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The taiga is well adapted to fire, but a 2013 study of charcoal records shows that lately, it's been burning at rates not seen for 10,000 years. Most carbon emissions come from the tundra-like peat of the forest floor; carbon from peat fires could equal up to 40 percent of that emitted by global fossil fuels. Worse, soot from such fires can darken Arctic ice, making it melt faster.
If increased global warming spurs ever-greater fires in the taiga of Alaska, Canada and Russia, as some scientists predict, it could create a feedback loop, in which more boreal fires lead to more warming, and more warming to more fire.
Sources: The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2013; Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre Situation Report; University of Guelph, Ontario; Mike Flannigan, wildland fire professor, University of Alberta]]>
About a third of American power plants run on coal, and more than half of it comes from Western mines. But even though it remains the country's greatest single source of fuel for electricity, its prominence is slipping; as recently as 2007, for example, coal-fired plants produced half the nation's power. Much of the drop is due to economics, as more plants convert from coal to cheaper natural gas. But more than economics are involved: The battle over coal is increasingly moving into law and public policy.
In June, a federal judge in Colorado stopped a lease expansion for the West Elk Mine, one of three mines in the North Fork Valley, above Paonia. The judge said that the agencies involved had failed to adequately account for climate impacts, either from the mine's operations or from emissions that could come from burning the new coal. The decision came just after the Environmental Protection Agency issued a new set of regulations for power plant emissions, and though it may be appealed, it could set new precedents in the way mines and agencies calculate coal's cost to the climate. It also came as the White House continues to push a climate change agenda through agencies like the EPA and the Bureau of Land Management.
Still, when U.S. District Court Judge R. Brooke Jackson – a Western judge appointed by President Obama – ruled to enjoin expansion of the West Elk Mine, it came as something of a shock.
"This is the first time, that I'm aware of, that conservation organizations like ours have been able to invalidate a BLM approval for a coal mine because an agency failed to adequately consider climate change impacts," says Nathaniel Shoaff, staff attorney for the Sierra Club, which joined other groups in suing federal agencies for approval of the lease expansion. "And that the court did so on these grounds is going to come up in lots of other cases."
Jackson ruled that the Forest Service and the BLM had failed to look hard enough at the impacts of the lease expansion, as required by the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act. The mine, owned by Arch Coal – one of the nation's biggest coal-mining companies – had sought to extend its underground mining operations into the Gunnison National Forest, an expanse of aspen, scrub oak and beaver ponds popular with big game hunters. The expansion would have required numerous wells to vent methane pockets trapped amid the coal.
The agencies thoroughly touted the economic gains of the expansion, "down to the job and the nearest $100,000," without fully examining the costs to the area and the climate, Jackson said. That includes the methane, a greenhouse gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide that's released during mining operations, as well as the CO2 released from the coal once it is removed from the ground and burned in a power plant.
Jackson also ruled that the BLM failed to account for the "social cost of carbon," a federally established measurement of how greenhouse gas emissions might affect global warming. "In effect the agency prepared half of a cost-benefit analysis, incorrectly claimed that it was impossible to quantify the costs, and then relied on the anticipated benefits to approve the project," Jackson wrote in his decision.
Jackson also took issue with something called the Colorado Roadless Rule. That 2012 rule, a compromise between the state's mining industries and environmentalists, was Colorado's response to former President Clinton's Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which put 58 million acres of national forest off limits to road building, energy development, logging and mining. Clinton's rule would have prohibited roads in coal-seamed areas of the North Fork, something the state's version allowed. In his decision, Jackson agreed with the plaintiffs, who claimed the Colorado Roadless Rule had not sufficiently accounted for potential costs to the climate and so should not be used in arguments for a coal-mine lease expansion.
The Colorado Roadless Rule effectively opens up 350 million tons of coal for extraction, Shoaff says. That's a huge amount of coal and a huge amount of carbon. In the past, the BLM and Forest Service have argued that if that coal is not mined in a particular location, it will be mined elsewhere, canceling out the costs to the environment.
"That is a totally specious argument," Shoaff says. "And this court got rid of it in about one page."
The decision creates potential precedents that could push agencies to better account for costs to the climate in their leasing agreements, Shoaff says, including the market impact of pulling so much coal out of the ground. Models can predict what will happen to the price of coal if that amount of coal is not mined. Generally, it will increase, potentially making other, less-polluting energies more appealing, and thereby reducing carbon emissions.
The West Elk Mine decision was not the only shift in the discussion of coal's future this spring. The White House is moving forward with an aggressive climate change agenda, and that, too, is affecting coal. The most visible of these initiatives is the EPA's Clean Power Plan, a rule that aims to reduce the coal industry's U.S. emissions by 30 percent below its 2005 levels by 2030. The rule has been discussed by policymakers in Washington, D.C., and via public comment meetings in three other cities, including Denver. Many high-profile environmental groups like the Sierra Club and the Environmental Defense Fund support the rule, but it also has its detractors, particularly from the coal industry and states whose economies rely on it.
In hearings at the EPA's Region 8 office in Denver last month, Colorado's Moffat County Commissioner John Kinkaid likened the rule to an "environmental extremist war."
"This isn't some abstract bureaucratic exercise to the people of northwest Colorado," he said. "To us, this is personal." A coal-fired plant and two attendant coal mines are the top three taxpayers for the county, he said in an interview later. "We feel that we're being told that the science is settled, so just be quiet, and, you know, live with the regulations," he said.
Meanwhile, the BLM is quietly moving toward creating regulations for dealing with methane from underground coal mining. Coal and methane are often found together, and it was the need for detection of methane, deadly for miners, that brought about the legendary canaries in early mines.
These days, methane is vented through wells drilled from the surface before mining begins, for safety purposes. But not all of that methane is captured, re-used or burned off, creating another kind of emissions problem. Methane is a major greenhouse gas that is 20 times more powerful than CO2 over a 100-year period. U.S. coal mines account for 10 percent of all human-caused methane emissions, according to the BLM. Adhering to the White House climate change initiative, the BLM is now requesting comments on a program to "capture, use, or destroy waste mine methane" in the mining of coal and other lease minerals.
All of this is to say that coal is being viewed differently, in the courts and by the agencies that regulate it. Coal mining is still going strong, though, with much of the domestic losses in the industry offset by exports to meet foreign demand.
Colorado's West Elk Mine decision is likely to be appealed, though details remain uncertain. A BLM spokeswoman in nearby Montrose, Colorado, declined to comment on the case. The overall effect on the industry, or even on Arch Coal, remains an open question, too. Company spokeswoman Kim Link says the ruling would not change operations immediately but it would complicate long-term planning.
That kind of uncertainty is the problem with decisions made in the absence of a coherent national energy policy, says Robert Godby, director of the University of Wyoming's Center for Energy Economics & Public Policy. No such policy means a "hodgepodge of rulings" like the West Elk Mine decision.
"The screws are getting turned on greenhouse gases, and anybody involved in that industry knows that," he says. "And they're hoping for some clarity so they can move forward."
Stuart Sanderson, president of the Colorado Mining Association, says such clarity is lacking.
"The administration was not capable of producing a climate bill that could get through the Congress, even when the Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority in the U.S. Senate," he says. "Failure to work with industries and try to achieve consensus has created a national (regulatory) vacuum."
Still, the West Elk decision makes clear that once arguments for burning coal are weighed against its costs to the environment, coal might start to lose.
"Slowly but surely those decisions are adding up," Godby says. "I don't know if we've hit the tipping point, but we're closer to it."]]>
The 2014 hunting season is being anticipated with particular eagerness on St. Lawrence Island. The residents, almost all St. Lawrence Island Yup'ik, rely on the annual bowhead whale hunt and the walrus hunt that follows – along with fishing – for the mainstay of their food supply. But last year, unusual weather patterns brought powerful winds that pushed offshore ice into huge pressure ridges that reached all the way to the sea floor along the coast, blocking access to the water. By the time the ice receded enough for boats to launch, most of the walrus had moved on, and only about one-third of the typical number were captured. The hardship prompted Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell to declare the island's two villages, Gambell and Savoonga, each with a population of about 700, economic disaster areas.
Successful hunting and fishing in the Bering Sea have always depended on weather and ice conditions. Island hunters have honed their ability to manage these variables through generations of experience. But climate change is now disrupting the seasonal patterns and threatening the food sources – and cultural traditions – St. Lawrence Islanders and other Native Alaskans have relied on for millennia. Over the past 50 years, average air temperatures have increased by 4 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit. Sea ice has been shrinking, sometimes by as much as 30 percent by the end of summer, and only gets about half as thick as it used to. Permafrost is thawing, and conifers have spread north into what was once tundra. In the Arctic, where climate change is progressing faster and more dramatically than almost anywhere else on earth, the resulting uncertainties are playing out not only in coastal communities but in inland Native villages as well.
A short walk across the frozen snow from the beach is the Gambell school, a one-story building at the inland end of the village. It's one of the newer buildings in the village, whose modest wooden houses, some weathered gray with age, are arrayed in unnamed streets. A display case inside the school features both student projects and traditional Native art and crafts. Dolly Silook is one of the school's cooks. Dark-haired, smiling, wearing an apron over her jeans, she and her two colleagues welcome me into the kitchen. "Everyone relies on native food," she says. "Store food is so expensive."
Here, as in many small, remote villages across Arctic Alaska, any food not harvested locally must be flown or shipped in at great expense. But it's not just a question of cost. Wild foods are also the mainstay of Native Alaskan cultures, which celebrate their connections to the landscape and environment. Passing on these food traditions is key to maintaining these customs. Standing by the stove where she's putting the finishing touches on a pan of macaroni and cheese for the students' lunch, Silook and her two co-workers rattle off a list of their favorite foods: Whale, walrus, baby walrus, seal, seal oil, greens, berries, and, Silook says, "the seafood that washes up after a storm," which includes clams, kelp and "sea peaches," a type of tunicate.
A typical Gambell dinner would be walrus or seal, boiled with sea veggies, says Silook. Dried fish and seal meat are also staples. But last year's unusual weather not only ruined the walrus hunt, it also spoiled the summer drying season, when villagers air-dry fish – salmon, cod and halibut – and meat on outdoor racks. "It was wet and rained, so the fish couldn't dry," Silook says. "It's a good thing I had food left over from the last year, because last spring, I didn't put anything away," she says. "If you put us back a hundred years, we would have starved. Hopefully it will be a better summer this year."
Before the advent of freezers, St. Lawrence islanders, like others in rural Arctic Alaska, cached food – often balls of walrus meat and blubber – in small storage dens dug into the permafrost. Some still do so. But thawing tundra and storm surges are literally undermining this practice.
Other local food sources include reindeer, descended from animals introduced in the 1900s and hunted primarily near Savoonga. There are also spidery king crabs, caught this spring by young men who drop baited lines through the ice not far off shore.
Silook and other islanders prefer these traditional foods. Store food, which often fills a gap now, falls short both in taste and satisfaction. "Non-native food is not as heavy," Silook says, "and makes you hungry again in a matter of hours."
While modern technology is nearly omnipresent and many households no longer support themselves solely by living off the land, tribal language, customs, art and crafts continue to be rooted in landscape and wildlife. Local geography is described by the location of family fishing and hunting camps; the year is defined by wildlife harvest seasons. Traditional foods such as walrus, whale, seal, fish – and for inland communities, caribou and moose – supply at least a third of daily calories for most Native Alaskans, and remain important to residents' health and well-being. "We live off the Bering Sea," says islander Gloria James. "We don't have chickens."
"Food security" alone doesn't adequately explain everything that access to wild foods means for Native Alaskan communities, says Carolina Behe, Inuit Circumpolar Council-Alaska traditional knowledge and science advisor. "Food security is everything around your life."
Thirty-nine miles east of Gambell sits the village of Savoonga. On a Sunday afternoon in mid-April, ATVs and snow machines zip around the snowy village, many towing sleds piled with children bundled in bright parkas. Children are sledding onto the frozen sea. Savoonga's one-story wooden homes are more closely clustered than the ones in Gambell, but here, too, the community is too small for street names. Each village has just one commercial store. Near many houses, snow machines sit parked near frames of the traditional wooden boats known as umiak.
A visit to the Savoonga store illustrates why a failed walrus hunt matters so much. Two-pound packages of frozen stew beef or pork run about $15, and two pounds of hamburger patties cost more than $11. Roasts and hams are over $40. A pint jar of peanut butter is more than $6. A half-gallon of fresh milk or apple juice costs about $10. The best-stocked cases contain frozen foods like pizza, chicken nuggets and microwaveable burritos. Most of the groceries are highly processed, long-shelf-life foods. Produce, even canned or frozen, is scarce.
About 10 minutes' walk from the store is City Hall, a two-story wooden building in the middle of town. The hallway outside Mayor Myron Kingeekuk's office upstairs is lined with cartons of canned salmon. On some boxes, family names are written in red marker. The room next door is stacked with packages of instant noodle soups and the large round crackers known as pilot bread. All are donations for village households, sent by organizations on the Alaskan mainland to make up for the failed 2013 walrus hunt. Kingeekuk, slim and soft-spoken but with a sharp glint in his eye, explains that the poor hunt meant not only less meat but also reduced incomes. St. Lawrence Island's Yup'ik community is famous for its ivory carving – museum-quality renditions of wildlife and village life that command high prices from collectors. "If we don't hunt walrus, we don't get ivory, and that is a major source of income for the island," he says. There are few local businesses, and the island's unemployment rate is nearly 30 percent.
Climate change in the Arctic is especially hard on the travel required for hunting and fishing. On St. Lawrence Island, family fishing and hunting camps are located at some distance from the village. Melting permafrost, rain and storms undercut shorelines and threaten the integrity of the island's dirt roads. "Erosion is happening along the coastline, so you have to be careful where you ride the Hondas (ATVs) along the shore road," says Kingeekuk. "This has also made it hard to bring boats up on shore," he says.
Thinning ice also threatens the safety of offshore hunts. Hunters butcher seals and walrus out on the sea ice. If the ice is too thin, they have to take their catch to thicker, safer sections – running their motors longer and using up precious fuel. Prematurely softening ice also makes spring ice fishing hazardous and, in some cases, impossible.
"If we don't have winter, we lose who we are," says Seth Kantner, a writer and photographer who was raised in Alaska's interior. "Everything to do with life here used to do with being out on the land, which in winter means the ice."
Now that snowmobiles, ATVs and gas-powered boats have replaced sled dogs and sailboats, the cost of vehicle fuel has also become a great concern. In April, it was almost $7 a gallon. "It uses five gallons of fuel to get to camp and another five to get back. Close to $70, roundtrip," says Savoonga resident and Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission Chairman George Noongwook. A full whaling crew might need 10 or 11 times that for a single hunting trip – about $700 worth of fuel, he explains. "A lot of people think we get our food for free," Kingeekuk says. "It's not free."
Alaskan Natives – Yup'ik, Gwich'in, Inupiat, Aleut, Tlingit and other tribal groups – make up about 20 percent of the state's population. About two-thirds of these roughly 150,000 people live in rural communities of less than 1,000. Most villages lack roads to major urban centers, and many coastal communities, like Gambell and Savoonga, lack harbors, ports or docks. And though median incomes are much lower here than elsewhere in the U.S.– a 2010 state survey found median household income in Gambell to be about $24,000, and just over $30,000 in Savoonga (compared to $51,000 nationwide) – food prices are far higher. Groceries in remote Alaskan villages can cost 600 to 1,000 percent more than in the Lower 48 states.
According to state government estimates, wild foods supply rural Alaskans with the equivalent of 185 percent of the recommended daily protein requirement. That amounts to about 354 pounds of fish and meat per person annually, compared to about 255 pounds per year of domestic fish and meat consumed in the Lower 48.
Relying on hunting and fishing to feed a household in rural Alaska has never been easy, and the policies that govern Alaskan subsistence harvest – the legal term for the noncommercial traditional gathering of wild foods – have always been complex. These challenges are now being compounded as Native Alaskans and subsistence management policies struggle to adapt to ecological conditions out of sync with historical norms.
Both state and federal agencies have a role in regulating subsistence hunting and fishing. For example, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service manages walrus hunting, while the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Marine Fisheries Service regulates whale hunting. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game manages in-river salmon fishing, but NOAA and the North Pacific Fishery Management Council manage ocean salmon fishing.
Under the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA), most Alaska Native communities ceded their tribal land to the federal government in exchange for cash and a future share of oil and mineral revenues. The settlement act also promised that both the state and the Department of Interior would protect Natives' subsistence harvest of fish, game and other wild foods. A subsequent state law gave subsistence uses priority over commercial and recreational fishing and hunting, but did not specify which residents had this privilege. In practice, all Alaska residents now have subsistence fishing and hunting rights, thus potentially increasing competition for resources that Native communities rely on (except for marine mammals, which can legally be harvested only by Natives living on the coast). This has also resulted in legal disputes over access to fish and game (such as Katie John v. Norton, a case involving Native fishing rights that was resolved in favor of federal law and Alaskan Natives). An additional federal law, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, gave "subsistence harvest" priority to rural Alaskans "in times of scarcity."
Both Gambell and Savoonga opted out of ANCSA. The villages and their tribal governments own St. Lawrence Island, and while this gives them control over their land, it also means residents don't receive the cash payments other Alaskan Natives do. That means St. Lawrence Islanders are arguably even more reliant on subsistence harvest than other Native communities.
As economic realities change, many families have less time to hunt and fish, so that if conditions are not as historically expected, harvests can plummet. This may also mean less game and wild fish for elders and others who can't hunt for themselves. In Kotzebue, tribal council member Cyrus Harris has established a program to supply harvested meat and fish to community elders and to the local hospital's elder care program.
Losing reliable access to wild food also poses a risk to Native Alaskans' health. Traditional meats like seal, whale and walrus are rich in protein, vitamins and fats, a diet that has kept Arctic Natives healthy without many fruits or vegetables. Now, the high fat and sugar content of most village store-bought food is introducing health problems. Eating these highly processed foods has led to a prevalence of obesity, diabetes and hypertension, and associated neurological and psychological problems. Such health issues are a concern for both children and adults. Meanwhile, elders complain of gastrointestinal upset caused by the new foods.
In addition to providing food, many local animals, among them caribou and seal, yield materials for clothing and shelter. Skin and fur hats and mukluks are still central to tribal art and craft and can often outperform gear from the sporting-goods store. Handmade mittens and headbands are worn with great pride by teenagers who are as absorbed in texting friends as any of their compatriots in the Lower 48. "We're now living two ways," a Savoonga elder named Harriet Penaya tells me. "Our way and your way."
It's not only coastal villages that are being affected by shifts in seasonal weather patterns. The warming temperatures that have caused record-low Arctic Sea ice also contribute to storms that have brought unusual winds and rain to Arctic Alaska over the past couple of years. Inland river flooding has endangered villages and damaged fish habitat. Exceptionally warm summers are drying wetlands and lakes and fueling destructive forest fires, like those raging this summer in Canada's Northwest Territories.
Such shifts are creating difficulties for hunting, fishing and wild-food preservation in Fort Yukon, deep in Alaska's interior. The village of about 600 residents – mostly Gwich'in tribal members – is nestled among spruce and willow trees along the Yukon River at its confluence with the Porcupine River, about 145 miles northeast of Fairbanks. Many of the modest-sized log-timber houses are decorated with caribou and moose antlers.
Caribou and king salmon are essential local foods and central to Gwich'in culture. The Porcupine caribou herd migrates through the Yukon Flats here. But this year, rare winter rains have left ice beneath the snow that could injure caribou and moose if their legs break through the crust. The ice also harms the low-growing plants, such as lichen, essential to the Arctic food web, and seals them off from hungry grazers. Summer wildfires have also been damaging vital caribou habitat.
The salmon aren't faring well either. Yukon River kings are prized as the richest of all salmon species for the muscle and oil they build up during their migration to the ocean and back – the longest of any salmon. Since an all-time high return in 1980, Yukon king or chinook have been declining. Their management has also become more contentious, with an increasingly shortened state-permitted window for subsistence fishing, particularly upriver. This year, fish numbers are expected to be so low that for the first time ever, there may be no king salmon on Fort Yukon drying racks.
For Yukon kings to survive, a certain number of fish need to return to their spawning grounds to foster the next generation. In an attempt to ensure this, "escapement" goals have been set by estimating and modeling fish populations and return numbers. To meet the 2013 escapement goal, the state-permitted season for Fort Yukon's subsistence king fishery was reduced to a single day, resulting in "the lowest subsistence harvest on record," said Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist Stephanie Schmidt, speaking at the 2014 pre-season salmon fishery management meeting in Fairbanks.
This year's forecast looks worse. In early May, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced that to meet the 2014 escapement goal, no intentional catch will be allowed, including by Native subsistence fishers.
The reasons for the decline are not entirely clear. "Some things point to the ocean and some things point to freshwater conditions and to the coastal zone," says Schmidt. Factors affecting habitat include low water, high river temperatures, tundra and bank erosion, and ocean conditions influenced by high atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Fort Yukon winters used to be much colder than they are now. "Elders used to see 70 to 80 below. We didn't see minus 50 this winter," says Fort Yukon Natural Resources Department staff member Walter Peter.
"The permafrost banks along the river are starting to drop," says James Kelly, natural resource director of the Council of Athabascan Tribal Governments in Fort Yukon. "There are now big cut banks – 20-foot cut banks where there used to be permafrost down to the sandbars." The eroding silt disrupts gravel bottoms where fish eggs are laid and destroys the fragile eggs. The river's water is also not as cold as it used to be, says Kelly. "Glaciers keep the water temperature really good for fish and there's less of that now as the glaciers recede."
At the April fisheries meeting, discussion focused on king salmon numbers, in-river fishing-gear restrictions designed to reduce salmon catch, and alternative fisheries – fishing for chum/keta salmon, sheefish, whitefish and other species instead. Many in upriver fishing communities feel that management decisions that favor Alaska's lucrative commercial fisheries, such as for pollock, are taking a toll on Yukon River kings. NOAA estimates that the 2012 Bering Sea pollock catch was worth more than $343 million, and that products made from pollock, like fish sticks, earned $1 billion. While NOAA says bycatch numbers are minimal, Yukon kings do get swept up accidentally by pollock trawlers. The North Pacific Fishery Management Council has placed "hard caps" on the number of bycatch salmon. On-board observers and salmon "excluder" devices are also used to minimize bycatch. Even so, the allowable total bycatch numbers have begun to equal or exceed the number of kings expected to return to the river in a single season.
At the same time, decreasing ice cover, particularly near shore, may harm Yukon salmon development at key stages, says salmon biologist Jim Lichatowich, who has served on scientific review panels in the Pacific Northwest and California. NOAA researchers are also beginning to investigate how ocean acidification may be influencing salmon health. While it's too early to know anything definitive about impacts on salmon, cold Pacific Ocean waters are becoming increasingly acidic as atmospheric CO2 dissolves in the ocean and forms carbonic acid that harms the shell-producing organisms on which salmon feed.
Between impacts upriver and those in the ocean, Lichatowich describes what's happening to Yukon River salmon habitat as "burning the candle at both ends." When management "focuses on numbers, it focuses on the symptoms, not the underlying problems," he says. "If you're going to close the fishery, there should be a parallel effort to protect the habitat." Thus far, there is not.
Although subsistence hunters across the Arctic still head out after fish and game as eagerly as always, and Native family meals continue to center on traditional foods like salmon, caribou, seal, walrus and whale, the harvest is becoming increasingly difficult. Empty nets, empty boats, spent fuel and energy are taking a toll economically and psychologically. "Food security existed. It doesn't now," says Clarence Alexander, former Gwich'in grand chief and founder of the Yukon River Intertribal Watershed Council.
Yet despite the anxiety and pessimism, there is also a strong sense of determination that the traditions connecting Native communities to the land will continue. "Communities are adapting," says Alisa Kelly, a family practitioner at Fort Yukon's Yukon Flats Health Center. "They always have."
Precisely how this will play out remains to be seen. Along with the direct impacts of climate change on wildlife and habitat, the warming temperatures are facilitating increased Arctic ship traffic, mining and oil and gas development. These will bring noise, pollution, and degrade wildlife habitat, all impacts of great concern to Alaska's Native communities.
Yet as they work to maintain their traditions, families in and around Kotzebue and Fort Yukon are also experimenting, planting herbs and vegetables in garden boxes and "high tunnel" greenhouses. Extensive efforts are underway within Native communities across Alaska to document environmental changes – for example, mapping populations of key plant and animal species – so residents can respond more strategically to protect precious resources. From the pre-school to the college level, educators are working to bolster language and cultural programs. In Gambell and Fort Yukon, Head Start program teachers are encouraging children to learn their Native languages and enjoy traditional foods. Maintaining connections to local wild food sources plays an important role in all of this.
It's hard to fully understand the visceral connection to the landscape that comes with eating wild foods unless you've tasted them. On my last day in Alaska, I am offered muktuk – whale blubber served nearly frozen – dried caribou, bear fat with berries and moose roast with muskox fat. The bear fat tastes like finely smoked fish, as does the muktuk. The meat is rich and satisfyingly salty. After several weeks of eating crackers, peanut butter and powdered soup mix, my tongue tingles with excitement. At lower latitudes and in urban communities, we are far less connected to our food sources, but they too are already being impacted by climate change. "Maybe if we looked at these changes through the lens of food," says Carolina Behe, "it would be easier to make better decisions."
Back on St. Lawrence Island, Savoonga's crews have already caught their first bowhead of the season. In Gambell, the day's bowhead hunt is just ending. Toward sunset, community elder Clement Ungott sits atop his ATV on the high ridge above the snow-covered beach and trains his binoculars west, watching for the whaling crews' return. Beyond the dark calm open water, the horizon is a wide band of white ice. The lowering sun casts long cobalt shadows. The Bering Sea has supplied this island with food for thousands of years. "It was only four years ago the last boats with skin sails went out and caught a whale," Ungott says from under his fur-rimmed parka hood. As we speak, at the far end of town, a school basketball tournament is underway and families in the bleachers are snacking on frozen pizza.
We are too far away to hear them, but the boats appear from the expanse of water. As the crews haul their empty boats up on shore and begin loading sleds and revving snow machine engines, the men say they saw a few whales, none close enough to catch. But Gambell's whalers will be out again as soon as weather permits.
Elizabeth Grossman is the author of Chasing Molecules: Poisonous Products, Human Health, and the Promise of Green Chemistry and High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health. Her work has appeared in many publications including Scientific American, The Washington Post and Mother Jones.
Research travel for this story was made possible, in part, by a grant from the Society of Environmental Journalists' Fund for Environmental Journalism. Additional funding came from reader donations to the High Country News Research Fund.]]>
Climate Central, an independent organization of scientists and journalists, recently created an interactive map that estimates future temperatures for American cities. We've used this data, based on greenhouse gas emission scenarios developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to look at what the future might hold for the West.
In the 11 cities shown here, you can see the current average summer high – Denver, 85.5 degrees Fahrenheit, for example – followed by two lines. The yellow line shows the projected temperature should emissions begin decreasing rapidly by 2020, thanks to, say, a drastic climate policy intervention. In that case, Denver's summer 2100 would feel like Coral Gables, Florida (88.1 degrees Fahrenheit) today, minus the humidity. But if emissions continue unabated, Denver's summers will follow the red line to Pharr, Texas (96.4 degrees Fahrenheit). Assuming current emissions continue, average summer highs are projected to increase 7 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit.]]>
BROWNSVILLE, Texas - In April 1991, health care workers in this border town were brought up short. In a matter of hours, three babies were born at the Community Health Clinic with anencephaly, a rare birth defect marked by the failure of the fetus to develop a skull or brain.
It was just the beginning. By the end of 1992, workers had reported 30 cases of the disease, bringing Cameron County to more than triple the national average. Worse, no one could figure out what was causing the disturbing trend. The mothers were mostly poor recent immigrants. In this region, among the poorest in the United States, local health care agencies could do little to help, and the state had no system for monitoring birth defects, much less responding to such an outbreak.
Over the following decade, the state set up the Texas Birth Defect Monitoring Division to track birth defects and search for their roots. But the problem persists. In late 2000 and 2001, another seven newborns in the city of Laredo were born with anencephaly. The Lower Rio Grande Valley has also seen clusters of other neural tube defects, including spina bifida, a malformation of the spinal cord, and encephalocele, an often-fatal disorder that leaves portions of the brain exposed through a hole in the skull.
Texas Public Health spokeswoman Amy Case says state officials have been studying health problems such as obesity, dietary deficiencies and diabetes, which may contribute to birth defects. They are also looking at possible links with agricultural and industrial pollution. "Factors in the environment are always something you have to consider," says Case. But for the time being, there are no easy answers.
A recent study from an unlikely source may provide a breakthrough. For 17 years, Oklahoma State University zoological toxicologist Douglas Fort has studied the impact of contaminants and toxins on frogs. Specifically, he looks at how pollution affects frogs' ability to metamorphose from tadpoles into adults. While he is careful to point out that human embryo development is substantially different from that of amphibians, Fort believes that his work may hold clues as to why so many damaged children are being born in the Lower Rio Grande Valley.
"We've found that frogs make a pretty good model from a developmental standpoint," he says.
Already, Fort has been able to create syndromes in frogs that mimic dietary deficiencies that have been blamed for human birth defects. Now, to study possible connections between birth defects and pollution, he has been exposing frogs and tadpoles to water and sediment from the Lower Rio Grande.
"We've been taking samples all the way from the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge to Boca Chica (where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf of Mexico, a distance of nearly 200 river miles)," he says.
Lo and behold, many of Fort's frogs have suffered from developmental deficiencies similar to the neural tube defects found in human newborns. Using water collected from the Brownsville area, Fort has replicated anencephalitic brain deformities ranging from reduced brain size to no brain at all.
The studies provide a strong link between water pollution and birth defects, says Fort, but they offer no smoking guns. "Where (the pollution) comes from, we don't know," he says. "There's a host of possibilities."
Pediatrician Carmen Rocco is less hesitant to assign blame. Rocco, who was the medical director of the Brownsville Clinic during the first outbreak of anencephaly in 1991, has since left the clinic, claiming that the state is turning a blind eye to some of the most obvious polluters in the Lower Rio Grande Valley: agriculture and industry. She is particularly suspicious of the corporations that have set up maquiladoras, or maquilas, along the border, taking advantage of cheap Mexican labor to manufacture items as diverse as computer modems, color TVs and cars.
"Most of the studies so far have been inconclusive," says Rocco, "but we still think it's very important to look at how the maquilas and pesticides are impacting our air and water quality."
Not everyone agrees. "There's very little credible evidence that the maquilas are doing anything to harm the environment," says Mike Allen, the president of the McAllen Economic Development Corporation, a nonprofit organization that works to attract new business to the region.
"We all have to live here, and there's a need to be vigilant," says Allen, who in a common confusion refers to anencephaly as "encephalitis," an unrelated mosquito-borne illness. "But (industry critics) never provide specific information about problems with a specific plant. All we're saying is, 'Where's the proof?' "
Proof is hard to establish, says Miguel Mora, a biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, who has compiled a database of pollution on the Lower Rio Grande spanning 35 years. The maquilas use a suite of solvents, acids and paints laced with heavy metals, he says. It's difficult, however, to track where those chemicals end up, and runoff from agriculture and urban areas only complicates matters.
The recent discovery of trihalomethanes in the drinking water of a dozen communities along the Lower Rio Grande has the attention of scientists here. These chemicals - which have been linked to neural tube defects - are created when chlorine, commonly used to disinfect drinking water, combines with organic material and fertilizers. But on a river that has been transformed into a drainage ditch and a dumping ground for a growing border population, tracing human illness to specific sources is sure to be a monumental task.
Dan Oko writes from Austin, Texas.
Copyright © 2002 HCN and Dan Oko]]>
EUREKA, Utah - The mayor of Eureka, Utah, is hard to catch. I'm told that he drives a two-tone beige pickup, has a medium build, and at 60-some years old, is quick on his feet.
He's eluded me once already, near City Hall at the north end of town, where I saw a man with a flash of white hair leap into a truck and spin out of the parking lot as I pulled in.
"Beige truck?" asks Patricia Bigler, the city recorder who set up my meeting with Mayor Lloyd Conder. "Well, then, you just missed him." Bigler, a pleasant woman who looks like she's in her early 30s, writes down Conder's home address and points me up the hill. "He's hard to nail down sometimes," she warns.
Just above City Hall is a series of switchbacked dirt roads that cut up the steep hillsides framing Eureka's narrow main street. At the top of these gray, silty steppes are the remnants of the town's fame - burnished wood skeletons left over from the silver mines that once made Eureka one of the richest cities in the West. Around 1870, a cowboy named George Rust found a promising strike of silver in the valley. By 1910, the town's population had swelled to 8,000, mine shafts and headframes peppered the hills, and Eureka was the second largest silver-producing region in the world.
The mines have since shut down, the population has shrunk to just under 800, and Eureka is in bad shape. On the way to Mayor Conder's place are small miners' houses, some with florid Victorian details, most with peeling paint, a few with slumped, rotting porches. On one block there are six homes for sale. A block north of it, seven homes are for sale.
One block west, I hit a vein of houses with peculiar, immaculate, lime-green lawns, each enclosed in a sparkling new chain-link fence. Up the damp hillside, against a cold October sky, the yards connect to look like a long verdant smear on a burlap canvas. This is the telltale imprint of the Environmental Protection Agency's yard service.
In early September, Eureka became a Superfund site, a designation that marks it as one of the most polluted places in the country and puts it in line for federal cleanup funds. Managed by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Superfund program gives priority to places where toxic contamination poses "a dangerous and immediate threat" to human health. In Eureka, the contamination is so severe that the town landed on the EPA's version of critical care - the National Priorities List - along with 19 other sites across the country this year.
This summer, even before the town officially landed on the list, EPA-hired contractors came out to Eureka in full force, digging up yards, removing the top 18 inches of lead-saturated soil and replacing it with sod or gravel, a tree and a fence. But for now, a landscape makeover may be all Eureka gets. In July, the EPA revealed that the Superfund "trust fund" is nearly out of money. Originally, the fund was built from an excise tax on the chemical and oil industries, but Congress killed the tax in 1995. Since then, the fund has dwindled, increasingly supplemented with taxpayer money and fines paid by polluters.
But under the Bush administration, contributions from the general tax fund have been cut, and fewer polluters are paying fines. This year, the program has received only half the total amount of money the EPA regional offices needed to complete cleanups. The Bush administration has been quietly weakening the program in other, more subtle ways. While there are currently two bills sponsored in the Senate to reinstate the "polluter tax," they have little chance of success.
If Superfund disappears entirely, Eureka and more than 1,200 other sites nationwide will be hung out to dry - which may be why Mayor Conder is so hard to find. He's made it clear in town meetings and editorials in the local paper that he doesn't want the EPA here. His town, he contends, doesn't want to be a Superfund site, and publicity that might broadcast its plight just makes life harder. On one level, he's right. The end of the program could leave Eureka scarred - left not only with a contaminated landscape and a population with dangerously high blood-lead levels, but also with its new, detested classification as a Superfund site - a stigma that could snuff out the economically embattled town for good.
The Superfund bill, officially called the Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act, was spawned in 1978 by the controversy surrounding Love Canal, an upstate New York neighborhood built atop a chemical dump. As birth defects and cancers popped up with alarming regularity, the residents there had neither the legal knowledge nor the money to pursue the companies responsible for the contamination. So an EPA hazardous waste investigator named Hugh Kaufman proposed that Congress create a tax on industry to help clean up sites where polluters couldn't, or wouldn't, pay.
Signed into to law by President Carter in 1980, the fund collected $1.6 billion from the industrial "polluter tax" in its first year. The program also allowed the EPA to sue polluters, holding them liable for messes they left behind.
While Superfund offered help for a number of communities, the program also earned a reputation more typical of an unchecked Russian oligarchy, marked by dubious accounting, manipulative private contractors and self-interested politicians controlled by big industry.
Near the end of President Reagan's first term in office, critics accused the EPA of cozying up to the companies it was meant to police. In 1983, several congressional investigations ensued, eventually resulting in the firing of 22 EPA officials and the arrest and imprisonment of then Superfund Director Rita Lavelle. Reagan appointed new leadership at both the EPA and Superfund, created a Superfund "ombudsman" to act as a watchdog over the program, and directed the EPA to hire private contractors to speed up the cleanups.
But as the list of contaminated sites grew, the contractors' bills skyrocketed, prompting Congress to again investigate. In 1989, a House subcommittee chaired by Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., uncovered widespread fraud. The subcommittee found that one company regularly marked up its equipment by more than 400 percent, and charged the EPA for an executive's fishing trip to Alaska, $16 million in employee bonuses, and a reindeer suit for a Christmas party. By the beginning of 1995, the EPA had cleaned up only 285 National Priorities List sites in almost 15 years, at a cost of nearly $30 billion. The Republican-controlled Congress voted against reinstating the polluter tax, scoring a victory for industry and a blow to citizens looking for a way to clean up their communities (HCN, 9/4/95: U.S. House to the environment: Die!). Under the Clinton administration, despite a shrinking trust fund, the EPA completed cleanup on 475 priorities list sites over the next five years. But each year, Democrat-sponsored bills to reinstate the polluter tax and replenish the Superfund trust failed in Congress.
Last year, under the Bush administration, the Superfund program completed only 48 priorities list projects. The trust fund was dwindling, and regional offices were starting to complain that they hadn't received their requested cleanup money. The agency was also being less aggressive in pursuing polluters. This November, researchers working with newspaper publisher Knight Ridder reported that polluters have paid 64 percent less under Bush than they did when Clinton was president.
Enter a familiar name: John Dingell, the Michigan Democrat who uncovered Superfund fraud in the 1980s, and is now a member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. This June, Dingell, along with Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., demanded that the EPA's inspector general produce a report on the status of every Superfund site in the country. The July report revealed that Superfund was $225 million short of its budget. Dingell estimated that the trust fund would dwindle to $28 million next year and disappear completely by 2004, making the Superfund program entirely reliant on taxpayer dollars.
About two months later, Eureka became a Superfund site, with an estimated cleanup bill of $54 million.
When I finally find Mayor Conder's address, a tidy home with an EPA yard, there's no truck there. So I turn down to Eureka's main street, pass a sooty gas station at the fringe of town and several blocks of abandoned storefronts, and park next to a souvenir shop called the Painted Lady. The beige truck is in the parking lot.
Inside the store, the walls are decorated with archival photographs of better times in Eureka, when the town had a brothel, a gambling hall, a few theaters, and a number of churches to counter its sins. In the middle of it all sits a large man in overalls, who introduces himself as Lyman Davis.
"I don't mind the EPA here," he says, leaning back in his chair, when I ask him if he's happy about the cleanup. He admits that the town is divided. "But look around. I don't think it'll hurt anything - only help.
"The one thing I don't like," he says, leaning forward, "is those damn shiny fences. They took away all that great barbed wire." To be sure, the ghost-town aesthetic is diminished by the glistening new yards.
I buy a few photographs, and Davis reveals that the mayor is across the street, in an arcade run by a friend.
I walk quickly out of the store, past a couple of kids loitering barefoot in the 45 degree afternoon, and enter a cavernous room filled with bleeps and electronic explosions. The arcade is throbbing with kids - more kids than I would have ever imagined could live in such a small town. In the far-back corner I spot a white mop of hair. I wave, just as the mayor moves deftly for the door. I follow him outside and yell his name before he can cross the street. I lunge for his hand, shaking it strongly, holding on to him. "Whatever I say you won't put in the paper," he says. "Everyone just wants to talk to the EPA." I assure him that isn't the case; I'd like to know what he thinks of the cleanup. But he slips out of my grip. As he starts across the street, he shouts back, "I've got a meeting!"
I watch him drive down the street, past the empty storefronts and the abandoned bank, and wonder what it would be like to be mayor here, in a town with no industry, where close to 50 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. Those who work are either employed by the school or the town, or they drive two hours to Provo, or to the Dugway Proving Grounds military weapons facility. But the residents here remain fiercely loyal to their town, where most of them have deep roots. Walk into a Eurekan's house and you'll likely find sketches of the town's landmark mining equipment framed and hanging on the walls. Even relative newcomers are literally living with the town's history: Every home in Eureka, including some constructed only two years ago, is built atop mine tailings.
But the town's loyalty was shaken a few years ago, after a nurse with the Utah Department of Health completed her routine rounds in the region's public schools. In Eureka, she found an alarming number of children medicated for Attention Deficit Disorder, or ADD. To her, there seemed only one explanation: lead poisoning, most likely from the mines.
The health department circulated fliers about voluntary lead testing, came back to the schools, and sampled about half of the kids. The youngest - from toddlers to elementary school age - tested high, with blood levels sometimes more than four times the limit established by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Typically, young kids are most affected by lead; they ingest dirt from their messy hands, they're closer to the ground, and since they're small, a little bit of lead has a big effect.
But in Eureka, the test also showed something unusual: An unexpected number of teenagers tested high as well. Soon after the blood tests, Steve Thiriot, a section manager with the CERCLA and Emergency Response Division of the Utah Department of Environmental Quality, tested the soil in Eureka. "We struck the mother lode in terms of contamination," says Thiriot, who discovered that lead levels in some yards were well above 500 parts per million - more than twice the EPA limit.
Since he couldn't explain why the teenagers were also testing high, Thiriot continued his investigation, eventually unearthing a book published in 1953 by Ralph Richards, a medical doctor with the University of Utah. Richards reported that a high number of miners in the Eureka area died from causes now linked to lead poisoning - things like kidney failure, anemia, high blood pressure and heart disease.
Between the soil samples, the high blood-lead levels, and the historical evidence, Thiriot presented enough material to the EPA to warrant an emergency cleanup and qualify the town for Superfund listing. But Thiriot still couldn't explain the source of the lead contamination in the teenagers, and neither could Bert Garcia, the regional Superfund supervisor, who visited Eureka last year.
"We couldn't figure it out," says Garcia. "Then we looked around the hills and saw the obvious." Along the hillsides, thin roads loop up and over steep slopes and cut across ridges - trails where the teenagers ride four-wheelers and motorcycles. As they buzzed around the dirt in the hot, dry summers, the kids inhaled lead-contaminated dust from the tailings.
For the residents of Eureka, the idea that lead and arsenic - another contaminant found in high levels here - pervaded every part of the landscape, fueled either anxiety or rebellion.
"I keep my kids really clean, but I got obsessive about it after we found out," says Nicole Hillman, a fifth-generation Eurekan, whose three kids tested above the limit. "I wish we had known before what we know now. Something definitely needs to be done." Her eldest son also has childhood diabetes, and she wonders whether that could be connected to the lead.
At the other extreme, some parents refused to have their kids tested. The health problems associated with lead poisoning are difficult to prove unequivocally, but high blood-lead levels have been connected to lower I.Q. scores, learning difficulty and ADD. Some people found the idea insulting, as if the EPA was saying that generations of Eurekans were stupid. A few people simply reasoned that they grew up with lead and turned out fine, so what could happen to their kids? The mayor, I discover, shares this attitude. "People have lived here for 100 years and never had a problem with lead," says Conder, when I reach him on the phone. "The EPA has figured they're smarter than everyone else. Nobody here is worried about the lead - I don't really believe those tests. Only the EPA is worried about it. We think they're just picking on us."
If the Bush administration has its way, Superfund may not bully Eureka for long. This year, Bert Garcia's regional department, which handles cleanups in Montana, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and the Dakotas, spent more than two-thirds of its $28 million Superfund budget on one site - Libby, Mont., where more than 200 deaths have been attributed to asbestos exposure from a local vermiculite mine (HCN, 4/23/01: Company leaves victims in its dust).
In response to Rep. Dingell's report, the EPA shifted $200 million left over from other projects to pay the initial costs of cleanup in Eureka and some of the 33 sites that the report identified as unfunded. But that kind of money is going to be hard to find in the future, says Kate Probst, a senior research fellow with Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan think tank that has been watching Superfund nearly since its inception. "Clearly, they're in a logjam. My concern is that they'll clean up everything obvious and not get at the larger contamination."
One solution offered by the Bush administration is to transfer responsibility for cleanup to the states, especially at "megasites" such as Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. There, the administration has put a 31-year, $359 million proposed Superfund cleanup in the hands of a local commission that will help direct the EPA. It's a strategy embraced by EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman, who, at a press conference unveiling the commission, said it might serve as a model for other megasites (HCN, 9/2/02: EPA puts cleanup in local hands).
"The local people are going to be managing the cleanup in the long term anyway," says Marianne Deppman, with the Region 10 EPA office. Some groups are opposed to localizing the cleanup, she says, because they think that the Superfund program works within a more stringent set of guidelines. "They just want to make sure that it isn't going to be a lesser cleanup," Deppman adds, "and we think that we can do that."
But critics say the states aren't qualified to handle Superfund-level cleanups. "As far as Coeur d'Alene goes, it's a bad trend to get into," says Jessica Frohman of the Sierra Club, which has been fighting the Coeur d'Alene commission and lobbying for full Superfund listing in the basin. "The states don't have the resources, the funds or the initiative to do it."
Probst adds that, in the end, local cleanups can often cost more money. "Usually (local cleanups) languish, and eventually get put on the National Priorities List," she says.
Another effort to put cleanup in local hands is an EPA program known as "Brownfields," which provides grants to businesses and communities that clean up and "redevelop" contaminated sites. This year, the Bush administration pushed Congress to give the program twice as much funding as it received in 2001 (see story next page).
While the Bush administration is handing off cleanup to states and private businesses, it has gutted one of the strongest safeguards for local communities - the Superfund ombudsman. When President Reagan created the position, he envisioned an independent, nonpartisan advocate, who would oversee the program and allay fear and suspicion by encouraging community involvement. But last spring, Whitman moved the position from the EPA to the Office of Inspector General (OIG), a division of the federal government that handles internal investigations. She also made it a presidentially appointed position - making it more vulnerable to political winds than it had been previously.
This put tremendous pressure on ombudsman Robert Martin, who had earned a reputation as a community champion (HCN, 8/28/00: Who'll clean up a mining mess?). "My entire job description was being eliminated," explains Martin, who discovered last year that Whitman had connections to a company responsible for a Superfund site in Colorado, where the liability and the cleanup had been shortcut. "The position used to be very transparent; I made everything open and available to the public. But the OIG is far more secretive - I mean, you've got people 'investigating' carrying badges and guns. I was no longer allowed to talk to the press."
Martin objected to the move and asked a judge to grant him a restraining order against Whitman so he could continue working freely until they could reach some middle ground. But Whitman had the order lifted. "Within three hours of the judge's decision, the administrators changed the sign over my door, and sent 20 federal agents to take my files and erase my hard drive," says Martin. "It became quite clear that they were eradicating the position."
President Bush has not appointed a new ombudsman yet, but Martin is not optimistic: "Whether it's by intention or default, the (ombudsman's) program is dwindling to nothing, and that's a disgrace."
The thinning of the EPA's Superfund responsibility continued in September, when Whitman signed an agreement giving the Nuclear Regulatory Commission oversight over Superfund sites resulting from uranium mining and other nuclear-related programs. The NRC is not known for its stringent cleanup standards.
While delegating cleanup to the NRC, businesses and local agencies might relieve some financial pressure on the EPA, regional supervisor Garcia says it's not solving his problems.
"Really, there's no one else out there who can handle these mining sites," he says. "Superfund cleans up the sites that no one else can handle. But if we don't have money in the spring, well, then it's not going to happen."
Back in Eureka, residents are already feeling the Superfund budget pinch. Posted on a wall at the city offices, a map assigns each home in town a color that indicates its level of lead contamination. "These green-colored ones are the highest levels," says town recorder Bigler, pointing out a series of squares that form a meandering line dropping from the mines to Main Street. The track follows the flow of snowmelt, she says. In the winter, the snowpack accumulates on the mine tailings, and in the spring, the runoff carries lead with it, contaminating the yards in its path.
The green on the map lines up perfectly with the fresh green EPA lawns outside, because the regional office, with its limited funding, tackled those yards first. The larger challenge - capping or removing the mine tailings that bleed lead through the town - will have to wait for another day.
Meanwhile, Eureka creeps closer to becoming a ghost town. Bigler tells me that at least 30 homes are on the market. "But no one can get a loan," she says. One of the challenges faced by Superfund sites like Eureka is the inevitable freeze on local real estate. "I don't think people don't want to move here - one man wants to buy a bunch of stores on main street and fix them up," says Bigler. "But the banks just won't let people move here."
On the wall beside us, a rack holds EPA-published educational pamphlets. Few are picked up, Bigler tells me. I flip through the titles: Lead poisoning and your children, Homeowners exempted from Superfund Cleanup costs, and one that I take out, This is Superfund.
Inside, pencil drawings illustrate a simple explanation of the law, where the money comes from, and what citizens can expect during the process. Ironically, the pamphlet highlights everything threatened by Superfund's empty coffers, things like "the best available science to determine risks," and "new and innovative technologies to help achieve faster and less expensive ways to clean up sites."
Bigler and I talk about blood-lead testing in children. I tell her that the CDC is considering lowering the acceptable blood-lead levels. In other words, lead may be even more dangerous than previously thought. She tells me her daughter had three tests over the last year, with wildly divergent results. She also tells me that her daughter is undergoing chemotherapy for bone cancer. (Later, when I get home, I discover that the Bush administration recently removed the CDC's advising pediatrician - who was pushing for the new lead levels - and is trying to replace him with a doctor who has discounted the consequences of lead poisoning and testified in defense of lead companies.)
I look back down at the last page of the pamphlet, which concludes: "EPA's Superfund Program is the most aggressive hazardous waste cleanup program in the world."
Lolly Merrell is senior editor for High Country News.
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While Congress and President Bush allow the Superfund cleanup program to bleed out, they're pumping money into a related program called "Brownfields." In January, President Bush approved $250 million for Brownfields, and is now asking Congress to double the program's funding over the next five years.
Spawned from the 1980 law that created Superfund, the Brownfields program didn't hit its stride until 1997, two years after the Superfund "polluter tax" expired. Led by then Vice President Al Gore, the Clinton administration expanded the program, which "redevelops" contaminated sites into everything from malls to apartments, sport stadiums to parks. The program is popular among free-market economists because, rather than forcing developers to clean up polluted sites, the EPA provides incentives, such as grants and tax breaks, which make cleanup a profitable business venture.
"We're realizing there are a lot (of sites) out there that aren't being cleaned up under Superfund," says Kathy Atencio, the EPA's Region 8 Brownfield Coordinator. "But there has to be a drive to actually clean up these sites. There has to be interest in reusing (them)."
The Brownfields program is meant to be "locally driven," says Atencio. The EPA offers technical assistance and some funding, but local agencies are responsible for the actual cleanup.
The effectiveness of the program has varied across the West as city, state and tribal governments have struggled to find businesses interested in revitalizing sites. Environmental groups also gripe that sites are not always cleaned to safe standards, and that taxpayers, not polluters, end up paying for the bulk of the work.
But the Brownfields program appeals to many groups: Corporations that buy Brownfield sites are freed of liability for the pollution; businesses and nonprofit organizations receive tax breaks and grant money; and cities get their contaminated sites cleaned up without the stigma of Superfund.
"The beauty of the (Brownfields) law is that whoever buys (the property) will clean it, put it into reuse, and the federal and state government won't be breathing down your neck," says Brian Lane with the City of Denver's Office of Economic Development and International Trade.
In the 1980s, Denver used the Brownfields model to revitalize its Central Platte Valley, a section of the city trashed by landfills, radium processing plants, and rail yards. The city offered private businesses incentives to develop these abandoned sites, and developers ran with the idea. Six Flags Amusement Park, Coors Field, Commons Park, the Pepsi Center Arena and the REI Flagship store are all Brownfield success stories.
Then, in 2000, as part of Vice President Gore's Brownfields National Partnership, Denver became one of the EPA's "Brownfield Showcase Communities." Now the city is using federal grant money to kickstart redevelopment in four of its polluted and economically distressed neighborhoods.
That same year, the EPA also named Arizona's Gila River Indian Community a Showcase Community. Lured by cheap Bureau of Indian Affairs leases, the military and private industry had set up shop on the reservation, leaving behind messes the federal government had little interest in cleaning up under Superfund.
"Tribes are in a position where there are not that many resources available for assessment, never mind cleanup (of contaminated sites)," says Pat Mariella, director of the Gila River Indian Community's Department of Environmental Quality. In 1997, when three million tires caught fire at the privately owned Blackwater Industrial Park, the tribe was left with a mess of biblical proportions. According to Mariella, if it weren't for the EPA's Brownfields program, the property never would have been cleaned.
"There is a lot of failed economic development on Indian land," says Steve Simanonok, the EPA's Region 9 Brownfield Coordinator. "(Our program) gives them the opportunity to clean up old problems and create a vision of sustainability."
But tribes still have a hard time finding the money for redevelopment, or coaxing private - and environmentally responsible - businesses onto the reservation. Even though the tribe cleaned the Blackwater site to commercial standards, the property still awaits "redevelopment."
Critics say the Brownfields program, which often tackles sites just as polluted as Superfund sites, is not always up to the challenge.
"A less-extensive cleanup is the pedigree of Brownfields," says Robert Hersh, Brownfield program director for the nonprofit Center for Public Environmental Oversight. When sites are cleaned up under state rather than federal regulations, the pollution is usually not removed, but "contained" in storage reservoirs or "capped" with clean soil.
Critics have also dubbed the Brownfields program the "pave and wave" strategy, because sites are not monitored once they've been cleaned and redeveloped. "With voluntary cleanup, the regulatory vigilance has been shifted to real estate instruments, like deeds and restrictive covenants, that will be considered when a property is sold," says Hersh.
Nonetheless, in January 2002, President Bush signed a law expanding the Brownfields program. The "Small Business Liability Relief and Brownfields Revitalization Act" increases funding for Brownfields, and makes mining properties and petroleum sites, such as gas stations and underground storage tanks, eligible for the funds. In the 1980s, the oil industry convinced Congress that since it was already paying into the "polluter tax," it should be exempt from liability for cleanup at its sites. Now, petroleum sites - which could account for half of the estimated one million Brownfields nationwide - can be cleaned up with money that comes straight from taxpayers' pockets.
"The Bush administration is using Brownfields as a way to claim successes - to show that they're doing something good for the environment," says Allen Mattison with the Sierra Club in Washington D.C. In fact, he says, the administration is simply using Brownfields to shift the financial burden of cleanup from polluters to the general public.
"The crux of the whole problem comes down to the fact that the 'polluter pays' tax has expired," he says. "Where do politicians stand in protecting communities? Are they trying to clean up communities, or help big companies pad their profits?"
Laura Paskus is assistant editor for HCN.
President Carter signs the Superfund bill into law, funded by $1.6 billion from an excise tax on the chemical and petroleum industries. The newly created Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry assesses the health effects of more than 65,000 industrial chemicals.
Congressional investigations reveal widespread corruption; 22 high-ranking EPA officials are fired, and President Reagan's Superfund chief, Rita Lavelle, is jailed for six months.
As the scope and complexity of toxic-waste cleanups skyrocket, Congress increases the tax-fed Superfund goal to $8.5 billion. States must pitch in 10 percent of cleanup costs.
Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., leads an investigation of the private contractors working for Superfund and finds that the EPA regularly paid for equipment marked up more than 400 percent.
Congress passes the Pollution Prevention Act, requiring companies to account for all the toxic materials they use.
President Clinton launches the Brownfields Initiative in an effort to "recycle" industrial wastelands and promote them as usable real estate.
Congress, led by Republican House Majority Leader Newt Gingrich, kills the Superfund corporate "polluter tax." Taxpayers pick up about 18 percent of the program's cost.
The EPA celebrates the 20th anniversary of Superfund, touting more than 700 National Priorities List sites cleaned up. Under Clinton, the EPA completed 605 of those sites, an average of about 76 each year.
During President Bush's first year in office, Superfund cleans up only 48 priorities list sites.
With Christine Todd Whitman heading the EPA, Superfund completes only 38 cleanups to date this year.
Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson removes Centers for Disease Control pediatrician Michael Wetzman, who argued for more stringent acceptable blood-lead levels in children, and nominates Dr. William Banner, who has questioned whether current lead standards are too strict.
The Superfund trust is predicted to fall to $28 million.
Unless the Superfund "polluter tax" is reinstated, the trust fund will hit rock bottom. Superfund cleanups will be entirely dependent on taxpayer money.
A company that operates a dam holding more than 8 million gallons of toxic waste discharges some of that waste into the Santa Anna River near Riverside, Calif. Children and animals swim in the contaminated water.
1978 Cleanup begins at Love Canal, N.Y., where residents complain of rising health problems in children and a suffocating odor emanating from a chemical dump in their neighborhood.
Superfund program becomes law.
Tests conducted in the Coeur d'Alene River Basin show that residue from mine tailings and giant silver smelters caused sharply elevated levels of lead in local residents, especially children. Part of the Basin is declared a Superfund site, but today, the EPA has put the $359 million cleanup in the hands of a local commission.
Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington becomes a Superfund site after more than 55,000 gallons of radioactive liquid contaminates groundwater and the nearby Columbia River. Managers at the facility report that 60 buried waste tanks are leaking waste that is four times more radioactive than that at Chernobyl.
Thousands of fish die when the Summitville gold mine releases cyanide into the Alamosa River in southwestern Colorado. A few months later, the mine claims bankruptcy, leaving Superfund with a $150 million tab for cleanup, which begins one year later.
After drinking water from the Berkeley Pit at a defunct copper mine in Butte, Mont., 342 snow geese die. Butte becomes home to one of the largest Superfund sites in history.
Dust from a vermiculite mine in Libby, Mont., is blamed for an epidemic of asbestosis, a lung disease responsible for more than 200 deaths in the town. The EPA spends $300 million testing the area, and one year later, adds it to the Superfund list.
Eureka becomes Utah's 21st active site on Superfund's National Priorities List.]]>
The surge can largely be explained by an increase in Alaskan tourism over the last few decades. But visitors have more than doubled in the past 16 years alone, and at least part of that can be attributed to "last chance tourism," or the flow of people rushing to see at-risk places before they're destroyed by climate change. An online list of the top nine destinations to explore "before climate change takes them away" includes the flooding city of Venice, the acidifying corals of the Great Barrier Reef, and the receding glaciers of Alaska.
Yet while Alaskan cruise lines are reaping the benefits, the economic boon of last-chance tourism is, of course, fleeting. A few hundred miles away on the Kenai Peninsula, Portage Glacier has seen its visitor numbers drop dramatically, in part because the once-famed tongue of ice has retreated completely out of sight. Neary, who took over the direction of the Forest Service's Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center 18 months ago, says that's not an immediate concern at Mendenhall, but before long, there won't be any more translucent blue ice floating in Mendenhall Lake.
"When I first came here, the glacier was visible from the west lake shore line," he says. "Now you can't even see the face."
Rather than revel in the current tourism boom and resign himself to the inevitable bust, however, Neary wants to use the melting glacier – and the influx of visitors – to educate the public about humans' role in our melting planet. The visitor center is due for an updated master plan, and Neary hopes to use the opportunity to reimagine it as a hub for climate change education. He'd like a new onsite facility to produce all of its own energy and water, as well as encourage tour operators to switch to electric busses that can be charged at the glacier's rebuilt hydroelectric station. He wants future visitors to walk away knowing three things: "That they contribute to climate change. That it's real and it's happening and it's in front of them. And that something could actually be done about it."
Because the vast majority of Mendenhall visitors are bussed to the glacier after disembarking from massive, carbon-belching cruise ships, Neary also hopes to point out the connection between where they've just been and the swiftly-disappearing natural wonder in front of them. "We think of (the glacier) as just a large chunk of ice," he explains. But in reality, Mendenhall Glacier is depositing highly valuable, ground-up organic material into its lake, which then flows by river into the sea. Once the glacier recedes too far above its lake, the supply of nutrient-rich meltwater will be cut off. Combined with ocean acidification and warming seas, that could spell disaster for the marine food chain.
"Tourists come to the glacier from the ocean," Neary says. "This points out an ecological connection they wouldn't necessarily have thought of. Melting ice sheets is sort of vague for people; they might think it only affects some distant place like a Micronesian island. I want people to think about how it affects them specifically. How it affects the fish they want to catch or the whales they want to see here in Alaska."
Neary wants to make clear that he's not singling out tourism for its fossil fuel emissions. Everyone, not just cruise ship passengers, are contributing to the environmental changes he sees each day when he goes to work. But "if we make this simple chain between ship and bus and destination, we can start to empower people," he says. "I want to help create a new niche of green tourism."
Infographic courtesy the University of Cambridge. Ice cave photo via Flickr user Gillfoto.
Krista Langlois is an editorial fellow at High Country News. She tweets @KristaLanglois2.
But to local opponents, the view is devastating. The new landfill is located on a wetland, square atop the aquifer that provides drinking water for 700,000 people.
"Five of my grandchildren drink water from that aquifer," says Don Olsen of the grassroots group Concerned Residents on Waste Disposal (CROWD). "If that landfill leaks, those kids will be drinking garbage juice."
Although the private company that owns the dump, Land Recovery Inc. (LRI), has already constructed two of eight planned waste "cells," activists are still trying to keep the dump from being completed. They say it is only a matter of time before their water is polluted.
When LRI proposed the landfill in 1989, Pierce County was getting desperate for a way to get rid of its garbage. For four years, the county had been hauling waste over 100 miles to a dump on the east side of the Cascades. Its previous dump site was designated a Superfund site after years of accepting heavy metal sludge and industrial waste. According to county solid-waste administrator Steve Wambach, building a new in-county landfill would limit costs, leaving more money for recycling and public education. And the county already had a company lined up to build a new dump - the same firm that had agreed to take over the former landfill and manage it as a Superfund site: LRI.
When area residents like Olsen heard the news, they quickly formed CROWD and began rallying to fight the dump. They soon had backing from the Eatonville city government, the local chamber of commerce, statewide environmental groups and a nearby wildlife park.
Both the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency objected to the project on environmental grounds and refused to grant needed permits.
"We believe the landfill poses a more significant risk to the aquifer than they want the public to believe," says Tom Mueller, chief of the Corps' regulatory branch in Seattle. "Their information is based on a best-case scenario in which everything works the way it's supposed to."
But LRI and Pierce County refused to give up. LRI spent some $14 million to fight numerous court battles and lobby Congress to limit the Corps' jurisdiction on the case.
When dump opponents gained enough momentum by 1999 to convince Gov. Gary Locke to sign a narrowly written law aimed specifically at preventing the dump project from proceeding, they were stymied by LRI once again. Despite an emergency clause allowing the law to take effect immediately, Pierce County "grandfathered" the dump, arguing the law came too late: Construction at the site had already begun.
State Sen. Marilyn Rasmussen, a Pierce County Democrat who joined with local Republican legislators to oppose the dump, says the power and influence LRI exerted in the fight to build the landfill was impressive.
"They've run over the Legislature, the governor, the Army Corps, (U.S.) Sen. Norm Dicks," she says. "They've let nothing get in their way."
According to LRI spokeswoman Jody Snyder, the dump that now takes in some 520,000 tons of waste annually is harmless.
"We've addressed every concern and met all conditions. We've even created higher-quality wetlands than what was there to begin with," says Snyder. "The bar was raised high for us, and we've exceeded every requirement."
The real reason locals are "exploiting fears about pollution," she says, is that they don't want a landfill in their backyards.
But even the company admits there have been a few glitches so far. LRI recently discovered the landfill's leak-detection collection system is wasting thousands of gallons of water each week. In a year of epic drought in the Northwest, the first cell alone is pumping out more than one and a half times the amount of groundwater experts thought would be drawn from all eight cells together.
CROWD activists and local residents worry LRI can't accurately test for contamination if thousands of extra gallons of water dilute the samples, but Snyder says testing for pollutants in a large volume of water is not a problem.
"If you can't detect it, what harm can it cause?" she argues.
Because historic water-resource protection laws have focused on post-contamination cleanup, current federal law says that LRI is required to meet only minimal standards to prevent pollution. But under the 1996 amendments to the federal Safe Drinking Water Act, states must inventory underground drinking-water sources, identify potential sources of pollution, then get the information to the public by the end of 2003. In Washington state, these "right to know" reports should be posted on the state Department of Health Web site by the middle of 2002.
David Jennings, director of Washington's source-water program, hopes communities will use the information when making land-use decisions that could affect their drinking water. It's a lot cheaper to protect a water source than it is to clean it up, he points out. And communities that want to promote economic development are more attractive to businesses if they can guarantee a source of clean drinking water.
Standing atop the grimy mountain of trash at the LRI landfill as trucks line up to dump their loads, Viki Steiner, president of CROWD, says she plans to be around to be sure her community does just that. She says CROWD will use the assessment information to stay informed about the safety of local drinking water and to continue the fight. In between fund-raising events, CROWD is working on another legal challenge to make LRI close the landfill.
"No way are we going to just stand by while this landfill poisons our water," says Steiner.
Kasia Pierzga writes about land use and the environment from Olympia, Washington.
Copyright © 2001 HCN and Kasia Pierzga]]>
Delamore is drainage chief for the largest, richest and most troubled irrigation district in the nation. For much of his career, he has tried to balance two incompatible demands: draining salt from one of the world's most productive plots of farmland, and protecting water quality in the San Francisco Bay Delta.
He hasn't succeeded yet. "The agency has been dealing with this for more than 40 years," he says.
It might seem surprising the problem is that difficult. All irrigation water carries some salt, but the water diverted from the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers to farms in the San Joaquin Valley has lower salinity than typical Southern California tap water * about one pound of salt for every 300 gallons.
The problem here is volume. To produce more than $1 billion in crops each year, the 1,000-square-mile Westlands Water District imports up to 400 billion gallons containing 610,000 tons of salt. It's the equivalent of a train of salt 6,100 cars long, year after year.
When, under the San Luis Act, Congress authorized the Bureau of Reclamation to bring the irrigation water to the west side of the valley in 1960, geologic surveys revealed an impermeable layer of clay beneath the area's sandy loam. In soil like this, irrigation salts build up and will eventually sterilize the land. So Congress told the Bureau to provide drainage from the valley to flush out the salt.
But, says Delamore, "I don't think anybody contemplated back in 1960 how difficult" building such a drain would be.
The Bureau started a 197-mile aqueduct to the delta, but the effort stalled in 1974, 112 miles short of its goal, when political opposition arose in the Bay Area and funding grew tight. Drain water then poured into a holding pond, forming Kesterson Reservoir, which proved to be an infamous killer of wildlife. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service linked deformed and dead birds at the reservoir to selenium, a naturally occurring but toxic element that had also been flushed from the irrigated soil. So in 1985, the Bureau closed the San Luis Drain.
Today, the drain is still plugged and the salt is still building up on the farmland. The land's productivity is falling and, partly as a result, farmers are going bankrupt. Environmentalists and the state water board, worried about threats to wildlife and human health, refuse to consider completing a drain to the delta, an area already impacted by pollutants.
"Any increase in the amount of agricultural runoff coming into the delta is going to bring in more salts and more pollution," says Jeff McLain, fisheries biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "And that's not good for the resident fish populations."
Yet federal courts, ruling on a lawsuit by the irrigation district, have reinforced the requirement that the Bureau of Reclamation has to do something about the salt. With the courts, Congress and farmers on one side, and laws such as the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act on the other side, the Bureau is caught in the middle.
The San Francisco Bay's delta stretches up the two main river systems nearly to Stockton and Sacramento and includes hundreds of miles of channels and islands. The delta receives about half of California's total precipitation runoff. It is the state's hydraulic hub: Water stored in the reservoirs in the Sierra Nevada flows to the delta, then is pumped south to cities and farms. Contaminate the hub too much, and you contaminate the whole system.
The delta is also a habitat hotspot. Millions of migratory birds stop in each year. Threatened and endangered chinook salmon, steelhead, delta smelt and Sacramento splittail all migrate through or live in the delta. In all, 230 species of birds, 45 species of mammals, 52 species of fish, and 150 species of flowering plants live in the delta, says Bill Jennings, director of DeltaKeeper, an environmental group based in Stockton.
"It really is a marvelous estuary," says Jennings. "And it is in critical condition, suffering the death of a thousand cuts."
Already, the delta suffers from high levels of pesticides, mercury, selenium and other toxics along with low dissolved oxygen levels, due to runoff from farms, cities and other sources, Jennings says. "The delta simply can't assimilate increased amounts of salt," he says.
Federal and state efforts to find other ways to deal with the salt have cost an estimated $50 million so far, exploring a range of technologies and management schemes, including desalinization plants and salt-concentration ponds.
Every strategy has a drawback: Desalinization systems are energy-intensive and leave behind mountains of salt. Evaporation ponds take up huge tracts of land, and also leave salt behind. Researchers have come up with methods to remove toxic selenium from the drainwater, but they also leave salts.
All of the technical fixes would be expensive. The Bureau estimates that completing the San Luis Drain would cost $850 million, while the cheapest in-valley disposal solution, evaporation ponds, would run $1.5 billion. Under reclamation laws, that cost would be borne by the project's beneficiaries, the district's growers.
"Farming can't support most of the options they've come up with so far," says Thad Bettner, the district's resource manager.
Though the district receives only seven inches of rain a year, the farmers grow about 25 crops, including citrus, grapes, beans, lettuce, broccoli and cauliflower, thanks to the irrigation diversions and pumped groundwater.
A nontechnical strategy - inconceivable until recently - is to take farmland out of production. The district and the Bureau have reportedly been talking about the Department of the Interior buying 200,000 acres - a third of the district - for $500 million. Such a massive land retirement would be a confession that irrigating this portion of the arid West no longer makes sense. It would also mean loss of crop production and a hit to the economy in one of the state's poorest regions.
"This concept of taking land out of production is almost sinful when you think about how good that soil was, and how good it could be again with drainage," says Lou Beck, a retired district chief for the California Department of Water Resources.
"If the government does nothing (about the salt buildup), then for sure during my lifetime or my children's lifetime, the ground will go out of production," says Ted Sheeley, who grows tomatoes, garlic, pistachios and cotton on 1,000 acres. Salty groundwater is now within five feet of the surface on half of his land and his yields are falling.
With their only alternative to sell out at depressed prices, the farmers continue what amounts to suicide irrigation. Last year, 10 percent of the district's farmers went bankrupt, which Sheeley says is due partly to salt and partly to shifts in global markets. Sheeley, also a member of the district's board of directors, is one of many people here who feel betrayed by the Bureau of Reclamation. "The Bureau has become very influenced by environmental groups. In the past, the Bureau looked out for our interests."
Mike Delamore calls the Bureau's approach these days "an evolution in thinking," based on a succession of federal laws, court decisions and evolving science. Under the most recent court order to settle on some strategy, issued by the 9th Circuit Court last December, Delamore is working toward a 2005 deadline to do an environmental impact statement and decide what to do with the salt. The reasonable alternatives to be considered include, once again, completing the San Luis Drain.
At DeltaKeeper, Jennings says any attempt to complete the drain will only trigger a lawsuit in defense of the delta.
"We may end up with competing court decisions," he says. From his perspective, "Ultimately the San Luis Drain is an elusive dream. It's not going to happen."
Jim Downing wrote this story while taking an environmental journalism course at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley.
Copyright © 2001 HCN and Jim Downing]]>
In the dead of winter, female wolverines dig elaborate, multi-chambered dens to raise their young, choosing sites where snowpack lasts well into the spring. But snowpack in the Northern Rockies is almost certain to decline as the climate warms, jeopardizing their chances for successful reproduction. There are fewer than 300 wolverines in the Lower 48, and models show that they could lose 31 percent of their habitat by 2045 and 63 percent by 2085. And so, in February 2013, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed adding the "mountain devils" to the endangered species list.
The science behind the proposal has not changed, but the agency's position on it has. Mountain-Prairie Regional Director Noreen Walsh advocated against a speculative listing in a memo released by environmentalists in July, citing uncertainty as to exactly why wolverines need a persistent snowpack to reproduce and how its loss would harm the animals. Though scientists recommended listing wolverines as threatened, agency leader Dan Ashe defended her position – a strong indication of which way the final decision, due in early August, will go.
Wolverines would have been the first species in the Lower 48 thrust onto the endangered species list by climate change. A listing would have helped validate the use of climate models to develop strategies to protect animals against future threats. And it would have been unusual because, unlike most of the species the act safeguards, wolverines, though rare, are not thought to be declining.
Idaho, Montana and Wyoming – the states that anchor the animal's range in the Lower 48 – dreaded the prospect of a listing and the public-land restrictions it could bring, while environmentalists cheered it on. In practical terms, though, would formal protections really help wolverines? Can a law that was designed to rescue species from discrete, localized threats also protect them from the more diffuse hazards of a warming world?
The Endangered Species Act has helped prevent the extinction of many species of plants and animals by removing specific threats to their survival, often only in areas designated as "critical habitat." Closing forest roads in prime grizzly habitat, for instance, helped keep poachers and stressful traffic at bay. Prohibiting the hunting or poisoning of wolves after they were reintroduced to the Northern Rockies allowed populations to rebuild. Restricting timber harvests in the Pacific Northwest took pressure off the northern spotted owl.
But the Fish and Wildlife Service can't simply rope off high mountain niches, exclude greenhouse gases and preserve the snow that wolverines depend on. Polar bears, bearded seals and ringed seals are already listed due to disappearing sea ice, yet carbon emissions continue to rise, and the Arctic is still melting.
The Center for Biological Diversity, which has sued for greater wolverine protection, wants the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service to include specific emissions targets in the plans they create to recover species threatened by climate change "to raise awareness about what these species need," says Shaye Wolf, the center's climate science director. But using the act to reduce greenhouse gases would be politically and practically impossible, argues J.B. Ruhl, a Vanderbilt University professor specializing in endangered species law. Scientists couldn't prove that a particular coal-fired power plant is responsible for the demise of polar bears, for instance. Plus, the idea has never had support in the agencies or the White House.
Still, listing species threatened by climate change isn't pointless. Recovery plans lead to basic conservation measures, such as long-term, range-wide monitoring of endangered populations and their habitats. Such unglamorous science is crucial to understanding what can be done to help at-risk species; it's not being done for wolverines, which are elusive and scarce, thus difficult and expensive to study. Insufficient funding for wolverine research also means that any decline in the population or devastating habitat changes might not be noticed until it's too late.
Additionally, the act includes an allowance for the introduction of "experimental" populations, which carry fewer land-use restrictions than existing populations that are declared endangered or threatened. In Colorado, wildlife managers have discussed introducing an experimental wolverine population for years. Trapping and poisoning wiped out wolverines in Colorado in the early 20th century, but its mountains could provide a snowy stronghold into the future. Now, however, the state is reluctant to reintroduce a species that could later become officially endangered.
Though few species have been listed primarily because of impending climate change, 66 percent of recovery plans now recommend action to cushion the impacts of warming. Of those, about 17 percent mention reducing greenhouse gas emissions, about half recommend monitoring, and most suggest actions to help species adapt, according to Wolf. These are incremental steps, but necessary to maintain the act's relevance in a warming world.
In the future, the Fish and Wildlife Service could take more creative approaches, like setting aside critical habitat that may not be ideal today, but could be essential tomorrow. Another option is to protect corridors that would allow species to move to friendlier climes as their current homes become less hospitable. The Endangered Species Act, explains Ruhl, hasn't solved traditional problems such as urban sprawl or invasive species – but it's helped species survive them. Similarly, the act must be used to address the effects, if not the causes, of a warming planet. "I think fundamentally this is about trying to help species to adapt to climate change," he says. "That's what the Endangered Species Act can help us do best."]]>
I didn't go to the beach on Sunday morning, July 27. Crowds generally clog up the swells on weekends, so I escaped to the mountains in Ventura County. When I left, the weather in Venice was gloomy with a mild drizzle — not an unusual syndrome for the Southern California coast — but by the time I hiked and returned to the car at around 3 pm, it had evidently taken a dramatic turn. When I flipped on the radio for the traffic report, I heard that just a half an hour earlier, a bolt of lightning had struck the water near Venice Pier, and 13 people had been injured. Two were found face down in the water.
Frantically, I called home to make sure my husband was not among the victims. He was not; he'd been inside all day. "It was close," he told me, "and loud." On KNX 1070 News Radio, reporters interviewed volleyball players who felt an electrical current through their bodies, who saw other players' hair stand on end. Later we found out that one young man, 20-year-old Nicholas Fagnano, had been killed when he ventured into the water to wash off sand. A 55-year-old man was in the hospital in critical condition; he'd been out on his board riding waves fueled by storms far out at sea — storms he no doubt assumed would remain there, as they almost always do. I arrived home to the repetitive thwump of circling helicopters and the screams of ambulance sirens. There was not a skateboarder nor cyclist, nor beach-going tourist in sight. The surfers who daily walk our streets with their wetsuits stripped to their waists, boards under their arms, were all hunkered down indoors, or on their way back to their inland homes.
Was the bizarre weather that hit Venice Beach a climate-related phenomenon? It's dangerous to pin any one local weather event on climate change; climate, as we know, is global and measured on trend lines, not in isolated cloudbursts. Still, it's hard not to suspect that something is up with our local weather on the West Coast, an area seized from north to south in an epic and record-breaking drought.
During the months of December and January, the sky stayed relentlessly blue, thanks to a high-pressure ridge parked for months out over the Pacific Ocean. When a storm finally did break through, a half a year's normal rainfall came all in a weekend at the end of February, accompanied by hail and high winds and weak tornadoes. It wasn't different, necessarily, than the weather the region usually gets — long periods of dry weather broken by ferocious rainstorms that flood intersections and send rivers of mud cascading through bedrooms. It was only more extreme.
But the Venice Beach lightning storm was not just a matter of degree. It was fundamentally weird for this microclimate in any time of year, and absolutely unheard of in the summer (even a trace of rain broke records for July in downtown Los Angeles). You have about as much chance as dying by lightning strike in all of California as you have of being killed by a shark anywhere in the world — one in 7.5 million (in Montana, by contrast, the lightning-strike odds are one in 250,000). Of the seven lightning deaths that occurred in California between 2003 and 2012, according to statistics compiled by the National Lightning Detection Network, none were on the coast.
"You don't have the complex vertical structure and wind shear typically associated with lightning storms," Kevin Trenberth, a climate analyst at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said of Venice-area weather. Trenberth stopped short of making a lightning-climate connection, but a reporter at the news site the Daily Climate inched closer: "A changing climate may alter those weather patterns," she wrote, "making such 'freak' occurrences more common."
Confused, I called Bill Patzert, a climatologist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "Climate change is huge," he says. "The world is warming. Los Angeles is warming. I tell my colleagues: I was talking about it before they were born." But when you have a "normal" climate that produces one inch of rain in one year and 38 in the next, as coastal California does, "it's almost impossible to say anything about climate change."
What happened in Venice that Sunday was not a global warming phenomenon, Patzert insists. "It was a weather event." Patzert went on: "Lightning strikes the surface of the earth 33 million times a day. In the United States on average over the last couple of decades, about 45 people a year are killed by lightning strikes." They just don't happen where I live.
"People generally have become blasé about lightning strikes in coastal California," Patzert says. "We're just not sensitized because they're so unusual."
In Florida, where lightning strikes every day, they have warning systems. "They see it coming, and they clear the beaches and golf courses, and get the kids off the playground." Such a system may not be worthwhile in Southern California — "you have to weigh the costs versus the frequency" — but the National Weather Service in Colorado already has one in the works: The Lightning Potential Index, developed by lead forecaster Paul Frisbie. Right now, it only covers western Colorado, but it may be expanded "if it proves valuable," Frisbie told the Christian Science Monitor.
Patzert does allow that eventually, global warming will begin to influence local weather events in a way we can't ignore. But at the moment, he says, "I'm getting tired of watching extreme weather and global warming stories," most of which are really about bad zoning decisions or the lack of storm shelters for Oklahoma school children. "What we should be talking about is population density and zoning and living with risk."
So when can we talk about global climate and local weather? When do we cross the line into a world where a freak summer storm really can be called a climate phenomenon, and the tragic deaths that come with it are climate-related deaths?
"I'll let you know," Patzert assures me. "I'll give you a call in a few years."
Judith Lewis Mernit is a contributing editor of High Country News. She tweets @judlew.]]>
Now researchers have discovered another water disappearance that's equally dramatic, but not nearly as visible as the newly exposed sandstone walls of Lake Mead. Over the last nine years the states drawing on the Colorado River Basin groundwater have pumped enough out from underground to fill Lake Mead nearly twice. That means groundwater has been drawn down even faster than Lake Mead or Lake Powell during those years.
It's well known that when surface water is scarce, cities and farms fill the gap by pumping aquifers. But no one knew that Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Wyoming and Utah have been using that much groundwater until the researchers measured it for the first time, using data from a NASA satellite. "I think the key phrase has been 'shocking'," says Stephanie Castle, a water resources researcher at the University of California, Irvine, and the lead author of the study published last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. That means a lot coming from a group of scientists studying worldwide groundwater depletion.
So why isn't more being done to encourage judicious groundwater use? It's not that managers aren't interested in it, says Sharon B. Megdal, an expert in groundwater governance and the director of the University of Arizona Water Resources Research Center. Ideas have been thrown around for years, but it's fundamentally a hard problem to solve and the politics of water don't make it any easier. This study is also the first to measure groundwater depletion in the Colorado Basin on such a large scale. The good news though is that "right now there's a lot of pent up demand (within the water-watching community) for developing solutions."
The first barrier to understanding – and caring about – groundwater use is that it's mostly invisible. With aquifers, there are no photos of marinas stranded well above Lake Powell's water line, just wells to drill and models to run. That's why satellite data is so valuable.
Plus, there's no single entity in charge of accounting for groundwater. That's different from surface water in the Colorado River Basin, since the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation keeps an eye on how much is entering and leaving their reservoirs. And every state using the river is bound by a 1922 agreement that the northern Colorado River states, where most of water comes from, will share half with the Southwestern states. Since those states know that the water demands of about 40 million people are perilously close to outstripping supply, they've begun thinking about ways to stave off water conflict by using less of it or finding new sources.
But states aren't held to any such agreement about their aquifers, and oversight varies, if there's any at all. For example, California's groundwater is the least regulated of any western state. With that state in throes of drought, overpumping has drawn saltwater into coastal wells. That's helped inspire two pieces of legislation that, if passed, could change the free-for-all nature of California's groundwater.
Arizona, where 40 percent of the water comes from underground, has made strides to preserve its groundwater stores, in part by recharging aquifers with leftovers from their Colorado River allotment, instead of sending it downstream to California, and by creating special water management districts. But those districts don't cover the entire state, and rapid depletion is still a problem.
Since groundwater is a local resource, solutions to its runaway depletion will likely be local too. But not solving the problem, and running out in important agricultural regions, like California's Central Valley, or cities, would have ripple effects that extend far beyond local wells.
Castle and her colleagues hope their revelations about the region's groundwater will raise the resource's profile in the management community and with the public. That's an important step to slowing the drain on groundwater reserves. "I do personally believe that we can all do more to conserve," says Megdal. "If people understood the pressure that is being put on our aquifers, they might think more about (their water use)."
Sarah Jane Keller is a High Country News correspondent based in Bozeman, Montana. She tweets @sjanekeller.]]>