Attention, parents: Now that you’ve seen your kids’ first report cards of the year, it’s time for a little homework of your own. No doubt you’re doing the best you can to ensure your little ones’ eventual membership in Mensa — promoting stimulating dinner conversation, reading a chapter together each night, maybe even playing Mozart during bath time. But wait — there’s more. You’ll find your next assignment in the pages of Colleen Moore’s Silent Scourge: Children, Pollution, and Why Scientists Disagree.

Silent Scourge
By Colleen Moore
Oxford University
Press, 328 pages,
2003

You probably already know that lead is not an appropriate component of any cerebral calisthenics program. But nor is it the only pollutant that can stunt intellectual development. In Silent Scourge, Moore, a developmental psychologist, reviews the case against lead and five additional types of pollutants — mercury, PCBs, pesticides, noise, and radioactive and chemical wastes.

With the possible exception of noise, most people recognize these pollutants as harmful and wouldn’t actively incorporate them into K-12 curriculums or meal plans. But that doesn’t mean we’ve got the necessary information — or power — to protect kids from them. Each of these pollutants has been the object of protracted debate, the kind of media-moderated, he-said/she-said dispute that frequently leaves us more worn down than wised up. Moore cuts through the confusion, using lay language to explain the dangers each pollutant poses to child development, including intellectual function, behavior, emotional state, and overall physical and psychological well-being.

No kidding: Pollution is bad for
young’uns.

Her conclusion: Children exposed to these pollutants — which is to say, all children, to one degree or another — experience consequences both subtle and profound. “These types of pollution are usually silent and insidious,” she writes. “The effects … are revealed by carefully constructed psychological assessments of memory, attention, learning, motor skills, intelligence, personality, emotion, and other characteristics.”

Moore is painstakingly fair, which, as any reality-TV producer can tell you, eliminates much of the potential for crowd-pleasing drama. She’s tried hard to be evenhanded in her explication of the science. Perhaps most important, she explains one of the great mysteries of science and public-policy debate: how “scientists can disagree about the scientific evidence without being dishonest.”

In answering that question, Moore doesn’t point her finger at outright corruption, corporate influence, or political manipulation, though these certainly can be complicating factors. Rather, she reports, scientists can disagree without being dishonest simply by “applying different decision standards.”

Does the science add up?

Decision standards determine how science gets used in the policy equation. This takes us back to lead again, and to 1926, when then-Surgeon General Hugh Cummings had to decide whether to allow the use of lead additives in gasoline. Using an early version of one decision standard, the precautionary principle, public-health advocates argued that the lead additive should be banned until it was shown to be safe. Industry countered with the so-called Kehoe Paradigm: “Tetraethyl lead should be allowed unless and until it is shown to be a health hazard … because there are benefits of its use” and uncertainty about effects. Industry won, with the result that lead wasn’t removed from gasoline until the 1970s. But perhaps the more important outcome was that the burden of proof in U.S. environmental policy was placed squarely on the polluted, not the polluter.

Nearly 80 years later, the rap sheet on lead is fairly complete, and quite damning. Even as Silent Scourge was hitting bookstores, a new study came out refuting the long-held belief that children can handle small amounts of lead. As Richard Canfield of Cornell University told the Los Angeles Times, “There is no safe level of exposure.”

So what’s the verdict on these other “silent scourges”? Forget about verdicts, Moore says; we’re still awaiting evidence: “Where are we now in the study of pesticides and children’s behavioral development? Basically we are in the 1940s. … I have been unable to find any studies that follow up child pesticide poisoning victims to see how they perform in school later. There has not even been good research to see if there is a link between current exposures to pesticides and neurobehavioral functioning in children.”

Moore believes that the lack of research has to do with a widespread belief that low-level exposure to pesticides is safe. Environmental-justice issues may also be at work: Those children most likely to be exposed to pesticides are poor and minority kids living in inner cities or agricultural areas.

Sound Effects

Perhaps the most ear-opening science in Moore’s book deals with one of the most common pollutants in the educational system: noise. Thousands of U.S. schools — many of them in lower income areas — are built near roads or rails, or in the flight paths of low-flying planes. According to national survey data, at any given time, one in seven children in a classroom has a temporary hearing loss of 16 decibels or greater, most likely from a head cold or ear infection. If any additional factor degrades the sound environment, those children simply can’t hear what’s going on.

Can you hear me now?

Most people know that particularly loud noises can damage hearing, but continuous background noise can also cause harm. The best research so far on this topic was done in 1973 and concerned a high-rise public housing project built over I-95 in Manhattan. The researchers compared the reading levels of children who lived on the bottom floors, close to traffic noise, with those who lived higher up, where the noise was not as loud. All the children went to the same schools, and the income restrictions for eligibility to live in the project helped control for economic and educational backgrounds (which have by far the most significant effect on children’s scholastic achievement). For those children who had lived in the apartments for at least four years, approximately 20 percent of the difference in reading scores could be predicted simply from their floor number.

Noise affects not just cognitive performance, like reading ability, but also mental health and such anxiety responses as annoyance, blood pressure, and stress hormone secretion. “Hearing other people talk is critical to children’s early language development,” Moore explains. “Memory and performance can be impaired because of the extra effort required to decipher speech [when there is significant background noise]. Mood can also become more negative, and the person feels tired or stressed.”

A little noise may seem like a minimal burden, but the effects of noise pollution “can cascade into poor overall academic performance and lack of motivation in school,” Moore writes. “Poor reading is a negative factor that can lead to other academic and social problems, so anything that affects children’s early reading needs careful consideration.” That is, a little downward pressure on children’s early potential can snowball into serious, lifelong consequences. And as with pesticides, the consequences of noise pollution are borne unequally, with poor and minority children more likely to be exposed to continuous background noise. What’s more, such children are also more likely to be affected by lead and other pollutants, a true double (or triple, or quadruple) whammy.

School Daze

How, then, should we go about protecting kids from these common hazards? One of Moore’s main points is that “we do not need a ‘body count’ of deaths or cancer cases in order to conclude that a category of pollution has serious developmental effects.” Moore argues that developmental psychology could help us escape this body-count paradigm for assessing the impacts of pollutants — and thus ultimately help us better regulate them.

It’s a jungle (gym) out
there.

Photo: EPA.

Currently, much of our regulation of chemicals is based on two kinds of tests. Screening tests assess whether a substance will, under laboratory conditions, cause tumors or birth defects. Epidemiological tests look backwards, in a complicated and often futile attempt to demonstrate a link between cause and effect, exposure and illness. But these tests fail children on three counts. First, they focus on catastrophic impacts, while developmental impacts are more often subtle and incremental. Second, they’re more concerned with the response to high doses, despite considerable evidence that developmental harm can occur at low doses. And third, they don’t look at the effects of exposure to more than one pollutant, which is almost invariably what happens in real life.

Consider mercury, a potent neurotoxin. (And a recent headline-maker, after the Bush administration proposed regulatory changes that could stymie efforts to reduce mercury pollution.) “The question now is not whether mercury is toxic, but how much exposure is too much for whom,” writes Moore. “This is where the controversy occurs both among researchers and in government regulations.” The same could be said of PCBs: Scientists are still arguing over whether PCBs cause cancer. If we used developmental benchmarks instead, Moore says, we would see devastating and irrefutable impacts on child development at doses where PCBs only ambiguously suggest cancer.

In other words, science will only answer the questions we ask of it — and therefore it can never be a proxy for our own morals. Moore has performed a huge public service with this book by unraveling the tangled skein of contested findings and revealing the value differences at the core of scientific debate. And her ultimate argument is difficult to take issue with: “Protecting children from pollution is plainly an ethical choice.”

It’s not a good-time read, but Silent Scourge could become an important tool for educating the public about paradigms for understanding the links between pollution and health, arming them with questions we should all be asking. Back to school, everybody.

Dick Koerner in his shack
on Lake Winnebago.

Photo: Erik Ness.

Early in the morning on Feb. 8, Dick Koerner jockeyed his pickup along the frozen track to his weather-beaten shelter. He unloaded his truck and unlocked the shack. The windowless, flat-black interior accentuated the glorious green light flowing from a rectangular hole cut in the ice. Koerner closed the door, completing the immersion in that transfixing light, then cleared the hole of ice shards, hung a decoy, and readied his spear: four feet long with a small and nasty head shaped like a pitchfork. He suspended it above the hole, then sat, as he has done every winter save two since 1953, and waited for a really big fish.

Welcome to the surreally patient world of sturgeon spearing, whose adherents regularly go decades without seeing a single fish. The hut is a close approximation of a sensory-deprivation chamber. Luminescent as it is, the hole looks like nothing so much as a plasma-screen television set flush into the floor. And truly, there is nothing on TV.

Sturgeon for action.

Photo: Erik Ness.

“You get all your meditation done,” says Koerner. “It’s like sitting in front of an aquarium for six hours. An empty aquarium.” Spearers have been known to nod off and tumble into their hole. The odds of catching a fish? Well, lie on your back, point a rifle up your chimney, and wait for a duck to fly by.

Zen jokes aside, the formidable spear leaves no question that this is a blood sport, with all the associated adrenaline and testosterone. But if the spearing seems brutal, note this: While most of the world’s 25 species of sturgeon are rare or endangered, there are more sturgeon in and around Lake Winnebago than anywhere on the planet. Once, sturgeon were poached at will from upstream rivers, packed illicitly in coffins, and shipped to Chicago by boxcar. Now, every spring, hundreds of people — many of them spearers — join the Sturgeon Guard, the volunteer army dedicated to protecting the helpless, spawning sturgeon from would-be poachers.

Caviar Emptor

As is so often the case in the natural world, sex and appetite lie at the heart of the sturgeon’s troubles. Sturgeon eggs, teased from the ovarian membrane and pickled in brine, are sold as caviar, a delicacy and also a reputed aphrodisiac. Up to one-fifth of the weight of a mature female can be eggs, and at $150 a pound, the poaching temptation is significant. In Brooklyn in early May, just after the Wisconsin spawn ended, Arkady Panchernikov, a 53-year-old Russian immigrant and this country’s largest caviar dealer, was fined $400,000 and sentenced to 21 months in prison for trading in ill-gotten sturgeon caviar. A few days later, California wildlife officers arrested eight people for poaching white sturgeon from the Sacramento River.

These are the forces the Sturgeon Guard is dedicated to fighting. In the 1970s and ’80s, careful management and lake cleanup efforts helped set the stage for a rebound of the Winnebago sturgeon population, estimated at a low of 11,500 in 1957. Ironically, though, the success of the sturgeon attracted potential poachers, and although wardens worked 12 hour shifts, they still couldn’t cover the terrain and adequately protect the species. In 1987, the state decided to ask for citizen volunteers, and the Sturgeon Guard was born. Under the program, which has become a model for others, volunteer guards are fed a meal at Fish Camp, issued a cell phone, and sent to spawning hot spots.

Spawned but not forgotten.

Photo: Wisconsin DNR.

The protection is needed because during spawning season, the fish are all but oblivious to anything but their primal urges; bystanders can literally reach down and pet them. Lake Winnebago sturgeon spawn upstream in the Wolf and Embarass rivers, swimming as many as 127 miles, past the town of Shiocton all the way to Shawano, to locate shallow, rocky shoals suitable for mating. The males, usually smaller and younger, swim in small packs. The spawning frenzy begins when a female arrives and scrapes against the rocks to release her eggs; the males, meanwhile, swarm about releasing milt, or sperm. Each act lasts about five seconds, but spawning activity for one female can last five to eight hours, and sometimes even into the next day. Few eggs survive; most are scarfed up right way by turtles and fish — even other sturgeon. Yet the Winnebago population is now conservatively estimated to number between 40,000 and 50,000 fish.

Poached Eggs

Poaching is still a sensitive topic in towns along the Wolf River. One Sturgeon General — the captain of the watch for the Sturgeon Guard — admits to kin whose legal relationship to the fish in their smoker may have been questionable. People still gossip nervously about coffin-filled railcars, shots fired on the river, and the so-called Shiocton Mafia.

A sturgeon smiles for the camera.

Photo: Erik Ness.

Those days are hopefully past, thanks in part to the Sturgeon Guard. That’s only fitting, as humans are the only threat to a species that has outlasted the dinosaurs. The skin on the bodies of individuals in this 100 million-year-old species is like that of a shark — leathery, not scaly — as is their tail fin, which is longer on top than bottom and breaks the water in eerie shark-like fashion. Sturgeon share their primitive anatomy with the likes of the coelacanth, the so-called fossil fish whose live capture ignited a scientific firestorm in 1938. Individual sturgeon live long, and large. In 1881, one I. Pollack is said to have caught a nine-foot, 297-pounder at Lake Winnebago. Two 310 pound fish have been pulled from Great Lakes waters. All of these fish were probably at least 100 years old.

Fish of those dimensions are exceptionally rare, although during this year’s run a fishery team from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources nabbed an 82-inch fish, estimated at 130 pounds and 60 to 70 years of age. Appropriately, the crew was all volunteer — retired fisheries biologists who call themselves the Geriatric Crew. In charge of the team was Dan Folz, who began working with sturgeon back in 1959. “We came out of college and started working with fossil fish,” he joked. “Now we’re the living fossils.”

The Geriatric Crew at work below
the Shawano dam.

Photo: Erik Ness.

Taking in the crowd of curious folks watching the work, Folz recalled tougher times. He used to work with Gordon Priegel, the fish biologist who pioneered sturgeon research in Wisconsin. One night after midnight, the pair were tagging fish in the proximity of a local tavern. “Why don’t you take a break, Dan,” Priegel called from the riverbank. “Nah, I’m fine,” said Folz, his back to the boss. A few moments went by, and again Priegel suggested that Folz take a break. Again Folz declined, but again Priegel insisted. Finally, Folz relented and climbed the steep bank to find his boss surrounded by a surly crowd from the nearby tavern. The men had little interest in the scientific exploration of their prized fishing hole. They already knew how to take its measure. But first they had to go through Folz, 6’9″ and an athletic former center for the University of Wisconsin basketball team. One by one, the men walked up to Folz, puffed themselves to full height, and backed down again. Nobody dared take him on.

Nowadays, signs in Shiocton direct visitors to sturgeon viewing at Bamboo Bend just outside of town. Late last month, with the run ending and just a dozen fish still churning the shallows, a steady parade of visitors still kept turning off the highway to watch. A well-worn bumper sticker protested plans for a large gold and zinc mine upriver — plans held at bay with the help of the spearing community. Shiocton’s welcome sign now boasts the silhouette of a crane and a pleasant bit of hype: “Where nature begins.”

If you happen to work for the Dutch Ministry of the Environment, playing computer games is now part of your job description. Or at least playing a computer game — the world’s only computer game designed to solve the problem of nitrogen pollution. The Netherlands is home to intense agriculture and industry, and is, not coincidentally, one of the world’s hot spots for nitrogen pollution.

Nitrogen is a confusing bad guy because it’s everywhere — and often a good guy. You just inhaled a lungful. You ate a bunch for breakfast, then relieved yourself of a bit more. Nitrogen fertilizer radically shaped the course of the 20th century, increasing agricultural output to help feed a growing world population.

The smoggy side of nitrogen oxides.

Photo: NREL.

But then there’s nitrogen’s dark side: Your car combines it with oxygen to form NOx, a component of smog. Nitrogen pollutes surface waters, and in drinking water, it can cause birth defects. We have substantially changed the flow of nitrogen on Earth, and the natural systems of the planet are responding with acid rain, suffocating air, and a massive dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

That’s bad news, but it’s hardly the kind of arch-villainy that makes for pulse-pounding, swivel-kicking, search-and-destroy arcade action. But that didn’t deter the computer programmers. At the Second International Nitrogen Conference, held outside of Washington, D.C., last October, the otherwise technical proceedings were spiced up by the official unveiling of NitroGenius, an environmental computer game commissioned by the Dutch government. The hype was palpable; teen-aged boys with nothing better to do than await the Christmas release of the Nintendo Game Cube and Microsoft’s X Box lay siege to the conference.

Okay, that’s stretching it. But to give you an idea of how much nitrogen matters to those in the know, the conference was held barely a month after Sept. 11 and was still attended by more than 400 participants from around the world. And if the plane trip wasn’t enough of a test of faith, we were convened at a Washington-area U.S. Postal Service facility just as the anthrax scare took off.

Make a New Plan, Stan

NitroGenius was born 18 months earlier and 30,000 feet higher, when Stan Smeulders of the Dutch Environment Ministry and Jan Willem Erisman of the Energy Research Center of the Netherlands were winging their way toward the U.S. to help plan the October conference. The pair had helped convene the first such meeting in Noordwijkerhout, the Netherlands, in 1998, thereby beginning the essential but difficult process of getting people who worry about pig farms and manure retention and people who worry about tailpipes and emissions trading to talk to one another.

Image: Play2Learn.

It was a long flight, and somewhere in the middle of it, Smeulders had his big idea: Let’s do something new, he proposed to Erisman, something totally unheard of in nitrogen circles. Smeulders started imagining a game — a game that would help everyone understand the problems associated with nitrogen and the equally thorny challenges of making policy to address those problems; a game everybody could play, perhaps even by joining through the Internet.

“It was a huge idea, of course,” Erisman says. He should know, because it fell to him to implement it. This brings us to the point in the story where many of us proud Americans wish, just for a moment, that we were Dutch. Unfazed by a half-million dollar price tag for a computer game to save the world from nitrogen, the bosses up the political ladder bought in.

Let the Gamers Begin

Fittingly, playing NitroGenius is a little like sitting at a starship console and deciding the fate of small planets. Only, instead of just pointing and shooting, you have to make myriad decisions, taking into account the potential environmental impact of various business and social decisions. It’s a four-person game, with each player representing one sector of the Netherlands: industry, agriculture, government, or society. Each sector can do more or less what it can do in real life: Government can tax, spend, and make policy; society can eat organic and join advocacy groups; agriculture can build green stables or change tillage habits; industry can invest in research and new technology.

Conference attendees playing dirty.

Photo: Play2Learn.

On every turn, each player has a budget and 90 seconds to choose from a series of behavioral options. Graphs show general levels of happiness, employment, and economic health, alongside maps of pollution levels plotted by region. The instruments are recalibrated after every turn.

But beware: Just as you lean in to check your readings, a tomato may hit the screen with a pixilated splat. The first time this happened, we were all startled — even the society representative who “threw” the tomato by exercising her veto power to nix exploratory drilling in a wetlands.

The game is full of pleasant quirks like that, including fake news articles about the discovery of “celestial backspin” and even the occasional advertisement — “Drink Spaz!” — which, when I sat down to play, served to break the ice and get the contestants chatting. From there it was a manure-covered slope to serious gaming. While everybody playing knew something about nitrogen pollution, nobody could go it alone. And nobody seemed to have trouble getting into their roles. “This guy’s spreading cow shit all over the place,” complained one player. Another, a U.S. EPA administrator, declared, “I want to be a radical environmentalist!”

Despite the giggles, the science is hardcore: NitroGenius incorporates state-of-the-art nitrogen modeling by pollution planners in the Netherlands. “The idea of having a game came from the scientific community, and they were focused on providing the right models,” emphasizes Erisman.

But he also got professional game designers involved. “It was a constant struggle between the scientists who wanted to do it right, and the gamers who are not as interested in science. They wanted to play and have fun. What you see here is a compromise.”

Some pig.

Take pig high-rises, for example. I nearly fell off my chair when one of my choices was: “Give permission for a high-rise filled with pigs overlooking the Rotterdam harbor with a central manure-treatment facility and windows with tree paintings for animal welfare. Free of charge!” Sounds funny, but it’s been suggested, says Erisman. “If you look at an aerial photo of the Netherlands, you see all those pig buildings next to each other. It takes up a huge amount of space. So why not build them [up], and place them near the harbors where all the food is imported, and place them near an electricity facility in order to process the organic waste and get all the energy out of it?”Logical, perhaps. But be warned: Build them and the pigs may come, but you’ll take a minus-four image hit.

Real Players

Erisman won’t be jumping to Nintendo, but he does hope to make a single-player version of NitroGenius available for public download soon. And he dreams of virtual reality: “Suppose you could walk through a forest, with the smell, the touch, and the view, and you can change the forest by putting more nitrogen in it. You can see the biodiversity loss. The smell will change. The view will change.”

I like the game the way it is, but then, I won. I even have a windmill trivet to prove it. I’m not expecting an offer to play Nitrogen Czar for the Dutch government, but NitroGenius sure beat the usual conference routine of networking, drinking bad coffee, and fighting the hypnotic influences of PowerPoint.

And that, after all, is the point. Says Erisman: “For me, the strength of the game is not the dataset, it’s not the models. It’s the people who will play it and talk to each other and interact and get an understanding of why someone makes a choice.”

After spending a long, frustrating time trying to get people to look at nitrogen pollution in an integrated fashion, Erisman seems to have finally found the right tool for the job. “It’s the first time they comprehended and saw the need for getting people together,” he laughs. “That’s perfect. Two years of lobbying and talking didn’t do anything. And a game — it works.”

Ninety-nine bottles of water on the wall.

This, at least, is the stern message being sent by thousands of Wisconsin citizens to Perrier, the world’s largest bottler of designer water. For the last few years Perrier has been a-dowsin’, seeking a Midwestern source for its Ice Mountain label, currently bottled in far-flung Allentown, Penn.

You might think spring water would be the ideal cash crop for rural communities. Perrier promises a potential $100 million investment and eventual employment for as many as 250 people. Bottled water is certainly not what you could call a smokestack industry; its product is widely considered wholesome. All the same, a thicket of lawn signs and bumper stickers chanting “Perrier Go Away” has blossomed across the state.

Dear Perrier … We Love You!

Ironically, the modern roots of the booming bottled-water industry can be traced to Wisconsin. In 1993, a cryptosporidium outbreak struck 403,000 Milwaukee residents, killing more than 100. Municipal water supplies — once a jewel in the crown of the nation’s public health infrastructure — have been suspect ever since. Meanwhile, per capita consumption of bottled water in the United States increased 40 percent from 1992 to 1999, with further growth expected.

While the West is accustomed to water conflict, Wisconsin is just dipping its feet into what is likely to become an ongoing battle. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, groundwater draws in Wisconsin rose a third between 1985 and 1995, reaching 750 million gallons a day. And thanks to Perrier, that pumping is no longer going unnoticed.

Perrier has had its trouble elsewhere; groups in Texas, Florida, and Maine have challenged local bottling operations. But the company’s dread Wisconsin trip actually came courtesy of state officials. Business boosters looking to liquidate some of the water wealth of the upper Midwest courted Perrier with tax breaks and airline tickets. And, like a dutiful child at Christmastime, Wisconsin’s Commerce secretary penned a cordial thank-you note to company officials.

Rights of Mecan Springs.

Photo: Friends of the Mecan.

But any idiot can find drinking water in Wisconsin; to Perrier’s dismay the real talent of state officials was finding hot water. The first site proffered by the state’s would-be water barons was just downstream from the Mecan Springs Natural Area. For years, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources had been safe-guarding the headwaters of the river, a trout stream of regional renown. When — despite a climate of secrecy — word leaked that the DNR was now offering Perrier a proprietary drink from this public trough, anglers and neighbors exploded. Perrier wisely backed off.

Department of Perrier

Take Two: Big Spring in Adams County. The surrounding area is picturesque — home to sandhill cranes, black crowned night herons, warbling vireos, beaver, fox, coyote, mink. There are also records of rare species and communities nearby, including the endangered northern ribbon snake and the threatened red-shouldered hawk.

New Haven’s no haven for Perrier.

Photo: Carol Zimmermann.

Almost from the outset, citizens told Perrier to take a hike, and quite officially. The New Haven town board enacted a one-year moratorium on zoning changes. Then New Haven citizens ousted a town chair — 263 votes to 92 — who supported Perrier. In the same election, they voted 290-101 against the plant, while their neighbors in Newport rejected it 114-26. Finally, the Adams County Board voted 14-3 against large-scale extraction of spring water and against the zoning changes necessary for the Perrier plant.

Perrier — perhaps taking a cue from boorish American tourists in Paris — didn’t get the hint. In late June of last year, it asked the DNR for permits to sink two wells near the headwaters of Big Spring Creek. To the amazement and outrage of local citizens, the DNR granted the permits, explaining that by the letter of state law it had no authority to regulate groundwater pumping if the pumping did not threaten a municipal water supply.

The lawsuits began. A new organization called Waterkeepers of Wisconsin sued in Adams County Circuit Court to halt the test wells. The Ho-Chunk Nation filed suit against the DNR, declaring that the springs were sacred. Their suit was joined to a similar suit filed by Concerned Citizens of Newport. Madison attorney Ed Garvey — one-time head of the NFL Players’ Union and former senatorial and gubernatorial candidate — represents the group.

Sign of the times near Big Spring Creek
aimed at then Gov. Tommy Thompson (R).

Photo: Carol Zimmermann.

“What we have is a DNR that has taken an extraordinarily narrow view of its mandate,” says Garvey. “The DNR is the trustee for our natural resources. They agree that they have this authority with respect to surface water. But they draw this false dichotomy between groundwater and surface water. I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that the DNR should be as concerned about groundwater as they are about surface water. Particularly when your talking about springs, because obviously the groundwater becomes surface water right there.”

“DNR has been part of Team Perrier from the beginning, helping them find the proper site” he says. “For them to then say, ‘Gosh, there’s nothing we can do to slow you down’ is disingenuous.”

The DNR did make a regulation gambit. They asked Perrier to agree that permits would be contingent on the results of extensive testing. Perrier would run the tests, and the USGS would check the company’s math.

Jane Lazgin, spokeswoman for Perrier, explains that the agreement is actually in the company’s interest. Perrier seeks geologically protected water that is “not downstream of something that could in any way imperil the water source,” she says. “As pure as it is for environmental reasons, it’s also needed in order to support a $100 million investment, to be sure this is something that will be sustainable for the long term.”

Last November, Perrier began testing, drawing 1,000 gallons a minute — twice the planned rate for the fully operational facility. DNR fish and groundwater specialists discussed halting the tests because flow on an upper tributary to Big Spring Creek had dropped by 45 percent, posing a potential threat to trout spawning beds; but the tests continued to completion.

Although the company reported almost no impact on nearly 50 distant monitoring stations, several local farmers saw their water levels drop immediately. At the time, Lazgin told local media that because of the high pumping rate, “data from the test should not be construed as a ‘trial run’ of the proposed water collection operations.” A final report on the tests is pending.

Meanwhile …

They’ve won the battle at Big Spring Creek.

Photo: Carol Zimmermann.

Last week, Wisconsin anti-Perrier activists had cause to pop the bubbly, because Perrier put Big Spring on ice. In
stead, the company announced plans to break ground on a state-of-the-art bottling facility in Michigan within the month. And, although Perrier was able to ensure the necessary local zoning, furious opposing forces have mobilized in response. Because a hearing held by the Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality on 15 May 2001 was attended by nearly 500 people, the written comment period was extended. DEQ now does not expect to make a decision until mid- or late July.

“From day one, we needed a legal opinion,” says Terry Swier, a retired librarian from Mecosta, Mich., and president of the newly constituted Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation. She has no experience as an environmental activist, but already the MCWC has a website and a $20,000 war chest.

“This has all happened very, very quickly,” complains Swier. “In my opinion it was a done deal. [At an informational meeting,] Morton Township already had packets telling how great Perrier was, but no hard facts. Only the facts from Perrier. The township did not ask for an environmental impact statement or traffic study — nothing like that.”

There is even a bit of intrigue: When opponents of the Mecosta Township site mounted a petition drive to challenge the zoning change, lawyers for Perrier’s local boosters hired detectives to investigate signature collection. In nearby Morton Township, a clerk dismissed a similar referendum petition on a technicality: The petition referred to two ordinance changes; under Michigan law each change requires its own petition and referendum. This despite the fact that nearly 500 valid signatures were gathered — easily exceeding the 135 needed to call an election. A court has since upheld the dismissal of the referendum petition.

Though the odds would seem to be against her, Swier is unbowed. Many of her neighbors are retired and spend the winters down south. As these home-owners return to find a new corporate neighbor, local ire is on the rise. “We’ve done all this without the snowbirds,” says Swier. “The snowbirds are very upset.”

For encouragement, Swier and MCWC have only to look across Lake Michigan toward Wisconsin, where opponents continue to aggressively combat Perrier’s P.R. efforts (which the company keeps up in anticipation of the need for another Midwestern plant within a decade). As Wisconsin opponents go forward with their lawsuit, one battle appears won: The joint finance committee of the state Senate has passed a bipartisan budget amendment, 14-2, requiring a full environmental impact study of high-capacity wells for water bottlers.

Lite brite, in Seattle.

Photo: Nathan James.

Among the surfeit of unpleasant consumer forces unleashed by The Holidays — from motorized Caddyshack gophers to commercials with more intelligence than the toys they flak, from virgin egg-beater-nog to post-Thanksgiving parking-lot scrums — the ubiquitous “decorative lightbulbs” get off remarkably, er, light. The bulbs’ free ride may come to an end now that acute power shortages in the state of California have led regulators to call for a cutback on super-charged holiday cheer. Even SeaWorld has put its 320-foot Holiday Tree of Lights on a diet, turning it off until the power crisis has been averted. As a rule, though, America’s appetite for decorative bulbs, both tacky and tasteful, remains unchecked.

Shiny No-Nos

I’ll be the first to admit that holiday lighting can be pretty in its place. Last Christmas Eve, my family wound up driving deep into the night through northern New York. The occasional pointillist murals of light along the way certainly helped revive our flagging spirits. But these were humble lights — not gala displays seeking First Contact via yuletide spirit or hackneyed constellations designed by color-blind elves from the Hallmark School of Design. It is these extravagant displays that make you wonder: Is that weapon-grade plutonium in Rudolph’s nose?

The Energy Information Administration — a statistical agency of the U.S. Department of Energy — claims to have no data on the electrical appetite of holiday decorations. Not that the feds are secular: The Consumer Product Safety Commission issues “holiday safety tips,” warning that hospital emergency rooms treat about 8,700 people annually for injuries incurred while trying to bring joy to the world. Christmas tree fires alone result in an average of 20 deaths and millions of dollars in property damage every year.

Even putting death and disfigurement aside, the numbers associated with holiday lights are damning. Steve Krauss, a corporate spokesperson for my neighborhood utility — Madison Gas and Electric Company — reports that a standard 100-mini-bulb string might set you back 70 cents over a month. The larger 25-bulb outdoor string will set you back about three bucks over the same period. “It’s pretty negligible, even though it appears there are a lot of lights,” he says. “For the month of December it’s about 1.5 percent of our entire electric load.”

But that depends (to paraphrase our outgoing president) on your definition of negligible. For a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation I hailed Dave Blecker, a friend and vice president of the Midwest Renewable Energy Association. Assume that 15 percent of all U.S. households use holiday lights, and that each house uses 10 50-watt strings; that’s about 500 watts of demand. Compound that across a string-strangled nation, and you’re looking at 4,932 Megawatts (MW) of power. With the average nuclear power plant running to 1,000 MW, “almost five nuclear power plants are required just to deck your halls,” says Blecker.

… and screw the environment.

Of course, most of our electricity is produced by fossil fuel power plants. “They produce carbon dioxide (CO2) to help warm our planet, sulfur dioxide to help rid our lakes of fish and our forests of trees and, of course, oxides of nitrogen so we can choke on smog during ever warmer summer days (see CO2),” he rants. “Based on average power plant emission rates as reported by the Department of Energy, the use of Christmas lights for six hours a day over a 45-day holiday season results in about 885,000 tons of CO2, 4,800 tons of SO2, and 2,800 tons of smog. Merry Christmas!”

And those numbers are probably conservative. California Independent System Operator, the nonprofit agency that oversees 75 percent of the state’s power supply, estimates that in California alone Christmas lights draw an extra 1,000 MW — enough to power 1 million homes.

So what’s a Claus-spirited family to do? In the words of Michael Welch, associate editor of Home Power (“the hands-on journal of home-made power”), “We don’t want to start putting candles on the trees again. That was a failure.” Off-the-grid products such as those showcased in Home Power are one alternative. And Backwoods Solar Electric Systems features LED light strings that sip just six watts — scarcely one-tenth the suck of an average string of lights.

Ambient, Tasteless, or Both?

Dave Crawford, executive director of the International Dark-Sky Association, points out that we can actually learn something from Christmas lighting. “Christmas trees generally use nice, low-level lighting,” he says. “We don’t floodlight our Christmas trees with 1,000 watts because that doesn’t make them look nice. It’s an example of the kind of lighting we should use; improve the ambience rather than destroy it by turning the night into day.”

Of course, ambience (some might call it “taste”) is not exactly the American way. There are times when it seems that every neighborhood features a holiday fantasia designed by Martha Stewart and installed by Tim “The Toolman” Taylor.

Tasteful climate change.

But there is a high-end Christmas lighting business. “We turn so much business away,” marvels Richard Lentz of Lentz Landscape Lighting in Dallas. His customers pay anywhere from the low hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars to make sure Santa has good landing lights. “On some of the large trees, you may have as many as four to six dedicated circuits just for that one tree,” says Lentz. “Some people actually have electrical panels that are only intended to do their Christmas lighting — panels large enough for an entire house for most people.”

Lentz has no idea how much people are paying their utilities to fulfill their Santa envy, but he does know he’s not getting rich. “I do not charge our normal street rates,” he says. “It’s not my belief to cash in on Christmas.” Not everyone rewards Lentz’s Christian generosity. “When somebody else is paying a professional to do it, every light off the house has to go in the same direction,” he says. “These people have parties all through the holiday season. You get a call at 5:30 saying, ‘I’ve got a party starting in an hour and I’ve got a strand out. I need you here to take care of it.’”

Clearly, Christmas can’t handle much more in the way of illumination. In our annual season of excess, we would do well to study the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, a.k.a. the Festival of Lights. Hanukkah celebrates the miracle of a small cruse of oil — normally enough to last an evening — enduring for eight nights. No doubt energy officials in California are praying for a similar miracle at this very moment.

Palm trees swaying, just like Florida voters.

We’ve heard an awful lot about Florida the swing state, where the good brother, Gov. Jeb Bush, was supposed to gift-wrap the condo vote and send it by special courier to the Electoral College. But the election pundits tell us the Sunshine State remains in sway, and it’s one of the major reasons we’ve got ourselves a race.

Still, I cling to the admittedly fictional notion that another Florida governor, Skink, might shake things up in the electoral arena.

Sick Puppy
By Carl Hiaasen
Knopf, 341 pages, 2000

Which brings us back to Hiaasen, and Sick Puppy. Skink is a recurring player — to call him a character would be redundant — in some of Hiaasen’s capers. His given name is Clinton Tyree, and once upon a time he was a football star, a hero of the war in Vietnam, and a populist governor of the state of Florida. He reflects Hiaasen’s own political tastes, and Hiaasen freely admits to creating him because he wishes such a man really existed.

Skink is a welcome antidote to the current real-life election scene, which Hiaasen sums up as “pretty grim.”

But forget the legal corruption of the McCain-Feingold era; it’s nothing compared to the graft-ridden state government Skink faced down. Not only did he refuse bribes — he recorded the larcenous offers and shared the audio with the FBI. Florida’s power structure responded by bribing everyone around him. After Skink cast the lone vote in opposition to turning a state natural area into timeshare condominiums, he walked off the job and into the anonymous fringes of what remains of the Florida wilderness. There he roams, living off fresh roadkill, until injustice, or his own brushes with misanthropic lunacy, call him into action.

Write on, Dude!

The Monkey Wrench
Gang
By Edward Abbey
Harperperennial Library,
368 pages, 2000

Since the death of curmudgeonly writer and wilderness defender Edward Abbey, enviros have needed a new George Hayduke. In a bizarre cultural feedback loop, Hayduke, Abbey’s original antihero, and his star vehicle, The Monkey Wrench Gang, are credited with helping to spur the creation of Earth First! That movement, and its various radical morphs, have in turn gone on to inspire a variety of fictional “eco-terrorists” from the pens of such writers as Ken Follett, P. D. James, and T. Coraghessan Boyle. The problem is, most of these earth warriors are merely literary devices.

But Hiaasen’s heart and instincts are too authentic to paint cardboard characters. In Skink, he’s given enviros a more inspirational proxy superhero, a Captain Planet for grownups. Skink brings to mind the real-life green crusader John Muir. In the opening sequence of Stormy Weather, Skink ties himself to the top of a bridge in the Florida Keys to commune with an incoming hurricane, reminiscent of Muir riding out a Sierra gale in the treetops. (Interestingly, Hiaasen didn’t know about Muir’s wild ride, and, though readers may spot a touch of Abbey in Hiaasen, and of Hayduke in Skink, Hiaasen says he wasn’t introduced to Abbey until after writing his third novel.)

Stormy Weather
By Carl Hiaasen
Warner Books, 388
pages, reprint 1996

While Skink has his PR defects, there are no doubt times when most environmental activists wish they could slip away from media kits, constructive engagement, and 501(c)3 choreography to shoot at all-terrain vehicles, roast a condo salesman’s rat-dog over an open fire, or humiliate litterbugs into eternal repentance. If you dare lay claim to this psychological profile, Skink should get your vote.

But for all you gentle readers, we must warn you that Hiaasen’s books — spirited stories about good and evil, wilderness and subdivisions, would-be heroes and witless hit men — are in fact a delicious subspecies of the detective novel. These capers have a cannily ecological sense of humor, but murder is an accepted — even expected — plot twist. While this might not coincide with this year’s version of family values, Hiaasen’s twisted comic sensibility gives the violence a Darwinian integrity. While the Hollywood murder market is plagued with high-test gun battles, Hiaasen kills his antagonists with mounted trophy marlins and overly amorous dolphins.

Making a Big Skink

Back to the elections, and how Skink might yet play a productive role in electoral politics. First, Skink as a running mate might be the key to securing the redneck vote. He does have a few character traits that might cause him trouble — he is described as “Marlin Perkins on PCP,” considers hurricanes holy events (“an eviction notice from God”), and spouts Moody Blues lyrics. His politics are decidedly liberal, but he is a crack shot with either rifle or handgun, and a very handy woodsman. Most important, perhaps, he is the bass master’s bass master. In Double Whammy, we learn that Skink spent his first decade of reclusion in Florida’s lake country living in a wooden shack loaded with books and cementing a relationship with Queenie, a largemouth bass who, at 29 pounds even, would shatter the existing record by nearly 7 pounds. Queenie so trusts Skink that she’ll swim into his hands. Certify that record and Skink could sew up the hook-and-bullet vote faster than you can say, “How about a cold one?”

Double Whammy
By Carl Hiaasen
Warner Books, 320
pages, 1989

Unfortunately, given the depths of Skink’s disillusionment, another run for public office seems unlikely. Perhaps a better role might be to send Jim Lehrer home and install Skink in the moderator’s chair for a new round of debates, with rules he sets himself. Perhaps he would take a cue from Stormy Weather, which is set in post-hurricane Florida. When Skink finds a tourist taking gleeful video footage of the carnage, he abducts him, fits him with an electroshocking obedience collar no doubt liberated from a happy labrador retriever, and takes him for a tour of primeval Florida. Whenever the tourist — who turns out to be an advertising executive — says something really stupid, Skink zaps him.

This method
seems perfectly suited for the debate circuit: Whenever a candidate says something stupid, off-topic, prevaricating, vapid, or vague — or goes over his allotted time — Skink could press the button. Perhaps we could even make it more democratic: If a supermajority (two-thirds) of the live audience or even the viewing public feels a candidate has transgressed the bounds of fair play, he would get zapped. Talk about snap polling. (Promise this kind of punishment and you’d better believe Buchanan and Nader would be added to the dance card if only to share the joy.)

Still, better not let the Presidential Debate Commission see a copy of Sick Puppy, in which Skink meets Dick Artemis, a former Toyota salesman and now the development-loving governor of Florida. For transgressions I shall not divulge, Skink pulls down the man’s pants and, using a buzzard’s beak, scratches the word “SHAME” upon his buttocks.

Team Rodent
By Carl Hiaasen
Library of Contemporary
Thought, 83 pages, 1998

As the pundits say, none of this seems very, well, presidential. But admit it: We’ve all been mad enough at politicians to imagine some form of vengeance that Skink would approve of.

So if politics-as-usual has you down, you might consider using Hiaasen as a pick-me-up, a pep talk for Election Day. (You have to trust a novelist whose other creative endeavors include two songs recorded by Warren Zevon, runner-up honors for the Pulitzer, and a book about Disney’s “creepy corporate culture” called Team Rodent.)

As Skink told Twilly Spree, the chief protagonist in Sick Puppy: “Son, I can’t tell you what to do with your life — hell, you’ve seen what I’ve done with mine. But I will tell you there’s probably no peace for people like you and me in this world. Somebody’s got to get angry or nothing gets fixed. That’s what we were put here for, to stay pissed off.”

Yummy! — compost in action.

Photo: Texas A&M Dept. of Horticultural
Sciences and Aggie Horticulture.

This won’t bother you if you don’t have a compost pile, but if you do, you are frozen on the horns of a messy dilemma. The wondrous microbial engine of your compost pile is no match for the big chill of winter. The tiny ecosystem that magically changed coffee grounds and sandwich crusts into prize-winning geraniums is chased underground until spring.

If you still insist upon leaving your warm kitchen during the winter months for gelid treks to your dormant compost pile to conscientiously dispose of potato peels and Aunt Bee’s fruitcake, you can count on three things: a) your bin will quickly fill with bizarre frozen constellations of broccoli stalks and green beans worthy of Jackson Pollack that b) will transform themselves into a sloppy, gelatinous mess come spring that c) may provoke unwelcome scrutiny from delicate neighbors, the city’s health department, and other assorted vermin.

Faced with this dilemma, many people stop composting for the season, abandoning their organic wastes to city sanitation or the local sewer district. But this increases the cost of city services and deprives the earth of valuable nutrients that could easily be reclaimed. It also robs you of a no-fail conversation starter for your company holiday party: “I have pet worms.”

My worms have always lived in a composting box in the basement. Whenever the kitchen compost bucket overflows, I trudge downstairs with the slops. It’s kind of like keeping pigs, but worms don’t smell, they don’t grunt or squeal, and their manure is the plant food of the gods, the queen of compost, shit extraordinaire.

Okay, you’re not convinced. Normally people with worms in their basement call their exterminator, perhaps even their realtor. But this really works. Mary Applehoff’s excellent guide to vermicomposting, Worms Eat My Garbage, even pictures a cleverly designed kitchen worm bin topped by a cutting board. (If you get really hard core, I’d suggest a companion volume, the juvenile fiction classic How to Eat Fried Worms, featuring such cuisine as the Whizband Worm Delight.)

You can keep your worms just about anywhere in your home, but you may want to consult with housemates first. Jerry Minnich, author of the 1977 opus The Earthworm Book, recalls a desperate letter he received from a woman while he was on the staff of Organic Gardening. “Her husband was composting earthworms under their bed,” he says. “She was wondering if this was grounds for divorce.” After exhausting the potential for intra-office humor, “we wrote back to her saying that this was a personal manner, but that if everything was contained within the bin we didn’t see any problem.”

Global Worming

Granted, worms lack for sex appeal in this day and age. But it was not always thus. While there is as yet no hieroglyphic or archeological evidence that Cleopatra kept a worm bin under her bed, she did declare the little crawlers to be sacred and forbade their harvest or harm — all without apparent repercussions to her love life.

Chuck D. and a worm buddy.

Charles Darwin, too, when not toppling paradigms, spoke highly of the earthworm. Shortly before his death, he followed up The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man with The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms with Observations on their Habits. “It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world as have these lowly organized creatures,” he concluded.

Minnich concurs, writing in The Earthworm Book: “The earthworm has played a paramount role in the building of man’s great civilizations. Were it not for this creature, in fact, it is entirely possible that man would still be subsisting in a primitive, semiprimitive, or squalid state, devoting most of his energies to growing or gathering food and fighting off attackers.”

As evidence, Minnich cites scholarship linking the rise of great agricultural societies in the Fertile Crescent to prolific soil-working earthworms. Similarly, agricultural productivity on the Atlantic Coast of the United States and elsewhere gained immeasurably from the earthworms the colonists unwittingly brought with them. In other words, thank the lowly earthworm not only for organic asparagus, but for Napster, the Denver Broncos, and nuclear arsenals.

Of course, in this day of ecological sensibilities, the work of worms is not universally acclaimed. It seems most resident American worms are invasive species, exotics that have supplanted native species, and scientists are beginning to learn that they may as yet cause great harm to some native ecosystems. In all likelihood, your neighborhood was colonized long ago, so stamping out exotic worms is about as fruitless as a crusade against dandelions. Still, so as not to exacerbate the problem, you should probably reconsider any overzealous plans to bring your worms along on backpacking trips in the Canadian Rockies. (In this sense worms are ideal pets for the commitment-challenged. They can go without food for months while you travel the world ’round.)

How to Feed the Beasts

A messianic passion for worms is not a requirement for vermicomposting. In fact, to get started you only need four things: a sense of how much kitchen waste you generate in an average week, a worm bin, bedding for your worms, and — of course — the squirmers themselves.

An example bin.

Diagram: Seattle Tilth.

You can feed worms most anything except meat or bones, and not too much cheese, butter, or oil. For every pound of food waste you create per week, you’ll need one square foot of bin space. Worms are surface feeders, so don’t make your bin deeper than one foot. You can use a plastic tub or construct a bin out of scrap wood or plywood. Drill quarter-inch holes every six inches around the bottom and sides to allow ventilation and drainage.

You’ll need biodegradable bedding that can hold a lot of moisture but also allow the passage of air so odors don’t develop. You can use leaves, peat moss, straw, or shredded newspaper or corrugated cardboard. Add a couple of handfuls of soil to jumpstart bacterial breakdown and provide grit for the worms’ digestive tracts.

I use leaves because they are free and easily available, but they can mat down, making it harder to bury your food waste. (With leaves, you also import other critters, such as potato bugs, springtails, and centipedes. By and large, these help with composting, but can be annoying.) Peat costs money, and can be a little acidic for worms (crushed eggshells can ease this). Straw breaks down slowly, and is also hard to moisten. Shredded paper and cardboard are
probably more valuable to your local recycler than to the worms, but if you do use paper, keep it moist. (Note to the paranoid: A worm bin can be the perfect complement to your paper shredder. No forensic expert in the world can glean your credit card number from worm droppings.) And remember to avoid using paper printed with color inks because they can contain heavy metals, which aren’t good for your worms or your garden.

The worm-up act.

Photo: City Farmer.

Once you have moistened the bedding, it’s ready for worms. Garden variety (ahem) earthworms won’t thrive in these conditions, and may even try to escape. Red wigglers (Eisenia foetida), also known as red worms or manure worms, are ideal, as they can practically eat their weight in a single day, and they breed prolifically. They can be ordered by mail, procured from local bait shops, or dug out of manure piles.

Feed your worms when you like, but the more regularly, the better. Smaller chunks of food break down faster. Think of the bin as a tic-tac-toe board, and fill in one square at a time, using all the squares before starting over again. Scraps left on the surface might encourage fruit flies, but don’t bury them too deep. A piece of black plastic on top will keep light out and moisture in.

After three or four months, your bin will contain a rich, dark soil. If it’s spring and you don’t intend to vermicompost again until fall, you can dump the bin on your garden or spread it over your lawn as fertilizer. If you want to keep your worms, a bright light will drive them to the bottom of the bin, so you can skim off the compost. Or you can push the compost to one side of the bin and fill the other half with fresh bedding and new garbage, and the worms will migrate.

Once you get started, the worms do the work. If you give them food and shelter, Aristotle’s “intestines of the earth” will enrich your own corner of the planet.

Sign of the times?

Photo: Robert Korth, UWEX.

But it is Lawlis and his fellow realtors who may ultimately prove the death knell to the Great North Woods. “Business is fantastic,” he confided to me. Maybe too good? “We’re having a lot harder time finding anything to develop,” he says. “There’s not much left.”

Not that Lawlis sees himself as a great despoiler of nature — in fact, he considers himself a conservationist. He’s chair of his local Ducks Unlimited chapter, and he recently changed companies, in part because his new employer shows a little more respect for Mother Nature. When people come to him with outlandish schemes to put roads and houses on wetlands, he says no thanks. “There are a lot of things we won’t do.”

But, Lawlis says, “Unfortunately, somebody has to develop it, because it’s inevitable.”

Land o’ lakes.

Photo: Robert Korth, UWEX.

In 1996, Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) reported that in the previous 30 years some two-thirds of Wisconsin’s pristine lakes 10 acres and larger had been developed, while housing density on private shore lands doubled. The department predicted that all undeveloped lakes — the state has 12,400 lakes in total — not owned by the public would be subdivided and conquered inside of 20 years. “[T]here are just too many of us longing to find that last special lake,” the DNR concluded.

Though Michigan and Minnesota — also well endowed in the lakefront property sweepstakes sponsored by the last Ice Age — don’t keep comparable statistics, they face similar problems. Some Fridays it seems like every car in the upper Midwest is bolting for some “secret” North Woods Shangri-la. A tsunami of baby boomers is approaching retirement, with one hand in the till of a high-octane economy while their 401k’s blush under the beneficence of an epic bull market. To add obscenity to opulence, some of the boomers are even coming into inheritances. Suddenly the dream of retiring to a cabin on a northern lake seems achievable, even modest.

Modest, that is, if your definition of cabin is a 3,000-square-foot home with a bathroom spa, a kitchen bedecked in Italian marble, and a home theatre.

Little Houses in the Big Woods

A historical marker in front of the courthouse in Oneida County, Wisc., commemorates the nation’s first rural zoning ordinance, adopted May 16, 1933. Strapped by the Depression, “the Oneida County board of supervisors resolved the costs of transporting school children and the construction and maintenance of new roads by adopting a zoning ordinance prohibiting settlement in remote areas,” the sign explains.

Those were the good old days.

A little “cabin” by the water.

Photo: Robert Korth, UWEX.

Steve Osterman, the zoning administrator for Oneida County, leads the understaffed, overworked office charged with handling the area’s current land rush. The county has 54,000 parcels of land, he explains, about half of them on water. Between 1994 and 1996, 10 percent — more than 5,000 parcels — changed hands each year. “And when you turn over property, generally it’s to improve it or develop it,” he says.

Of course, improvement is in the eye of the beholder. For many owners of lakefront property, it means not just constructing large domiciles but also importing exotic species. A duck-on-a-stick, with windmill legs; a 10-point buck posing as a weather vane; technicolor pinwheel flowers; cut-out bear, deer, mushrooms, and tulips; a family of loon decoys; a large waterfowl of indeterminate species, color, and artistic origin. Talk about biodiversity. This menagerie — and more — inhabits a mere three lots on the aptly named Lost Lake.

Problem is, these colorful creatures are encroaching on the shore-land zone where Mother Nature crafts some of her gooiest confections. Biologists define the zone as running from about 500 feet inland out into the lake to a depth of some seven feet. Here trees topple into the water and aquatic plants colonize the shallows. The prevailing winds often drive debris against the shore, which decays into a spongy mat. It makes a lousy beach, but it’s a delightful place if you’re a young salamander stud on the prowl.

Unless you have to share bunks with a pink flamingo. This is not about aesthetics; nature seems oblivious to kitsch. But a single pound of phosphorous lawn fertilizer can spawn 500 pounds of plant growth in the lake. As for the link between water quality and septic failure, let’s not go there.

One in 10 of the undeveloped or sparsely developed lakes in Wisconsin harbor threatened or endangered species. And 80 percent of these species spend part or all of their life cycle in the threatened shore-land zone.

Green frogs have got the blues.

Even common species such as the green frog — the loose banjo string in the summer’s amphibian chorus — are in decline. It’s not very complicated: As shoreline dwelling density increases, green frogs decrease. “They like a lot of fallen debris and stuff to hide in. Not surprisingly, as shoreline is developed and put into lawn, the amount of available habitat declines,” says Mike Meyer, a wildlife biologist with the DNR.

More disturbing, when Meyer matched the state’s minimal shore-land zoning requirements to his green frog findings, he concluded that if every lake were developed to its legal limit, the green frog would effectively be eliminated from Wisconsin lakes. Lake protections are being tightened, but the likeness of Kermit on swimsuits and diapers may still wind up more abundant than the native green frog.

Are we headed for the silence of the loons?

Photo: Mike Meyer.

Still uncertain is the impact of development on loons, whose loopy, ululating calls embody the mystique of the North. While loons can coexist with development, the common loon is currently a threatened species on Michigan lakes. Its food sources are degraded by poor water quality, its potential nest sites are eliminated by shore-land development, and boat traffic can cause the birds to desert their nests.

Land’s End

How can we avoid the slide from On Golden Pond to the golden arches? The problem stretches from the Adirondacks to the Outer Banks, from Cape Cod to U.S. 101.

For goodness lakes!

Photo: Sherry Bosse.

“Development’s going virtually everywhere now,” says Ed McMahon, director of land-use programs for the Conservation Fund. And rural communities are particularly vulnerable because they are often opposed to regulation. However, he’s heartened by what he’s seeing in a number of small mountain communities across the West that have realized land-use regulation is not an enemy o
f progress but a tool with which to preserve the land they love. “Change is inevitable, but the destruction of community character is not,” says McMahon.

“It’s not hard to understand why people love the lakes and so want to build a lake home,” says Dave Cieslewicz, executive director of 1000 Friends of Wisconsin. He believes the challenge now facing enviros is to promote city living. If people love natural areas, they need to leave them alone. “The whole thrust of the environmental movement has missed that point,” he says.

And if it fails to catch on, there is always the revenge of the locals. McMahon tells a story about Gatlinburg, Tenn., which “used to be a quaint little town on the edge of the Smoky Mountains National Park. Now it’s the bungee-jumping, water-slide capital of America.”

One day a ranger friend of his, while walking downtown, was flagged down by a tourist with a dire query: “I’m only going to be here for two days. Should I see the outlet malls or the national park?”

He sent her to the malls.

Long before the special-effects wizards made Stuart Little into a silver-screen sensation, E.B. White’s diminutive hero held a hallowed spot in a storytelling tradition that ranges from Gulliver’s Travels and “Jack and the Beanstalk” to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. The basic idea: Make the workaday world utterly fantastic by changing the scale. Or, most everything looks cool when you’re only three inches tall.

Underlying these tales is a serious metaphor born of humankind’s historical swings between feast and famine. Note, for example, that during Gulliver’s stay in Lilliput, his prodigious appetite taxed the pint-size pantries of his hosts. Which leads us to an interesting question: Does Gulliver’s Travels deserve a spot on your bookshelf between Silent Spring and Desert Solitaire?

Or if not Jonathan Swift’s classic, what about the latest book by Tom Samaras, a self-made expert on human scale? Samaras, a configuration engineer who lives in San Diego, is the diligent and passionately earnest author of The Truth About Your Height: Exploring the Myths and Realities of Human Size and Its Effects on Performance, Health, Pollution, and Survival. The gist of the book: Tall guys might get the money, the power, and the sex, but they’re also more likely to run the planet into an early grave.

Samaras’s vision is enough to set the gladiator economy on edge. With the NBA playoffs underway and the NFL draft only recently behind us (the first round averaged 6 feet, 2 1/8 inches and 245.9 pounds), Samaras compels us to rethink our appetite for giants.

“Most people are just saying taller is good, that it reflects good health and good nutrition. But to me it’s insane to promote greater body size. For what purpose?” asks Samaras. “It’s just a cultural thing that we’ve been brainwashed about.”

This is perhaps not the best line of reasoning if you’re trying to make friends in a sports bar in Cleveland. But Samaras — whose sporting interests run more toward Olympic gymnastics than contests sanctioned by Beer Man and Louie the Lizard — insists we need to listen up. After all, he says his theory is based on one of the more inexorable laws of the galaxy, the second law of thermodynamics: “The entropy of a closed system shall never decrease, and shall increase whenever possible.” Paraphrased roughly: The bigger they come, the harder they fall.

Only the Big Die Young?

“I’ve always been in love with the concept of entropy,” says Samaras, who earlier in his career applied the theory to corporate America, hypothesizing that the more people and money in a company, the greater the corporate disorder.

Andre the Giant, dead at 47.

Next he applied his notions on entropy to the aging process, with the aid of an unlikely epidemiological database — the Baseball Encyclopedia. Comparing the height and the age of death of players, he found that for every extra inch, a player died an average of 1.2 years earlier.

If increased size penalizes the individual, what does it do to the species? “If humans are getting bigger, and we have been getting bigger for the last 150 years, what are the ramifications of this increasing body size?” asked Samaras. “It just seemed obvious to me that consumption tends to produce pollution, and bigger bodies tend to consume more.”

“Are you a big guy?” Samaras asks me in the middle of our phone interview. “I always feel defensive when I’m talking to big people.” Assured that I would be a poor prospect for the NBA, he continues.

Short people rule!

In this age of obscure scientific jousting over complex environmental issues such as climate change and endocrine disrupters, Samaras has a disarmingly simple argument: Six billion people weighing in at an average of 190 pounds would be equivalent to a population of 10.4 billion people weighing 110 pounds each. And that’s not a historically invalid comparison: Eighty years ago the average American male weighed 140 pounds. Now, in California, the average is 188 pounds. “We’re talking about 50 pounds more of biomass that produces pollution and requires resources,” says Samaras.

Samaras is clear that he thinks total population is the number one problem — that ultimately 6 billion matters more than six feet. Still, as he argues in his book, “the ecological benefits provided by a population of shorter, lighter people are unchallengeable. Shorter people require considerably less to live at the same general standard of living as taller people. They need less farm land, produce less rubbish, generate less air pollution, kill off fewer other life forms, and require much less water. While we focus our attention on population control, let’s not ignore the environmental benefits of keeping the size of people smaller than their maximum genetic potential.”

The Miller’s Tale

There are those who are unmoved by Samaras’s argument, even people who are not sports agents or market strategists for Nike.

“Let’s face it, everyone knows that big people do big things, including big environmental things,” says Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), a green champion who stands “unofficially” between 6’3″ and 6’4″.

Big people fought for this big tree in the Tongass.

Photo: Alaska Rainforest Campaign.

“Congressman Mo Udall was a tall man when he protected the Alaska wilderness in the 1960s,” Miller says. “Congressman Phil Burton was a big man when he created the Golden Gate National Recreational Area in San Francisco in the 1970s. And I’m as big and tall now as I was when I protected the Tongass National Forest in the late 1980s. It’s true that sometimes I will order two entrees for dinner, exacerbating the demand for semolina, canned tomatoes, and garlic. But sometimes it takes big people to do big things, even to protect the environment.”

Bolstering Miller’s point is the fact that three of the stronger environmental legislators in the last few decades have been former NBA stars of not-insignificant stature: Udall, Bill Bradley, and Tom McMillen.

Nonetheless, Samaras insists we’re getting too big for more than just our britches.

“Right now we’re moving up,” he says. “The ideal height for a man is [seen as] 6’2″. If we reach that, then it will become 6’4″. Even if we didn’t do much about getting smaller but stabilized the growth and got away from this concept that bigger is better, we could save a lot in the future.”

And if we really work at it, we could feasibly shrink our frames toward the range of the Pygmies of the Congo — around four and a half feet in height — without damaging our cognitive potential, Samaras argues.

To truly downsize the species, we’d have to change our diet, specifically our children’s diet, he says. He cites one study that found kids from the ages of 2 to 10 get 25 percent more calories than they need. “Most people are actually overfeeding their kids,” says Samaras. (If you feel compelled to act on this theory, please consult your pediatrician before locking away the Cap’n Crunch.)

This plan may seem like radical dabbling with natural destiny, but Samaras argues that the tampering’s already been done. “The brave n
ew world has created this new being. It’s unnatural. We are eating in a way that, genetically, we have not ever been programmed to eat. We were programmed to be hunter gatherers and to eat when we could and to be very active. We are living the unnatural life.”

He has a point: Barring any undisclosed discoveries of the Human Genome Project, nobody has found the gene that inclines us to settle in with a box of Twinkies every time we tune in to the WWF (World Wrestling Federation, that is — not World Wildlife Fund). What the heck — perhaps it’s time to incorporate another direction into our obsessive cultural dialogues about body image. Read it and weep, supermodels and superjocks everywhere: Short is beautiful!

There’s only one catch: Somebody has to tell Shaquille O’Neal. I nominate Stuart Little for the job.