RAISING A STINK

Rural Residents Join Fight Against Factory Farms

Environmental groups who oppose industrial-style concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) on the grounds that they pollute air and water are finding support from an unexpected source: rural residents. Fed up by lax federal and state regulations—a report last year from the General Accounting Office found that sixty percent of the largest CAFOs are almost entirely unregulated—local grassroots organizations are filing lawsuits across the country. The movement is meeting fierce resistance at the state level where government officials have close ties to agribusiness executives and argue that concentration is required by the global market and jobs will be lost if factory farms are pushed out. “It’s not about smell,” said CAFO owner James McCune. “It’s about people without money complaining about people with money.” Tom Drew, who owns a family farm, counters, “My land is my kingdom, and I shouldn’t have it invaded by odor, by bad disease.”

Source: Chicago Tribune, Andrew Martin, 24 March 2004.

A THOUSAND POINTS OF GREEN

Environmental Movement Becoming Decentralized and Diversified

Environmentalism is going grassroots. While two-thirds of Americans identify themselves as environmentalists, membership in big, mainstream environmental organizations stayed flat throughout the 1990s. IRS data explains why, at least in part: The number of environmental groups with an annual income of $1 million or more fell by nearly half from 1995 to 2003; during the same period, 4,247 groups with budgets of less than $1 million were created. Many of these smaller groups involve people who have not been traditionally associated with environmentalism but who want to act on local concerns. In the West, ranchers and hunters fight to protect the natural resources they depend on. Other citizens band together around environmental justice, environmental health, and the intersection between religion and conservation. And some activists don’t associate themselves with any organizations, like Montanan Karl Rappold, who says, “I work with environmental groups, but I don’t belong to them. I can do more as an independent rancher.”

Source: The Christian Science Monitor, Mark Clayton, 25 March 2004.

LEEDING LIGHT

Green Building Is Booming

Once a fringe movement, born of the 1970s energy crisis, green building is going mainstream with a vengeance. Through its four-year-old Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program, the U.S. Green Building Council has certified 149 million square feet of commercial and high-rise residential space as green, up from eight million in 2000. The economic benefits are clear: According to a recent study by the California Sustainable Building Task Force, green building raises upfront construction expenses by two percent, but yields tenfold savings over twenty years by reducing energy and waste costs. Even those upfront expenses are decreasing as companies like Home Depot jump into the market with more eco-friendly, sustainable materials, driving prices down. Green building techniques range from the high-tech, like installing motion sensors that turn off lights when no one’s in a room, to low-tech, like situating buildings to receive maximum natural light. More and more cities require new government buildings to meet LEED standards.

Sources: The Mercury News, Paul Rogers, 30 March 2004; USA Today, John Ritter, 30 March 2004.

TALKING TRASH

New Biomass Process Holds Great Promise

Biomass—the process of converting carbon-based waste into fuel—is slowly but surely becoming a viable enterprise. At the forefront are companies like Changing World Technologies Inc.; its first commercial plant, recently built in Carthage, Mo., sees thousands of tons of turkey parts from a nearby Butterball plant transformed, via a multi-stage process of intense heat, separating, grinding, and distilling, into fertilizer, fuels, and clean-burning oils. The process produces no waste—no smoke, no dirty water—and can run on virtually any carbon-based input, from medical waste to old tires to cast-off computers, says the company. Currently, Changing World gets a boost from government subsidies, but it predicts that with refinements in its process and more cooperation from waste-producing industries, the sky’s the limit. Environmentalists have mixed reactions to this type of biomass, acknowledging the benefits—waste reduction, a cleaner process for producing petroleum, and a possible reduction in mad cow disease (with slaughterhouse waste burnt instead of fed to other animals)—while worrying that it could distract attention from the needed move away from petroleum to genuinely clean energies.

Source: New York Newsday, Dan Fagin, 4 April 2004.

FRIENDS IN HYBRID PLACES

American Automakers Get Ready to Sell Hybrids

Ford Motor Co. announced today that it will put a second hybrid SUV on the market in 2007, but the company and its American counterparts still have a ways to go before they catch up with Japanese automakers and satisfy the demands of environmentalists. Ford’s first hybrid SUV, the Escape, will debut in dealerships this summer, but protesters outside this year’s New York International Auto Show are keeping the pressure on CEO Bill Ford, Jr., who prior to taking over the company was an outspoken environmental advocate. “Ford has shown that they can make a 35-mpg SUV—now they need to use this technology throughout their fleet to clean up the environment and cut our oil dependence,” said the Sierra Club’s Dan Becker. General Motors also has a few hybrid models set to debut in 2007. By that year, however, Toyota and Honda—who have reported high demand for their hybrids—will be selling three to four hybrid models apiece, including mid-size sedans and SUVs. Some analysts predict, and environmentalists hope, that high gas prices will accelerate demand for the fuel-saving model

Sources: MSNBC, 7 April 2004; The Boston Globe, Reuters, Michael Ellis, 7 April 2004.

FARM AID

Small Farms Turn Organic to Survive

Battered by volatile markets and relentless corporate consolidation, many family farms are turning to organic cultivation—and joining organic cooperatives—to survive. According to farm advocacy group Farm Aid, the number of family farms in the U.S. has declined from eight million to two million in the last fifty years; an average of 330 family farms a week go out of business. Meanwhile, the market for organic food has grown by twenty percent a year for the last four years; organic farms now account for five to seven percent of all agricultural cultivation in the country. Putting two and two together, many family farms are moving to organic and joining organizations like Wisconsin-based Organic Valley, the nation’s largest organic farm cooperative. The shift to organic methods can be a substantial effort—three years with no pesticides on crops, one year with no antibiotics or hormones in livestock, and a great deal of paperwork—but participating farms enjoy stabilized prices, a growing niche market, and, of course, a bit of moral and environmental satisfaction. Says dairy farmer Theresa Westaby, “It’s about being healthy and doing the right thing.”

Source: Rockford Register Star, Anna Voelker, 12 April 2004.

WHAT ARE WE GONNA DO, WALK?

Rising Gas Prices Don’t Keep Americans Out of Their Cars

Environmentalists hoping that rising gas prices would change Americans’ driving behavior have been bitterly disappointed. Although gas prices have reached a national average of $1.80 per gallon, American drivers are buying more gas than ever, and big, gas-guzzling SUVs are flying off showroom floors like never before. Explanations for this phenomenon vary. For one thing, gas prices are not nearly as high, in absolute terms, as they were during the energy crisis of the late 1970s, when demand for fuel-efficient cars and public transportation spiked. For another, the U.S. economy as a whole continues to grow. Experts differ on what price level would cause enough pain to change behavior. Some speculate that the $2 per gallon mark would do it, but gas has exceeded that level in California without denting driving habits. Others say $3 per gallon—which could be reached as soon as Memorial Day—might be the magic number. Still others speculate that even when the world is reduced to a post-apocalyptic hellscape, Americans traveling in lawless gangs will still prize their cars above all else. Wasn’t there a movie about that?

Source: The Christian Science Monitor, Alexandra Marks, 13 April 2004.

LIVE AT THE APOLLO

Renewable-Energy Push Would Create Heaps of Jobs, Study Says

Federal policies favorable to renewable energy could yield up to 240,000 jobs by 2020 nationwide, whereas continued focus on new fossil-fuel development would yield only some 80,000 jobs, according to a new study by researchers from the University of California at Berkeley. The research was released yesterday at a Seattle press conference that highlighted the Apollo Alliance, a coalition of enviros, politicians, labor activists, and deep thinkers that is promoting a national effort on renewable energy commensurate with the single-minded pursuit of space travel under President Kennedy’s Apollo Project. The Alliance’s goal is to have renewables providing fifteen percent of the nation’s energy by 2015 and twenty percent by 2020. The Alliance sees hope for its agenda in the current troubles besetting Bush’s fossil-fuel-centric energy plan, which is mired both in the Senate and, the group says, the 20th century.

Sources: San Francisco Chronicle, Tom Abate, 14 April 2004; Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Robert McClure, 14 April 2004.

MAY WE SUGGEST THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE?

U.K. Ponders How to Rid Itself of Nuclear Waste

The U.K. is stuck with nearly 500,000 tons of nuclear waste, which will be dangerous for 250,000 years, and it is flummoxed about what to do with it. A government commission assigned to study the problem is considering a range of options including, we kid you not, firing the stuff into the sun, burying it underneath the ocean, placing it on Antarctica where it would melt its way down to bedrock, and tunneling it down under the Earth’s crust—an idea that’s already been tried (!) by the U.S. and Russia. There’s also the old-fashioned option of storing it above ground in concrete bunkers, but those things need upgrading every hundred years or so, and by our math, that’s 2,500 upgrades before the waste becomes safe. A report to the commission states, with tragic-comic British dryness, that fifty years of experience dealing with nuclear waste shows “the pursuit of ‘the best’ in the long-term management of radioactive waste to be an illusory concept,” and that success, in this grim context, means “the identification of ‘the acceptable.’“

Source: The Guardian, Paul Brown, 14 April 2004.

MY PUBLIC IDAHO

Improbable Coalition Proposes New Idaho Wilderness Area

An unlikely coalition of ranchers, off-road vehicle enthusiasts, politicians, and environmental groups has, after years of discussion and negotiation, united to propose the first new federal wilderness area in Idaho in more than twenty years. The official wilderness designation would give 511,000 acres of land in and around the Owyhee-Bruneau Canyonlands protection from almost all development. Access would be ensured for off-road vehicles that stay on designated routes; just 40,000 acres would be off-limits to ranching. Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), who helped shepherd the negotiations, said the agreement “should set a standard for collaborative decision-making”; he is “very optimistic” that it will pass through Congress. In 2000, the Clinton administration proposed setting aside a much larger 2.4 million acres of southwest Idaho as a national monument, which would have placed it under much tighter restrictions, but, said Idaho Rivers United Director Bill Sedivy, “That was a different time, a different place.”

Sources: The Washington Post, Juliet Eilperin, 14 April 2004; The Times-News, Associated Press, 14 April 2004.

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