transformed into a thriving arts center.

Air-conditioned hallways that sat empty after department stores and specialty shops closed or decamped for bigger malls are now lined by artists’ galleries and studio spaces, as well as the Amarillo Arts Institute, the Panhandle Arts Center, and the West Texas A&M Gallery and Studios. Replacing a big swathe of the old parking lot is a sculpture garden. Lively casts of frolicking children, bathing women and a buckaroo on a rearing horse arrayed amid flower-fringed pools greet visitors to the main entrance of the Sunset Center, near the corner of Plains Boulevard and Western Street. The recycled mall is in a commercial area along the historic Route 66 corridor that got bypassed by the nearby interstate highway, I-40.

“I’m an artist and I couldn’t have found a more enjoyable place,” Marsha Clements, a native of Amarillo, a small city on the vast plains of the Panhandle region of Texas, wrote in the current issue of Route 66 Pulse, a newspaper for history-minded motorists. “I love to stroll through art galleries and visit with artists about their work. It inspires me to paint something new, just be creative.”

The galleries, workshops and special events at the Sunset Center have become “a hub for the art community of our region serving artists from the Texas panhandle, New Mexico, Kansas, and Oklahoma,” Clements noted.

The faded 1950s-era mall was transformed by Ann Crouch, a local businesswoman with a vision, and the creative work of numerous artists. Many area residents drop by during the day to stroll the hallways, chat with artists and check out the displays of paintings, photographs, pottery, jewelry, woodwork, metalwork and other forms of art. During a visit this summer, an aunt and I were greeted by B.J. Smith, who fashions gourds into a fascinating array of painted, beaded or otherwise bedecked artwork, and invited in for a tour of her studio.

“A fellow artist and friend (Ann Crouch) had a dream and purchased (the mall) several years ago,” artist Bob “Crocodile” Lile said in a recent interview in Route 66 News on the opening of his new gallery in the arts center. “Personally I never thought it would be a success, but with time and effort it has grown into about 46 galleries and is the premier place to teach and learn as well as show and sell art in the tri-state area.”

The arts center grew in stages, noted a recent article in amarillo.com on the arts scene in the city. It began with the 2001 opening of the Panhandle Art Center, an exhibit area for artists set up in a wing of the sprawling mall. The Amarillo Art Institute offered art classes in 2004, followed by artists opening individual galleries in 2005. The sculpture garden opened last year.

First Friday Art Walks, held the first Friday of each month, “now draw thousands of visitors,” Crouch said in a recent article in Amarillo.com. “We have a growing art market,” she said. “We're starting to get attention from people driving through on the interstate."

For more information:
http://www.artamarillo.com/
http://www.route66pulse.com/
http://rwarn17588.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/roadie-opening-art-gallery-in-amarillo/
http://www.amarillo.com/stories/030809/new_news1.shtml

National Defense: Saving the Environment

2009-08-18T11:20:00.000-07:00

One of the biggest forces of destruction of the natural world are military actions in wars and training exercises, such as extensive explosions at bombing ranges and pollution of groundwater from leaking gasoline storage tanks, chemical and nuclear wastes. Imagine if “national defense” missions were reconfigured to fully focus on saving the environment that sustains life on earth. A germ of that idea is contained in a current advertisement on the Military Times website, placed by Colorado State University.

The Sustainable Military Lands Management (SMLM) Certificate program is a one-of-a-kind online educational opportunity that trains current and future professionals in the breadth and complexity of military land management to provide you with knowledge of the rapidly evolving practices, technologies, and analytical tools necessary to support this national defense mission. Civilian and military land management professionals learn the key concepts for conservation and sustainable management of natural and cultural resources on Department of Defense lands. The knowledge and skills gained can be used by a wide array of United States and foreign, federal and state land management agencies.

This certificate will help you understand the importance of military lands management and the cultural and ecological significance of sustaining these lands. You will learn the general practices and the theory of land management as well as cultural anthropology. You will also study the ecological principles of military training and testing areas and the impacts of disturbances caused by these activities. Topics covered will include an overview of military lands in the United States in historical, geographical, and environmental contexts, cultural resources laws, policies, management, and preservation as they apply to military lands.

Imagine if every soldier, sailor, marine, airman, secretary of defense, member of Congress and president had to take this course. Under a law signed by President Eisenhower in 1960, the Department of Defense—which oversees 30 million acres of often prime wildlife habitat—is obligated to develop and follow a natural resources management plan. The purpose of these management plans is “to provide for the conservation and rehabilitation of natural resources on military lands,” according to an agreement signed in January 2006 by the Department of Defense and US Fish and Wildlife Service. Under other laws, the Department of Defense is obligated to clean up contaminated sites it owns or that were used by military manufacturing contractors, including some of the most heavily polluted Superfund sites in the nation. This is a mission that may require an army of well-trained experts to do right.

For more information:
http://www.learn.colostate.edu/certificates/military-lands-management/
http://cbey.research.yale.edu/uploads/Conservation%20Finance%20Camp%202008/Mark%20Shaffer-DoD-FWS-AFWA%20MOU.pdf
http://www.defenselink.mil/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=931

Clearwater Legacy

2009-06-23T23:38:00.000-07:00

When folk singer Pete Seeger and some friends launched the Clearwater project in 1969, the Hudson River was an open sewer for industries, cities and towns along its majestic sweep from the Adirondack Mountains to New York Bay. In the years since, the full-sail sight of the Clearwater sloop tacking up and down the river with a pickup crew of excited kids and adults has been paced by outbursts of activism on shore that has prodded cleanups and publicly targeted the major sources of pollution.

The inspiration for this hearty brand of environmental activism is a 90-year-old guy who still tramps around with a banjo singing old-fashioned folk songs. In recent weeks, Seeger has energized hand-clapping, standing audiences of all ages in singing grassroots movement songs at a jam-packed high school auditorium in White Plains, NY; the annual Clearwater Festival/Great Hudson River Revival in Croton Point Park; a 90th birthday bash and star-studded Clearwater fundraiser at Madison Square Garden in New York —not to mention, leading the television-watching nation in singing “This Land Is Your Land” at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. during the inauguration celebration for President Obama.

“I’m more optimistic than I’ve ever been before,” Seeger said at an Earth Day fair at Columbia University’s Teachers College in April, where he was the keynote speaker/entertainer. He said his optimism is fueled by the computer-generated “information revolution,” which has sped up the process of exchanging good ideas. “I now speak with people I never used to speak with—some on the left, some on the right. I think, I believe, we will see more miraculous things happen,” Seeger said. And then he launched into his trademark patter of story-telling songs with an activism hook.

One of these chestnuts is Seeger’s infectious channeling of Martin Luther King Jr. and the hymn-based anthems of the civil rights movement. The refrain goes:

Don’t say it can’t be done
The battle’s just begun
Take it from Dr. King
You too can learn to sing
So drop the gun.

Seeger, a World War II army veteran, is an ardent peace activist as well as an environmentalist. In his view, the two issues are not unrelated. When the Clearwater campaign began, a major polluter was the US Military Academy at West Point, which flushed raw sewage into the river at its picturesque site in the Hudson Highlands. In his war protest songs, Seeger prodded the Pentagon to clean up its act in Vietnam, as well. The Clearwater campaign provided potent ammunition for Congress to pass the 1972 Clean Water Act, which forced West Point and Hudson River cities to build modern sewage treatment facilities.

Pete Seeger has long been more than a singer with a protest message. He relentlessly organizes people to change things from the way they are: Build a replica of a 19th-century river sloop. Take people out on the river and show them the pollution and where it’s coming from. Raise money to hire scientific experts to testify at public hearings. Mobilize crowds of people to attend public meetings. Organize festivals where musicians and activists can energize each others’ work.

At the recent Clearwater Festival at Croton Point, happy concertgoers tramped through mud and rain puddles to hear a baker’s dozen of musical acts—including Arlo Guthrie, Richie Havens, Taj Mahal, and the Hudson River Ramblers—and to also check out the wares at scores of tents set up by activist organizations, handicrafts merchants and food vendors. A Veterans for Peace contingent was setting up its display early Saturday morning when Seeger wandered by, sipping a cup of coffee. Throughout the weekend, he dropped by various events with his banjo and joined in for a song or two.

Behind the scenes, Seeger was also overseeing the next step in the Clearwater campaign. Earlier this year, his Hudson River Sloop Clearwater organization announced its “Next Generation Legacy Project.” The first stage is the Clearwater Center for Environmental Leadership, a youth education camping program opening this summer in Beacon, NY.

“Clearwater youth education programs presently reach over 15,000 people each year. At Camp Clearwater, it is planned that several hundred students will be in the ‘leadership pipeline’ at any time, experiencing life-changing programs at camps, seminars, retreats, demonstrations and green jobs programs,” Communications Director Tom Staudter said in a news release. A longer range goal, he said is “the establishment of eight Green Cities / Green Jobs Satellite Centers in Environmental Leadership along the Hudson River in partnership with local environmental and community groups. This is to ensure that eight targeted cities / communities—New York City (Harlem), Yonkers, Peekskill, Newburgh, Beacon, Poughkeepsie, Kingston and Albany—have powerful connections to their waterfronts through environmental education programs that will, in turn, support green job development and training programs for young people from the region’s inner cities.”

There’s still a state advisory warning about eating fish from the Hudson River. But a major source of contamination is finally being reduced. In May, General Electric began dredging PCBs from a heavily polluted stretch of the river after a decades-long battle with environmentalists. “This has always been a classic grassroots effort, achieved in large part due to the tireless and scientifically-based work of past and present Clearwater staff members and volunteers, our collaborative partners in the Friends of the Clean Hudson Coalition, and the hundreds of thousands of people who wrote letters, signed petitions and cared enough to take action,” said Manna Jo Greene, Clearwater’s environmental director.

Meanwhile, the Clearwater campaign fired warning shots in another battle. In March, it filed a contention with the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board “focusing on United Water New York’s application to build a desalination plant to extract water from the Hudson River for use as municipal drinking water for Rockland County.” The Clearwater’s stance is that if river water just downstream of the Indian Point nuclear power plant is to be used as a source of drinking water, the plant owners and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission must re-assess the environmental impacts of the power plant’s license renewal application. That stance sparked an investigative project into the potential for radioactive contamination of the river and area ground water, conducted by environmental students at Ramapo College of New Jersey. The student report concluded that an effective energy conservation program combined with wind and solar power could replace the aging nuclear power plant and negate its potential dangers.

At the Clearwater Festival in June, a group of New York City high school students proudly showed their newly learned skills in boat building and offered tours on the river in hand-made, wood reproductions of classic sailboat tenders. Nearby, Pete Seeger slipped into a rain-drenched tent and joined in a round of sea shanties with a crew of bearded old salts. Embracing a 60ish singer wearing a Vietnam Veterans Against the War cap, Seeger coached the audience to chime in on an old Irish ballad. Then he was off to the next gathering, joining a stage full of folk song luminaries and belting out one of his favorite tunes:

Don’t say it can’t be done
The battle’s just begun...

For more information:
http://clearwater.org/index.php
http://www.peteseeger.net/
http://www.rockingtheboat.org/programs/boatbuilding/

Revive the Civilian Conservation Corps

2009-05-18T12:18:00.000-07:00

Faced with millions of Americans out of work, including an army of roughly 154,000 homeless military veterans seeking shelter every night, President Obama and Congress should quickly revive one of the most successful government actions during the Great Depression. That action was creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps, which the Roosevelt administration convinced Congress to support within weeks of FDR taking office in 1933. Over the next several years, the CCC hired more than three million young men to plant three billion trees in over-logged forests, repair 40 million acres of soil-eroded farmlands and create 800 state parks, according to the US Forest Service web site.

While billions of dollars are being promised to bail out banks and Wall Street firms nearly sunk by reckless investments, the Obama administration should make better use of lessons to be learned from studying how America climbed out of the last big fiscal collapse that sank the national economy. “Today, we drive on roads laid out by the Works Progress Administration, drop off our children and pick up books at schools and libraries built by the Public Works Administration, and even drink water flowing from reservoirs constructed by the Tennessee Valley Authority,” among other public services provided by workers funded by the federal government in the 1930s, notes author Neil M. Maher in Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement.

Indeed, he argues, the CCC was the pioneer project in lifting a bankrupt, dispirited America by its bootstraps. “The immediate popularity of the CCC … helped the new president [Roosevelt] to jump-start the New Deal,” writes Maher, a history professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology-Rutgers University. “During the Great Depression, the CCC continually linked the outdoor labor performed on its conservation projects to an increased sense of national pride.” Another legacy was that many CCC participants got hooked on environmental causes, “thousands of whom took jobs with conservation agencies and became actively involved in a host of environmental groups across the country.”

Modeled on a conservation program Roosevelt had championed as governor of New York, the CCC tackled big issues, from reclaiming Dust Bowl farmlands and fighting forest fires to providing a new start for jobless veterans.

“Several thousand World War I veterans had taken part in the ‘Bonus Army’ marches on Washington in 1932 and 1933. The earlier march in Hoover’s administration was dispersed by the U.S. Army, while the latter march was dispersed by FDR by offering to allow them to enroll in the CCC,” the Forest Service notes. Nearly 250,000 veterans enrolled alongside more than 2 million younger men, aged 17 to 28, who were guided by military officers and woodsmen recruited from the surrounding area of the hundreds of CCC work camps, located in every state. About 8,500 women were also enrolled in the program.

Vital work that a revived CCC could do includes: clean up abandoned industrial waste areas, many of which are in public parklands and at former and current military bases; restore and reforest blighted mountaintop mining areas; retrofit government buildings, including schools, with solar panels and windmills to generate electricity; create a network of marked bicycle paths along city streets, rural roads, greenways and unused railroad corridors; restore or create greenway wildlife corridors along streams and rivers; clean up polluted streams and rivers and coastal areas.

Experience in working on such vital projects would provide a trained workforce for the green economy that President Obama and others are promoting.

A current program that can provide additional ideas is the California Conservation Corps, created in 1976 along the lines of the original CCC. It hires 3,300 young men and women annually at the minimum wage. The state agency does projects “for more than 250 local, state and federal agencies each year,” the California CCC web site states. Its members are trained as emergency responders and clean up crews at forest fires, floods, earthquakes, oil spills. They also maintain hiking trails and a nursery that has produced more than 3 million trees for reforestation and stream bank restoration. “Many recruits start out as unemployed high school dropouts and end up moving on to jobs in the California Department of Fish and Game, state and national parks, and forestry and fire departments,” the San Francisco Chronicle noted in a recent article.

Gov. Schwarzenegger’s proposal early this year to close the agency to save $17 million as he faced a $40 billion state deficit stirred a wave of public protest; the funding was restored by the state legislature. "Not only did we get restored, but with all the [federal] stimulus money, I see us expanding," Jimmy Camp, communications director for the Conservation Corps, told the Chronicle. "They are coming to us and really looking to put some of that stimulus money into projects for us.”

Many in California saw a ready-made opportunity for the federal stimulus fund to invest in conservation projects. “Indeed, far from being cut, the corps should be a model for other states,” the Redding (CA) Record Searchlight stated in an editorial.

For more information:
http://www.ccclegacy.org/CCC_brief_history.htm
http://www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/research/heritage/documents/LookingBack_TheCivilianConservationCorpsandTheNationa.._000.pdf
http://www.ccc.ca.gov/index.htm
http://www.save-the-ccc.org/press_reddingrecord_editorial.html
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/02/23/BA3U1632FK.DTL

Energy Conservation: Challenges, Rewards

2009-01-12T16:27:00.000-08:00

Imagine a light bulb wearing a sweater. That’s the clever image Time magazine displayed to illustrate its current cover story about energy efficiency. That’s a catchy way to call attention to what the newsweekly describes as “those pigtailed compact fluorescent lightbulbs that use 75% less power than traditional bulbs.”

And that’s the kind of idea sponsors of the Igniting Creative Energy Challenge contest hope to spark among elementary and high school students across the U.S. and Canada. Grand prize winners get a trip to Washington, DC, home to the incoming Obama Administration, which pledged to make energy conservation a major issue—starting with cutting “15 % of all energy use by the Federal Government, the world’s largest consumer,” according to Time.

Meanwhile, college students at Rutgers University in New Jersey are being challenged to devise “creative and innovative solutions in reducing energy wasted” on campus. First prize award is $2,500. Priming the pump with a big feasible idea, the state university is building the largest solar power array in the Garden State. “The 1.4-megawatt (MW) solar energy facility at Rutgers will consist of more than 7,000 solar panels and will generate approximately 10 percent of the electrical demand of the school's Livingston Campus,” saving the university more than $200,000 in its first year of operation, noted Renewable Energy World.

This is just a sampling of programs and projects that are targeting what Time’s cover story calls “Wasting Our Watts.” The newsweekly argues that “A nationwide push to save ‘negawatts’ instead of building more megawatts could help reverse our unsustainable increases in energy-hogging and carbon-spewing while creating a slew of jobs and saving a load of cash.” One energy efficiency expert estimates that “today’s best techniques could save the U.S. half our oil and gas and three-fourths of our electricity.”

Hint: “even our new consumer electronics—the fastest growing segment of power demand—slurp alarming quantities of juice,” Time notes. For instance, “video-game consoles devour two fridges’ worth of electricity when your kids leave them on, which they probably do, because manufacturers ship them with the auto power-down disabled.”

So kids and adults have plenty to think about as to how to save energy that’s just going to waste. Adults can save money on electric bills. Kids with good ideas might win a prize. “The Challenge to students is simple,” state the Igniting Creative Energy Challenge guidelines, developed by Johnson Controls Inc. and the National Energy Foundation.

"Step 1 - Learn how an individual's own wise energy choices and environmental stewardship can help reduce energy consumption and improve the community in which we live.
Step 2 - Ignite your creative energy to explore new and creative ways to make a difference in the way you use energy.
Step 3 - Use your creative talents to communicate your energy ideas and actions to others."

For further information:

Igniting Creative Energy
Energy Conservation Contest for Rutgers New Brunswick Undergraduate Students
Rutgers University Breaks Ground on 1.4 MW Solar System
America’s Untapped Energy Resource: Boosting Efficiency

(This article was also posted at Opinion-Forum.)

Slow Down, Save the Planet

2008-08-26T21:47:00.000-07:00

Imagine how much gasoline use—and climate-changing fumes—would be reduced if speed demons slowed down to the speed limit. "’Jack-rabbit’ starts and hard braking can increase fuel consumption by as much as 40 percent,” says Eartheasy.com. “Tests show that ‘jackrabbit’ starts and hard braking reduces travel time by only four percent, while toxic emissions were more than five times higher.”

I drove like that, when I was young and in a hurry. Now that I’m much older and more inclined to live at a slower pace, I notice how many other people still drive like maniacs. Given the growing warnings about climate change, drivers should accept a share of responsibility for the fate of the planet and not rush to put the pedal to the metal.

Slowing down is also patriotic. It can help improve what the US government calls “our national energy security,” as well as help ease the demand for gasoline that’s a factor in pushing up prices at the pump. That’s because so much of the oil used for gasoline comes from the Middle East, where we’re waging a costly war in Iraq to keep the overheated oil flow flowing to millions of homes, businesses, and drivers.

And then there’s the planetary security issue. “Increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs) are trapping more of the sun's energy in the Earth's atmosphere, causing global climate change,” says the US departments of energy and environmental protection on the web site fueleconomy.gov. “Carbon dioxide (CO2) from burning fossil fuels is the most important human-made GHG. Highway vehicles account for 26% of our CO2 emissions (1.7 billion tons each year).”

What’s that mean to me? “Each gallon of gasoline you burn creates 20 pounds of CO2. The average vehicle emits around 6 to 9 tons of CO2 each year,” the EPA/DOE web site notes. The bottom line is that the way we drive, the kind of vehicles we drive and how much we drive is how this situation became a global problem too big for government to handle without a great change in people’s driving habits.

So what’s the alternative to fast driving on boring highway trips? I like to see the miles fly by as quickly as anyone. But the fuel consumption rate can zoom up as much as 20 percent higher at 75 mph than at 55 mph, according to Eartheasy’s research. I make long trips fun while doing about 55 mph by taking older scenic state roadways, instead of an interstate highway, for long stretches in the countryside.

I take older side roads in built-up areas as well where there are frequent traffic jams on crowded highways. Gas mileage and state of mind are both terrible when you’re creeping along bumper to bumper. Traffic where I live in New Jersey is often so jammed up, it’s faster to walk, bike or take a train wherever possible. Indeed, that’s what many people have been doing. And that saves a lot of gasoline.

For more information: Road test shows how driving style affects gas consumption—
MotorWeek Video (5.6 MB)Text Version

The Ultimate Scary Scenario

2008-08-06T21:44:00.000-07:00

Whatever the worrisome projections for global warming may be, there is an even bigger threat to our well-being—nuclear war. Aging stockpiles of nuclear weapons are a potentially Earth-shattering, ticking time bomb, capable of going off accidentally or deliberately. The United States, Russia, China, Britain and France have thousands of nuclear missiles left over from the Cold War and still primed for waging World War III. India and Pakistan developed competing nuclear arsenals. Israel and North Korea also reportedly developed nuclear weapons. And now, with US-led wars raging on two of its borders, Iran may be trying to join the nuclear club, setting off saber-rattling and threats of military attacks by the US and Israel.

Here’s the problem: “In the 1980's, work conducted jointly by Western and Soviet scientists showed that for a full-scale nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union the climatic consequences, and indirect effects of the collapse of society, would be so severe that the ensuing nuclear winter would produce famine for billions of people far from the target zones,” says a recently update essay in the Encyclopedia of Earth, written by Alan Robock, a professor of climatology at Rutgers University.

That warning was based on computer models of the likely effect of massive radioactive clouds of dense smoke circling the Earth and blocking out sunlight for months, killing food crops and dropping temperatures to deep winter. More recent studies have found that the earlier research may have underestimated these effects, Robock adds: “Based on new work published in 2007 and 2008 by some of the pioneers of nuclear winter research who worked on the original studies, we now can say several things about this topic.

New Science:

A minor nuclear war (such as between India and Pakistan or in the Middle East), with each country using 50 Hiroshima-sized atom bombs as airbursts on urban areas, could produce climate change unprecedented in recorded human history. This is only 0.03% of the explosive power of the current global arsenal.

This same scenario would produce global ozone depletion, because the heating of the stratosphere would enhance the chemical reactions that destroy ozone.

A nuclear war between the United States and Russia today could produce nuclear winter, with temperatures plunging below freezing in the summer in major agricultural regions, threatening the food supply for most of the planet.”

Looking for a comparison to such a scary scenario, Robock points to one of the most devastating climate changes on Earth: “65,000,000 years ago an asteroid or comet smashed into the Earth in southern Mexico. The resulting dust cloud, mixed with smoke from fires, blocked out the Sun, killing the dinosaurs, and starting the age of mammals. This Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) extinction may have been exacerbated by massive volcanism in India at the same time. This teaches us that large amounts of aerosols in Earth's atmosphere have caused massive climate change and extinction of species. The difference with nuclear winter is that the K-T extinction could not have been prevented.”

Robock argues that the only way to be sure nuclear winter never happens is to dismantle the nuclear arsenals. Among a growing list of supporters of abolishing atomic bombs and missile warheads are several former US government officials, led by former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, who signed a joint statement published in the Wall Street Journal last year to endorse “setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal.”

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) was launched in 2007 by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which received the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize for its public education campaign on the dangers of nuclear war during a tense standoff in US-Soviet relations. The ICAN campaign is based in Australia. The Campaign for a Nuclear Free World was launched in Washington, DC, last year by a number of American peace organizations.

For more information: http://www.eoearth.org/article/Nuclear_winter; http://www.icanw.org/; http://www.nuclearweaponsfree.org/

So What's the Problem?

2008-08-02T22:08:00.000-07:00

Lots of posts on the Internet state that global warming is a scam or a joke. But a group of generals and admirals is not laughing. “Global climate change is and will be a significant threat to our national security and, in a larger sense, to life on earth as we know it to be,” General Gordon R. Sullivan, a retired US Army chief of staff, told a Congressional committee last September.

Sullivan headed a military advisory board to a defense contractor that took a close look at the controversial issue and then sent a report to the Pentagon titled National Security and the Threat of Climate Change. “The path to mitigating the worst security consequences of climate change involves reducing global greenhouse gas emissions,” Sullivan added. “There is a relationship between carbon emissions and our national security. I think that the evidence is there that would suggest that we have to start paying attention.”

The retired general did not come to this conclusion as a tree-hugger activist. The only thing green about Sullivan is his uniform. “The retired officers who made up the CNA panel are hardly environmentalists, and many said they came to the report skeptical of climate change,” Time Magazine reported on its website in conjunction with a special environmental issue in April. “That was then. ‘It's now a mainstream security issue, not a fringe movement for tree-huggers and Birkenstock wearers,’ says Sherri Goodman, who chaired the CNA report and served as deputy Undersecretary of Defense for environmental security in the Clinton Administration — a position that does not exist today. ‘It's affecting the lives of billions and so we've got to understand what those threats are, and how to plan for them and reduce them.’”

What was it that got these retired military commanders’ attention? Having served in the military during the Cold War, when the top priority was preventing a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, they knew that some human activities could have devastating global effects—such as thousands of nuclear missile explosions blanketing the sky with smoke that might block out sunlight and trigger a “nuclear winter.”

“The CNA Report likens the threat of climate change to that of the strategic threats we endured during the Cold War, that is: while the probability of disastrous climate change cannot be determined with certainty, the effects of climate change (if current trends continue) on international security are so great that one must prepare to deal with severe security consequences,” retired Vice Admiral Paul G. Gaffney II testified in Congressional hearings in June. “First principle: whether one believes climate change will happen or not, the effects if it does happen are dangerous enough that security forces must plan for it.”

Speaking before another Congressional committee in June, Goodman, the former Pentagon official overseeing environmental security, said: “In the last year, the debate on climate change in the United States has shifted from ‘Whether it is happening’ to ‘What should we do about it?’” The first thing, Goodman and the retired military officers emphasized, is to make this issue a top national priority.

For further information: http://securityandclimate.cna.org/

What's Happening?

2008-08-01T21:25:00.000-07:00

Adding polar bears as a “threatened” species due to shrinking ice near the North Pole, the US Department of Interior in May released satellite data showing sea ice receded dramatically since 1979. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said this decision was separate, however, from determining if the ice melted due to global warming. On that score, he seemed to say, figure it out for yourselves.

Finding out what's going on ain't easy. We live in a world of rumors, speculation, gossip, political spin, advertisements, tall tales, little white lies, fibs, scams, whoppers, dreams, nightmares, visions, vows, text messages, web postings, talk radio, comedy shows, song lyrics, supermarket tabloid headlines, he said/she said disputes, religious pronouncements, government reports, consumer reports, eyewitness accounts, sworn testimony, news items and conflicting commentaries. So, what really happened?

That’s the dilemma of journalists on deadline, juries, judges and everyone else who wants to know the God’s honest truth. Whether it was an event in the neighborhood or ice sheets melting in the Arctic Ocean that might portend global warming, getting the full story is often tough to do. But environmental issues generally have a clear cut element—something observably changed. Hospital syringes washed up on a swimming beach, for instance. Environmental issues are issues because people noticed a drastic change in their surroundings and complained about it. The outstanding questions usually are: What’s going to be done about it? Who’s responsible? Who’s going to pay for it?

Global warming, or climate change, is a projection by scientists as to what might happen in the future if we continue burning fossil fuels in the same pattern as in the past and today. Some people say it’s sheer speculation. And how are ordinary people to know? This is a tough one. Common sense, however, suggests some ways to test this theory. Compare the temperatures in a large city on a hot day with temperatures in the nearest countryside. Any commuter knows that a city street in summer is much hotter than a forest path just a few miles away. The big question is whether global temperatures can be drastically affected by the cumulative effect of human activity.

Al Gore says yes. Others say no. If Gore is wrong, we may spend a lot of money on windmills and battery-powered cars. If the nay-sayers are wrong, we might end up like the dinosaurs, unable to survive on a drastically changed planet. Big stakes. In this case, finding out what’s going on, and what to do about it, may be vital to our future.

Learning to See the Problem

2008-07-31T22:55:00.000-07:00

When I was a youngster, I wanted to be a famous military commander and wage historic battles around the world. The first war I participated in was so questionable, however, I decided to get out of the war-making business and take up a more socially useful line of work. Like Mark Twain and other authors I admired, I decided to wage war on outrageous behavior, by shining light in dark corners of daily life.

It took me awhile, however, to master the craft of writing anything worth reading. A big step was becoming a newspaper reporter and recording other people’s concerns. That’s how I happened to start writing about environmental issues. One of the most outrageous issues I heard about, while still learning how to be a journalist, was a worry by many Vietnam veterans that Agent Orange and other chemical herbicides used in war zones to kill jungle vegetation may have endangered their health and that of their children.

Agent Orange is a now classic example of unintended consequences—how using a toxic substance as a weapon in a distant war can boomerang as a danger at home. But in the 1970s, when I first encountered it, it was a daunting issue. I had no idea where to find out the truth of the matter. I didn’t recall anything about the spraying operations when I was in Vietnam. But I remembered reading Silent Spring while at a stateside training base and wondering if the herbicides and insecticides Rachel Carson warned about were the same chemicals listed in military chemical warfare manuals. What I learned from investigating the Agent Orange issue years later was to carefully listen to people with personal concerns for their health and dig for answers to their questions.

As I wrote in a newspaper opinion piece summarizing what was known and still unknown about this issue (“Troubling Questions About Dioxin,” New York Times, 6/11/83): “When health questions about Agent Orange first arose in the late 1960s, the focus was on new laboratory studies showing increased rates of cancer, birth defects and deaths among test animals exposed to ingredients of the herbicide. This news appeared after reports of birth defects, serious illnesses and deaths among Vietnamese … exposed to herbicide spray.

“Incredibly, no one at the time—not in the Federal Government, not from the environmental groups, not from the press—asked about the possible health consequences for G.I.’s. Nearly a decade passed before Vietnam veterans began to discover that question for themselves.” And that was largely because a Veterans Administration caseworker in Chicago noticed a pattern of illness among many veterans who served in Vietnam and questioned whether they might have been poisoned by herbicides used in the war. When she took her concerns to the news media in 1978, it hit home for a lot of veterans who had been diagnosed with cancer or rare skin disorders.

While VA officials were telling veterans there was nothing to worry about, citing government reports, the US Environmental Protection Agency issued an emergency ban on almost all domestic uses of the Agent Orange component that contained dioxin. These herbicides had been used for decades to kill weeds in farm fields, along utility lines and in people’s lawns. EPA pointed to lab studies that linked dioxin to higher levels of cancer and birth defects in test animals. Frustrated veterans did their own research and found reports in industrial medical journals of workers at plants that made ingredients of Agent Orange getting a distinctive skin rash called chloracne. So did they have the same skin condition, they demanded to know. Veterans and their families compared health notes and found that many of their children had a birth defect called spina bifida. Was this caused by exposure to dioxin?

The newspaper I worked for at the time, the Morristown (NJ) Daily Record, ran a series of articles I wrote with another reporter, Igor Bobrowsky, that profiled local veterans or their widows, examined their health problems and what was known about a wide array of hazardous chemicals used in Vietnam, interviewed veterans’ advocates across the country, and pressed government officials for answers. “Did Agent Orange poison Vietnam veterans?” was a typical way we posed the questions. “Nearly three years after the federal government announced a massive effort to find out, the answer seems as elusive as ever,” is how we reported what was happening. Quoting various scientists, our reporting pointed to the specific studies that needed to be done.

To help get answers, New Jersey created an Agent Orange study commission, which found that—contrary to federal government assertions—dioxin could be found in many Vietnam veterans’ bodies years after they returned from the war. Other studies by various agencies and independent researchers focused on answering the questions about cancer and birth defects. As results of studies in the US and previous studies in Europe piled up, Congress in the early 1990s mandated that the VA treat or pay compensation to Vietnam veterans for a number of cancers—and their children with spina bifida.

But it was already too late for many veterans. As I reported in 1980 from my research, Vietnam veterans in suburban Morris County, NJ, were dying of cancer at a rate nearly three times the national average for young men in their 20s and early 30s. It was a sobering spot check, as no agency at the time was keeping track of the cause of veterans’ deaths on a national level. Across the nation, these deaths hit hard in unexpected places. “Elmo R. Zumwalt 3d, son of the admiral who ordered the spraying of Agent Orange in Vietnam, and who was exposed to the defoliant himself, died of cancer today at his home. He was 42 years old,” The New York Times reported in August 1988.

“In an article published in The New York Times Magazine on Aug. 24, 1986,” the obituary added, “the younger Mr. Zumwalt said: 'I am a lawyer and I don't think I could prove in court, by the weight of the existing scientific evidence, that Agent Orange is the cause of all the medical problems - nervous disorders, cancer and skin problems - reported by Vietnam veterans, or of their children's severe birth defects. But I am convinced that it is.’”

Admiral Zumwalt took a closer look at the available studies and concluded, in a 1990 report to the VA, that there was sufficient evidence to link various cancers and birth defects with dioxin. But, he added, this information had been deliberately concealed from Congress and the public. “Unfortunately, political interference in government sponsored studies associated with Agent orange has been the norm, not the exception. In fact, there appears to have been a systematic effort to suppress critical data or alter results to meet preconceived notions of what alleged scientific studies were meant to find,” Zumwalt noted.

Zumwalt put his finger on the problem stemming from a military tactic he and others had used to kill vegetation that could conceal enemy troops and heralded a larger danger that potentially affected anyone exposed to these chemicals. “The flawed scientific studies and manipulated conclusions are not only unduly denying justice to Vietnam veterans suffering from exposure to Agent Orange," Zumwalt said in a quote circulated in a US Veterans Dispatch report in November 1990. "They are now standing in the way of a full disclosure to the American people of the likely health effects of exposure to toxic dioxins."

Revelations about this secretive government program continue surfacing. “Years later, a sad and fitting epitaph for the Agent Orange saga would come from James Clary, an Air Force scientist and author of the official history of Operation Ranch Hand, in a statement to Senator Tom Daschle: ‘When we initiated the herbicide program in the 1960s we were well aware of the potential for damage due to dioxin contamination in the herbicide. We were even aware that the military formulation had a higher dioxin concentration than the civilian version, due to the lower cost and the speed of manufacture. However, because the material was to be used on the enemy, none of us were overly concerned,’” a Vietnam veteran’s son, Ben Quick, wrote in the March/April 2008 issue of Orion magazine (“Agent Orange: A Chapter from History that Just Won’t End”).

“My father returned to the Midwest after his tour in the jungles of Vietnam accompanied by a dehumanizing terror,” Quick wrote. “But along with the images and the guilt was something more tangible, a rash that covered his back, raised hivelike splotches that didn’t go away for five years—until I was nearly three. The name for this rash is chloracne; its cause, prolonged exposure to herbicides.”

Ben Quick was born with a deformed left hand. “I know how lucky I am—that things could be much worse,” he wrote. “I’ve seen the pictures of the Vietnamese tending the earth after the fire. The parents who cut and burned the trunks of leafless trees to keep their children warm in winter. The beautiful young girls with jet black hair and loose blouses trimming grass for baskets. The peasants planting saplings in barren ground.

“And I’ve seen the photos of jars filled with the stillborn at the Tu Du hospital in Ho Chi Minh City. Babies born with two faces and three ears. Dead babies with limbs like ropes, long, slender, twisted like pale pretzels in formaldehyde. Siamese twins with melting heads, gathered in a lovers’ tangle, the lips of one pressed to the neck of the other in the softest kiss. Shelves full of pickle jars holding the rawest fruit.

“And the living, the children of the damned.”

As the Agent Orange saga reveals, before there can be a solution, people first have to acknowledge the problem. There’s plenty for everyone to do, at every level of society, to ask questions, dig out and share facts, and press for appropriate actions.

Leaving a Future

2008-07-30T14:33:00.000-07:00

If I had my life to do over, there are things I'd do differently. Let's start with the meadow in this photo, taken this summer behind my parents' place in upstate New York. The boy with two horses pulling a simple rig cutting wildflowers and grasses for hay would have been a familar sight to my grandparents and generations before them. When I was a boy, that field to me was a battleground, like something at Gettysburg or Normandy or Korea, where I played war with neighborhood kids. If a modern battle took place there, that meadow would be a dangerous place to farm, spiked with landmines, unexploded grenades, bombs, artillery rounds and toxic substances such as Agent Orange, napalm, depleted uranium.

That is not a legacy any responsible person would wish on their backyard or their nation. So, if I knew what I know now, I'd have given more thought to the future of that farm field and woods and refrained from dropping out of college to join the Army and charge off to war in Vietnam. The New York State College of Forestry, where I was so bored as a student, could have provided a good grounding for addressing what is now the greatest challenge of my lifetime--saving the world from the toxic waste of our throw-away age. But it's never too late to learn.