There is only one resource left that these countries, and the rest of an economically depressed world, can continue to wring additional economic growth from: increasing efficiency in the exploitation of natural resources. Technologies like photovoltaics, fuel efficiency, low-impact development, organic farming, and water purification offer the only environmentally safe, sustainable opportunities for economic growth. But here’s the rub: These technologies can only succeed, at least at their present level of development, with dramatically reduced world consumption and both will eventually mean many fewer jobs available for a growing world population. Nowhere more so than in China and India. So, NBN dares to say that the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s International Energy Outlook of 2011 is dead wrong. Global energy consumption has to plummet or we’re all screwed.

Here’s the good news. The world, with the U.S. leading the way, has been so wasteful of natural resources, particularly energy, that we could well see an explosion of economic growth as we develop the technologies to curb our consumption of those natural resources. Just imagine the work required replacing our centralized power grid with solar panels on every roof in the world. Imagine the work involved and replacing all our cars with Chevy Volts. Imagine all the work involved in upgrading our wastewater treatment plants to tertiary systems. That economic growth will have to end, if these technologies work as designed. But if planned correctly, it could well be a very soft landing where we all find ourselves doing a lot less work to buy many fewer things. It really could be that simple.

Is it possible that the fact that there is so much bad environmental news in the U.S. is actually good news. Might it mean that we’re paying more attention to the environment in the US and that perhaps there is a little room for easing restrictions in the interest of improving the economic climate here? Yes, it pains us to write this but let’s be realistic, all this talk of de-regulation in Washington means environmental restraints on industry are going to be the first regulations to go. But when you think about the favoritism China, India and other developing counties extend to economic versus environmental concerns, we here in the US are still rather lucky.

Of course, this line of thought requires we accept that global warming will send sea levels rising dramatically and completely reconfigure world climates to where regions of the world will be unrecognizable in another generation or so. NBN increasingly believes, as does a growing number of very clever scientists, it’s too late to stop it. Let’s talk about other kinds of pollution, like smoke stack emissions waste water treatment and road runoff, and the growing body of regulations aimed to keep them in check. Is it possible we can afford to be a little more lax when it comes to keeping these forms of pollution in check without causing permanent damage? Take for example the acid rain crisis in the 1960s and 1970s. Throttling back on coal plant emission seems to have solved the problem, with few lingering side effects. But what if we hadn’t forced Mid-west power plants to clean up their emission? The problem that was spawned in the Ohio Valley impacted Adirondack lakes and streams about 500 miles to the northeast and pretty much stopped there. Speaking globally, acid rain was still a fairly localized problem.

Now let’s turn our attentions to China and the massive coal emissions and other forms of pollution over there. Is there any reason to think those pollutants won’t rain out of the air over China much as happened in the Adirondacks? Ditto for the massive amounts of water pollutants we can pretty safely assume China and India are dumping into their watersheds and coastal marine ecosystems. Is there any reason to think those contaminants won’t be locked up in soil sediments only neighboring countries need to concern themselves with. This is hardly a vision of hope we’re offering here. Rather, it’s a little perspective.

 

No matter how radical right the next U.S. president is, it’s not likely we’ll see U.S. pollution protection laws become anywhere near as lax as those in China, India and other developing countries. So maybe we can relax environmental standards in this country a little. The beauty of those regulations is they’ve shown us that we really can clean-up after ourselves if we need to. We offer up the example of Ohio's Cuyahoga River which was so polluted in the 1960s it caught fire. Now fish are returning to its banks. If that river can be cleaned once, it can be cleaned up again. Ecosystem are a lot more robust than we realize. it's just a thought. We'll probably change our minds next week.

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A Thomas Friedman column forecasting unavoidable ecological Armageddon might not seem like something to click your heels over, but when we read this June 8 piece we couldn’t help but think it’s great news. First, the column says pretty much everything we’ve been saying here at NBN for the past 18 months: that globally, humans have done so much damage to the planet that we may actually be running out of planet to ruin. It easy to argue against this position when you look singularly at any one ecological issue like ground water contamination, algae blooms, invasive species, aquatic dead zones, fisheries collapse, and the chemical build-up in the air, water and food we consume. (Let’s see… did we leave anything out? Oh yeah, global warming.) But when you look at the impact of all these ecological maladies together, maybe NBN isn’t crazy to think that humanity as a whole is in deep trouble.

So why are we so happy about this Friedman column? Because now, the great Thomas (The-World-Is-Flat) Friedman agrees with us. That means NBN is not just a bunch of maniacs screaming in the wilderness. Millions of people just got the same message through Friedman’s column that NBN has been saying for the past 18 months. Friedman quotes some folks in his column who are even more blindly optimistic than NBN that humanity will actually find a way out of this mess. He quotes Paul Gilding, author of “The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World.” Beyond loving the title of this book, we love its message. Gilding says human response to this pending ecological calamity “will be proportionally dramatic, mobilizing as we do in war. We will change at a scale and speed we can barely imagine today, completely transforming our economy, including our energy and transport industries, in just a few short decades.” So, how does this miracle take place?

This is where the story gets a little scary. Friedman, this guy Gilding and NBN all agree that Americans are going to see a radical shift in our standard of living. No more consumer driven mania. No more jet skies, no more SUVs, no more throwing out half of the food we prepare each day—food that wreaks ecological havoc on the planet to produce and consumes many times more calories than it eventually yields. And how does this miracle take place and how do we accommodate the dramatic reduction in economic activity it will require?

This is where the story gets good. We work fewer hours. If we’re consuming less we need less money. We’ve said it all before here in NBN, so we’ll let Gilding field this explanation: “How many people,” Gilding asks, “lie on their death bed and say, ‘I wish I had worked harder or built more shareholder value,’ and how many say, ‘I wish I had gone to more ballgames, read more books to my kids, taken more walks?’ To do that, you need a growth model based on giving people more time to enjoy life, but with less stuff.” Bravo, Mr. Gilding, Bravo. Thanks again to Tom Friedman for once again boldly going where no man—with rare exception—has gone before with his column.

Drinking the water from what was once the nation’s dirtiest harbor may sound like something done to earn $50 from your frat house brethren. Yet that, in some respects, is the upshot from this announcement that Malibu Beach outside Boston Harbor is open to clamming after a century of being deemed too polluted. Those clams filter Boston Harbor water for tiny plants and animals called plankton. Along the way, they pull in all those goodies being discharged into the water from sewer pipes and storm drains, like the one pictured here. Why in the world would anyone eat clams that did nothing but filter water that no one would dream of drinking? Because, they’re delicious.

 Let’s be honest. Most of us have eaten some pretty funky things at one time or another. Watch Andrew Zimmern’s Cambodian episode of Bizarre Foods to see just the sorts of hurdles the human intestine can handle. So, why would anybody eat shellfish taken from water so dirty it derailed Dukakis’s presidential bid and propelled The Standells to their only serious hit. Consider something else before we answer that question. The industrial revolution started in New England and factories of every imaginable production pumped every imaginable pollutant down the Charles and other rivers, like the Merrimack. That pollution washed over some of the country’s most productive clam beds, like the Merrimack’s Joppa Flats and Boston Harbor’s Malibu Beach: Both now being opened to clamming.

So, what’s the problem? There is none. It’s great to think places like Boston Harbor and the Merrimack River, which were little more than open sewers a half-century ago, are now clean enough to eat from with a little help from biologists at depuration plants. But think of how much cleaner our watersheds can get if we go after these remaining sources of pollution. Communities across the country are groaning under the costs of EPA mandates to clean up wastewater treatment plants and storm water runoff. Yet, when we realize these are the last two impediments to returning our rivers and streams to nearly pristine condition, perhaps people will be a little more supportive of these clean up efforts.

It will be two years in June that the Cooperative Institute for the North Atlantic Region was cobbled together from labs at five prominent universities to study climate change effects in the Atlantic. Can you imagine anything clunkier than getting five, top-tier schools working together toward teasing out the effects of climate change in the Atlantic? So NBN thought we’d see what they’ve accomplished in two years with $3.3 million in federal funding. Here’s what Google News has on the group: nothing. Looking into the organization’s website newspage we found this recent study on how currents washing nutrients in from the South China Sea are affecting fishing in the Gulf of Alaska. Beyond that they had something about a new post graduate student joining the project. So what has CINAR been doing for the past two years? Gathering data. Warning! Long personal anecdote approaching.

The CINAR story reminds me of a series of articles a decade ago on NY's DEC taking fish, salt and water-clarity samples in Long Island's Peconic Bay. Watching a team of scientists weigh, measure, and count mountains of minnows pulled from nets pulled along the bay bottom seemed like a huge waste of tax payers' money. It looked more like an excuse for a bunch of biologists to go boating for the day. 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 salinity in the bay should be. They didn't know how many anchovies to expect to find at any given time of the year. They didn't know what the water clarity should be. Such information she called baseline, and it's vital if we're every to tease out a real understanding of how this planet works.

Baseline or no, these scientists are using up a lot of taxpayers’ money to produce data of little or no immediate value. But NBN would like to argue that baseline data  has got much greater long term value than the make work jobs, jobs, jobs so many politicians are calling for today. The same sort of scientific practice, gathering baseline data, started over a century ago is now the primary engine behind the nation's weather forecasting abilities. NBN can testify that the weatherman was pretty much right on the money this winter and those forecasts were of invaluable use to our planning. All thanks to a century of scientists gathering data of little immediate use. How much more so for airports, transportation department…ect? It may be hard to imagine right now what use nutrient flow into the Gulf of Alaska holds for the 2011 fishing season but is there any reason to think that a century from now, the folks working those waters won’t be as grateful for that information as we were for the extraordinary science behind weather forecasting this winter. The work you are doing should be more important than doing work.

Here’s a headline that says most everything about the story that follows, but leaves out any perspective on just how extensively the oil industry has polluted Texas. So, NBN turns to that treasure trove of environmental perspective, “The World Without Us”, for help. This is a book about how nature would reclaim the planet should all humans suddenly disappear leaving behind all our buildings and infrastructure. Author Alan Weisman paints an excellent portrait of what would happen if the world was suddenly without Texans to run all the oil refining machinery built up over the past century. Unfortunately, he did such an exhaustive job detailing the physical and biochemical reach of the state’s oil industry, that we can’t possibly  refine it here—pardon the pun. Suffice to say, the book depicts thousands of miles of piping above and below ground carrying every conceivable oil product across equally extensive low-lying former wetlands. Houston alone is 620 square miles. That can't be good for a coastal environment.

Improvements compared to what? And they make no mention of improvements to water quality. That’s the perspective missing in this piece. If you want that perspective, read Weisman’s chapter called “The Petro Patch”. It’s only 12 pages which we’ll sum up with: Texas’ oil country has been an marine wasteland for decades. Any "industry friendly" improvements being made will still leave the state's salt marsh ecosystems far behind what you'll find in Georgia, South Carolina or New England.

So, why should the country be annoyed that Texas not only won’t clean up its act, but professes to be setting a national standard in environmental stewardship? This image of the Gulf of Mexico tells part of the story. This is not open ocean. Rather it’s the oceanic equivalent of a backwater. It might be one thing to have these refineries relentlessly oozing illness into the middle of the Atlantic, but water circulation is restricted in the Gulf. What happens in the Gulf stays in the Gulf. Now, add the recent assault from the BP oil spill and 4.5 million gallons per-second of water laced with farm-chemicals, road runoff and treated waste water from the Mississippi  and we start to add a little national, even global perspective to Texas’ reckless reluctance to embrace  EPA’s efforts to clean the place up. Alaska might be able to get away with this sort of arrogance, it has thousands of square miles of pristine wilderness. But is it unreasonable to think that the entire Gulf of Mexico, shared by five states and three countries, is imperiled through the kind of arrogance on display in Texas? NBN is all for state's rights, but not when they encroach upon the rights of other states.

Normally news of a country’s flight from rural areas to urban would be a sure sign that something’s rotten in Demark. But when the exodus is happening in places like Nowhere, OK, it might not be bad news. Nothing against Nowhere, but we have to wonder how useful such places are going to be in a US economy that’s becoming less dependent on farming and manufacturing and more dependent on information. At least that’s our theory: As China, India and practically every other emerging nation exploits limitless cheap labor, all that’s left to drive the US economic engine will be producing new and ever-more-useful information. Naturally, when NBN went looking for news illustrating the decline of US farming to support our theory, we found a chart that shows food exports have never been higher. So, why then, is everyone going everywhere but Nowhere if US farming is doing so well? Why are we moving back to the cities?

We found another chart that’s a little more cooperative. This shows the value of the S&P 500 stock index versus the number of farms in this country. This chart doesn’t mean there is less farming, it just means fewer farms and that has to translate into fewer farm jobs. This chart also means that there are a lot more jobs being created in new industries. What industries, you might ask? NBN is going to take a logical leap of faith and say those jobs have a lot more to do with working with our minds than working with our hands. Like it or not, the only way this country is pulling ahead of the pack once more is by embracing an information based economy. Warning! Personal anecdote approaching.

Back before the advent of running water, I received my bachelor’s degree in the completely useless expertise of animal behavior. At my graduation, my brother, who since went onto manipulate information for a living, told me this country is going to move toward an information-based economy and that the mighty US manufacturing base was going to die. His argument seemed incomprehensible at the time. How could information drive an economy as large as this one? It helps if you think about information as a commodity, kind of like corn. Information finds the medical breakthroughs that we depend on as much as corn. Information finds the new energy sources that our future will depend on as much as oil. Information will find the filtration systems we need as much as clean water.

Such information is going to be very valuable to these emerging nations which are trashing their resources--clean water, air, and land--much the same way the US has done for the past century. Let's face it, we can't sell these folks manufactured goods that costs the US so much more to build than it costs them. What we can sell them is the information they will desperately need to correct the damage they are now doing to their own natural resources in their efforts to grab all these manufacturing jobs from Americans. Let them have them. These emerging countries are going to need a lot of this information and it’s going to take a lot of work to produce it. So, yes, in that light it does seem possible that manufacturing information could some day soon drive the US economy.

So, how does the former US farm hand or Ford assembly line worker whose job has been automated or shipped overseas learn to harvest or assemble information into a form that can put bread on the table? The answer is right in front of you: your computer. For better or worse we have to spend a lot more time in cyberspace and a lot less time in soybean fields if we want to compete in this world. There are too many people fighting for those soybean jobs to make it worthwhile pursuing them in this country. And as long as Asian factory workers are willing to build stuff for a small fraction of what the US unions want for their members, those jobs are going to continue heading overseas.

Before you accuse NBN of elitism, ask a plumber if he'd rather be a scientist. Plumbing sucks, we know because we've done it, for 15 years. Technically, it was tile setting, but it still sucked. What's worse is, so many plumbers  and tile setters think they can't possibly be scientists. We're going to let you in on a little secret: scientists aren't all that smart either. We know, we've done that too. Remember what Einstein said: Genius is 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration.  There is a lot of work out there for unemployed plumbers who want to be scientists. What this country needs is plumbers who believe they can be scientists.

09.07.10 Banks Grow Wary of Environmental Risks Economists like Milton Freedman here might cite this article about banks backing away from polluting industries as proof  the Free Market can actually correct calamities it creates without government meddling. NBN isn’t so sure. Let’s start with the assumption free market forces helped, at least in large part, sculpt the fossil-fuel driven, consumer economy that gave us the enormous ecological liabilities of the Gulf oil spill, Global Warming and mountain-top mining. Any way you cut it, these are bills that have to be paid and now it appears such liabilities are scaring off some of the banks that financed the companies that created them, according to the Bloomberg News piece linked above.

The article notes that Bank of America — listed as recently as 2008 as one of the “syndication agents” on a $175 million revolving line of credit to Massey Energy — has eliminated that and all other connections to the coal industry giant. The article also notes that JPMorgan, which had previously underwritten $180 million in debt securities to Massey, no longer has any financial ties to that company. In May, the bank said it would be subjecting all future engagements with companies involved in mountaintop removal mining to “enhanced review.” Uncle Milty might cite all the above as the free market’s self correcting capacity, provided the government stays away.

Conclusion? Seeing the banks back away from ecologically risky ventures is great news, but then we have this from Massey energy’s Roger S. Hendriksen: “While some banks no longer provide financing for companies conducting surface mining, there are many who will. We have and will continue to replace their services with alternate bank providers with little difficulty.” We suspect he’s right and Uncle Milty may be jumping the gun. Free markets are great, but they can’t exist without a government to keep out the chaos. And as the world gets more and more chaotic, we fear the only solution is more government, not less. We really do wish it wasn’t so.

08.24.10 DES to Test Oil Spill Protection Strategies on Little Bay and in Furber Strait, Newington on August 25 and 26  Here’s one piece of good news to come out of the Gulf oil spill: Tests are scheduled for oil spill preparedness in New Hampshire’s Great Bay. You have to know the Great Bay to fully appreciate the implications of this test for New Hampshire and elsewhere in the country. As salt marshes and estuaries go, the Great Bay earns it name. It’s one of few water bodies in New England that still has native eel grass. Big deal, you say? Eel grass once carpeted the bottom of pretty much every bay from Maine to South America. Now nobody knows what it is. It provided an abundance of habitat for all kinds of increasingly scarce creatures like sea horses and bay scallops. Now it can only be found in odd places like New York’s Orient Point, of Massachusetts Martha’s Vineyard, and the Great Bay.

Sadly, the Great Bay is fed by ocean water delivered by the Piscataqua River which washes right past a Naval base and natural gas and salt loading docks in Portsmouth. Docks which service tankers, like the one pictured here, less than a quarter mile from the inlet leading to the Great Bay. If you look at the image up top, the loading docks are right next to the number 4 designating Rt. 4 in Portsmouth. Sounds like as good a place as any for an ecologically devastating spill of oil or salt. Let’s hope such a spill is a less likely scenario after these tests. Let’s also hope the state finds a way to bill the shipping companies for the test. That will mean more expensive natural gas and road salt. It would also mean the risks of dealing with these materials in ecologically sensitive areas might actually be reflected in the price we pay to consume them. Now that would be great news.

That includes how environmentally safe the stuff inside the TVs is, and how responsibly the TVs are thrown out when they've left this world. In other words, do manufacturers provide some sort of recycling programs for their TVs? Samsung and Sony do. They top the list of green tube makers, so perhaps some appreciation is in order. Now, if Sony and Samsung can just get us to watch a little less of the programming that's polluting our minds. It sounds like good news to us.

There's more to Mending the Meadowlands than Landscaping 08.03.10

Last week we cautiously wrote on the NBN cover about a  marsh restoration plan we saw from the New Jersey Turnpike. Cautious, because we weren’t 100 percent sure the massive excavators we show again here weren’t out there digging the foundation for a new highrise in the middle of the marsh. This week NBN had a great conversation with Jim Wright from the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission. Fortunately, Write said we were right about the excavators, adding that similar successful efforts to dig out phragmites in the Meadowlands and replace them with spartina grass has this stagnant ecosystem showing real signs of recovery.

What NBN didn’t know about this project, and Wright explained, is the marsh restoration is more than a change of landscaping. There's also a network of buried pipes collecting millions of gallons of heavily polluted water draining from landfills that operated for decades throughout the Meadowlands.

Wright also explained that this marsh restoration is a lot more than big machines digging holes. The excavators, nearly invisible in the awful photo above, are not just tearing out the phragmites they are opening up channels so salt water can flow in as it once did centuries before. Such circulation in salt marshes is analogous to proper blood circulation in the body. The marsh dies without it and now the marsh is living again with it. Add on the fact the landfill leachate is also being kept out of the newly restored waterways means a real salt marsh is being recreated in the Meadowlands.

It's not just some half-baked effort forever hobbled by the mystery chemicals draining from the former landfills. Imagine that! A viable salt marsh with herons, egrets, mummichogs, snappers, blue crabs, fiddlers crabs, eels, ribbed mussels, oysters, soft and hard-shelled clams and a whole host of other plants and animals where an impenetrable monoculture of pollution-soaked phragmites dominated for decades. To quote Wright: “It will be a fully functioning marsh again.” That is seriously Good News.

Urbandale, IL, reports its largest increase in recycling since the municipal program got started, thanks largely to a new collection can program. We at NBN were shocked to see it’s the same sort of can that’s been distributed by our trash haulers here in the People's Republic of Massachusetts. And yes, it’s improved recycling at the offices of NBN as well. Not that we were less than maniacal about recycling before we got this new can. Quite the opposite. We were beginning to suspect NBN's staff recycler needed professional help when we found him in the basement using a blow-torch to reduce to a plastic puddle the otherwise incompressible plastic containers they sell strawberries and blueberries in. Now, he just chucks it all into this cavernous container for some other poor slob to sort out. That’s what so cool about these recycling bins. They are huge! You could lay them on their side and use them for a garage. It’ makes it kind of hard to obsess over separating and bundling your recyclables when it’s impossible to fill the bin that collects them. As usual, the secret to success is excess. Let's not leave out the latest news on the city's recycling program.

It appears the one thing the Gulf’s marine ecosystem couldn’t afford to lose, the marsh grasses, are showing signs of new life amidst their oil soaked roots. While the talk of endangered tuna and turtles could still spell catastrophe for various other components of the marine ecosystems in the Gulf, losing the marsh grass would mean losing everything and the story linked above suggests that may not be happening. The jury is still out on the damage to the coral that could yet result from the spill. And we’ve got our fingers cross for the Dry Tortugas and the Keys. But the importance of the new growth in the marsh grass can not be over stated."This makes me believe that the long-term impact, at least at this point in time, on these reeds communities will be relatively small -- again, just on the vegetation. There will be new shoots being formed, and as long as they're not being oiled again, the vegetation should show a minimal impact." Irv Mendelssohn, a professor at Louisiana State University's School of the Coast and Environment. That is seriously good news.

07.27.10 Georgia Getaway Improves Nation’s Best Canopy Tour with Three Unbelievable Upgrades NBN has no idea if this “Georgia Getaway" is any good for kids, or adults, but similar sites are a big hit in Central American rainforests and this place clearly has a lot going for it. First, we love the concept of exploring tree-tops. Why let birds,squirrels, and tree trimmers have all the fun? Then there are all the other good things about this getaway: no fossil fuel being burned, the place is right here in the Good ‘Ol USA and folks learn about that most unsung of environments: forest canopies. There is a lot going on up in the trees that we never get to see. All kinds of xenophobic animals hang out there. Lastly, it looks like these folks have turned a defunct Georgia factory into a very green entertainment industry employing a lot of residents who were probably skeptical of the plan when it was first proposed to the local planning department. Talk about good news.

07.27.10 Code Council and ASPE Present First U.S. World Toilet Summit If ever a headline begged the indulgence of the reader, this one does. A toilet-talk summit? Who would think people would gather from around the world to discuss the intricacies of the ivory alter. Yet toilet water, without all the wonderful poisons we use to keep it clean, is a useful, nutrient-rich, toxin free resource. It’s only after we add in all the chemicals from the dishwasher, washing machine, showers and sinks that we end up with everything but the kitchen sink sliding down the drain. Getting those disinfectants, detergents and dyes out of our toilets would make that wastewater more useful and less toxic. Imagine if we could then divert  toilet from the rest of the sewage we produce. It would mean a 26 percent reduction in sewage going into our ground water, rivers, streams, bays, creeks, oceans and other undesirable places. It sounds like serious subject matter for the First World Toilet Summit, but you can be sure for the folks attending will have some fun. There's bound to be plenty of potty humor. We say “bravo” for the First US World Toilet Summit. (Sorry, we get excited over some pretty boring stuff over here at NBN.)

This message on this sign is kind of depressing. So, what’s it doing leading off the Good News section of the Good News issue of NBN? The good news is this is the entrance to the interpretive trail of the old growth forest at Gifford Woods State Park in Vermont. Old growth forest in New England is rarer than beer cans in Saudi Arabia. Gifford is one of just three old growth forests in Vermont and it’s just 18 acres. We’ve all seen the awe inspiring redwoods and cedars of the Pacific Northwest, but if you’ve ever wondered what New England old growth forests look like take a look below.

These are three trees leading into the old growth forest at Gifford. The big one in the center is a sugar maple about 30-inches wide. For anyone who pines for the days (pardon the pun) when old growth forests ruled New England, this image here is what they are missing. Disappointed? Don’t be. We're playing a little fast and loose with the facts here, so corrections are welcome. But as NBN understands it, New England old growth forests are not like the Pacific Northwest. With the  possible exception of the American Chestnut, eastern hardwoods don’t grow much larger than what you see here. And that’s great news because it means the forests of New England might already be back to their former glory, before colonists came through and mowed them all down.

Rebounding rivers and forests aren’t the only good green greetings these days. Cars and homes are becoming more fuel efficient, ground water contamination is declining through dramatically less intensive landfilling practices and improved recycling. Waste Water treatment plant upgrades and improvements in storm water runoff, are making our rivers and lakes cleaner than they’ve been in centuries.  It's hard to estimate the reach of the green movement but it appears to NBN that this is no longer token, tax-write-off stuff. It maybe wishful thinking, but it appears we're seeing a wholesale shift in global attitude., with the exception of a few morons. The benefits of all these wonderful efforts are really just starting to roll in. Just wandering through NBN's emailbox for good news one morning this past week here’s what came up.

*Flights are Greener Today and Set to Be Even More Fuel Efficient In Years Ahead
*Ocean Energy Institute steps up activity in Maine
 *Global Leaders In Renewable Energy Sign Agreement To Develop, Finance And Operate Projects Across Northeast
*Verenium Corp. reports it will sell its cellulosic biofuels business to BP Biofuels North America for $98.3 million.
*San Francisco Bay Area renewable energy businesses land $800 million in 2010 venture capital investment
*This is juist a fun site to play around with if you want to see fuel efficiency improvements in certain cars over the past 35 years

This list above could go on forever. Yes, we’ve had to pay for all these environmental protections, and replacing fossil fuels will no doubt be a painful shift in this country's industrial output and manufacturing base.  And we can’t talk about good things in the environment without paying tribute to global warming, which can still make all this silver lining stuff look like hubris. Then again, should the threat of rising tides be as dire as some folks are predicting, then global warming could be the best news of all. As Global Warming doomsday seer James Lovelock put it (we can’t find the link anywhere) in the next few decades we’ll forget all about Osama Bin Laden and his buddies and we’ll all be working side by side to save the planet. We may never know the joy of hunting wild turkey in New England’s old growth forests, or cod fishing off Stellwagen Bank before the invention of the bottom trawler. But if this country stays this course, this generation will enjoy natural resources Americans haven’t seen for the past three generations. And that's good news, if not hopeless optimism

In the Godfather, Don Corleone advises his favored son Michael to: “keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” Which pretty much explains why we were listening to Boston talk radio host Michael Graham—shown here in situ. Graham offhandedly referred to the “failed” Stimulus bill, as if “failed” is part of the title. In an effort to better understand his argument we called up Massachusets' Stimulus on the internet. Right at the top of this itemized list of Stimulus expenditures we found this jewel: $299k for MIT scientists to do an “analysis of microbial activity under a supercritical CO2 atmosphere.” It sounds like they are looking at how bacteria grow in bad air. It also sounds like spending five-year's salary to examine the inside of the average American refrigerator. Next up was another $299k for MIT scientists for “modeling and risk assessment of CO2 sequestration at the geologic-basin scale.” In English, this (hopefully) means troubleshooting plans to pump tons and tons of CO2 into underground crevasses, such as the voids remaining from depleted oil fields. It's a proposed strategy for curbing global warming. Right after that, there's $25,560 for an alternative energy audit at a New Jersey National Wildlife Refuge. Apparently, the Massachusetts office of the US Fish and Wildlife Service is filing for a grant to change the light bulbs in a New Jersey swamp park headquarters.

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:
Item 41) $25,000 to $100,000 for florescent light fixtures at various northeast US Fish and Wildlife Service offices.
Item 93) $100,000 to examine a school vaccination billing program. That's not paying for medicine, it's paying for figuring out how to pay for the medicine.

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 money for computerizing a Kansas City power company's electric generation and distribution system in hopes it will also save money. (Sorry, we just pulled that KC project out of Google News, it's got nothing to do with Massachusetts) So much of this Stimulus spending seems so pie-in-the-sky at a time small businesses could stretch that money so much further. You can kind of see why  Graham calls the Stimulus plan a failure right out of the box. It's even harder to see US government workers overseeing these ambitious science projects when their agencies are already strapped for cash.

What Michael Graham's listeners, and a very large percentage of this country doesn't realize is: this country is going to be forced to change, big time. Who can see our consumer-driven model of America surviving when the rest of the world already spends so much less on their daily expenses. American's will have to as well, and that means we'll have to become much more efficient if we want to enjoy anything resembling the lifestyle we enjoy now. So, is buying more energy efficient light bulbs of state park offices really such a waste of money. Ditto for home energy audits. How can spending for alternative energy research be a bad idea when wer're spending $1b a day on foreign oil? So much of the Stimulus spending plan, as suggested above, is all about science, some of it pretty scatterbrained. Which brings us back to listening to Michael Graham criticisms of the failed Stimulus plan. Where do you put your faith: in Graham or the government? Neither. You put it in yourself. Turn on your computer and do the research. These spending plans are a mouse click away. See for yourself if  the money is being spent wisely.

During a recent hike through southwest Virginia, NBN got a close look at the Appalachian Mountains, a part of the U.S. not plagued by nitrogen loading, over-fishing, over-development, road runoff, groundwater contamination, or combined sewer overflows. However, it's got another plague of sorts: Rednecks. We're talking tobacco-chawin', beer swilling, shotgun-in-the-back-of-their-pick-up-truck good old boys that make Blue State liberals hope Darwin was wrong. And after three days riding around in a pick-up packed with Pall Malls, with a fella named “Bubba” at the helm, NBN has come to this conclusion: it might be time to move to Atkins, VA. (Bubba is not his real name. But he had no idea when we spoke, NBN was going to make him famous. You can decide if he's for real or not.)

The Appalachians suffer environmental maladies as nasty as those mentioned above: Clingman’s dome in Georgia has been denuded by the wooly adelgid, and not far from where we hiked, they still practice mountain top mining. But somehow all that passed over Atkins. This column is an attempt to explain why, through the thoughtful, deliberate folks like Bubba living in two-bedroom ranches and double-wide trailers in places like Atkins.

It's tempting to open this explanation with a few twangs of a banjo. The geography for such an accompaniment would be dead on. This is the heart of Appalachia. But the culture and people take a little more explanation. Let’s start with the stereotypes that held fast for our hike; Everybody smokes, drives pick-ups, drinks beer, communicates through clichés, wears pancake makeup and is making a frontal assault on obesity, if not having soundly conquered same. These are people you assume to be flocking to the Tea Party like 1940s Alabama Protestants to a KKK rally. And in the all-too-short time we were there it was clear they do hold fast to many Tea Party ideals, tops among them: Don't Tread on Me.

What becomes clearer when you spend a little time there is that these folks can afford to hold fast to such ideals. These hill-billies have lived on the mountains and off the lands since shortly after New England was settled. But it seems they have done considerably less damage to their surroundings in the process. You could argue there are considerably fewer of them living there to do that damage. This is where Bubba and Atkins enter the argument. The latter suffers from 17 percent unemployment that the former counts himself amongst. Bubba, haltingly called himself a “tree-hugger” only when he realized he was being paid to spend hours driving the real McCoy around the mountains he grew up in. (Bubba, seriously, what kind of a tree-hugger recalls fondly a childhood spend rubbing cats’ behinds with corn-cobs just to see how fast they run when said surface is then washed with kerosene? I gotta tell ya, my wife almost jumped out of your truck when she heard that one.)

To get a real handle on Bubba it might make more sense to describe his hometown first. Right now Atkins is on very hard times, but even in good times most everyone is a million bucks shy of being millionaires. Right now, in Atkins, $12 is a good hourly wage and lots of folks in this area are commuting 50 miles or more to make less, according to Bubba, who charged us $30 for spending 90 minutes driving to and from a trail head the first morning we met. It may be presumptuous to use Bubba as representative of Atkins, or for that matter use Atkins as a representative of the typical Red State community. But, when you see bumper stickers in town saying: “10 reasons to Vote Republican, The 10 commandments” you can be forgiven a few assumptions.And, it was clear from the outset, Bubba was no blue-state liberal.

Still, Bubba made clear these people don't fit the stereotypes so often crafted for them. Particularly, when it comes to balancing the environmental and economic needs of their communities. Here are just a few of the environmental issues of the day in Atkins and where Bubba stands on them.
*Local planners denying Shoney's a sign height variance? “Stoopid. A dozen desperately needed jobs moved one town north on Interstate 81 where the welcome was warmer.”
*Pepsi being denied water utility considerations for its plant expansion plans? “Really stoopid: 200 jobs moved one town north on Interstate 81 where the welcome was warmer.”
*Mountain top coal mining? “Really, really stoopid. You ruin the mountain and get many fewer jobs.”
In the end we found ourselves more in agreement as not with Bubba. It would be nice to think that Bubba came away from our time together thinking the same about us. Thanks for the rides and education, Bubba. Now, take a word of advice from a northerner: put down the Pall Malls!

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Last Saturday I ate what were without doubt the best raw oysters in the world at Claudio's restaurant in Greenport, NY. I have eaten several thousand raw oysters in my day. I used to catch them as a kid. I love the things. Once you get past the nausea-inducing chewy-jello texture, they have a refreshing salty meaty kind of taste that makes them go down like Lays potato chips without the crunch. One you get past the first one, you can never again eat just one. Yet in all my oyster exploits never, never did an oyster taste quite like those Claudio's served that night. They had a silky texture married to an almost sweet, slightly salty flesh that messaged your taste buds before searing the taste sensation into your cerebral cortex. Kind of like great champagne. Here's the cool part: these oysters were farmed by a resident living about a quarter-mile from Claudio's. The guy takes baby oysters, called spat, puts them into some sort of mesh containers and tosses them off his dock. Two years later he's selling horribly misshapen shellfish for a $1 each. When I shared the Claudio's experience with my father's neighbor, he told me his son-in-law is doing the same thing with nearly the same results from a small creek around the corner from Claudio's.

That's just half the story. Speaking with an oyster researcher from the University of New Hampshire this week, he had what could be very exciting news for fans of this beguiling bivalve. What is spoken of in hallowed terms by bivalve biologist as the “2006 set” is enjoying a very significant birthday this year. Not only are these oysters entering their fifth growth year, they are changing into females.

This is great news for oyster lovers. The '06 set earned a place in oyster record books as the number of spat in New England waters, and lesser so farther south, increased ten-fold. These are not farmed oyster, like the fellow in Greenport is growing, these are naturally occurring. The '06 set, set in motion a natural phenomenon that could reverse decades of devastation from a disease dubbed dermo that decimated oyster densities across the diaspora. Since dermo, and another parasite called MSX struck, you can see by the chart here, the oyster catch is a shadow of what it once was. A really short shadow. This is where the story gets interesting. Since the discovery of dermo, scientists like my UNH friend have been focused on breeding disease resistant oysters—They raise oyster in pens throw a lot of derma and MSX into the water, pull out the survivors and do it all over again. Along the way they seeded surrounding waters, near UNH and across the country, with these super oysters.

Now, there is good reason to believe the effeminate '06 oysters that are growing in record numbers in north Atlantic marshes are not only disease resistant, but as females the spat production should be way beyond what it's been seen every year since the extraordinary '06 set got things started.

Time to complicate the picture a little more before we start to wrap up. The '06 set was so successful because of what's been called the Mother's Day Storm, shown at left in technicolor and in this video. In 2006, parts of New England got close to 12 inches of rain in 24 hours. Certain salt marshes saw so much rain they became fresh water marshes for a few days. It's thought the Mother's Day storm is what caused the '06 set. Now we've had back-to-back storms in late March which dumped almost as much rain on estuaries full of oysters that were expected to have a whizz-bang of a year with or without the rain.

One more point to make. Oysters don't just taste great, they clean up the water. Oysters are literally salt water washing machines. Each adult oyster filters up to 50 gallons of seawater looking for tiny plants and animals to eat. It's believed the entirety of the Chesapeake Bay was completely filter by the oysters that once grew there every year.

So, what's this got to do with Claudios and the raw oysters I ate. Simply this: the age of the oyster may be upon us. If all these factors conspire the way my UNH friend, and a lot of others hope, it could be transformative for marshes across the country that are struggling mightily with a form of pollution called storm water runoff. Many feel it's the most pressing form of pollution in our waters today. Oyster are particularly effective at filtering this nutrient -rich water that runs off of lawns and parking lots and into storm drain and then marshes. They also can be quite effective at combating the goodies discharged by old sewage treatment plants that they get over run with rain water, a problem called combined sewer overflow. As man has perverted nature in all sorts of ways that only seem to invite calamity, it looks like the oyster could be a major step in the other direction. Here's another great story about the oyster efforts down south.

It's said that when both sides walk away unhappy, a good compromise has been negotiated. What about when boths sides are happy? That's what's going on off the coast of northern New England lately. Fish hungry residents are knocking out the middle man and buying directly from commercial fishermen. There are all kinds of benefits, like fresher fish and better-paid fishermen. What we find most heartwarming is the business model. Residents lock in the right to buy these fish by paying upfront, at the beginning of the season. They are buying shares of the catch, before the fish are caught. This means the fishermen's incomes are not at the mercy of market price fluctuations.

Those price fluctuations result in lower income and overfishing and many folks argue they are a central problem in commercial fishing today. Residents buying shares in the catch at the start of the season is a cousin to the concept of Catch Shares, spoken of perhaps too often on this page. Shown above are some Maine shrimp, the catch being sold directly to residents referred to in the program linked above. The catch with this catch is, the shrimp come with heads, tails and insides too. But it's fresher than any shrimp you'll buy elsewhere. The stuff is unreal curried. And for true fish lovers, freshness is all that counts.

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This pond outside the Hyatt Grand Champion in Palm Springs looks a suspicious shade of green, doesn't it? What are the chances the Hyatt is directing the gray water collected from its hundreds of bathroom drains to a collection of landscaped ponds attracting visitors throughout the complex? A Google search of the Hyatt's website produced nothing. Then again, coloring waste water and funneling it into landscaped ponds is not something a family resort is going to boast of on its website. Finding fish in these ponds is also a surprise. Not only is there carp, but if you look closely, there's catfish too. Again, we're only guessing about the gray water use at the Hyatt. However, according to this link, gray water water makes a decent fish pond. Then notice the type of fish living in this pond. Carp and catfish. The invasive Asian carp was imported to this country originally as a pollution control for catfish farms. Carp and catfish are pollution pals. Now ,add on the fact that Palm Springs gets less than six inches of annual rainfall.

It seems Palm Springs can hardly afford the water needed to sustain large fish ponds in what's essentially a desert. Unless, of course, that water was heading for a septic system anyway. A neat picture of efficiency starts to emerge in a town not famed for frugality. Could the Hyatt be diverting a portion of its sewer water into fish ponds? If so, we love this kind of engineering. It's turning a liability into an asset. There was even this green heron hunting along the banks of the Hyatts' fish pond. If our gray water theory is true, the Grand Champion is making a septic system into an ecosystem. Perhaps we should call the Hyatt and find out for sure. Why let the facts get in the way of a good story? Seriously, it's the point we wish to make, not the story we wish to tell. It illustrates a very smart possible use of limited resources. Such technology holds out such promise, if only it were employed more often. Southwest ground water aquifers and watersheds like the Colorado River have been ravaged through thoughtless exploitation. But as you'll read in Watershed News today, watersheds elsewhere in the country are getting a new lease on life.

Here is a chewy announcement saying that NOAA is putting together a national policy on open ocean fish farming. The idea of putting fish farms farther off shore sounds pretty good. The biggest problem so far from fish farming closer to shore is pollution. All those fish concentrated in such tight quarters means more parasites and disease which are wiping out wild fish unfortunate enough to swim near these farms. That's part of the reason for the push to place these things off shore. Maybe this policy will promote that. This is an image of a salmon farm up in Maine. The fellow here is feeding farm salmon pellets made in large part from ground up fish that don't taste as good as salmon. A lot of those pellets settle on the bottom uneaten. Add on the feces from all the fish above and the water around these fish farms starts to get pretty funky.

Now, look at how many nets there are. Now look at this link to see how concentrated these farms are getting, and how they are tucked into the streams and coves for protection. That link is the Pacific Northwest. But the same applies in the East. Moving these operations offshore, will doubtless mean less of a problem for wild Atlantic Salmon stocks. In fact it's possible all the nutrients from the salmon food and poop, could be good in those nutrient starved waters off shore. Here's a Time magazine piece on the subject that might be useful. Here's another well-written piece on the innovations to end inshore fish farming being proposed in Massachusetts.

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This Cornell newsletter might be worth a read. On the bottom of the front page they discuss Massachusetts farmers fooling around with drip insecticide applications instead of spraying. Apparently, this application works only for insecticides that work their way up through the roots of a plant, and don't have to be sprayed right onto the fruit or vegetable. Fortunately, the number of these systemic insecticides is growing. My bet is collateral bird or insect deaths will be cut way back if it can be made to work. Caution! Personal Anecdote approaching.

I was working for a cement company putting in curbing in a subdivision in 1977 when helicopters started spraying the surrounding potato fields. It started raining insects of all kinds just after the helicopters left. I clearly remember seeing a lot of dragon flies dropping at my feet. Dragon flies eat mosquitoes, lots of them. Dragon flies are good. Unfortunately, spray insecticides don't discriminate. Of course at the time I didn't realize I was breathing this stuff too. I was eighteen and immortal.

This is a cool project. Folks over at New Hampshire's Department of Environmental Services have a program aimed at picking cigarette butts off the beach. New Hampshire has the unfortunate distinction of having 11 miles of gorgeous ocean-front beach that has historically been the playground of blue-collar families from the Merrimack Valley mill towns of Haverhill, Lawrence and Lowell. It's arguably the last vestige of American honky tonk. Get your funnel cakes here. There still a few penny arcades left. Make no mistake, I love the place. More to the point; lets be honest, blue collar folks smoke more than rich people. Hence, New Hampshire has a Butt's off the Beach Day while the Hamptons on Long Island, NY, doesn't. This sounds incredibly crass, but lets face it, it's true. Anyway, I was doing a story for the Globe once on a similar effort at Hampton Beach and there were folks walking around with these portable ashtrays

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Another dam coming out of a New England river is reason to cheer. However, this one shown in the picture at right, was pulled from the Black Brook, in New Hampshire, a tributary of the Merrimack River. The folks that pulled the dam say the project will restore all manner of fish habitat. But what about Merrimack River dams downstream in Lowell and Lawrence still blocking access for anadromous fish migrating from the Atlantic to the Black Brook to spawn? The Lawrence dam in particular has been an enormous stumbling block in the Merrimack to restoring fish runs to upstream spawning grounds like the Black Brook. Here are the latest numbers of anadromous fish making it past the Lawrence dam to spawning grounds upstream.

Fortunately, there is also some good news regarding the Lawrence dam. This picture is of work crews putting in a crest gate at the Lawrence dam which is hoped to better regulate the water flow over the dam when the river is running high. The problem with fish migrating past the Lawrence dam is that during high water herring, shad, alewife and salmon heading upstream get confused by water that's spilling all over the place. Normally, the only water passing the dam washes through the turbine spillways of a hydro-electric plant at the dam's south end. A fish-lift strategically placed in the wake of the spillways, attracts migrating fish and lifts them to the top of the dam. When the river is up, however, water is spilling over the dam as well as washing past the fish lift. The counter currents confuse the fish and they don't make it to the lift, which is why the migration counts have been so pathetic.

The new crest gate, being installed here, is expected to more effectively regulate water flow over the dam so the fish trying to get upstream will get less confused. It will also make for more efficient generation at the power plant, so every body makes out. Here's a great story on the Lawrence crest gate installation. There will still be the Lowell dam impeding the Merrimack migrations, although it too has a fish lift. Unfortunately, there is no good news we could find about the future of that dam..