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12.26 2009 DO WE REALLY NEED GORILLAS IN OUR MIDST?
We've got various pieces in NBN today that show that much of the world's biodiversity is going the way of the Dodo. With that great unknown, global warming, we'll probably see more animals go extinct. But there are signs that even rare and highly specialized species can adapt to this brave new world, in the wake of humans already doing so.
<')((((((((><.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
12.21.09
~~~~~~~~~~~~><.((((((((()'> 12.18.09
<')((((((((><.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 12.16.09
These days wild population fluctuations are everywhere. Cod fish stocks are sinking, white tail deer are bounding, burning bush is exploding and salt marshes are vanishing. If this a trend, where does it end? More importantly, can science do anything about it? The latter answer is: there is a lot science can do. Man's fooling with Mother Nature has produced some startling results. A grad student studying dramatic declines in Connecticut River herring schools told me a resurgent striped bass population is one possible explanation. The bass have rebounded thanks to a wildly unpopular fishing ban 20 years ago that's repeatedly cited by science as proof regulations can make a real difference in the fish populations. Look at wild populations swings of other plants and animals in the woods and waters around us. Man seems to have had a hand in all of them. There are no stable ecosystems. Evolution is no longer survival of the fittest. It's survival of fastest to adapt to the random mutations man exacts on the world's ecosystems. But, are we really the Lords of all we survey? How much control do we really have here?
~~~~~~~~~~~~><.((((((((()'> 12.11.09
Outside of his disdain for big government, it turns out there's nothing wrong with Sutton or his article. I was the wrong one, for my knee-jerk reflex to discredit him rather than consider his arguments. Factually, his piece makes decent points. However, his article is just as pointed about ignoring opposing arguments, and that's what's wrong with the whole GW debate these days. It's no longer a debate, it's a fight, helped in large part by those biased British scientists and their leaked memos. Debate has been deflected from vital issues and questions that are a lot easier to answer than: is the world a half degree warmer today than yesterday? So, to help NBN's 10 readers understand where they stand in the Global Warming debate, we put together a questionnaire: If you answered yes to any or all of the above then you believe in alternative energy. If you answered yes to any or all of the above and you believe the polar bears are drowning, according to Mr. Sutton, you're a stooge of the global warming movement. <')((((((((><.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 12.09.09
That's just the first three of 1,415 Stimulus grants being spent by the Bay State. Wading deeper into the same documents we've got: Meanwhile, my buddy who just opened a deli downtown, is slugging it out in one of the worst economies since 1935. He would kill for that $25k for the alternative energy study in the swamp park HQ. It might carry him over until enough folks can afford again the killer Whoppie pies and lobster rolls he's making. Then he could hire some help. That prospect, Michael Graham would argue, is economic growth. Not changing light bulbs and short term make-work projects for university scientists. Here's comes the HOWEVER!
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<')((((((((><. 12.03.09 TRASH AIN'T NOTHIN' BUT CASH
You're supposed to have good lawyers, not good judges, aren't you? But this town worker was stating what has already been worked over in these pages before: environmental law is ripe for corruption and trash disposal is the low-hanging fruit. What was sad about the encounter outside the landfill was the odd alloy of respect and resignation in the town worker's voice. Whether it's Don Corleone's senatorial aspirations for his favored son or town code enforcement officers looking the other way on the construction projects of political donors, government power is at once respected and reviled in this country, even by those working for it.
You could argue the stream was already condemned by the town's original decision many decades ago to allow the landfill to be sited there. You could also argue anybody who “has a great judge” should not be sealing the fate of a 20-acre landfill. Government/private partnerships work reasonably well in many facets of American society. However, what kind of environmental oversight can we expect from government workers intimidated by the political powers of immoral garbage men. Like the great Sandy Padwe said: if you want to find political corruption look in the trash.
There are plenty of opportunities for making money in the environmental movement. Cleaning up the environment should not be one of them. <')((((((((><. GOOD OLD DAYS REDUX 11.30.09
It was a catharsis of sorts; my morning routine yanked like a wisdom tooth, the virtual void filled by once closely-held comforts now largely forgotten. If I had solar panels or a wind turbine fixed to my roof, I'd have never emerged from my computerized coffin that morning. Thanks to the vagaries of a company called National Grid I was forced back into a routine that was once a sanctuary, left to balance the virtues of self sufficiency against the certainty of corporate comforts embodied in a 16-ounce disposable coffee cup and four pounds of newsprint. All for $8. Thank you National Grid. You may just have saved my life. <')((((((((><. 11.27.09 DATA MATTERS
One scientist on the DEC boat helped me see the light. She noted that while the information gathered that day had little immediate value, it was really intended for long-term research. Nobody knew what the normal salt level on the bay should be. They didn't know how many anchovies to expected to find at any given time of he year. They didn't know what the water clarity should. That's because the data they were gathering was the first such organized effort to methodically gather such information. The information they were gathering she called baseline data and it's vital if we're every to tease out when things are going wrong in the environment. At the time I was doing the story, the Peconic Bay data gathering project was only a few years old, the information being gathered largely useless for immediate purposes. I wonder if it's still useless, now that they've got 15 years of “baseline” data to work with. The same sort of scientific practice, gathering baseline data, is the primary engine behind the nation's weather forecasting abilities. The federal government has been gathering baseline weather data for about a century. Hence there are about 18 different formulas, called models, which consist of millions of pieces of baseline information accumulated from countless snow storms, hurricanes and heat waves that are now employed to help us predict when to expect more of the same. The more such data is accumulated, the more accurate those predictions become. The same idea applies to this academic coalition mentioned at the top that's being formed now to study the Atlantic. It will likely take years before for these folks find anything of immediate use. But the data collection starts now.
<')((((((((>< 11.25.09 HOBSON'S CHOICES WITH HEATING PLANET
The economic powers aligned against global warming theory are formidable. This Time magazine link gives an excellent snapshot of how entrenched the oil industry is in American culture. Heck, our culture runs on oil. The lifestyle changes needed in this country to make a dent in global warming border on revolution. That's assuming we even can make such a dent in global warming. Those lifestyle changes and Big Oil are the reasons there is a global warming skeptics movement. Now, these scientists have gone and fueled that movement with some 43 pages of emails those same skeptics will be pouring over for further proof that global warming is a conspiracy. Along the way we lose the crucial argument that, not only is it possibly dangerous to be burning all this oil and coal, it's also unnecessary.
NBN would love to discover that global warming theory is wrong. We don't want to discourage any unbiased effort toward same. Accordingly, there is little we can do about the biased efforts without directing valuable resources away from the very serious tasks ahead and making ourselves look petty in the process. Here is the link to one of the more sensible global warming skeptics websites. Give these folks a few minutes. They make some good points. <')((((((((>< 11.23.09
I don't care if it's an Edsel, it's true. Looking quickly through Google News, we see that the nation is now a-howl with stories about sloppy bookkeeping surrounding the Stimulus spending plan. So, NBN thought it was time to do its own Stimulus plan audit. We turned to that paragon of propriety Sen. Tom Coburn, for some figures to work with. Below are Stimulus spending proposals the Senator from Oklahoma listed as the more aggregious in the president's spending plan, with a little of our own perspective added. • $1.3 billion for Amtrak What could we possibly need trains for, we've got cars? We're making light of a very serious matter; clearly there is a lot of taxpayer money in the Stimulus plan being poorly accounted for. We confess to pulling some pretty stupid Stimulus stuff out of the Senator's Stimulus posting linked above to help drive home our point. But we feel we've got a little self-righteous license, here. People like the senator, and even the very level headed editor over at Granite Slate, shrug their shoulders about the loss of American life and treasure in Iraq which, when all is said and done, will match or exceed what we're spending on the Stimulus. Yet they pounce on considerably less costly details in the Stimulus plan—Coburn's list starts with $1 billion for an experimental, zero-emission manufacturing plant MIT scientists even say is foolish. But that plant is still putting American's to work, and the occupational hazard is much lower than it is in Bagdad. The war in Iraq was an horrendous waste, yet opportunistic politicians tear at the soft white underbelly of a spending plan that, by and large, represents an enormous investment in the one thing that promises a return on thatinvestment: our own country. That is, of course, with one notable exception. That bridge for the Patriots football stadium has got to go.Let's spend the money on a new quarterback for the Jets. <')((((((((>< 11.19.09
Allow us to introduce the science of ethology. (Now, we're really going to start playing fast and loose with facts. If anyone out there wants to correct us, please do: (comments@nbnpress.com.) Ethology, very roughly speaking, is where cognition meets chromosome. It's examines the role of evolution in learning and, more radically, the possible role of learning in evolution. While there is obviously fertile ground here for the study of the evolution of animal instincts, ground zero in ethology is the human mind and the role, if any, our remarkable learning skills play in our evolution as a species. In short: can learned behavior somehow make its way into our DNA? (Anyone still reading?) If you accept this possibility, that learning can drive the process of evolution, than all animals, but particularly humans, are not just a product of random chromosomal screw-ups that provide an occasional competitive advantage over those less fortunately endowed. Space, and the alarming rise of adult ADHD, suggest that's enough about ethology in this column, suffice to say we gather some spiritual solace knowing learning could play a role in how we became human. It has a certain open-endedness that gives us high hope for what humanity can eventually become.
<')((((((((>< 11.18.09 GLOBAL WEARING?
<')((((((((>< 11.16.09 CATCHSHARE CALUMNY?
“The natural fisheries themselves also were said to improve. More selective and rational fishing, with reduced by catch and smoother levels of supply were described, as resulting from the removal of the impetus for fishermen, as quota holders, to no long race around in unorganized "derbies," liberated to create supply strategically to match demand....
Sadly, the reporter’s “analysis” offers up no alternative solution other than pining for the status quo in Gloucester. That’s because there is no solution. The good old days are gone. We're either going to manage these fisheries sensibly or we're going to destroy them. The reason these Pacific Coast communities “shrank” with the imposition of catch share is they were no longer over-exploiting a limited resource. This is science, there's little room for sentiment.
<')((((((((>< 11.13.09
<')((((((((>< 11.11.09 BRINY BLUE SALTED WITH SADNESS
That's all well and good. Those cruise companies that are members of the organization above are clearly cleaning up their act. So, let's muddy the waters a bit.
Before we just assume these floating condominium complexes are an affront to what ever ecosystem or community hosting them, this point worth giving some thought to. As we've discussed in these pages before, probably the worst part of dumping sewage, treated or otherwise—and certainly, some ships still dump the dirty stuff—is the e. coli bacteria. It will make you real sick if you eat it. But, it's not going to upset an ocean ecosystem--it's a different story for in-shore marine ecosystems. The grey water the ships dump presumably has soap, bleach, ammonia and detergent. In million-gallon doses, that's definitely bad for the environment. Then we've got the food, that's got to provide some nutritional value to fish, clams and plant-life that consume it. It's an interesting give-and-take which isn't as straight forward as it sounds when you first read the Fox News piece. Of course, I'm probably butchering the pros and cons here: the pollution damage from cruise ships has got to outweigh the benefits of the food they toss overboard. But by how much?
<')((((((((>< 11.09.09 CRYING WOLF IN WATER WARS
Make no mistake, the rivers these folks here are working to protect are very troubled. They are doing their areas a great service. Are they shouting a little louder than needed at a populace that's clearly responding to their call. Yes, the fed study cited above suggests that the message from such groups is getting across. Still, there's a certain element of overkill needed in the environmental activism biz. These people have to cry wolf. They have to be zealots. If not, the wolf will come knocking; whether it's a developer tapping into an already stressed stream or an aggressive, coal burning power company looking to meet an area's "expanding" energy needs. Until environmental sentiments start to seriously change in this country, we'll need the green groups fighting the good fight, even if they do shadow box from time to time. We can't rely on reason to win the day, not while tens of millions of American's still pledge alligence to powers like this.
As an aside, it's interesting what the fed study says about the Great Lakes. They hold 95 percent of is country's fresh water. Those are some Great lakes. At top above is the Ipswich River's western reaches, which run dry pretty much every August, with a lot of help from residential water wells that punctuate the surrounding earth like a pin cushion, extracting ground water needed to make the Ipswich a river. The Ipswich was declared the nation's third most endangered river a few years back. Looks more like Ipswich Pond in this picture. The Ipswich River Watershed Association was one of the groups protesting the Gov's water policy mentioned above. This is what they are fighting to protect. <')((((((((>< 11.04.09
Those haddock fish cakes I made checked in at about $10 each when you add on the $175 we spent to go fishing that day. We had fresh halibut for dinner last night, like the picture above, that cost about $5 a serving. It was brought in to the fish store that morning. You could shave by the oily sheen reflecting off the snow-white meat. That halibut was on a par with the finest dry-aged strip steak I've ever eaten, yet it was a half the price. (The fish cakes didn't compare.)
What about all the trawlers, who've made a living over generations doing work they love in God's Country? The price for the fish they catch should go way up and the number of fish they can catch should go way down. Is there anything wrong with having the environmental damage from catching these fish reflected in the price? Perhaps, we could leave certain sections of the ocean open to trawling while setting aside more areas as preserves to maintain the stocks of all the other species that depend on these ocean bottom ecosystems to remain in tact. Sadly, any way you fillet it, it's going to mean fewer fishing boats in the water. Just as we have to stop putting so much pollution into the air and ground, we've got to stop doing so much damage to our underwater environs as well. 11.04.09 ON GELDED POND
11.02.09
10.30.09
Reading the comments below the story provides insight into what is often the genesis of these conflicts, and they happen all the time, all over the country. The comments predictably run between; tax payer anger over big-brother meddling in private property rights, to resident indignation over an arrogant neighbor thumbing his nose at official policy designed to protect the environment everyone enjoys. No mention is made in the comments or the story of the real problem or the solutions available.
What if the home-owner approached the officials considering his landscaping plans and said: “what do I need to do to get these plans approved.” There are all kinds of mathematics that go into finding compromises here, as noted in this excellent Boston Globe piece. All the officials want is for rainwater to sink into the ground, before it goes into the lake, filtering out the fertilizer along the way. An asphalt driveway doesn't do that, a bluestone driveway does. There are also paving products out there that provide a rigid/permeable driveway surface, like this one below.
10.28.09
I just want to take a moment to describe my own epiphany this summer regarding another sport. My wife got me into hiking, using guilt like a scalpel. Hiking can be dangerous: there are cliffs and boulders involved that no sane man wants his wife negotiating alone. Not to mention the fringe element that can be found eking out an existence along some of the trails she is hiking, human and less-so.
10.26.09
Well, as we can see from this AP piece the public got the message and is now forgetting the message. We've got health care, the economy, and war now grabbing headlines and the drumbeat this SEJ fellow urged me and some 40 colleagues to take up, is apparently being drowned out. Or worse, the public is getting numb. What if this fellow had urged us to take a different approach to getting out the global warming message. Rather than crying “wolf” at every opportunity, what if he'd urged us to also cry “common sense.” There is a lot of common sense to curbing global warming. Stuff that immediately benefits the consumer, like cutting your gas bill in half by using more efficient cars. Just the term “global warming” seems to imply a sense of urgency, that's just not there, yet. Let's face it, if people aren't dying from global warming, nothing substantive going to be done about it. Even if Obama did make global warming an administrative priority, if he's having such a fight over health care, what are his chances of success over something as intangible as global warming. His cap and trade bill is already more symbol than substance.
We all know that figures lies, and I'd hate to be called a figurer. So, let's just take as a given that this country could save a boat load of money and improve our leverage on terrorism and other international issues with cars that get the same mileage as European models. It's also great for global warming. These ancillary arguments are the low hanging fruit for those concerned with global warming. There are myriad arguments, outside global warming, to support reducing green houses gases. So, when you write, or talk, about global warming, the money should be as central to your arguments as the polar bears or the fate of tropical islands. Unfortunately, saving the planet isn't enough these days. You've got to hit people in their pocketbooks. Here's another article from the folks in the Maldives which says global warming is a bigger threat than terrorism. That's the message to send these days. It's the ancillary arguments that hit closer to home that will help sell global warming initiatives. Global warming is as serious as a heart attack, but until you can prove it's killing people, we're not likely to do much about it. In the real world, if it bleeds, it leads. If it costs a ton, it's on Page 1. That's how you sell global warming. 10.23.09
10.21.09
You can take away my Hummer, make me recycle and eat farmed fish, but please, please don't touch my fireplace and barbecue. Is there no vestige of masculinity not in the crosshairs of the treehuggers? Like all things environmental, this issue is not that simple. This USA Today piece makes a powerful argument against wood stoves and Mother Earth News says wood stoves gives you cancer through something in the smoke called polycyclicorganic matter, or POM. (Kind of a nice name for a carcinogen.)
10.19.09
10.16.09
Wasn't the whole point of Cap and Trade to take the nation in a more efficient, cleaner direction. NBN is a big supporter of not letting conviction get too much in the way of a good compromise, but here Kerry seems to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Doesn't encouraging more offshore drilling, de-facto discourage the pursuit of greater fuel efficiency. We have too much oil, not too little. Gas prices are too cheap. We don't need more oil. Isn't there supposed to be a principle behind Cap and Trade.
What are our grandchildren going to think if all this gloom and doom comes true. They aren't going to be thinking anything, they are going to be swimming. It's not like our lives depend on driving Hummers. In some respects, it's obscene that we'd take such a risk with the future of our planet just so we can have a dozen cup holders in our cars. Wouldn't it send a better message to Congress and the Hummer crowd if Kerry just dropped cap and trade. Just said: “the heck with it.” It's been whittled down to a token measure anyway. Once again, NBN finds itself in the position of capitulating on this issue, PTP. In an earlier column we praised cap and trade as setting a vital precedent. But things change and opinions should change with them. Here's a useful piece on the car culture in this country, and why we're so resistant to changing it. 10.14.09
Remember when everything I was eating would have come in Styro-foam? Now, we don't even notice it's all been changed to biodegradable containers. This is a significant change which we now just take for granted. Presumably, this transition has come at the cost of fast food that cools a little more quickly then when wrapped in Styrofoam. Oh, the sacrifices we make to save the planet. On a less sarcastic note, let's extrapolate to what life would be like without powerplants. The solar panels and tiny wind turbines fixed to your roof come up short every once in a while so you have to go with out AC and be more careful about standing in front of the frig with the door open while you ponder the bacterial content of the month-old meatloaf. Small concessions, to possibly short circuit global warming, if possible, and end acid rain, very possible. There are hundreds more examples of the little concessions we can make, and are making, to make the world better. People will still throw their Big Mac wrappers out car windows. To stop that we have to stop fast food drive-thrus and they are way too much fun to allow that. BTW the Big-N-Tasty wasn't too shabby. The first edible burger from a fast food place I've seen in a while. 10.12.09
10.09.09
What the heck? The director, I believe, is the top environmental official in the state. The really sad part is the second half of the sentence: “...unless such land is located within an area which has been duly designated as a significant habitat." There are significant habitats all over the state that haven't been duly designated. For that matter, the same can be said for every state in the country. Does this bill mean projects won't be reviewed for possible threats to endangered species of animals unless the area is deemed environmentally significant before hand? Rather than just attack the politicians and say they are all corrupt, we try and imagine it from their perspective. They may not understand the significance of such a bill. They may see it as a small concession to a generous constituent who is helping them stay in office and fight the good fight a la Primary Colors. That doesn't seem to apply here. Look at the sponsors of the bill. There are well over 100 state legislators in Mass. yet the dozen or so who fixed their names to this bill are all from the Springfield area. What? Are they just more civic minded in Springfield? Something isn't right here, and the folks over at the State's Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program will see their entire legislative charge yanked out from underneath them if this bill is passed. NBN emailed a query about this to two Springfield area newspapers. No answer yet. 10.7.09 Do we really need gorillas in our midst?
10.2.09
Detractors will doubtless say this takes from the spirit of the park setting. If it means more money for the parks, who cares? We're not suggesting we post bill boards in the middle of the woods. But, in those areas in our nation's parks where civilization is already intruding on the solace-- i.e. the visitor's centers--let's let the marketers loose. This survey suggests it's an ideal marketing opportunity. So, let's give the folks who sell green a chance to pitch in our parks and maybe make a little more money to keep up those parks. Or even expand them. Just as important as the money that could be raised, is the message sent: Green is good. It would be nice if that message could just get out there on its own. But people in this country need advertizing to assure them that they are doing the right thing. Getting advertisers to use natural resources as marketing tools means popular sentiment backs the idea of protecting the environment. It's depressing to have to admit that “warm and fuzzy” advertising campaigns work as well, and probably better, than ads that just promote the better value of their products. But you only need to look at this commercial to see logic doesn't always rule the roost when it comes to what we buy and the marketing that gets us to buy it. Using our natural parks as a stage for promoting products that promote the environment may actually raise the nation's environmental awareness at the expense of private industry rather than taxpayers. Sounds likea good idea. Here's another survey about the power of green when it comes to commercials. And the survey said: these people buy green. Sorry, we couldn't get past all this talk of surveys without getting Richard Dawson into the act. Check out the link. It's a riot.
Back to the comments in the story. They are obviously a little charged up over the issue. Commercial fishing is an emotional issue. However they are exchanging solid information outside of the contentious atmosphere of a meeting hall where these issues so often get discussed. If you don't like what you're reading, you can stop reading. But your usually don't. As a result you hear the other argument. You don't like what you're hearing in a meeting hall, tempers seem to rise and the message tends to get lost in the medium. Yet another wonderful means of communication, compliments of the internet. As for the author of this story: He has the pelotas (look it up) to say in the first sentence of the story that the herring fishery “is healthy.” The reason he's writing the article is because there's disagreement over weather the fishery is healthy. Here's a reporter, saying he knows more than the scientists he's quoting. Is that objective? The beauty of it is, his editor let it go by. That's just flat wrong. If the writer is not capable of objectivity, he should be reassigned to cover school board meetings. Here's a video telling the story a little more objectively. Who do you believe? Hopefully these arguments will become moot. This study is just out, saying half the fish the world eats is raised in farms. That's another story for another day. 9.30.09
On the other side of the coin, we've got to spend more time listening to the ancillary arguments of the GW doubters if we're to effectively refute them. We're not familiar enough with those arguments to do them justice here, and that's the point. We should be. It's a given that many doubters have a huge conflict of interest, draining the credibility of their arguments. Coal companies are hard pressed to argue objectively on the subject. That doesn't mean we can't listen to them. GW theorists have their own credibility issues. The issue has been an economic boon to a whole litany of environmentalists and those just looking to make a fast buck. There are treehuggers out there making some pretty shady arguments, PTP, based on global warming hype. NBN is full of examples of exploitation of the environmental movement for personal gain. Even more subtle, is the exploitation of GW's gloom and doom prospects by environmental groups dependent on grants from local, state and federal governments sympathetic to their cause. Bad news on the environment is good news for these folks. There's an inherent conflict of interest here that we spoke about in the 7.13.09 ONews. It's easy, even for an environmentalist, to get tired, if not angry, over the endless drumbeat of global warming. Particularly when it means such a huge change of lifestyle to do anything serious about it.
9.28.09
Doing something about the farmer is trickier. We can ask the farmer to cut back on fertilizer use, and we eat more mediocre meals as a result. Or, look at all the algae explosions in a slightly different light. Sure cyanobacteria may be dangerous, even fatal, to humans. Some folks think it might be tied to Lou Gehrigs disease. But the algae, like the stuff over on the beaches in France, are also plants and plants are the the first step in converting these man-made fertilizer-driven chemical imbalances in the environment back into nutrients that can start making their way back up the food chain. The trick is getting the algae out of the water. That will start to lower the nutrient level in the water. In the short term, is it possible to more actively collect the stuff and find a use for it? Get volunteers out there with hand seine nets and chest waders. Get it out of the water before winter sets in. If there are any surrounding woods, dump it in the woods. Forest floors are starved of nutrients.
Obviously, it's not a simple solution. One more thought. As always, correcting the problems is going to cost money. As there is less and less wiggle room for polluting the planet, the costs of that pollution is going to go up, as is the price we pay for past pollution. Perhaps, we can increase the costs of the food. The nearly sensual ears of corn we've been nibbling on this past summer from Woodman's farm stand have cost 50 cents each. Ditto for equally superb produce we've been enjoying on Long Island. I'd be happy to buy them for $1.50. We eat very well in this country, it's why we're all shaped like bowling pins. Perhaps, we should be paying a little more for that food to cover the costs of preventing the pollution that has allowed our over indulgence to date. In the meantime, could you pass the corn? 9.25.09 WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE TOO OFTEN
On the same hike we came across another pond with a cow moose wading up to her shoulders. This was more like a beaver lake than a pond. It was easily seven or eight acres. More importantly, the dam the beavers built was not nearly as long, but it had to be about eight or nine feet high, at its highest. The beavers who built this were quite the engineers. They found an ideal location and apparently put in half the efforts that the beavers at the first impoundment put it. We walked past the base of this dam with some concern. If it gave we we'd be gone. That's a lot of trust to put into an animal with a brain the size of a small lemon.
Is there any reason to think the same won't happen with the country's mountain lion population. Or Grizzly bears? It's already happening with wolves. These animal populations may struggle a little after reintroduction efforts. But nature adapts. It's nature's MO. The peregrine population struggled for years and now it's taking off, PTP. Beavers in the northeast have gone from cute little industrialists under state and federal protection to royal pain in the neck in a few short decades. Yet Massachusetts has resisted calls to reintroduce beaver trapping. Admittedly, it's not the nicest way to kill an animal.
9.23.09
If we can't get significant international cooperation on life and death matters like war in Israel, how can we hope to get similar cooperation on more subtle matters like global warming. Notice there's no mention of the Mid-East oil producing nations in the first piece. They love global warming. What's another couple degrees when you live in the desert. Especially, since that extra thermometer action pays for your air conditioning.
We don't want to put down the importance of international cooperation. Setting such standards internationally can help establish global priorities. But to expect any real international changes is unrealistic in the absence of such changes not first taking place at home. Here's another piece on the proported importance of these talks. And just to balance the books, here's Roger Gay writing for Mens News Daily on the global warming hoax. That's a tough by-line. In hindsight, maybe Obama's right for not taking too tough a stand on global warming at the UN yesterday. He's got to establish his street cred, and healtcare is how he's going to do it. Then he can go after global warming. 9.16.09
The reason we write about it here is this: the real pollution often isn't in the river, it's under it. I know we've harped on this a few times at NBN: see our 8.20.09 article in this section about pollution being buried in river sediments. Today, we're going to look at how a river gets un-polluted, if that's indeed possible. Unpolluting a river is much more complicated than just upgrading sewage treatment plants and building retention ponds for road runoff. You've got to get under the river and we're going to use the Merrimack River in Massachusetts to illustrate. It's hard to imagine an American river that's suffered the environmental assault the Merrimack has. This was the birth place of industry in this country. There were some 40 mills in Lawrence alone. Not to mention Lowell, Haverhill and Nashua, NH, which also sit on the Merrimack. Those mills were originally powered by the Merrimack. What powered them was a system of canals built on the banks of a section of river that dropped some 40 feet over a quarter-mile stretch. That natural drop, much like a waterfall only more gradual, provided engineers the opportunity to tap hydro-power from the river by channeling the fast moving water through mill buildings. An example of those channels, or chases, are shown just below. As the water rushed through the basements it was channeled past turbines of sorts. First it was a systems of paddles that turned gears and pulleys on machinery on the floors above. (A more industrial version of this image.) Later on, that water rushed passed turbines powering electric generators, the modern-day version of hydro-power.
A little perspective is in order here. Raw sewage is an esthetically unpleasant form of pollution, but in reality it's an almost organic pollutant. For the most part, it's all biodegradable. The biggest problem with sewage is the bacteria, which will make you sick, but it won't give you cancer. On the other hand, chemicals like dioxin, toluene, polychlorinated biphenyls, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, nickel, de-greasing solvents, tetrahydrofuran, benzene, ethylbenzene and xylene will play hell with your kidneys, liver and even your teeth. Getting back to the Merrimack. All the above, and a laundry list of other goodies have soaked into the sediments and soil lining the Merrimack in these milltowns. Those chemicals are presumably seeping every day, with the ground water flow, into the MerrimackRiver itself. At what's known as the GenCorp property in Lawrence, those pollutants have seeped so deep into the earth surrounding the river, they are locked into the bedrock beneath the soil and can't be extracted.
Warning! Tangential digression approaching: The US EPA operative overseeing the GenCorp clean-up told me it wasn't named a Superfund site because GenCorp was doing such a fine job of addressing federal and state clean-up concerns for the site. However, a local newspaper editor opined at the time the Superfund decision was being made, that politics more than pollution played a role in keeping GenCorp off the roll of Superfund sites. That ruling came down about the same time the late Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy was taking heat over his nephew's rape allegations. Edward Achorn, now of the ProJo, speculated that Kennedy could have made life miserable for GenCorp director Michael O'Neil by pressing for the property to be put on the Superfund list. According to Achorn's column, O'Neil was a relative of the woman who was allegedly raped by Kennedy's nephew. Sorry, no link to Achorn's column. Back to the point. The GenCorp property is so completely steeped in pollution it will never be completely clean. However, keeping it off Superfund may have been the right decision. There was so much industry along the banks of the Merrimack, you can travel another half mile upstream and find soil holding the same sorts of nasty chemicals being extracted from the GenCorp site. The GenCorp property may be as much about drawing the line in environmental clean-ups as it is about removing pollution. But, is it an acceptable compromise?
In the 1950s they bought the land that went on to be designated as the new “Gateway” to the city of Lawrence. That's what put the environmental magnifying glass on the GenCorp mill complex. Their misfortune has been alleviated somewhat by tax credits that have been showered on the project. Still, last I checked, their bill for the clean-up was $30 M and counting—it could have been much higher if the project had been designated a Superfund site. General Electric has dropped $700M cleaning PCBs out of the Hudson. Sadly, there is no solution here. The damage is done and can't be fixed. The clean-up may be futile, but it is getting more pollution out of the ground. Still, it's entirely possible there's some chunk of sediment under one of the dozens of other industrial sites in the city that's contaminated with enough dioxin to give a rock cancer. Such potential contaminates are going to inexorably work their way toward, and eventually into, the Merrimack River. The river will then wash that dioxin, or some other chemcial, over the Joppa clam flats 20 miles downstream. There's been talk of re-opening those clams flats, closed for the past 50 years over pollution problems, now that the Merrimack is getting cleaner. But is it, really? The EPA official mentioned above said there are “tens of thousands” of ground water samples taken from this site. I examined a few hundred of them myself, at EPA's Salem, MA, records center. Several of the tests had bewildering entries, some scratched out and reentered numerous times. It would be easy to hide all manor of environmental diseaster in the shelves of files on this cleanup site in Salem. I think I'm the only one who has seen them. Which brings us to the point of this column. Is the Gateway clean-up worth doing? Is it more than just an opportunity for the EPA and MassDep to say they are doing their jobs? Even the gargantuan Hudson River clean-up by GE is a more easily defined project than cleaning the banks of the Merrimack. Why hold GenCorp accountable when the pollution they are cleaning up got its start decades before they bought the land. Not to mention, there are hundreds of acres of polluted soil surrounding it. Those are tough arguments. Any way you cut it, bad stuff is being taken out of the ground at the Gateway site. GenCorp doubtless put some of that bad stuff in there and is now being held to some account. Could that money have been put to a better use environmentally? No doubt. Is government effort to hold polluters responsible working as it should? Sort of. But, is it deterrent or remediation 9.14.09
The new forest managers are not clear-cutting tracks of land creating erosion problems along the way. In many cases, this iwork is going on inside stunning, pristine wilderness with lakes, rivers and ponds, interspersed with areas of regrowth that were recently cleared, like the one above. What do you do with a 30,000 acre patchwork of north-Maine wilderness in various stages of regrowth? That's where the management companies come it. These companies actually cut down trees in an environmentally sensitive fashion and return part of the timber revenue to the owner, sort of like how a stock pays dividends. Only these dividends are pretty small. At least, that's what the company linked above told a group of marauding environmental journalist who stopped by their operations one day in 2005.
The key difference between these newer forestry management operations and the clear cutting are the forest managers themselves. They decide which trees can be taken down with minimal damage to the habitat of birds, bears and all the other forest flora and fauna. In theory, it was far more healthy for the forest than the clear cutting the paper company had conducted for the past 150 years. The forest management was also conducted with an eye toward encouraging the natural succession of the forest from secondary growth of smaller, more scraggly, woodlands to mature stands that dominated the landscape in Indian days and can still be found in the Pacific Northwest. These new forest managers are serving more than one master--their paychecks are signed by a company trying to squeeze as much timber money as possible out of the forest while appearing to help it. Still, you have to admire the effort. Those less admiring were the surrounding communities. For centuries they depended on the pulp-paper industry for jobs. When those jobs dried up, they diversified by taking folks fishing, hunting and snow-mobiling in the paper company's woods. with the blessing of the paper company which still owned them. Now, private investors are posting no-trespassing signs and enforcing them.
9.09.09
The point is, the government stats probably are way off, but who needs them? All you need is bait and a hook to know the fish aren't there in nearly the numbers they used to be. In ENews we go into the first real Northeast test of a quota system of fisheries regulations called catch shares. Fishermen don't take a shine to catch shares because it's just not like fishermen. Catch shares limit the number of fish a boat can catch. It's different from the present quota system, which limits the total number of fish all boats can catch. The old way, one lucky boat, or particularly skilled captain, could have a wonderful year while those less gifted and fortunate could be skunked. The harder and faster you worked the more money you made. Catch shares get away from what fishing is all about: luck, skill and hard work. Catch shares also gets away from something fishing was never about and has now ruined the industry: greed. Most traditional commercial fishermen, if given a chance, just want to earn a living in what is a singularly wonderful way to do it: captain of your own boat out at sea. But with today's modern technology, it's possible to make a killing out there. In a few short seasons you can make enough to retire. Read the wonderful book “Hooked: A True Story of Pirates, Poaching, and the Perfect Fish.” It's about the the rise and fall of the Chilean Seabass and the global damage modern fishing can do, and how quickly it can be done. A little over a decade ago, Chilean Seabass was as plentiful as New England cod was a century ago. Now, it's another fish on the ropes.
9.07.09
8.31.09
The next commercial was even more infuriating. It's the one where the mother drops her son off for his first day at high school. The supremely self-confident kid says nothing as he strides past his future classmates. They gawk at the car and one says: “Nice Ride,” as the commercial closes.
Through my jaundiced eyes, it seemed Hummer drivers were 75 percent white, balding, middle-aged men and the rest were 30-something white women. Talk about a niche market: angry white males and the terminally vain. My anger got to the point were I'd glower at people driving these things thinking they'd have a change of heart and buy a Honda Fit. Never mind that I didn't personally know a single Hummer driver. It's a lot easier to hate people when you don't know them.
Once again, you find out that life isn't what it seems when you take a harder look. My friend with the Suburban is a caring decent, arguably over-stressed, loving mother of three. In her eyes, she needed that Suburban. The scene inside her car was like a Buddist temple compare to the chaos in the VW of my childhood. Warning! Personal anecdote approaching! It was beautiful! My brothers and I waited until we knew we were more than half way to the beach before we'd start fighting. My mother would threaten to turn the car around, but never did. We knew she wanted to go to the beach as badly as we did. Who wants to sit in a house in Westfield, NJ, on a hot summer day when you can spend the same time at Sandy Hook? There did seem to be an odd correlation between our behavior on the drive over and how closely our mom watched us as we played in the surf. Back to the point. Odds on favorite, Hummer drivers are just as nice and caring as my friend with the Suburban, and a lot of other drivers for that matter. Hummer drivers were just doing what they want to do, like Happy Jack. More importantly, there was no one telling them not to. Just the opposite. It was the message of America during a time that perhaps history will have us less proud of. The people writing that message deserve the brunt of the blame. (Those who bought the message have nothing to be proud of, either.) It looks like the hammer is coming down on the Hummer folks. Drive down the roads today and the number of SUVs has plummeted, now that efficiency is all the rage. It's unfortunate that something like efficiency can be trendy, but you take what you can get. Survival will force the changes on civilization that it will. Hopefully, in the future, practicality not vanity, will pay the majority role in advertising campaigns and consumer decisions. In the meantime, Hummers must be selling for a song. Maybe I'll get one. Just for driving around town. 8.26.09 Raising the White Flag on Invaders
This woman was so impassioned because the water chestnut is turning the Charles and other robust New England rivers into swamps. This isn't just bad for boating, it plays hell with the environment. In italics below is an excerpt from this article, that's puts the threat of invasives into some perspective: “About 400 of the 958 species that are listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act are considered to be at risk primarily because of competition with and predation by non-indigenous species. In other regions of the world, as many as 80% of the endangered species are threatened due to the pressures of non-native species.” Wow! Time to start ripping the water chestnuts out of the Charles River, right? Read this piece, before you break out the chest waders. Then read this piece and this one and this one. New Hampshire just fired up its own newsletter on the subject. What? don't feel like devoting the entire morning to reading about a serious environmental problem with no apparent solutions? Then let me over-simplify this complex problem for you and make up a few statistics.
So, invasive species are being brought in to control invasive species. Hmmmmmmm. When I did a story on folks using the loosestrife-eating beetles in Massachusetts, there was only one scientist who asked what might happen if these imported insects started eating other stuff. Does the insect takes over another environment? Do we then have another invasive species to worry about? At left is the saltcedar plant. Look along the banks of the Colorado River around Utah if you want to get an appreciation of how dense this plant can grow. There are 10-foot-tall thickets of saltcedar that provide the coolest maze around the base of these plants.
The solution I propose is one that enraged the chestnut woman and will probably enrage others. Here goes, anyway. Leave the invasives alone. Just let nature take its course. You could argue that invasives are a man-made problem and man must fix it; there is nothing natural about zebra mussels traveling to the Great Lakes in the hulls of cargo ships. However, it's possible that, to steal a line from Jurassic Park, Nature will find a way. It may take years, possibly decades, but as it is now, we're losing this battle, badly. One need only circumnavigate New York City and see the endless acres of invasives phragmites to see that plant is here to stay. And yet people are ripping it out of ponds where it is blocking the view of the water in Orient, NY, about 90 miles to the east of the city. Perhaps, if people want go rip out invasives like water chestnuts and phragmites, it might keep water ways open for boating, but it's got to wreak havoc on the environment underwater, which has already had to adjust to the invasive plant. And while invasives can be problematic, they can also provide some good for the environment and people. Baby fish love to have weeds to hide in. Green crabs are an invasive that have become a favorite food for black fish on the East Coast. Blackfish are delicious. Read this well-written piece about a Canadian using phragmites for roofing material.
These is, perhaps, another useful point to be made here. These invasive plants and animals have one thing in common, they can eventually become food for something. Is it unreasonable to think that something may eventually start to eat kudzu. The plant's been around for almost 40 years, but that's a blink of an eye in ecological terms. And like the picture at left suggests, we're growing tired of fighting it. Perhaps some mold will eventually spring up and wipe it out. Or maybe some bacteria will appear to eat all the zebra mussels. It doesn't seem an unreasonable argument when you look at how hard farmers have to work to keep pests and disease out of farm fields. Row upon row of identical plants invariable produces some sort of insect, mold or bacteria that goes ballistic on the feast set before them. Is there a parallel we can draw between environments overrun by a single invasive and farm fields planted with a single crop? Another thing to think about is this: how much of our spare time and money can we put into stopping plants and animals that are fighting to stay alive, day and night, 24/7. We'll lose that fight. Like it or not, invasive plants are living by the one law of nature: survival of the fittest. All the volunteer efforts, like the chestnut woman and the beetles, might buy nature a little time to find a less invasive way to battle invasives. At NBN we prefer to let nature take it's course, as unnatural as that may be sometimes. 8.19.09
A century ago, duck farms on Long Island's East End flushed incalculable amounts of duck poop through the creeks and into the bays where it got locked into the sediments in Great Peconic and Flanders bays. It's believed the juice from that duck poop even today is adding to what's generally accepted to be too much nitrogen in the water sending the bays' environment into low gear. But the problem is much more complicated in our rivers, here's why.
Why belabor all the bad news? Because it gets at a thorny issue bloocking, what some science suggests, could be a major step forward in improving the health of nation's rivers. Dam removal. Let's take a step back. Imagine the river bottom, or bay bottom, as something like a tea bag filled with pollution that settled out of the water decades ago when environmental regulations were more lax. Since then, sediment has continued to settle onto the river and bay bottoms, only now it's got less pollution. Nonetheless, as water washes over the new, clean sediments, that old pollution keeps slowly seeps out. Hence the tea-bag effect, that I just made up. Over time, the seepage should decreases, just like a tea bag looses its strength. But, every once in a while something comes along, like a dredge barge, that stirs those sediments up again. Presto! You get a whole new teabag. Just like the Hudson River PCB project just stirred up a whole new crop of PCBs. It will take a long time for those chemicals to work their way out of the river. (Even a severe storm can help liberate old poisons from river-bottom sediments.)
So, once again we're paying for the sins of our past. These fish runs today are a shadow of what colonists reported finding before the nation's rivers were turned into power plants and sewer systems. History has it, you could walk across the backs of the blueback herring in the Connecticut River years ago. You can't disparage the ingenuity of our founding fathers. Their ability to squeeze energy from these water bodies laid the foundation for a powerful nation that I hold very dear. But what about the dams? Rip them out! Get rid of them all! There are all kinds of problems with this. First some of these dams are power plants, others are vital to drinking water supplies and recreational resources. Then, lets not forget all the lakefront homes that will become river- and stream-front homes. Those issues may make a more powerful case against removal in a limited number of cases. But we have 75,000 dams relentlessly seeping unknown toxins into our rivers and streams. I'm not a hydrologist, but it seems that releasing the toxins locked in those sediments in one big rush might be the most sensible solution. Here's why. If you remove the dams you flush the sediments behind them into calmer waters—like the ocean or Peconic Bay—where they are less likely to be stirred up again. It's useful to note that some really nasty stuff could get release into our salt water marshes and esturaries—further hobbling the very foundation of the marine food chain, which is already struggling with road-runoff. But once it's done, it's done. All that stuff will eventually get locked up in the sedminets of much slower moving waters like our bays and oceans where it will eventually loose potentcy, like a teabag. If I understand plate-tectonics correctly, that pollution will remain entombed for a few hundred million years before emerging as a mountaintop mineral in the middle of Tibet. And who cares what happenes on a Tibetian mountaintop in the year ten million and ten? (That's got to be a new record for butchering theory in as many of the natural sciences as can be squeezed into one scenario!) I oversimplyfy here and undoubtedly unfairly so to the scientists meansureing PCBs in the GE Hudson River dredging project. But I think a little devil-be-damned might go a long way, and save a lot of money, toward solving the problems of contaiminated sediments in our rivers and behind our dams. And if we want to get these rivers really clean, clean enough to pull clams from the mouth of the Merrimack again—ENews, July 24, 2009—then we've got to get these rivers really clean. And lets not forget the fish runs. Maybe some day again we'll be able to walk across the backs of the blueback herring swimming up the Connecticut River. 8.17.09 When Anarchists Become Activists
They could then measure the amount of CO2 absorbed and sell that for carbon credits to companies that produce a lot of CO2, like coal-buring power plants. (Carbon tax credits have been around for a while, Obama's Cap and Trade just stepped toward mandating them. Here's a very well written piece on carbon credits pre-Obama.) Ocean iron seeding sounded like a money maker and Planktos went public. Planktos bought a boat, filled it with iron dust and was mapping plans to dump it into the ocean. Planktos stock reached $1.95 pershare.
8.14.09 Is the Fox Guarding the Gravel Pit? The federal government lowered a $2.8 million-boom on a Massachusetts-based gravel and cement company for discharging sediment and cement-laced water into surrounding waters. It's the largest industry penalty to date, according to this piece in the Salem News. It's the sort of story that tree-huggers like myself love. A Goliath industry ruthlessly destroying the environment gets whacked by the defender of public resources, the Environmental Protection Agency. But what if the crime didn't fit the punishment. Conversely, what if the EPA is letting worse polluters off the hook? It doesn't, and they are. As discussed before in NBN, EPA enforcement actions are far too expensive and EPA agents far too underpaid to expect everything to work the way it should. It's a recipe for corruption that's likely only to get worse as environmental concerns become more dire. This is the grossly oversimplified story of the Beede Waste Oil Superfund site in Plaistow, NH.
At some point in the late 1970s and early 1980s it's determined that there are serious problems at Beede. Yet, the state's Department of Environmental Services continues to license Beede as a waste oil recycling center. Gas stations, community public works garages, Exxon Mobile, a Berkshires ski resort,...in all some 2,000 Beede customers go on doing business with the place, despite the pollution problems, with state assurance the place is a legal repository for waste oil.
Certainly, one way to view this is that: Beede had so many customers that shutting the place down may have made life very difficult for thousands of customers who depended on it. Another way of looking at it, and this is where it gets complicated, the state and federal governments needed someone to blame for Beede.
The EPA needed to clearly document the list of customers using Beede before it could go after them for clean up costs. One EPA official presiding over this case told me Beede was exceptional among Superfund sites, because it had such a clearly documented customer list: called primary responsible parties, or PRPs. The Beede case, because it has so many PRPs, is seen as something of a test case for the reach of the Superfund statute for seeking such clean-up costs.
And what of the gravel and cement company that provided the great segue into this story? There are mostly being fined for erosion control and stormwater discharge violations involving -truck washing water. Taking another leap of faith here: cement is essentially organic, it's limestone that's super-heated to form quicklime, the main ingredient in cement. Erosion involves sediment, A.K.A. dirt, washing into rivers and streams. Used waste oil washing into rivers and streams sounds a lot worse and yet these folks are getting hung out to dry, along with many of Beede's customers. Make no mistake, the EPA has done great things and most of the folks working for them do so out of conviction and at great professional sacrifice. The point here is, a higher public price is paid when things don't go as they should inside EPA's offices, and that should change. 8.12.09 Fuzzy Math for Coal-burning Plant
The plant is expected to emit 30 percent less pollution than older coal plants and it's being touted as a vital, reliable source of power for a fast-growing region desperately in need. It will put coal miners to work which will also mean more mountain top mining which, at least one Virginia pol says, takes a toll on tourism. Here's a letter from one power company official perhaps better explaining the need for the plant. Here's a good Virginia Pilot piece weighing the local pros and cons.
Let's factor in a few intangibles: solar power is free energy, coal costs money. Both plants will need upkeep. The solar panels need to be kept clean for maximum output, the coal plant needs to discard the coal ash. Coal is reliable power, solar performance is effected by the weather. There's something we're leaving out...what is it? Oh yeah. Global warming, that most intangible of the intangibles. We'll leave that out for now. This is the math we need to start doing on a daily basis for everything around us, and there's nothing easy about it. For me it's a no-brainer, but I don't work in a coal mine and didn't work in any of the numerous Appalachian furniture factories that have gone out of business in recent years. Take a hike along the Appalachian Trial, the environment looks like it's in pretty good shape from that vantage point. Are we willing to pay twice as much upfront for what's essentially free energy for the rest of our lives, or go with the dirty alternative which means a lot of jobs right away, costs a lot less up front, but continues to cost down the line? The power plant company representative in a letter to a local paper there said this of the solar option: “in order for (energy) efficiency to reach such a scale, sweeping changes in human behavior would be required.” Is it time for a change in human behavior? Another intangible, I guess. 8.10.09
This past weekend I sat on the deck of my parent's waterfront home a short distance from that chained roadway mentioned above. I wondered what gave the folks using a similar right-of-way past our house the notion that it was OK to sit on MY bulkhead. Then I remembered something my father said years ago when the same situation arose and we'd just been living on this beautiful stretch of waterfront for a few years. Back then, they were hippies hanging around our beach, drinking beer and clearly enjoying life. I asked my dad what they were doing on our beach. He said so long as they aren't throwing out grapefruit rinds or beer cans, he pretty much didn't care what they were doing. Let's complicate the picture. Our neighbor on Long Island is the nicest person you could hope to have living next door. This home is his summer home. He has half the beach we do. When the hippies show up, they are a lot closer to his home than ours and he resents them a lot more than my dad. And believe me, you don't want his property tax bill or my father's. This problem has become an epidemic nationwide with the recent real estate boom, but it's not likely to cool down now with the drop in prices. What's the answer? The public must continue to use these public resources, don't be deterred by landscaping, pavement or angry property owners. But keep in mind whose taxes make that access possible. Make sure to clean up your grapefruit rinds and beer cans. 8.5.09
These shut-downs are no minor inconvenience. The idea that it's being done in futility on any given year is frustrating and brings into question the whole policy. Take a gander, PTP (Pardon the Pun) at this note just in from MassWildlife. Peregrin falcons were once as scarce as hensteeth, PTP. Now, their numbers are taking off, PTP. Ditto for the Northeast's osprey population. I was just down on Long Island, NY and the birds were circling overhead everywhere. When I was growing up down there, ospreys were nonexistent. And, we all know the success of the bald eagle in the Lower 48 over the past decade. That's the way it works, according to MassWildlife's wildlife expert Tom French. The populations of these struggling species will not respond immediately to restoration measures taken on their behalf. They take a little while then, when numbers reach critical mass, the populations take off. That's what happened with the striped bass populations of the East Coast. But it does beg the question of how much sacrifice should be made on behalf of these critters when you don't see the kind of improvements you want, and the piping plover is being generously out-shined by the raptors. The piping plover is not a raptor. In the survival-of-the-fittest scale, they are quite a few rungs down from the raptors and just a few rungs above earthworms before learning to fly. Raptors numbers dropped sharply when the pesticide DDT, which built up in the fish they eat. That weakened their shells so the mother osprey, falcon eagle...ect, couldn't sit on them. The DDT didn't help plovers any either. But, they are also suffering from habitat loss and that's a much harder problem to correct than just banning DDT.
Warning Tangential Digression Approaching. Here's a story where the sacrifice doesn't seem too great for the effort and reward. To save these very rare whales all Exxon has to do is back off on oil exploration for a few months a year. It sounds a lot like closing the beaches, but Shell is working in the same area and they agree to the same conditions.
The folks pointing the fingers are interlopers, people who for the most part moved to this town from other parts and now are resented for interfering in local goings-on. Isn't that pretty much how it goes. The local property owners are the ones caught up in the pollution problems. In Civil Action the fellow owned the property that Beatrice and Grace befouled. He was part of the community. Now you've got Town Hall officials giving the hospital the benefit of the doubt, great benefit, project opponents would say. Here's another example that never made it into the local papers in a town not far from this hospital. Haverhill, MA, is a former milltown that saw plenty of pollution along its extensive Merrimack River shores. There is a cesspool pumping business owned by a very prominent Haverhill businessman that is right on the river. One day I get an email about a story I'm doing on cesspool inspectors working for this company that are handing in incomplete and inconsistent inspections to the town officials who oversee the private inspectors. Some of those inspectors started making a fuss, hence the story. The email says there's much more to this company than bogus inspections. Specifically, they have a pipe leading from their property into the city sewer plant, next-door. I get a hold of this fellow, get his name and testimony that he has aerial pix of this cesspool company pumping untreated waste directly into the town's treatment plant. He is supposed to pay for each gallon he dumps into that system. It's a fee the cesspool company owner is charging customers but never paying himself. This is the goose that laid the golden...ahem. And nobody is paying any attention to him. Here comes the punchline: as I'm writing the story, a call comes in from Massachusetts State Sen. Steven Baddour. He wants to know why I'm writing the story and goes on to tell me what a great guy this cesspool company owner is. This, after I spent a week tracking down another source who confirmed everything the email fellow said. The anonymous source told me I was just scratching the surface, that the business owner “owned” Haverhill. The editor was right. It went no where because I had seven stories to write that week and small town corruption is part of American life. Not just in Massachusetts, but in towns across the country. And what better place to reap the rewards than environmental clean-up. Going by the book is prohibitively expensive. Look the other way and the pay-off is equally large. I've written already on June 8, 2009 about the Greenport, NY, mayor in ONews. You've haven't heard about the former East Brunswick, NJ, mayor and the PA landfill. The point is, in the hospital town, and in Haverhill and in New Jersey, and on Long Island the fox is so often guarding the chicken coop, it takes outsiders to shed a little light. July 28, 2009 Somehow, a press release extolling ESPN'S environmental sensitivity rings hollow. Every sports star you see is driving an Escalade and spending money like a, well, like a sports star. Being wasteful is an industry MO. So, we have to ask: does it bolster the planet's environmental ambitions to boast about the green measures taken by organizers of ESPN's annual ESPY awards? Or does it dilute those ambitions.
Host Samuel L. Jackson, will be joined by Tiger Woods, Michael Phelps, Dana Torres, Condoleezza Rice, Demi Moore, Kobe Bryant, and Rob Lowe. These folks are not famed for their conservative lifestyles. Have any of them done any commercials about the importance of recycling? It's wrong to just damn the effort by the ESPYs: any environmentalism is good environmentalism. These problems we face are not going anywhere, regardless of how we temporarily prostitute the movements dedicated to solving them. But it seems like ESPN is jumping on the bandwagon here, paying lip-service to a movement because it's trendy.
Along the same lines, the company that's promoting the Green ESPYs, a company called Beyond Zebra, sounds like they got off on the right foot: a couple of gals from Disney who wanted to take environmentalism a little more seriously. Read their mission statement, it's great. It's also completely at odds with this ESPY awards thing Beyond Zebra is now promoting. Then look at this group of Texas housewives, doing it for the love of the game, so to speak. And in Texas no less, taking their message into our nation's oil heartland. It's hard to say Beyond Zebra has sold out. I'd be doing backflips if ESPN called me to handle their PR. It's easy to sell out when no one is paying you not to. It's even easier when no one is paying you at all. July, 24, 2009 This is bound to confuse you, but I've not got the time to rewrite. Read the article, it says it all. Hugging trees is not enough if we want to change climate change. We've got to live it, not preach it. The author notes that environmentalists of every ilk somehow manage to justify the pollutions they still put in the air through all manner of self-deserservidness. I thought about this when my wife and I were driving to Long Island recently. We live a five-minute drive from the train that could take us to the ferry that could take us to Long Island. We have a car waiting on the other side. Yet, we happily burned through 40 gallons of gas because we didn't want to be inconvenienced. (We made the car trip in two hours instead of the five required to take mass transit, BTW) Climate change is a matter of lifestyle change and how much you are willing to do. So far, even the best of us, this article argues, are doing too little. By way of extention of this argument, the article makes the point that this lack of complete conviction, by the holier-than-tho has placed climate change arguments at a disadvantage to those arguing against the problem. Their convictions run much deeper,more completely than ours. Very interesting point. July 22, 2009
What could this possibly have to do with the Connecticut River's shovelnose sturgeon population? The scallops and sturgeon are a renewable resource that generate income. Learning more about them will at very least improve out ability to sustain this fishery if not make more money off it. It will definitely broaden general scientific knowledge. Can the fans of McPhee make the same claim about the Beantown PD's mounted police? A better question still is: why did you just spend about five minutes to get to this question? Because, we're going to have to answer a lot more questions just like this, and the disparity here is very problematic. I can think of no better way to spend $1 million than attempting to help the scallop industry back to its feet, and I've got about three readers. McPhee, who has millions of fans, wants to spend that money on nostalgia with zero return on investment. It's our past that has made our future so complicated. Ask yourself: can we afford these indulgences anymore? 7.15.09
Both are espousing centralized energy generation and distribution: power plants. The president's focus on wind and solar energy decentralizes power production and distribution. Ask yourself which seems safer in terms of national security: electricity that's generated in small amounts across the country delivering energy for local consumption or large power plants generating large amounts of electricity for regional distribution. Which is easier to target if you are a terrorist? Now ask yourself which seems better for our economy, the capital intense, highly localized construction of power plants, or the gradual, nationwide installation of solar panels and windmills. With power plants you have a huge burst of very centralized economic activity orchestrated by a large corporation. With solar panels and windmills there is a sustained, lower level of business distributed nationwide to small business owners. If you're not swayed so far we'll forget about global warming and environmental arguments. This should all be obvious, which makes the last point particularly important. Former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee on Fox News was backing Palin's remarks asking viewers why would anyone want to ignore American energy reserves in favor of remaining dependent on Arabian oil. What Huckabee seems to be ignoring is that solar and wind power sources replace the Arabian oil. Ask youselves, does argument make more sense than those listed above? Shouldn't we be independent of the oil companies as well? Trash Trackers
7.13.09 GRAY AREAS FOR GREEN GROUPS
When it comes to green groups a good rule of thumb is the more grant money in the annual budget the less elbow grease in the schedule of events. Take the Shawsheen group: this link says it all about them. The MRWC and the NFEC types are a little harder to figure. Six years ago the MRWC spent millions on some very sophisticated watershed analyses. This was science in its purest sense. They were doing chemical analyses, they weren't pulling old tires from the riverbank. When Massachusetts Gov. Mit Romney pulled the plug on the the state's five-year watershed initiative—in it's fourth year—the MRWA's efforts went down the drain. The executive director a skilled administrator named Donna Brazil was replaced by a considerably less able woman whose prime directive it seemed was to get people to pay attention to the SRWA. There was one event she scheduled where a half dozen experienced state biologist explained their research to a sparse collection of lower caste state political staff and me, an environmental reporter for the Eagle Tribune. It was an excruciating exercise in bureaucratic thumb twiddling. I didn't even get a story out of it.
July, 7, 2009 Plucking statistics out of thin air is perhaps a dicey practice for a website dedicated to simplifying science, but what the heck, I'm the editor here. Lets say about half of the people who like to swim in lakes and oceans know anything about the biology of the water they swim in. Lets further speculate that maybe a tenth of those understand the role seagrasses play in that biology. That means this Associated Press story on the disappearance of 58 percent of the worlds seagrasses is pretty much lost on everyone. Yet this story touches on one of the strongest testaments to the widespread nature of the damage we're doing to this planet through a nearly invisible form of pollution called runoff. Seagrasses are to our coastal environments what trees are to our forests. They provide shelter to creatures that can't live without it. To steal a term from college biology, they are vertical substrate. What's perhaps less understood by the swimming pool set, is the number of different creatures dependent on this shelter. Caution, long personal anecdote approaching! I was snorkling along New York's Peconic Bay shore this weekend. I know this shoreline well. We used to spear eels there as kids. We caught blowfish, by hand. We tiptoed around poisonous toadfish, played with the pipefish, and marveled at the legions of baby winter flounder. Even an occasional seahorse, a relative of the pipefish, would turn up in the minnow nets we'd pull along the seagrass bed that formed a 30-foot-wide belt of shelter for all of the above throughout the Peconics. All the above were no where to be found in the time I spent in the water this weekend.
Finally, we have to ask what is the ultimate cost of losing the seagrasses. Wiser minds than mine are working hard on the answer right now. President Obama has pledged $167 million to help restore some of these ailing ecosystems. Time to cloud the issue a little. In fresh water the reverse seems to be happening. Algae, and plants called invasives, are clogging ponds, lakes, rivers and streams. So much so, they are becoming more like swamps than ponds and lakes. Enormous effort and money is being spent to tear them out. In short, we're struggling to pull the plants out of fresh water and put them back into the salt water. This is so confusing because environments are ecosystems, emphasis on the word system. There are many parts working together. When one goes the effects are felt everywhere.
June, 29, 2009 This press release is a serious and apparently sincere refutation by a group called the NCEE of a federal global warming study just out. The release is a commentary by the NCEE tacked onto the top of the EPA study it’s criticizing. The NCEE commentary cites myriad scientific inconsistencies in global warming theory as presented in the EPA study and the commentary makes a few good points. Specifically, GW isn’t as bad as the EPA says because 1) the economic downturn has likely reduced greenhouse gas emissions evidenced by plummeting gas prices. 2) Solar activity, like sun spots, have a profound but otherwise unknown impact on this planet’s climate that have nothing to do with GW
This company is looking to give bottle water magnates Nestle competition. Here's another air purifier company and then there's something called a membrane bioreactor which scrubs pollution out of groundwater in contamination sites like old gas stations. (This last one is worth a read. Few people have a grasp of the tens of thousands of gas stations and leaky chemical plant underground storage tanks that have ruined ground drinking-water supplies across the country. Clean up efforts swell the ranks of Superfund sites and costing billions annually!)
June 23, 2009
One scientist on the boat helped me see the light. She noted that while the information gathered that day had little immediate value, it was really intended for long-term research. Nobody knew what the normal salt level on the bay should be. They didn't know how many anchovies to expected to find at any given time of he year. They didn't know what the water clarity should. The information they were gathering she called called baseline and it's vital if we're every to tease out what environmental problems we have control over and which we don't have control over. At the time the Peconic Bay project was only a few years old, the information being gathered largely useless. I wonder if it's still useless, now that they've got 15 years for of “baseline” to work with. The same sort scientific practice, gathering baseline data, is now the primary engine behind the nation's weather forecasting abilities. The federal government has been gathering baseline weather data for about a century. Hence there are about 18 different formulas, called models, which consist of millions of pieces of baseline information accumulated from countless snow storms, hurricanes and heat waves that are now employed to help us predict when to expect more of the same. The same idea applies for this coalition being formed now to study the Atlantic. It will likely take years before for these folks find anything of immediate use. But the data collection starts now. Caution! Anecdote approaching. I did a story on Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's decision to end a five year data-gathering program on the state's watersheds. Romney killed the program in its final year. He did it to save money. In the process he threw out five year's worth of research before it could culminate.
June 18, 2009
The point I wish to make here is the hypocrisy. Or is the word disingenuous-ness? How much local say was there when Shoreham Nuclear Power plant was built and then scuttled on Long Island in NY? Where were the local environmental commissions and plannerswhen Spectra Energy leveled a 670 mile swath of New England wilderness to deliver gas from Nova Scotia to Boston? How many dozens of towns did that pipeline cross through? I personally walked a few miles of that pipeline, it wiped out sensitive forest wetlands.
June 17, 2009 The federal government wants to invite more input on how best to let US fishermen catch as many swordfish and giant tuna as possible without killing all sorts of other creatures that aren't quite as tasty, or valuable. These two fish, despite how much mercury may be dissolved into their muscles, can fetch over $10,000 a piece at dockside, even higher since sushi came on the scene. They are prized game, not to mention a ton of fun to catch. Not surprisingly stocks plummeted as European and US swordfish fishermen have gone after them with dollars bills blinding them to the turtles, dolphin and undersized fish killed in the process.
This fellow seems to have overlooked one very important detail in his editorial. He's right about the regulation overkill the federal government has indulged in, especially in matters environmental. Some of the regs are working against public interest. Nowhere in all of government bureaucracy has so much power been handed to enforcement agents making so little money. A quick personal story if you will. Years ago I was writing about a former gas station owned by a Long Island village mayor that was being converted into a winery. Only problem was the gas tanks buried on the site had contaminated the ground water. One day a fellow with EPA's Region 1 office is telling me the mayor's property needs a six-figure clean-up, three days later he said it wasn't a problem anymore.
June 5, 2009 The Conservation Law foundation is clapping about the latest incremental advance in the glacial project known as the Cape Wind wind mill project off Nantucket Island. CLF is advocating for a project that shows real promise of producing significant power, despite the protests of influential Island residents fretting over their water views. Having grown up on the water I can relate to the latter. But, it's not like billboards for Hooters are being proposed for Nantucket Sound. I bring it up here because this project has gotten more ink than the Arab/Israeli peace process. You have to wonder if the project would have gotten half so much coverage if the Kennedy clan, whose Nantucket residency is well documented, weren't opposed to the project. We're covering old ground here for a reason. The 20 comments posted on this Gloucester Times piece about plans to plant a single turbine in Rockport's Pigeon Cove almost all cite the damage to the view. Of course it's a single turbine and no Kennedys are involved, so who cares? You should. This is where the rubber meets the road, folks. Don't be surprised if one of these things is popping up in you neighborhood soon. I was lucky enough to spend a winter overlooking Pigeon Cove at the best, if not the most bucolic, B&Bs on Cape Ann, Hedges by the Sea. (Thanks again Marley!!!) Pigeon cove is pretty, make no mistake.
June 3, 2009 New Hampshire's Department of Environmental Services Issued this warning about PCBs in large bluefish and striped bass. Apparently this warning is a new effort by East Coast states to issue uniform warnings following a study last year that suggested such uniformity was waranted.
PCBs like mercury are on a long list of chemicals we breath, eat and touch all day every day. The point I want to make now, which Alan Weisman, in his brilliant, slightly chewy, book "The World Without Us points out that plastic has permeating our waters the same way PCBs and mercury have. Weisman noted that a plastic bottle rolling in the surf gets worn down much like beach glass. The difference being those tiny particles of plastic that got scraped off over time, unlike tiny glass particles, have no business being in nature. There question remains does all this plastic working it's way into all things living great and small pose a problem? It's an unpleasant thought. June 2, 2009 Kind of a slow day. Page 1 draws possibly non-existant parallels between between sewage treatment plants in the Northeast US and whale strandings off Africa. Enews has a few tidbits on war vets becoming energy auditors and banboo building material and Scinews has sustainable fishing practices by cavemen. This came out of Scientific American today. It's about whales stranding themselves and the mystery behind it. Just a thought that might provide clues to the mystery. All the pollution that's still being dumped into the ocean. Even as you read this, five large sewage treatment plants discharge secondary treated sewage into the Merrimack River and who know how many more discharge into New York's Hudson River. The next time you're crossing east across the George Washington Bridge look to your right. You'll see an enormous brown plum pouring out of the North River Sewage Treatment Plant.
June 1, 2009 Watersheds and pollution flowing from land to sea are in today's coverage.Page 1 discusses efforts to increase salt water influx from sea to land. Enews has a cool USDA census/study depicting farms in watersheds. INews has a couple of arguably overly opinionated snipets about doing bad in the name of good.That's about it for today. As always, please email comments, requests, ideas to comments@nbnpress.com. Thanks. Linda Friar, a wonderful PR person with the National Parks Service sent over this release regarding the Everglades. (sorry about the odd link it's the first one I found) This sort of work is vital if the putrifying tide of non-point source pollution is to ever be rolled back. The NPS release is a pedestrian sort of appeal for public input on federal plans to enlarge some bridges, culverts and such that will increase water flow into the Everglades. The same sort of expansions are taking place in the marshes of New England.
Wednesday, May 27 Over indulgence has always been a pet peeve of mine as well as a personal character flaw. That didn't stop me from singling out some poor water park in Utah as a gratuitous example of same, see below. Aslo, dug up a great press release on drinking straws in Ideas.
Tuesday, May 26 I got a little preachy today on trash and recyling, see below. Ideas has some cool things about green weedings and mercury in teeth fillings. And Environmental News has something about the country's dirtiest power plant. If you like what you read please email me at: comments@nbnpress.com I did this story in 2005 about a company that was using its waste water to grow bananas and such in a greenhouse in Ipswich, MA. I hung thestory on an opening line about New England's first banana harvest,but a much more subtle message went largely ignored.
I was banging off the walls when I saw this technology, I started shooting queries to magazines across the country. The fellow who built the green house was was considerably more subdued and it took me a little while to figure out why. All you need is one employee to flush a few gallons of ammonia down the toilet and the greenhouse will be taking on a few shades of brown.
The point is there are so many efficiencies to be extracted from our present lifestyle. The challenge for the future will be teasing them out, mining all the resources we throw out with the bathwater each day. Not just in our wastewater but in every facet of our lives. This is impossible when attempted at the receiving end, the landfills and cesspools and such. Which might explain why my greenhouse septic system engineer isn't too concerned about PR right now. However this extraction process becomes more practical, even possible, when the enduser, the home owner, is helping out. Imagine not just separating your plastics from newspapers, but separating your plastics according to the little numbers stamped into the recycling symbol on the bottom.Suddenly the mixed plastic that's barely redeemable in the recycling markets today starts to take on real value. Imagine telling Poland Spring that it can purchase an unlimited supply of it's bottles back,clean with no paper labels. They could start to reclaim the billions, yes billions, of plastic bottles they've littered across the planet. (In my mind one of the greatest environmental crimes of this century that we've yet to start seriously paying for.) These efficiencies will cost money, imagine actually paying a $1 for a pint of Poland Spring instead of the 25 cents youpay at supermarkets. It will also take a fundamental rethinking of how we live our lives and what we throw out. But once the trasnistion is made it will never be needed again. And think of the money we will save. Modern day America can eliminate a lot of it's pollutions problems and pay of the absurd debt this president is getting us into if we were just much more care about what we throw out and where we throw it.
The Memorial Day issue is memorable for a piece about healthy cigarettes and green dating in our Ideas section. Environmental News has something on deep water mineral mining off the African coast, that you might want to read. .
I dropped something neat about MIT and chrome plating into University News and added a few incendiary comments into the invasives piece right below. Added a few things into Ideas Just checked my emailbox, and Joe sent a ton of stuff so more most likely to come to come. However nothing tomorrow, I'm off
Nothing big today. Emailbox has a few items. Ditto for Ideas Great and Small. The piece below on invasive species has been freshened up. I'm sorry to say I've let it sit for way too long. I tried to finish it up in the past two days, but really didn't do justice to the subject. When Guests Become Governors 1/26/09 Invasive species are foreign plants and animals that take over a host community, largely because that host community has no plants and animals that know how to compete with the invaders. It's an evolution thing. Invasives have been in the news since killer bees started terrifying Texans. They've been around since Capt. Bligh brought breadfruit back to Britain. Recently the Boston Globe had a piece on invasive species which talked of efforts to clean ship ballast water before the ship takes it on—ship ballast water being a likely source of most of the marine invasives in this country. The idea in the article was that water born invasives can't hitch a ride in ship's ballast if you clean the water before the ship takes it on. The article was fine up to this line: All this has sent engineers, scientists, and coastal resource managers scrambling to find ways to deal with these marine invaders before it's too late.
Back to the Globe piece. Take a look around you folks, it is too late. Invasives are like global warming: we're a day late and a dollar short on this problem. Unlike global warming, invasives are a natural process (Indeed, you could almost argue that global warming is a natural process, but we won't go there today.) Whether it's Kudzu climbing all over Alabama or zebra mussels clogging industrial cooling systems in the Great Lakes, invasives are plants and animals A.K.A. FOOD!. Is it unreasonable to think that at some point another species is going to discover that milfoil which is turning ponds into swamps, is edible? I offer up the invasive greencrabs which make great bait for our native blackfish which make great fried fish sandwiches for our native filet-o-fish-o-philes
I don't mean to belittle the invasives problem this planet is facing. Invasive plants and animals kill off competeing plant and animals and that reduces biodiversity. But I'd like to argue that some well intending folks misunderstand biodiversity. It's wonderful to have all these species but we've already done so much damage to this planet that biodiversity will suffer considerably greater reductions in the years to come. It can't be avoided. So, the question becomes how much effort do we put into curbing invasives when natural forces will eventually smooth out these vicious populations swings while we devote ourselves to more productive or promising pursuits, like non-point source pollution or global warming or proliferation of plastics or proliferation of poisons. To illustrate my point NY's Suffolk Times today had a piece about folks striping invasive phragmites A.K.A. reeds out of an Orient, NY pond which is being choked off by the invasive. I've also spoken with folks ripping waterchestnut out of Boston's Charles River and other folks pulling milfoil out of tiny Mill Pond in NH. Invariable their enjoyment of the waterbody is driving their effort as much as environmental concerns. But is it the best thing over all for the environment?
1/03/09 Waves, Whales and Wastrels, Oh My! In case you think Bernie Madoff just hurt wealthy investors,Mass High Tech had apiece showing two Bostonresearch labs that will have to look elsewhere for some of their funding. It's worth reading, if for nothing else, a reminder that an awful lot of science is driven by charity.
The Globe had thispiece on a Northern Right Whale wintering ground found in the Gulf of Maine. These poor creatures get an amazing amount of ink, primarily because there is concern Northern Right Whalenumbers are getting so low that they may go extinct. However, rarely in allthis coverage is it mentioned that the Northern Right Whale is not a distinctspecies. There is a Southern Right Whale whose numbers appear to be on therise. What are the differences between southern and northern, minimal according to this Wikipedia entry. So, is it reasonable to have this panic over the plight of the Northern Right Whale when it appears their near siblings are doing fine farther to the south? Given the rate at which we’re ruining our oceans with ubiquitousforms of pollution like road runoff, that’s a tough question. No amount of concern for sea creatures is too much. Still, to say the Northern Right Whale is facing extinction, is in some respects misleading.
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Biodiversity, sounds like, and often is, a lofty term thrown around at wine and cheese parties. You won't hear it much on scallop boats dragging the Sable Bank, or in Everglades limestone quarries or along the skidways of clear-cuts in Maine. Folks in this line of work see biodiversity first hand. They see fish stocks bounce back after government regulations. They know how a wetland or woodland grows back after it's been cleared for limestone or timber. But there's a lot these men-of-the-earth don't, or won't see, in the environments they work for a living. Biodiversity has taken it on the chin as result.
Take 
If you've heard this all before, perhaps we can hit a little closer to home. A few years ago, I bought a house in an up-and-coming neighborhood on Long Island. The worst house in a nice neighborhood. Investment-wise I made a killing. I also likely killed a lot of little critters along the way. My back yard was a half-acre of woods surrounded mostly, by well landscaped properties. It was a wildlife refuge. As I squeegeed the leaves, branches and forest litter from my backyard with a backhoe one day, I knew a lot of increasingly rare animals in those parts were having their last day on earth. I also added about $50,000 to the value of my house. I tried to compromise, and left about half the back yard natural. The person who bought the place yanked out what I'd left behind and a neon green lawn stood where I used to overturn logs to find salamanders. Still, I look back and can't see how I would do it differently. It was an investment. The only way to get around that situation is to not put yourself in it. And I won't ever again. If anything, it will be the opposite. I will adapt, like commercial fishermen are adapting.
What's all this got to do with biodiversity? The world will turn without gorillas, seahorses, salamander, 
Christmas is supposed to be all about family memories, but the Christmas that was most memorable for me was the one that never was. Imagine you're a 12-year-old and your mother mentions in an oh-by-the-way voice that she was thinking of taking the family down to Washington to protest the president's Christmas bombing campaign in Cambodia. Would it matter to me if we didn't give gifts this year and did that instead? Let's see: cashing in the most cherished day of the year to spend a cold winter morning on the White House lawn making a spectacle of ourselves in front of an entire nation?
I didn't go into hysterics over the prospect that this most precious of days was anything less than sacrosanct in my own mother's eyes. My mind went into overdrive calculating the answer that would most quickly unravel the faulty logic that sprouted this clear manifestation of metal illness. Seriously, what did she expect me to say? Sure, mom, that sounds like fun? The idea died. I'm not even sure if she repeated it to any one else in the family. For years I didn't even think about what it would have been like if we'd followed through on the Christmas that never was. Make no mistake, my mother would have followed through. 
As she did several years earlier when, determined to share the season-of-giving with those outside the family, she sent an enormous box of balloons to some South American children's charity. They sent us a thank-you card asking that next year we send cash. This protest idea sounded just as ridiculous. Would we have stapled posters with peace sign to yard sticks and picketed the White House? Would TV cameras have shown up? Mortification piled upon mortification. My mom wanted that instead of a morning sitting around a pine-scented living room strewn with gifts and candy, a tree burdened with 15 pounds of ornaments holding some of my earliest childhood memories with a roaring fire digesting wrapping paper as fast as we could feed it. That's my generic memory of the holiday.
I couldn't hope to tell you what really happened that particular Christmas morning or what gifts I got. I wonder if I'd recall better a Christmas morning spent marching in front of the White House with my mom protesting a bombing campaign on the day the nation's supposed to be celebrating the birth of the Prince of Peace. Looking back, it almost sounds like fun. Not to mention an indelible memory I now don't have. With apologies to Bill Watterson and whatever cartoon syndicate is making gobs of money off his brilliant work. Perhaps, he won't object to my ripping off this great cartoon given. It's the holiday season.
Is anyone really surprised all the hype prior to the Copenhagen climate summit resulted only in vague 
As we pollute this planet into a toxic soup not vastly different from what we've evolved from, changes will occur. Will they occur in time to save the planet is anyone's guess. If you want radical change, average folks must be willing to do the research needed to see what's really happening in the world around them.Just listening to 
In the theater of the absurd that is so much of global warming argument, we've this 
On the doom-and-gloom side, we have a mountain of science pretty much predicting the end of the world on some distant date if we don't radically alter our lifestyles right now. On the hast-makes-waste side, we've got a fickle governance system ignoring storm clouds of really scary science everywhere but over head. With apologies to the LA rate payers who may see their bills go up, NBN sides with the scientists for the simple reason stated in the story: as much as their utility rates may go up in the short run, the coal and natural gas costs for producing the energy they consume now will disappear forever with the solar installation. We also take a 
As an undergraduate pitting his future on a bachelors degree in animal behavior, I minored in studies that might actually have had some job prospects today: marine biology. One of my favorite teachers,
The short term answer, as the striped bass story above suggests, is we have a lot control. We'll continue to see different animals have boom and bust years as science, government and altruistic organizations pull up one ecological sock as the other sags. We may keep the 
That's the long term answer and it's vastly more uncertain and will no doubt be cast by global warming. If the theory holds up, we'll see whole-sale extinctions of species. That leafy sea dragon on the cover today and the sea turtle shown here? Say good-by. In the fast-approaching, man-made survival-of-the-fittest sweepstakes, these creatures don't get tickets. If tides rise as quickly as recently forecast, salt marshes, those volcanoes of marine life and biodiversity, will get wiped out. Ditto for untold forests that will turn into deserts across the globe. How far will this damage go and how far back along the evolutionary 
When I read this Forbes 
In the Godfather, Don Corleone advises his favored son Michael to: “keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” Which pretty much explains our addiction to talk radio, here at NBN. So, when 
In the long term, the florescent bulbs in the park service building will save lots of money over incandescent bulbs. The same can be hoped for the energy audit. The carbon sequestration program study could find a viable technology for combating global warming which could save incalculable amounts of money, if you buy into that whole GW thing. The bacteria and vaccination billing studies do take a little leap of faith. So does $24 million in Stimulus 
What Michael Graham's 
This just in from our liars-figure and vice-versa file: dueling articles on global warming. One 
Do we believe the senator from the oil state or the Danish denizens of the soon-to-be deep? Any objective sources want to weigh in? In all of this, not a word about the economic advantages of weaning the country from its addiction to foreign oil. Or the benefits to spurring US manufacturing of alternative energy from the money we're no longer pouring into the sand in Saudi Arabia. That's as important, or more important, to the Cap and Trade legislation, but it keeps getting lost as the world only focuses on the environmental arguments which have now been knee-capped by the email story linked above. A story that this senator now wants Congress to spend taxpayer money 
Out on the town looking for some cover art recently, I ended up at our local landfill, now being disposed of in a process called “capping.” As I started snapping pictures a town employee pulled up and asked what I was doing. I immediately assumed an I'm-a-taxpayer-on-public-property attitude. He responded with a you're-an-idiot-I-work-for-town condescendence. The chilly encounter quickly thawed as I explained my anger over how badly the landfill capping process had been handled. He nodded in agreement, suggesting putting away the camera because the landfill was now owned by a trash hauler who “had a very good judge, and loves to sue people.”
That's all well and good when you're talking about government paving, military, and/or vending machine contracts. But when it comes to environmental maintenance and remediation, it's more than people being corrupted. Take the case of this landfill. It's being “capped” with ground up construction and demolition debris. That means when ever a house or building is torn down in many parts of the state, the landfill owner takes the refuse and grinds it up to a near-dirt consistency and spreads it out over this landfill. The stuff hardens pretty nicely to form a cap of sorts. Pipes are drilled into the mound to drain methane gas from rotting material below, a membrane is installed on top of the cap to keep rain out. Grass is planted on top of that.
In theory this is a great idea. The garbage man recoups the capping costs from the tipping fees he's collected from those folks throwing out their unwanted buildings. If the membrane and cap do their jobs, there should be limited rainwater seeping out of the landfill into the surrounding environment. Presto! The landfill is disposed of at no cost to taxpayers. The immorality of the story is nobody really knows what was in those ground up piles the garbage man spread across the landfill. Worse, there is a stream running beside half of this mountain of mystery trash. Even if the landfill cap works reasonably well, this stream is 
Here's what I've found picking around in same: a Greenport, NY, mayor who made an underground gas plume on this property here disappear without the $100,000 clean-up an environmental official told me was needed; a North Brunswick, NJ, mayor building landfills in Pennsylvania and a Massachusetts state senator who called me out of the blue to ask why I was investigating a local septic service company. And that's just what I've seen in the few northeast towns I've covered as a local newspaper reporter. Can you imagine the stuff that goes on in places like Ohio or Mississippi? Or Alaska.
In these pages I've often harped on the evils of corporate-owned power plants and the salvation of consumer-generated solar and wind energy. All it took was a 90-minute blackout two weeks back to see the error of my ways: Corporations can be a great comfort. It was as if the Hand of God reached down and threw some unknown switch that wiped “Google News” from the computer monitor at 6 am that morning. The coffee maker stopped dripping, the batter-powered laptop couldn't pick-up any outside WiFi. I found myself buying a coffee and New York Times from a Starbucks downtown, a Sunday ritual not observed in over a year.The coffee shop was abuzz over the power outage. The brew better than what was half-finished on my kitchen counter. A distant sense of silent security settled on the morning as I folded myself into my living room couch and unfolded Page 1. 
The federal government has cobbled together a 
Caution! Personal anecdote approaching. A while back I did a story on Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's decision to end a five-year data-gathering 
Lest anyone doubt that scientists can be pretty stupid, read Page 1 of the Nov. 21 New York Times. The 
How do you think Exxon and Duke Energy feel about folks finding out their product isn't needed. They hate solar panels and windmills. They love this story about bias science from global warming theorists because they know this planet is awash in wind, solar and hydro energy options sufficient to dramatically reduce our dependence on them without giving up a lot of the conveniences now fueled by their coal and oil. Now, instead of discussing those options and advancing policies to pursue them, we're going to be thinking about those awful scientists cooking the books so we give up our jet skies and SUVs. Nice work 
Whether the global warming scientists are cooking the books or not, it's also disheartening to see their attitude toward those forces that challenge their methods. Forces that, by design, focus on profit not public service. Science has to be better than those who seek to discredit it. Unwavering adherence to objectivity is the only option. Any publicly-funded scientist who says those who doubt their efforts are 
I found myself recently in the uncomfortable position of defending questionable disbursements in the president's Stimulus spending plan, eloquently noted in the popular New Hampshire political blog 
Time to challenge Darwin's theory of evolution. Why does NBN dare go where no sane scientists have gone before? We're a little short on copy today. It's kind of hard to see who put this press 
The reason we raise these issues here is, those high hopes are dashed in the face of press releases like the one linked above. It smacks of the very sort of desperation-driven embrace of shaky science and religious zealotry that, by its own, more recent evolution, is turning a blind eye to an ever growing body of superb science. In the process of this willful ignorance, such people are forced to turn against science itself, an alarming trend on the rise in 
In our never-ending search for a global environmental assessment, NBN vacillates disquietingly between hope and despair. Today, we indulge in a little despair. It started over the weekend with this New York Times 
Unbeknownst to just about everyone but the readers of the 
However, the GT articles also point out that catch shares work at the expense of the fishing community they are being foisted on. Throughout the stories, the point is made that catch shares will mean fewer, bigger fishing boats, reduced commerce and thus, a reduced fishing community. Mom and pop will be driven out of commercial fishing. It's a sad, and probably true statement. The 
Why should the rest of country care about what happens in New England's waters? Warning! Personal anecdote approaching. Since assuming a new life in the virtual world of my office, fishing has been limited to renting cheesy dinghies in over-fished New Jersey waters and going out on 
This just in from our tilting-at-windmills department. Or is it our: what's-wrong-with-this-picture department? Today's headlines include oil lobbyists arming themselves with 
Fox News 
Anyone, who has ever been on one of those boats knows, they are all about luxury and excess. The amount of food that gets thrown out is unbelievable. This Seattle Times 
And what about the ships that don't have multi-million dollar public relations budgets and commercial images to worry about? The military, cargo and private vessels. Sadly, tossing trash overboard has been as much a part of maritime lore as star gazing. Caution! Personal anecdote approaching. In 1980, while on-board a 100-foot sailboat cruising the Caribbean during a college semester-at-sea, I came face-to-face with the maritime tradition of throwing trash overboard. The captain ordered that 20 large plastic bags of trash piled on deck be tossed overboard. This was a boat full of college students. Not surprising then, a lot of my fellow students mutineed. Not me. The captain is the captain and the bags went over the rail. I distinctly remember seeing them bob up and down in our wake as we sailed into the sunset. Now, multiply that times thetens of thousands of boats plying the world's waters since the advent of plastic and you've got 
The US government has this 
Perhaps the irony here is, the push-and-pull that's become a necessary evil in all issues these days. Advocates and opponents, overshooting their arguments to better position themselves in on-going battles both subsist on. Confusion and credibility like the above are the casualties. Which is why we write these pages. To the three or four people who actually read NBN with regularity, you may remember the 7.13.09
Hypocrisy hurts. Even more so when you're the hypocrite. In this 
The halibut is a bottom fish, most likely caught by an otter trawl like this one. Increasingly, it seems the only way I can justify eating my favorite fish these days is to go out and catch my own, which I'm going to do more of. It's better for the fish and better for the economy. There were a lot more people working on that party boat where I caught that haddock than on most draggers. In the meantime, looks like we'll be eating more 
Welcome to NBN’s Wednesday puzzle page. Can you spot all the environmental problems in this picture? Here’s one hint, look past the neon green lawn to the woods on the left-hand side. Now, look at the slightly aqua-marine pond. That’s right, this gorgeous piece of landscaping was once a vernal pond in the middle of the woods. Want to try the puzzle again? Ok, we’ll help you again. Start with the lawn, without plenty of lime and fertilizer this would look more like the 
Ditto, for the two paved driveways better seen in this picture. For that matter, the blue-green tint in the pond in this second picture, might suggest cyanobacteria, which bloom in ponds where there's lots of fertilizer present. Then there's the bridge connecting to the fixed deck. The deck is doubtless a great place to have a drink, provided you've killed all the mosquitoes. Hence my suspicion that this entire landscaped leisure-land is one big chemical sink that has neutered what was once a vibrant vernal pond. This sounds like we're having way too much fun at the expense of this fellow's hard work and beautiful landscaping. But, if we're not 100 percent accurate, how far off can we be? There are those who will argue this is not a true vernal pond because it's got standing water year-round. It still attracts the same creatures. If I am wrong, someone please tell me where or how. Be the first one to email me at 
This is quite likely what the pond in the picture above looked like before the landscapers came through. This pond was about a quarter of a mile down the road. Don't get me wrong, the house looks really nice when you drive past. It's an amazing bit of landscaping. But again, we have to look at the price paid here. First, what happens to all the animals that used this pond before it was landscaped into sterility. Here's a long, but worthwhile 
So, this homeowner works his tail off to maintain this chemical oasis at the expense of thousands of little critters, some of which are endangered. You tell me: What's wrong with this picture. I can't let this opportunity pass without a plug here for the 
We here at NBN try to stay away from politics, but when we saw this book we thought we might wade in. The book is all about President Obama's call for American citizens to do their part to contribute to remaking the country. In his image, perhaps? Don't get us wrong. Obama seems to be taking this country, for the most part, in the directions it needs to go. However, this kind of book feels like a 
In that regard, we feel it's important to note that the energy efficiency this administration embraces, does not just benefit the country. Nor is it right for the administration to ask us to embrace such efficiency out of a sense of patriotism. Such sentiments are washed away when the next presidential candidate declares SUVs the American Way of Life. It's the consumer, you and me, who benefit from recycling, solar panels, reduced road run-off, more efficient cars and stricter development and fishing regulations. Those benefits can be far off on the horizon, like global warming. That doesn't make them any less real. That's the message this president needs to embrace. It's only that message that can be sold to a sufficient swath of the American political landscape for it to take lasting root. Taking proper care of this planet is not a common cause we can all believe in, it's common sense we can all deduce. We belabor it here because it's a cause we believe in. Passionately.
Property rights too often run afoul of environmental law unnecessarily. Take this 
The reason this fellow was cited is called, “hardening of the 
The driveway is just an example, but other solutions can be that simple. If those options aren't available on the homeowner's land, perhaps he could have looked around the neighborhood for another, more serious, run-off or erosion problem he could have fixed, in consideration for what he wanted to build on his own land. Big time developers do it all the time. You can measure fairly accurately, how much water runs off into a lake and how much runs into the ground. If your project results in more total water running into the ground than runs into the lake: Bingo! you should be in. Instead, we have this fellow shelling out $25k for a fine that could be spent on mitigation efforts. We've got hardened feelings along with the hardened shoreline along the beaches of Arlington Pond. And what about the restoration he's been ordered to do? That's a serious, lingering problem. Look at this 
I hope you'll forgive me for using tragedy to make a point. This 
Thus, I've gotten into hiking rather reluctantly. At first exposure, there is little that can be defined as fun consuming the 14th mile of a 15-mile hike up and down mountainsides with 40 pounds of sustenance on your back. At least, not for the first few days you're out on the trail. But after a week or so, something odd takes place. The sheer exertion over the course of several hours, becomes a very real element of pleasure. Your heart rate goes up and stay up. The exhilaration of charging up a 500-foot elevation in 40 minutes and realizing you don't have to 
This summer we hiked Mt. Killington. A rock-strewn ribbon bored through stands of birch, hemlock and Fraser and Douglas fir. It was more steeplechase than trail. At one point I just burned past my wife and hiking companions in a sort of frenzy not unlike my pathetic attempts to master moguls on this same mountain years earlier. What I'm trying to say is, hiking can be every bit the all-consuming sensual experience that screaming through the woods on an ATV is, without the screaming. Also without burning gas, flattening woodland ecosystems and endangering yourself or those around you. Try hiking, really hiking, not just hitting a trail for a few hours. Live in the woods. You become part of nature instead of conquering nature. At the same time you can still test your limits in ways on a par with any sport. I know that's sounds impossible, but it's true. Pictured here is the top of the Mt. Killington Trail
At my last newspaper gig, the editors sent me down to Providence, RI, to attend the annual meeting for the Society of Environmental 
Sadly, people will only start responding to global warming when it's too late to do anything about it. This 
If global warming theory holds up, it's too late for these folks. The Maldives are done. I'm thinking of taking a trip out just to see the place before it goes under, because it's quite likely to happen in our lifetime if the more pessimistic global warming forecasts hold true. Rather than beat the drum, perhaps the SEJ should be counseling its members to be more vigilant about adding economics or over-dependence on Mid-East oil to their global warming stories. These are very strong arguments. I've searched everywhere for an article I read recently saying if American cars were as efficient as European we'd no long need Middle East Oil. I can't find it. But this graphic, shown compliments of 
NBN felt it needed a little more fun in its pages, so we thought we'd introduce a game today. It's called: find the plastic in this photo of the 
I'm sure there's more stuff in that photo. Still, that's not too bad, and it's not like this was a particularly polluted section of the wrack-line, although we did look around a bit. There were Tropicana bottles and all sorts of bits of Styrofoam, even a tiny race car with wheels that still spin. All along what, by most standards, is a pristine beach. What's not so pristine is the river about nine miles to the north. The Merrimack River winds through poor milltowns like Lowell, Haverhill, and Lawrence, collecting along the way all manner of trash thrown there by residents. It washes downstream, floats into the ocean then gets rolled around in the surf and sand, gradually shedding minute pieces of plastic into the water. Those tiny pieces of plastic get sucked up by tiny surf clams which these tiny sanderlings eat. These birds are, in turn, eaten by bigger animals and so on, until we're pounding town the plastic with our No. 3 Filet-o-Fish sandwiches with tartar sauce. Bioacumulation. That's how it works, folks.
Is nothing sacred anymore? That last vestage of the outdoors-indoors, that rectangle of romance, that cube of cozy, the wood-burning stove is coming 
According to the MEN piece, the problem of wood stove pollution became most prominent with the proliferation of the air-tight stoves. They are super efficient but also produce more POM. Wood pellet stoves on the other hand don't produce POM but they don't burn real wood. No sitting by the crackling fire. Might as well have propane. Except propane is not renewable and the pellets are made from grass and such. Here's a good 
This 
As a result, a keystone species of the prairie that's as cute as a baby panda is being targeted with a hatred AlQueda would consider cordiality. The YouTube videos you've been spared of prairie dogs being blown to pieces by gleeful hunters suggests these animals have seriously worn out their welcome out west. Anyone with a fondness for a perfectly seared, dry-aged New York Strip steak may grapple with the moral issues here a little more than the tofu crowd. As a confirmed member of the former, I can see how ranchers might be a allowed a little discretion if prairie dogs are making it hard on their cows. But looking deeper into this prairie dog issue, once again painfully points up how wasteful we have become as a society. Let's see what price we pay for a great steak, or a Big Mac. It takes about four or five 
This 
To court more Republican support for the Cap and Trade bill, it looks like Democrats 
We just traded our Jeep Cherokee that got 20 mpg highway for a Honda CRV which gets 27 and it's making a big difference in our gas bill. And the CRV was the least fuel efficient of the cars we were looking at. Hey, nobody's perfect. Our next car will be a Ford Escort. I just took the train from New London, Ct. to Boston, Ma, it cost $60. It takes $10 in gas to cover the same distance in our CRV. No wonder nobody takes the train. There is something seriously askew here. There is so much room to reduce the amount of fuel we burn in this country, yet all we think about is finding more. These concessions on Cap and Trade are the wrong message at the wrong time. (As if the global warming threat weren't bad enough, here's a 
I was administering the last rights to some McNuggets and a Big-N-Tasty burger heading back on the train from Long Island, when I noticed it. Almost all the of packaging the food had come in was biodegradable. Everything except the honey mustard sauce container and the lid to my strawberry shake was made of paper and corrugated cardboard. Fast food litter in this country is a huge problem. But to look at the cubic foot of trash my $6 meal eventually de-evolved into: I wouldn't have a problem knowing it was tossed out the window by some high school kid rebelling against such conventions. Most everything in that bag will eventually feed the microbes in the soil it's eventually added to, whether in a landfill, highway median or Ed Begley's backyard. Only the plastic shake lid and sauce container for my McNuggets will resist the elements. (You could argue the McNuggets themselves might be equally resilient. They tasted like plastic. Hence, the honey mustard sauce, two containers for six McNuggets. I think they are still stilling somewhere in my lower intestine.
You can argue that we here at NBN are a little utopian in our hopes for the future. We speak of recycling as a Zen, and we harp on energy efficiency as if it were the 
Sometimes it's hard to care for the environment when people with so much more power than we have, so clearly don't. I've already expounded on the fellow who managed to get Massachusetts state policy changed to profit his construction and demolition business at the expense of homeowners living near the landfill he's overwhelmed with sulfurous debris. It's in the 9.02.09 
Here's 
Finding the good news in a ban on herring fishing in the Gulf of Maine took a little work. But there it was, at the bottom of 
In the chicken-or-egg arguments that so often crop up behind intractable issues like global warming, it's easy to get angry. Thus, NBN started to read 
Case in point: the ancillary arguments in favor of Cap and Trade don't need to rest on global warming. Especially given that Cap and Trade will be a huge drain on our economy at a time when we can ill-afford it. Over a concern that skeptics say may not materialize. We've got to get global warming doubters to listen to the ancillary arguments. Less dependence on foreign oil means more industry at home creating alternative resources, less oil-intense plastic packaging means less trash to store and more clean industry—there's big money in recycling; decentralizing our energy production and distribution [alternative energy] means a more robust, secure power grid. That's not to mention the biggest argument of all: less fossil-fuel pollution from all the above. 
If it appears that NBN vacillates—in this case on one of the biggest issues in our future—make no mistake, we hold a very grim view of the future vis-a-vis global warming. We've characterized the issue with images of Beavis and Butthead and reference to Nero's last violin gig. However, muzzling or ignoring the opposition is wrong. That economist doubtless has some good points to make. In all the acrimony over global warming there are valid points being made on both sides. It's those ancillary arguments that, in the absence of greater certainty over GW theory, can help us better prioritize and make the immediate decisions needed, both economic and environmental. The NRDC has to listen to the NRA and Bill O'Reilly has to listen to Keith Oberman. Rodney King has one thing right, we all have to get along, and looking at 
The algae problem on European beaches is back 
So what price produce? The cover art today pretty much spells it out. Anyone fond of farm fresh produce—the real stuff, not what you get in supermarkets—knows the price. We were picking apples and blueberries at 
Do we really want to give that up for the sake of reducing farm fertilizer running into our rivers streams and salt marshes? If we want to end beach closings in Wisconsin and killer sea lettuce in France, we have to start thinking about doing something. Most, if not all, these explosions of algae growth are driven by too much nutrient, a.k.a. fertilizer: lawn and, more significantly, farm fertilizers. The first and easiest step we take is getting rid of lawn fertilizer. For the sake of a green lawn we are polluting our swimming holes? That doesn't make sense. Lakes abloom with cyanobacteria are dangerous to swim in. Even pet owners are discouraged from letting dogs into the water. Now look at the lawns surrounding these lakes.
On the other end, maybe farm run-off can be captured in retention ponds, much like road runoff is captured in retention ponds along highways. Maybe those ponds could be used to grow the oil producing algae we talked about in 
Hiking along the AT in western Massachusetts, we came across this beaver dam. These things surely deserve nature's-seven-wonders status. What you can't clearly see from the picture is, this roughly five-foot overgrown wall of mud and sticks stretches about 75 yards, and it flooded—at a guess—at least three acres. Let's do the math. Assuming the pond averages about six feet deep, that's about 250,000 cubic feet of water, at 62 pounds per. That's 15.5 million pounds of water, and this was a small pond. The dam is in the foreground. The beaver's den is in the background.
Now read 
In the 9.14.09 
This 
Seriously, curbing carbon emissions starts at home. It starts with things like national and local laws and initiatives. Look at 
Which, is the country's most polluted river? Wiki-Answers says it's the Chicago River, which is annually laced with green dye in homage to St. Patrick. This 
That water power generated a lot of industry in the Merrimack Valley. Paper and textile miles first dotted the Merrimack. Later it was plastic companies, tire companies, shoe and buggy makers. All moved into the mill towns along the Merrimack. The Merrimack, and rivers across the country were quite literally the engines that drove the industrial revolution that helped make this such a prosperous country right from the start. What was less noticeable in the basements of these mill buildings were the discharge pipes. For well over a century everything these mills could flushed down a drain ended up in our rivers. Sadly, the logic back them was: why would you put it anywhere else? 
How do you clean that up? It's an very imperfect science that costs horrendous amounts of money and will never get everything completely clean. The first, and most important step is: don't let the place be declared a Superfund site. The epicenter of the Merrimack clean-up, indeed you could make the argument the fall-guys in the Merrimack clean-up, is the GenCorp property.GenCorp is a former tire maker that had the misfortune to buy what is possibly, the single most polluted property in the Lawrence mill basin. The GenCorp property is now being called the Lawrence Gateway. This region of eastern Lawrence, MA, was so-nobly named back when the US economy looked like the it had the strength to revitalize an impoverished mill-city 30 years past its manufacturing prime. The GenCorp property also held what was essentially the trap, to use a plumbing term, for the waste discharge pipes draining a large complex of mill buildings on the Merrimack's northern shore. This little stretch of canal is to industrial pollution what Yuca Mountain is to nuclear waste. But it's not a Superfund Site. Although, right now it may look like one. These canisters above are chemical filters located on the GenCorp site. 
Cleanup efforts are focused on a specific section of the GenCorp property called the raceway shown at right. This canal, which extends from the heart of the north half of the Merrimack industrial canal system, looks like it might have drained more than one building. (Numerous buildings have been torn down in the Gateway project. See cover art.) When the river was down, so was the flow through the raceway. So, what was dumped into the raceway didn't necessarily wash right away.
The clean-up now entails sucking contaminated water out of the raceway, purifying it through various filters on-site, then sending the water through a final sediment trap, shown here, before discharging it into the Merrimack. Intuitively, this sounds like the little Dutch boy plugging the dam with his fingers. An eight-acre clean-up in the middle of several hundred acres of contamination is hardly comprehensive. You could argue it's lip-service, hence, the reference above to GenCorp, perhaps, being the fall-guy here.
What? You don't own a forest? Then maybe there's a future for you in forest management. More and more people do own their own forests making forest management a very real business to go into. With construction on the ropes and the US paper industry 
Warning! Personal anecdote approaching. This trip was like Hunter S. Thompson meets Euell Gibbons. A bus full of environmental journalist, myself included, were given a tour of Maine's more vibrant, and challenged, environments compliments of a 
The story of 
Quimby says she wants to use her land for part of a massive national park. But she also wants to limit how that parkland is used. This harkens back to the battle over snowmobiles in Yellowstone, out west. This brings up some tough questions. Should investors be allowed to fenced off these forests? Should they be allowed to dictate how these lands are used if they are opened to the public? Is it better to buy up these lands for public parks, a huge tax-payer expense. Perhaps, a mixture of both. Could we form a forest preservation authority, which could acquire the property through bond issuances and then manage it on a comprehensive basis rather than piece meal. Put snow mobile courses in the least sensitive area. Build a ski resort or two with the same precautions. Harvest timber in ways that are government-certified safe. Provide lease opportunities for established recreational businesses while assessing how best to enjoy the untouched tracks. It's got to work better than just carving it up in private ownership, and there's still money generated for the original owners. Maine's north woods is a singularly unique track of land, larger than Yellowstone and Yosemite combined. It could be a national treasure. But we need a plan. We can't just start throwing up 
Here is another very fishermen friendly 
This argument is probably valid, those stats come from government officials posted on boats and from what is sold at wholesale markets, hardly a fool-proof science. But arguing over the numbers seems to miss the point. Today in 
Unfortunately for fishermen, catch shares makes fishing more like farming. But something has to change. One more thing. These fisheries, like Tome Fote notes in ENews, are also being badly affected by pollution and other human pressures. Even global warming 
You may have heard of the hoop skirts, but the 
This is kind of a hard concept to get your mind around, but plastics are molecules a lot like oil, only much larger. It's why oil is used to make plastic. Just like tiny strands of cotton pull off natural threads through use, tiny pieces of plastic can pull off synthetic fibers. So, theoretically, more plastic in the air we breath, water we drink and fish we eat. Intuitively, it seems plastic threads will release these tiny shreds of plastic a lot more easily than plastic bottles which are designed to be rigid. Once again the road to hell is paved with good intentions. If, on the other hand, we had a $.25 deposit on all plastic bottles, we'd be using plastic for its best and highest use. There's nothing wrong with plastic bottles, provided we don't make any more of them. The good folks at Nestle, Coke, Pepsi...etc. have already made enough plastic bottles to last the rest of the world a lifetime. Put a $.25 deposit on these things and we'll be scouring the earth for them. We solve world hunger, unemployment and the soaring incidence of diabetes at the same time. How cool is that? The plastic-shorts folks say it takes seven, 16-ounce bottles to make one pair of bathing trunks. The folks over at Nestle could outfit the world in hoop skirts with the plastic bottles they pump out of their Poland Spring, ME, plant in a couple of days.
I hated Hummers. Not just the awful gas mileage, it's what they represented to me: showing people you having enough money to waste it. For marketing purposes, Hummers represented independence. Like that 
Commercial 1 says: screw everybody else, do what you want. Commercial 2 says: drive around in 4,500 pounds more car than you need because it will help your kid's self esteem. Hummer was sending the absolute worst message at the absolute worst time in the planet's history. Polar ice sheets are melting, sea levels are threatening the future of billions of people and we're jumping into cars that burn four times the gas needed to get from Point A to Point B. Nero, strike up the band.
Then I went for a roughly 200-mile ride to the Jersey Shore in a friend's Chevy Suburban, a Hummer disguised as a practical car for soccer moms. Her three kids sat in their thrones watching DVDs for four hours while the adults chatted uninterrupted, our Egg McMuffins, hash browns and coffee sitting comfortably in a console the size of a coffee table. From a childhood spent shoulder to shoulder with my four brothers in the backseat of a VW Bus with virtually no heating or windows, this was luxury. And Hummers were presumably even more comfortable still. 
When I suggested recently to a woman ridding Massachusetts' Charles River of a weed called 
Along with the efforts by my fellow natural foods fan listed above: poisons, plows, persistence and pests are being rained down on this problem all over the planet. That last option—pests—is of particular interest. Here is an article about the use of a tiny beetle from Europe recruited to battle 
Here's a picture of the Diorhabda elongata, a bug that's being used to eat the saltcedar in the Midwest. Saltcedar is so pervasive it's sucking up the Midwest's precious water sources. Water that Con-Agra and ADM desperately need.
So, what do we do? Compromise. Doing nothing, as I suggest, is not likely to be acceptable to the chestnut woman and a lot of other folks, but perhaps we can draw the line at biological controls. We can use all the beetles and weeding we want, but no chemical controls. After viewing a few pictures, like this one at left, of the invasive kudzu in our nation's Southeast, this may sound naive. But, there are instances where nature has found a way to keep these invasives in check. What ever happened to the “Killer Bees” slated to take over the country 20 years ago? They didn't. And look at how green grabs have become a favored food for blackfish and those beetles are reportedly working well on the loosestrife. 
This 
Let's take the Merrimack River in Massachusetts for example. It's full of goodies that got locked into its sediments during 200-years of intensive industrialization which used the waterbody as an all-purpose waste-disposal unit. Not the least of these goodies is mercury, which was used in large quantities to make equally large quantities of ridiculous looking hats. (That's not to mention all the human waste that's still getting flushed down this magnificent river from the 
Now, think about dams. They slow down the water flow prompting sediment build up right behind them. In the days of free-wheeling pollution, some really nasty stuff built up behind these dams. Warning, Personal Anecdot Approaching. My wife's co-worker, an old Merrimack Valley milltown girl, said you could tell what color sunglasses a company in the area was making on any given day by the color that the Shawsheen River was running that day. At left is a poor example, perhaps, of how sediment can buid up behind a dam. Back to the point.
Here's the other half of the story about those damn dams. They keep fish like salmon, herring, alewife, shad, and eels from swimming to spawning grounds upstream. Millions have been spent on clever fish ladders and lifts to help get these 
Some folks must have heard about plans to dump iron filings into the ocean to boost plankton growth as a means of curbing global warming. This 
Then a couple of green groups started getting plenty 
Beede is a waste oil disposal site that dates back to the 1940s. It started off taking crank case oil, dumping it into pits alongside the Kelley Brook, mixing it with the sandy soil there and selling it as a primitive paving product. These pit were not lined. There is little chance that the ground water flow did not take this oil straight into the Kelley Brook. Time goes on, groundwater concerns force the paving operation to shut down and Beede now becomes a state and federally licensed oil recycling center. This drawing here is impossible to read but it attempts to shows how pollution from above gets into the ground water below.
Beede is a mess, and it has already cost many millions of dollars and the clean up is far from finished. The EPA's Superfund policy is to recoup those clean-up costs, when possible, from the folks who pollute Superfund sites. That policy is fine, when your talking about Beatrice Foods and Grace which surreptitiously ruined the Aberjona River in east-central Massachusetts. The same policy becomes extremely unjust when you have small business owners being charged thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars, for dumping oil in a licensed facility. Why was it licensed when it was known to have problems? You can take the explanation above, or take the explanation provided by my anonymous source, or many of the other Beede customers, should you take the occasion to ask them. This is the Beede site as seen from about two miles up. Thanks Google Earth.
The folks who worked at NHDEP during the last years of Beede's licensing, have now moved on to positions at the EPA's New England regional office. And what about Beede's owner? He served a few years in jail and is out. What about the money he made running one of the largest waste oil recycling centers in one of the most densely populated, industrialized regions in the country? This is where my story ends. I don't know what happened to his money. It might be nice to find out. I can provide names for most of the above, but why bother. Their remarks aren't what matters here, it's the chain of events which can be readily confirmed by spending a few minutes on the internet. Track down the attorney for the PRPs, if you want. The point is this: there is so much money involved in environmental enforcement that it's bound to encourage these marriages of convenience and occasions to overlook. Like the great Sandy Padwe once told my investigative journalism class at Columbia: if you want to find corruption, look in the garbage. This is what it looks like when oil flowing with the groundwater emerges into a standing waterbody. In this case the Merrimack River 
Let's do some green math. The federal government 
Some 2,200 miles to the west we have the other side of the equation. A San Diego government/business 
Condo owners in Greenport, NY, 
The Newburyport 
Still, as this 
July 30, 2009
Turning the environmental movement into a trend is a disservice to the wonderful folks who work for nothing to increase public awareness. Why doesn't ESPN really do something about the environment. Get Tiger Woods to back a message that matters, not shill for clothing and watch makers as a poster boy for an industry that's about as damaging to the environment as ski slopes. Golf courses may look green but they neuter wilderness areas, much like ski slopes do. Kids pay attention to sports figures and when they see them driving around in Escalades and Hummers, to them it means it's a good thing to drive around in Escalades and Hummers. Is it? Sports figures should be pushed harder on this. My guess is they will step to the plate soon. They'll have to.
Here's a follow-up to the importance of raw data in the absence of scientific conclusion, a topic which led 
There are too many opinions out there for anyone to take mine seriously, so I struggle to keep mine to myself. However, two things crossed my desk this morning that should be put in some perspective. First there is 
T
There is one common denominator here: pollution. Not the stuff spewing out of smoke stacks or pouring out of pipes. Subtle stuff call non-point source 
June 24, 2009
Why all the filters? Because of all the pollutants in our environment. Which brings us to the subject of burning trash to generate electricity and 
Theoretically, we shouldn't have to throw out anything. This is not utopian, it's just very expensive. But not more so than the cost we will end up paying in future health care and heartache. In the meantime, if we continue to slowly poison ourselves and our planet, perhaps we might want to buy some 
DATA MATTERS!
If you you could have heard the voices of the state scientists who were seeing five years of their hard word halted before they could draw conclusions from it. The really painful part was they couldn't complain or criticize because it could cost them their jobs. There were a few folks in the agency's press office who were forced to tell me why it was such a good idea. Lets hope the feds keep this program alive a little longer. If global warming fast tracks like so many people say it will, we'll need all the information we can get. Along the same lines I ran into this 
The windmills proposed off Cape Cod are getting yet 
Forest wetlands, a.k.a. 
Speaking of overfishing, the Pew research institute released 
Underneath this winery gas tanks from a gas station previously on the site leaked petroleum into the ground water. One day federal regulators were saying the problem had to be cleaned up, a short time later the same regulator said it was no longer a problem. What happened in between? The mayor who owned the property had a buyer. 
But, will a turbine really ruin that view. Take a look at this turbine erected off Low Street in Newburyport some 20 miles to Rockport's northeast. While it catches the eye, does it offend it? Back to the neighbor's fretting about the view. Do you really expect people who don't object to the Pigeon Cove project to join the fray? If the Kennedy's weren't aligned against Cape Wind would we be reading about it in every other issue of the Cape Cod Times?
FYI
THE NORTH RIVER SEWAGE TREATMENT PLANT ON MANHATTAN'S WEST SIDE DISCHARGES HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF GALLONS OF NEW YORK'S FINEST INTO THE HUDSON RIVER EACH DAY. IT SITS ABOUT FOUR MILES UPSTREAM FROM THE ATLANTIC OCEAN
WHAT COULD PROMPT A WHALE TO HEAD FOR SHORE AND STAY THERE DESPITE HUMAN EFFORTS TO FREE THEM? HOW ABOUT ALL THE GOOD STUFF HUMANS ARE DUMPING INTO THE WATER WHALES CALL HOME. I OFFER INTO EVIDENCE THE EFFLUENT FROM THE SEWAGE TREATMENT PLANT ABOVE.
HERE'S A ROCKPORT, MA, CULVERT NOT DOING ITS JOB. THESE THINGS NATURALLY FILL WITH DEBRIS AND EVENTUALLY CHOKE OFF THE WATER BODIES THEY WERE BUILT TO SUPPLY, DRAMATICALLY CHANGING THE PRODUCTIVITY OF THE MARINE ECOSYSTEMS THAT DEPEND ON THEM.
This 
Butch's billed itself as “Southeastern Utah's Only Water Park.” There's a good reason for this folks. There's virtually no water in southeast Utah, except the Colorado River which Butch funneled into five slides and three pools spread out over a "17-acre Waterpark Oasis." Meanwhile the Colorado no longer reaches the ocean because too many other folks are tapping into it to power Phoenix golf course sprinkler systems. At left is a section of the Colorado, No doubt south of Phoenix and Butch's. There was no locater on the website I stole it from. However it's well established that the Colorado no longer makes it to the Gulf of Mexico. With the decreasing incidence of rain in the west, is there any doubt such scenes will only increase. Again, nature forcing man's hand. Goodbuy, Butch.
Before I get too comfortable on this soap box, Butch's offered a heart rendering fairwell to customers where he pointed out Moab school kids, the park's best customers, will no longer be heard laughing and splashing about. And what more wonderful thing than being able to hit the water slides on a 110 degree Moab summer day. I'd like to put forth the argument that this planet can no longer afford such indulgences. If you want to go swimming move near the water. If you want to see one-of-a-kind natural rock formations amidst some of the most stunning scenery in the country, move to Moab. 
The waste water came from a very wealthy biological manufacturing company, they made enzymes for lab tests and such. It boggles the imagination to think what gets flushed down those drains. Yet the end product was growing tropical fruit and red Amarillos.
That gets to the essence of America's environmental problems and the concept that there is no such thing as waste. In theory even a discarded Poland Spring bottle has utility. I saw lots of folks using them to carry stove fuel on the Appalachian Trail. But Poland Spring makes millions of new bottles every year rather than pull old bottles from landfills. Ditto for the hypothetical ammonia that gets flushed into the waste stream when it could get segregated into a separate chemical receptacle. used ammonia may not have the same utility as used bottles, but you get the idea. The same applies to the hot water we flush down our drains after we've taken a shower or done the dishes. Could that heat somehow get extracted? Perhaps divert shower and dishwasher drains to wash over copper coils in your water heater?
Little wonder why people love the burning bush as an ornamental bush, it turns bright red in the fall. 
The sad reality is the bush is overwhelming New England forests. Take a drive through western Connecticut in the fall to see just how pervasive this invasive is. 
This fish, which is native to East Coast waters
Loves to eat greencrabs, which came to this country a few decades ago
And I love to eat these things, when they are made our of blackfish.
In my experience the more structure in a water body the better for little plants and animals seeking shelter. Be it phragmites encroaching from the shore or milfoil springing up from the pond bottom or rocksnot fuzzing over the Housatonic River, this is life and it invariably begets more life. There are doubtless great arguments to be made against this thought, One of them being 
Schematic of an oscillating water column. Wavesenter through a subsurface opening into the chamber with air trappedabove. The wave action causes the captured water column to move up anddown, pushing the trapped air into an electricity-generating turbine.The turbine turns continuously, despite the changing direction of theair stream as the waves come in and out. Graphic courtesy / MIT Energy Initiative
The Southern Right Whale has a slightly different skull structure and body fat content from its northern version.
