NRDC in the News: Summer 2010
"’There’s…a right way and a wrong way of providing our nation’s future energy needs,’ said Wesley Warren, NRDC’s program director. ‘The right path is one that provides economic growth while providing economic protections.’" –From "Offshore Drilling: Impact on Americans," CNNMoney.com , April 1, 2010 "’Oil is semi-volatile, which means that it can evaporate into the air and create a heavy vapor that stays near the ground-in the human breathing zone,’ [said Gina Solomon, senior scientist at NRDC]….’I’m also worried about the cleanup workers….This cleanup needs to be done quickly, but it also needs to be done safely. Eleven workers are already dead from the explosion; let’s make sure worker and community health is protected from now on.’" –From "Burning Oil Sends Heavy Vapor Toward Gulf Residents," Grist.com , May 3, 2010 "’A lot of people think that conservation means you have to diminish your lifestyle,’ said Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist with NRDC who helped coordinate greening efforts for the [White House Correspondents] dinner. ‘[But] it’s a question of operating more efficiently and choosing environmentally better products.’" –From "At 96, White House Correspondents Association Goes Ecological," Politico , April 30, 2010
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NRDC in the News: Summer 2010
Letters from Our Readers: Summer 2010
Red, Blue, and Green I enjoyed "Renewable Energy Catches On in Red America," by Michael Behar (Spring 2010), but I am puzzled by people’s continuing tendency to think of one issue at a time, rather than to mobilize multipronged efforts for conservation. When choosing appropriate sites for solar panels, step one should be to ensure that no endangered species or critical habitat will be violated, and step two should be to consider local water needs, not just electricity. In areas around Tucson, where we expect to have significant water-supply issues in a few years, many people are beginning to harvest rainwater for various uses, while others are single-mindedly thinking about setting up large arrays of solar panels. If water people and power people would communicate with one another, they would realize that they could put gutters on solar panels and pipe off the rain to storage areas. In Tucson, which gets about 12 inches of rain a year, a square mile of solar panels could collect 208,529,432 gallons of water. Charles J. Cole Tucson, Arizona Although master planner Lorelei Oviatt correctly states that no condor has been killed by a wind farm, these birds are rapidly expanding their range toward the wind projects in Kern County, and the current fast pace of permitting turbines, especially on ridges and in condor habitat, increases the risk of this unfortunate event occurring. Audubon California urges Oviatt and Kern County to dedicate a portion of the tax resources from renewable energy development to a study of the cumulative impacts of all of the wind and solar energy projects in the county on birds, bats, and other biological resources as well as to a plan that can mitigate those effects. We need renewable energy, but not at any cost. We need it properly sited to minimize the impacts on wildlife. Garry George Chapter Network Director Audubon California Los Angeles, California Fuel for Thought There are a couple of points that could stand correction in "Driven," by Craig Canine (Spring 2010). Honda’s first automobile was not the N600 of 1970 (its first to be exported to the United States) but rather the S500 of 1964, a tiny sports car. And Honda’s 1984 CRX-HF was by no means the first mass-produced car capable of 50 miles per gallon. There was a raft of tiny cars available in Europe and Japan, some of which were exported in small quantities to the United States. Some of these two-cylinder, air-cooled cars could approach 60 miles per gallon under the right conditions. Jim Emerson Portland, Oregon Leftovers I’m amazed that Laura Wright, the author of "How to Wage War on Food Waste" (Spring 2010), and her husband, Peter, apparently do not possess a freezer! What’s left from our Thanksgiving bird (organic, free-range) gets segregated into white meat, dark meat, and carcass for soup, then dated and frozen in freezer bags whose crossed-out labels attest to their six or seven previous uses, ranging from blanched snow peas to leftover corn cut off the cobs from last summer’s garden to three-month-old spaghetti sauce. Likewise the whipped mashed potatoes, even though they’re not as good as the freshly made portion. The wilting greens and vegetables, once sautéed with onion and garlic, could thriftily serve as a soup base. I can’t speak to the half-used tubs of hummus; my heart is broken. But I too would toss the sour milk unless I was on the cusp of making corn bread. Anyway, the illustration is arresting. And I know the putative waste was to make a point. Maxine Kumin Warner, New Hampshire
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The Seeds of Change
Born and raised on a Kansas farm, Wes Jackson grew up to help establish one of the first environmental studies programs in the country at California State University-Sacramento. But during a leave of absence, the plant geneticist began to ask himself whether being a tenured professor was where he could do the most good. He answered by chucking the academic life and returning to his Kansas roots. Jackson started a nonprofit organization, The Land Institute, which has been rethinking how humans grow and cultivate food for more than three decades now. As part of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Visionary Speaker Series , Jackson discussed his revolutionary thinking on agriculture. He spoke to journalist Michael O. Allen. What does The Land Institute do? We are perennializing major crops. What farmers do today, and have been doing since agriculture began 10,000 to 13,000 years ago, is plant annual crops. That is just not natural. By subduing or ignoring nature, we’re saying we’ve got to destroy the ecosystem in order to eat. In the wild, nature features perennials and mixtures. That’s all we’re trying to do at the Land Institute, bring the processes of the wild to the farm. With perennials, we don’t have to tear the ground up every year. Perennial seeds have these extensive root systems that grow deeper into the ground. The roots then manage nutrients and water and microorganisms such as bacteria, fungi, even the worms. Perennials are also going to capture sunlight over a larger percentage of the year than annuals do because, with annuals, you’ve got to wait until the seeds come up and for it to spread and form a canopy to capture sunlight. How are you bringing the processes of the wild to the farm? Through plant breeding. We are crossing annual crops with their perennial relatives. We are also domesticating wild perennials that are promising. If we succeed, we’ll have a mixture of grain-producing crops grown by farmers who have a 19th century British naturalist way of thinking. It’ll be people managing a domestic ecosystem that has signatures of the ways of the wild. Don’t big agricultural companies grow most of our food now? Yes, but that will end because it is dependent on burning a lot of fossil fuel. How are you going to carry on with industrialized agriculture if you don’t have a lot of fossil carbon to run it? There’s only so much oil. What makes anybody think that it’s going to go on and on and on? We’re showing signs of desperation already, including our presence in the Middle East. Our leaders understand that if we don’t have that portable liquid fuel, we’re going to have widespread social upheaval. A 10-year-old has lived through a quarter of all the oil ever burned, and a 22-year-old, 54 percent. The scaffolding of modern industrial society is dependent upon highly dense, ancient, energy-rich carbon. So, when you start losing that, you start doing crazy things, like more offshore drilling, which means more ecological accidents like the one we just had in the Gulf. It’s just sort of a downward spiral toward a desecrated planet. What are the forces you have to overcome to change agriculture as we know it? The big chunk of money made in agriculture is for the suppliers of fertilizers, the insecticides people, and the seed houses. If the plant keeps coming up every year, you don’t need to buy seeds. Look at a native prairie, those root systems, that whole underground activity there is very efficient in the management of nutrients and water. We just want to bring so much of what the prairie is all about to our agricultural fields, but the first requirement is to have the perennials. When that happens, the reward runs primarily to the farmer and the landscape and you’re going to have less need for nitrogen. About 50 percent of the nitrogen that’s applied to fields in the form of fertilizer isn’t taken up by the crops, and it leaks into our streams. How big a challenge do you face? Huge. I mean, partly, because people have left the farms and they don’t have a connection to the land. So, now, here they are, living in suburbia or cities with little appreciation of the source. Aldo Leopold long ago said that there are two spiritual dangers that come from not owning a farm. One is the belief that heat comes from the stove, and the other is belief that food comes from a grocery store. We’ve got these disconnects. I suspect something will have to happen to make people focus, to get them to make the connection. You are 74 years old this year. Do you have a sense that you’re running out of time? We’ve got a motto around The Land Institute: If you’re working on something that you can finish in your lifetime, you are not thinking big enough. Read interviews with more NRDC visionary speakers .
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The Seeds of Change