At Last, Economy AND Ecology

These are scary times: the stock market tanking, banks collapsing, jobs vanishing, state and city budgets imploding, the housing bubble burst.

As Bill Clinton’s team reminded him frequently in 1992, “it’s the economy, stupid.”

But wait. If you place your finger on the pulse of the planet, you’ll discover that temperatures are rising, glaciers melting, oceans warming, sea levels rising, rainforests burning, coral reefs dying, old-growth forests disappearing, deserts spreading, the world’s population rising, and species vanishing at record rates.

It’s also the ecology, stupid.

Yesterday, Vice President Joe Biden inaugurated his Middle Class Task Force in Philadelphia, presenting a panel discussion on the emerging green economy. Green collar jobs, everyone noted, is a key path out of our economic wilderness.

As an educator plowing the environmental field for 30 years, this is a hallelujah moment, as at long last there seems to be some recognition that the ecology underpins our economy, that the health of the two have been long connected, and that we have a unique opportunity to restore both, to, as it were feed two birds with the same crumb.

Finally, there is a unique confluence of economy AND ecology, and we no longer have to choose between them.

I hope this moment lasts.

The Last Polar Bear

An extraordinary book crossed my desk the other day, arriving at a critically important moment.


The Last Polar Bear from Braided River Books is described as a “photographic journey” by photographer Steven Kazlowski. It’s a coffee table book overflowing with photos of polar bears (not to mention seals, whales, walruses, Eskimos, and more), sharing the bear’s incredible natural history while cementing its place in the annals of environmental concern. Like eagles and peregrines were the 1960s symbol of DDT’s impact, the polar bear has become a reluctant poster child for global warming.


But the terrain the book covers is expansive, as Bear includes a series of elegiac essays from notable writers like Theodore Roosevelt IV, Newsweek correspondent Dan Glick, and several Alaskan environmental writers. These essays dive into politics, climate change, natural history, Inupiat Eskimo culture, and a whole lot more.
The book opens with a preface by Helen Cherullo, executive director of Braided River Books, the nonprofit publishing house that released Bear, who took Kazlowski to Congress in 2007 to share his photos. His presentation ended with a photo of a polar bear in a zoo, with him noting that “within decades, this could be the only place on earth a polar bear will be found.”

So the book’s title is a preemptive shot across the bow of American culture. But remember, the Interior Department finally bowed to pressure (and court orders) and listed the bears as a threatened species, threatened because the ice upon which they depend is thawing underneath them—far faster than scientists imagined possible. A study by the U.S. Geological Survey, released last fall, predicts that two-thirds of the world’s polar bears, including Alaska’s entire population, may disappear completely by 2050.

The last two years saw record ice melt in Arctic Ocean summers, and many scientists are now predicting ice-free summers in coming decades. Polar bears, of course, use this ice to move about, find mates and hunt for seals. As temperatures warm, the loss of the pack ice directly impacts their ability to survive.


Right now, as the long Arctic winter winds down, mother polar bears are nursing their young in ice-bound dens while hibernating. In March or April, the mother and pups emerge from their dens to start the new spring season.


What kind of world will the polar bears emerge into this year? That’s partly up to you. Grab this book.


The Last Polar Bear: Facing the Truth of a Warming World. Braided River Books, February 28, 2008 235 color photos, 192 pages, 10”x12”, Hardcover. Photos courtesy of Braided River Books and Steven Kazlowski.

Into the Frying Pan?

This is amazingly sad. A Worcester's buttontail quail, a shy Philippine bird long thought to be extinct by scientists, was FOUND recently in the wild…

..but promptly eaten. After it was photographed, the bird was sold in a local marketplace as food. Sigh.

Clean Energy: A Bright Spot in Stimulus Bill

So Obama flew to Denver today to sign the much-discussed $787 billion stimulus package—thank you, Senator Specter—and while we’ll hold our breath waiting to see if it works, as a card-carrying environmental guy, it was hard not to smile, bad as the economy is.

Renewable energy was a bright spot in the bill.

He signed the bill at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, first visiting the solar panels on its roof with the youthful head of Namaste Solar Electric, a small Colorado company that installed similar panels on the governor’s mansion there. Obama saw the future, and it worked.

The stimulus bill “is an investment that will double the amount of renewable energy produced over the next three years,” Obama noted, promising it will “transform the way we use energy.” Included in the package are $5 billion for low-income weatherization programs, several billion to modernize federal buildings for energy efficiency, $11 billion for “smart grid” investments, $3.4 billion for clean coal, $2 billion for research electric car batteries, $500 million in green job training, a three-year extension of the “production tax credit” for renewable energy projects like biomass, geothermal, landfill gas and some hydropower projects, and tons of energy-saving mass transit projects across the country.

Two quick thoughts: First, Obama could easily right a longstanding wrong by putting solar collectors back atop the White House. Installed on the West Wing (photo, below right) by the cardigan-carrying Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, Ronald Reagan’s very first act as president was to remove those offensive symbols of our energy ennui from the rooftop. Putting them back would be an easy symbolic gesture.

Second, Obama’s done a lot right on the environment. But his one error is a whopper: clean coal is a classic oxymoron. It doesn’t work and is not shovel-ready. While King Coal is undoubtedly crowing, we desperately need to shift energy policy in a different direction, and we’ll pour money down a bottomless clean-coal mine shaft and one day realize it didn’t go very far. You watch.

We’ll continue following that story and report as developments occur. Until then, there is plenty of good green news in the stimulus bill.

Top Eco-Doom Movies!

Mel Gibson, Al Gore, and Kevin Costner cracked at least this one Top 10 list.

But wait, where’s Bruce Dern? We wuz robbed!

It’s that time of year where everyone releases their top 10 lists, and the Mother Nature Network, www.mnn.com, a new Internet news site created by Rolling Stones keyboardist Chuck Leavell, has just released its top 10 eco-disaster movies of all time.

As a big fan of eco-doom movies, I couldn’t resist.

Their list includes Mel Gibson’s apocalyptic 1979 Mad Max, Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, and two flops, Kevin Costner’s Waterworld and Keanu Reeves’ The Day the Earth Stood Still. The really cool The Day After Tomorrow made the list—it should—and here's a surprise: Darwin’s Nightmare, a 2004 documentary about the ecological devastation of Tanzania’s Lake Victoria.

But four animated films make the list, including Wall-E, Happy Feet, Ice Age: the Meltdown, and Madagascar: Escape to Africa. Wall-E belongs, but Happy Feet? The overfishing subplot, while surprising, was just that, a subplot.

Truth belongs—it’s the most important environmental movie ever. So does Waterworld, an underrated ecological adventure. Max Max is great, especially in today’s end-of-oil-era times.

But where’s 1972’s Silent Running, one of the first and still best ecological sci-fi movies? Starring an impossibly young Bruce Dern as a botanist in space, he’s part of a crew caring for a series of satellite domes containing all of Earth’s plant life, as the planet itself is uninhabitable. The botanists are keeping the plants alive waiting for the day when they can return and replant. But budget cuts call for the end of the program, and the plants are to be jettisoned, which Dern, whose character’s name is Freeman, finds unconscionable. Great, underrated movie that played a HUGE role in at least this young environmentalist’s imagination. And I don’t think I’m alone.

I’d also add the magnificent 1982 Koyaanisqatsi with Philip Glass’ haunting soundtrack, and John Boorman’s rainforest-drenched The Emerald Forest (1985), with one of my favorite movie endings ever.
By the way, the Mother Nature News network is designed as “a one-stop resource and an everyman's eco-guide offering original programs, articles, blogs, videos, and how-to guides along with breaking news stories.” Compare to another similar outlet, the Environmental News Network, www.enn.com.
And Happy New Year.

Conquer the Blue Christmas: Go Green!

And so this is Christmas, goes the John Lennon classic, and an interesting one it is, as the economy has severely dampened the Yuletide cheer.

But even with the year’s grim economic news, interest in green gifts continues, and an ocean of web sites offers millions of ways you can give memorable presents that have a net-positive impact on the ecological systems that sustain us. So here are some green ways to conquer a blue Christmas.

Green is a very big umbrella: when purchasing gifts, a few pointers are appropriate. First, local products are very green. Locally purchased gifts require less fossil fuel to get to your door, reducing your carbon footprint.

Second, reused products trump recycled ones. The difference? Recycled materials are melted down and turned into something new, a process that saves materials but requires energy and water. Reused objects save tons on energy and water, again lowering that carbon footprint, the Holy Grail of our time.

Sweet Mabel’s, a gift shop in Narberth, is a homegrown gift shop featuring wild things like clocks pressed from classic rock albums, cuff links made from typewriter keys, goblets formed from soda and beer bottles, purses produced from reclaimed inner tubes and candy wrappers, wine bottle stoppers cleverly crafted from doorknobs, of all things, and even beautiful, colorful baskets hand-woven from telephone wire by Zulu women. (OK, a Zulu hand basket is not local, but it does contribute to the creation of sustainable economies in third world countries, not a bad reason to think globally as well.)

On the web, a Google search for recycled and green gifts offers an ocean of possibilities to wade through. Great Green Goods lists jewelry made from recycled flip flops, of all things, plus tree decorations crafted from recycled oxygen containers found on Mt. Everest and Santas cut from Dr. Pepper cans. Eco-Artware presents bracelets from vintage watch faces and subway tokens. Uncommon Goods provides wine goblets made from tinted automobile glass by people in Colombia and elegant journals and stationery made from—get this—elephant dung by women in Thailand. Yes, elephant droppings are loaded with fiber, and this fiber is turned into beautiful paper—check it out.

Speaking of elephants, Abundant Earth offers tire swings made from reused truck tires that come in the shape of elephants, horses, reindeer, T. rexes, even motorcycles and fire-breathing dragons—a great way to reuse tires and get the kids outside. And speaking of kids, if you want to give them a head start in the post-carbon economy, lots of web sites offer a variety of hydrogen-powered toy cars for kids, which run only on water. Today it’s a toy, tomorrow perhaps the greenest invention of all, an adult hydrogen car.

Adopt a species this Christmas. You can adopt a polar bear, killer whale, panda, tiger—or even an elephant so it can continue pumping out poop for your stationery! From the Defenders of Wildlife, you get plush toy versions of the adopted animals for your child’s room.

Erthnxt.org (not a typo, but a relatively new group connecting kids to the outdoors) offers a variety of tree-planting packages that are extraordinarily priced—go to their web site to see what’s available, and plant away! Other groups allow you to adopt sections of rainforest and coral reef, two of the most important, vulnerable, and species-rich habitats.

One final green gift that benefits the local economy: give a membership or a contribution to an environmental nonprofit—again, your choices are limitless.

Beat the blues: GO GREEN.

Santa Swimming: The Science of North Pole Ice

This week’s multiple days of frigid weather and snow flurries were quite the counterpoint to last week’s posting about Obama wrestling with global warming on his short list of big concerns. That’s the bummer about climate change—it makes weather patterns increasingly erratic, not predictably balmier.

And the fact that the weather may be changing doesn’t change the fact that we’ll still have snow.

But with snow falling and Thanksgiving arriving, thoughts do naturally turn to colder places, like the North Pole, habitat for reindeer, polar bears, and, of course, Santa and his elves. And the story there is interesting.
Classroom globes show a static amount of ice covering the Arctic Ocean above Canada and Russia. The truth is very different: the polar ice cap is a dynamic system that contracts and expands, thickens and thins with the seasons. During our summer, the ocean melts; in the winter, snow cover increases substantially. For millennia, permanent ice—ice that survives the summer thaw—outlasts the summer season and builds up, thick and massive deep-blue plateaus decades, even centuries old.

That was then.

For the last 30 years, polar scientists have been noting a decline is polar sea ice. In 2007, Arctic sea ice hit a record low, covering only 1.6 million square miles of ocean. The previous record? 2005. With the ice cap now rapidly cooling again, the National Snow and Ice Data Center says the ice covered 1.7 million square miles at its lowest point on September 12. To put this in perspective, 30 years ago there would be about 2.5 million square miles of ice left at the end of an Arctic summer—roughly the size of the lower 48 states. That's now dropped by almost 40 percent.

"We've essentially lost sea ice equivalent to land east of the Mississippi River and even beyond. So that's a significant amount of area," Walt Meier, a scientist at the snow center, recently told the BBC.

And here’s the kicker: both last summer and this one, for the first time in quite a while, the ice pulled far enough back from adjoining land masses that at high summer, a boat could circumnavigate the North Pole, using the northwest passage above Canada and the northeast passage above Siberia, to circle the globe in the north, in the Arctic Ocean.

So I’m happy to report that this summer's ice cover did not set a record. No. It was only was the second lowest since satellite records began 30 years ago, which Mier says emphasizes the “strong negative trend,” as the three years of the least amount of ice ever recorded all occurred within the last four years.

And the ice is younger: less of it is surviving the winter as permaice. And it is thinner—19% thinner last winter than the average of the previous five years. That’s a big change in one winter.

The best known consequence of disappearing sea ice has been the loss of polar bear habitat, and the polar bear is quickly emerging as the poster child of global climate change. Dependent on sea ice for so much of its behavior, including standing on it to hunt for seals, its most important source of food, reports are emerging of bears starving, drowning, even eating each other. One scientist monitored 9 polar bears swimming in the Chukchi Sea north of the Bering Strait, not in itself unusual—bears are powerful swimmers capable of covering 100 miles in the water. The group was only 40 miles from land—but heading in the wrong direction, where the closest land was 400 miles away, well out of range.

In May, the polar bear was listed as threatened—one step away from endangered.

The scariest part of the data is the quickening pace of the change. Only a few years ago, many scientists were noticing a warning trend, and began predicting a totally ice-free Arctic Ocean at its summer peak within 50 or 80 years. Then they began saying it would likely happen within 30 years.

Some are now predicting only five years from now. Within five years, an ice-free pole in the summer.

For ice is a giant mirror reflecting sunlight back into space, protecting the ocean water below from sunlight energy. When sea ice melts, the sunlight strikes the dark ocean water, which then warms. As it warms, it melts more snow, which uncovers more water, which warms—and you have a positive feedback loop exacerbating the trend.

Now some nations, most notably Russia, are salivating over the notion of an ice-free Arctic, as there are huge possible pockets of oil trapped beneath the waters, oil much easier to reach without permanent ice. Talk about a positive feedback loop: the burning of fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide, which warms the climate, which melts the ice, which opens up new oil fields, which releases carbon dioxide—and ripples throughout both economy and ecology.

But all this discussion of polar bears and petro-exploitation misses the biggest issue raised by the possible melting of the Arctic’s ice cap:

Just where will Santa put his workshop as the sea ice vanishes beneath the North Pole?

Something to think about as you place your child atop Santa’s lap in the holiday season. And shop for presents that release no greenhouse gases.