For all intents and purposes, during the summer, it is the 45,000 people found on the dozens of cruise ships that ply that state’s southeastern coastal waters. And the effects of that “city” on the natural environment are indeed urban, in the worst imaginable ways.

Cruise Ship Blues
By Ross A. Klein
New Society, 200
pages, 2002

The average cruise passenger produces 10 gallons of concentrated sewage every day. Before I began to read Cruise Ship Blues: The Underside of the Cruise Industry, Ross Klein’s diatribe against pleasure cruises, I had never thought much about what happens to sewage on cruise ships. Few people have — even among environmentalists. That fact in itself underscores how this burgeoning industry has managed to navigate largely beneath the environmental radar screen.

To the extent that I’d thought about sewage on ships at all, I had always assumed that it was kept on board until it could be transferred to some sort of land-based treatment system. If only. The reality, as Klein explains, is that sewage is simply dumped overboard. So are dry cleaning chemicals, kitchen waste, batteries, paint, solvents — everything but oil and plastic. Actually, oil and plastic often do go overboard, but they aren’t supposed to; it’s illegal. Dumping all the rest, however, is perfectly legit, and in some places, it happens within a mile of shore.

And it’s happening on an increasingly vast scale. Cruise lines put the “industry” into “industrial tourism.” Between 1980 and 2000, North American boardings of cruise ships increased 500 percent, to 7 million annually. Worldwide, 12 million cruise boardings were tallied in 2000. (By comparison, about 13 million Americans go skiing or snowboarding each year.) Accommodating this dramatic growth has meant, obviously, putting a lot more cruise ships on the seas. In 1981, the North American cruise industry could handle 41,000 passengers at one time. By 2006, according to Klein, that number will have jumped to 260,000.

Meanwhile, the ships are getting bigger, too. A typical cruise liner in the 1970s (think Love Boat) was built for 700 paying passengers, plus crew. In 1999, Royal Caribbean International christened a 143,000-ton “Eagle-class” ship that carries 5,000 passengers and crew. How big is that? The biggest U.S. aircraft carriers, such as the Abraham Lincoln (upon which President Bush held his recent flight-suit photo-op) weigh a comparatively puny 97,000 tons.

Dock and Cover

Cruise Ship Blues undertakes to indict the leisure cruise industry on several counts: misleading marketing, poor labor practices, poor treatment of guests, and degradation of the environment. I opened it with high expectations, and indeed, some of what Klein finds is damning. Cruise lines have launched several “save the environment” campaigns during the last decade, but it’s tough to regard these as much more than marketing stunts, given that the industry has been fined a combined $33.5 million in recent years for polluting the environment. And that number doesn’t tell the whole story, because in truth, meeting the requirements of the relatively lax laws that govern cruise lines is no guarantee that the environment is being protected. “Many types of discharge from cruise ships are exempt from key regulations under the U.S. Clean Water Act,” Klein reports.

Ships out of shape.

Despite such eye-opening nuggets, I found myself growing increasingly frustrated while reading Cruise Ship Blues. Klein repeatedly nicks at the edges of significant problems with the cruise industry, but the book’s absence of determined investigative journalism, compounded by poor editing, left me exasperated. Cruise Ship Blues seems to have been compiled from three sources: the author’s extensive personal experience as a passenger (he’s taken 30 cruises), anecdotes he collected during these travels, and research of published articles and documents.

What’s missing here is actual reporting. Nothing in Cruise Ship Blues suggests that Klein, an associate professor of social work at Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada, expended any shoe leather or telephone time to flesh out and verify his anecdotes and assertions. Nowhere in the book, for instance, does he confront anyone from the cruise industry with his charges. Nor, for that matter, does he give the industry’s critics room to speak.

Many of the anecdotes of pollution, poor treatment of staff and guests, and shoddy safety practices are disturbing, but without more context, they fail to tell us anything conclusive about the industry. Ultimately, Cruise Ship Blues was more alarmist than illuminating. More problems in a growing industry isn’t a good thing, but neither is it necessarily an indicator of a worsening situation. In fact, matters could be improving — as they are with airline safety, for instance. Although the total number of airline accidents is much higher today than it was in the 1950s, the rate of accidents per 1,000,000 passenger-miles is much lower, which means that air travel is statistically safer now than it was a half-century ago.

If Klein had used his anecdotes as illustrations within a larger framework instead of as stand-alone criticisms, Cruise Ship Blues would have been much more powerful than it is. Standards of comparison would have been very helpful — perhaps something like “rate of environmental violation per ship afloat.” Likewise, an examination of trends would have been useful: Are ships cleaner or dirtier than they used to be? Is galley-worker pay rising or falling? How much increase has there been in cruise ship miles logged in the Caribbean?

Instead, what the reader is left with is a great deal of personal anecdote that comes across as mere griping: Klein’s stateroom was dirty, the bartenders were rude, the food was bad. Such complaints comprise a flimsy weapon with which to storm the red-carpeted gangways of an increasingly powerful industry.

More problematic is Klein’s affection for innuendo. In one instance, he cites the problem of industrial contaminants poisoning orcas in Alaska and details the alarming quantities of DDT and PCBs found in the bodies of these marine mammals. Then, almost as an afterthought, he writes, “While the cruise industry is not a source of DDT and PCBs, this illustration demonstrates the fragility of the marine environment, and underlines the importance of control over disposal of chemicals and other pollutants at sea.”

Such intellectually flabby incrimination by association does his cause no favors. This book needed an aggressive editor. I’m sure Klein, if pushed, could have come up with powerful examples of the effects of cruise ship pollution on marine ecosystems.

Lost at Sea

A cruise ship docked in Juneau, Alaska.

It’s a pity he didn’t, because he’s almost certainly on to something. As I noted at the beginning of this review, cruise ships are like urban areas — urban areas that visit beautiful and fragile places, with potentially crushing consequences. Klein mentions in passing the story of the village of Tenakee, Alaska, which was visited by its first cruise ship in 1998. Upon disembarking, the passengers were greeted by locals distributing leaflets in protest of the ship’s arrival. This tantalizing tidbit could have made a chapter unto itself. What caused the Tenakee residents to take such a drastic step? Why did they close their businesses and turn their backs on what appeared to be an economic godsend? What did they know that made them so afraid? A few days in Tenakee with a notebook might have produced a rich and powerful story that could have loaned Cruise Ship Blues some of the credibility it lacks.

The way the cruise industry does business has real costs, both human and environmental, and many cruise lines are failing to address this reality. Ships operate under much less stringent environmental and labor laws than most Americans would assume are appropriate, and they are poorly regulated. The cruise industry does a masterful job of hiding this from their clientele. Such a situation cries out for a beefy expose.

Unfortunately, Cruise Ship Blues is not that expose. True, after reading it, I’ll never be able to board a cruise ship and claim naivete about the impacts of doing so. But this book could have had a much larger effect. It could have given the cruise industry a large, public, and perhaps well-deserved black eye. Too bad that Klein didn’t have the follow-through to deliver it.

The Granola Ayatollah of Canola.

Photo: Eric Limon.

The truck’s top is off for the summer and the boxy, orange-and-black vehicle is in mint condition. Clean, vintage floor mats declare “Let’s Boogie!” A small disco ball hangs from the rear-view mirror, and a five-inch Heinz A-1 cardboard air freshener, shaped like a ketchup bottle, dangles from the driver’s sun visor.

“If you’ve got the french fry car, you’ve got to have the ketchup air freshener,” Ford declares.

Does it actually smell like ketchup?

“Actually,” he says a little sheepishly, “it smells like coconut.”

The child of two Woodstock hippies, Ford, who is now 32, spent 10 years living a back-to-the-land existence on a remote Tennessee farm. He learned to farm from his Amish neighbors, logged trees with the help of two Belgian draft horses, and rode a bicycle that bore a sticker declaring “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive.” Now, propelled by a commitment to “serve society,” Ford is on a mission to save us from our petroleum addiction.

“If we made it through the ice age, we can make it through our energy crisis,” he says.

Vin Diesel he ain’t:
Rudolph Diesel.

Photo: National Parks
Service.

Ford’s truck runs on biodiesel, a fuel that can be made out of virgin oils from plants such as soybeans, corn, canola, coconuts, or peanuts, or by filtering and processing used vegetable oils, principally restaurant grease. Biodiesel is not new; indeed, when Rudolph Diesel first described plans for his engine in 1893, he thought he had designed something that farmers could fuel themselves using peanut oil. (Cheap petroleum hijacked his dream of rural self-sufficiency.)

But if biodiesel isn’t new, it is newly popular: Production in the United States is growing fast, from about 15 million gallons last year to an expected 20-25 million gallons this year to as many as 40 million gallons next year. Still, biodiesel comprises just a tiny fraction of the 55 billion gallons of diesel fuel consumed annually in the United States, when it could account for a lot more: The U.S. Energy Department concluded last year that current soybean production and waste grease could produce about 6 billion gallons of biodiesel annually. Major oil companies such as BP and Gulf Oil are getting into the biodiesel business, and the fuel is already used in vehicle fleets across the country, including that of the U.S. Postal Service. (Retail biodiesel is hard to come by; only about 30 drive-up pumps exist nationwide.)

There are good reasons to welcome biodiesel’s increasing popularity. In addition to being a renewable energy source, biodiesel is substantially cleaner than regular diesel. When the Berkeley, Calif., Ecology Center converted its recycling trucks from conventional diesel to biodiesel, particulate emissions dropped by 84 percent. According to Ecology Center Director Dave Williamson, biodiesel emits 78 percent less carbon dioxide than conventional diesel over its full life cycle, as well as 43 percent less carbon monoxide. He calculates that the daily waste grease of a single fast-food restaurant could fuel one of his trucks for its daily recycling collection rounds.

The fuel does have its drawbacks, however — principally expense. Currently, biodiesel costs about $2 per gallon, or almost twice the pump price of conventional diesel. In addition, biodiesel coagulates at cold temperatures, so vehicles must be retrofitted with a fuel-heating system. And although biodiesel vehicles are cleaner than regular diesel in many respects, they still emit about the same amount of nitrogen oxide, one of the main components of smog.

7-Eleven From Heaven

These problems aside, Ford thinks the biodiesel moment has come. “If we keep burning petroleum and just keep taking what The Man’s got for us, we’re not going to be making any big moves,” says Ford, who is six feet tall and wiry. A fuzz of close-cropped brown hair covers his head and wraps around his face beneath intense blue eyes. “Biodiesel is a powerful message that we can send to oil companies and car companies and our fellow citizens. Alternative fuel is the wave of the future — if we’re going to have a future.”

A biodiesel-powered truck in Michigan.

Photo: NREL.

Ford is charming, confident, and charismatic — so much so that his friend Howard Donner made a short film called French Fries to Go about Ford and his biodiesel passion. The 15-minute work premiered to popular acclaim at Telluride’s Mountainfilm Festival in May, and since then the self-described Granola Ayatollah of Canola has been asked to introduce it at other festivals. Ford, who left Tennessee in 1998 and now works with his wife, Dulcie, as a caretaker on a 1,000-acre ranch outside Telluride, is only too happy to tell his story.

When a co-worker crashed Ford’s previous, gas-powered truck in 1999, Ford decided to kick the petroleum habit. He found the Scout on the Internet, paid $8,000 for it, and drove it from Pennsylvania to Colorado. He switched out a few hoses — biodiesel will corrode natural rubber — and has been running it on recycled french fry grease ever since. With two partners, dentist Ken Hodges and builder Glen Harcourt, Ford collects used vegetable oil and refines it in Harcourt’s barn in a simple process that removes the natural glycerin and leaves a petroleum-like fuel. Their $6,000 plant can produce up to 25 gallons of fuel a day, enough for all three men to run their biodiesel vehicles.

“My real commitment is to educate and inspire the nation’s interest in biodiesel,” Ford says with characteristic intensity, “and if I can do that, that’s the job I’m interested in. My feeling is the people who are going to get rich off this are already rich.”

Thank heavens.

Ford’s larger goal is not simply to get us to buy renewable go-juice; he wants to reinvent the corner gas station. “I’m calling it the 7-Eleven from Heaven,” he says of his vision for a 21st-century alternative to the modern, soul-destroying convenience store. “It would be the Hard Rock Cafe of alternative fueling stations,” selling not only “Grassolean” — his catch-all term for biofuels — but health food, micro-brewed beers, and information on alternative medicine and energy-saving technologies.

It’s hard for most of us to get excited about reinventing the gas station, but Ford is, deeply so. “I say, screw Exxon’s green fueling station, where all they do is install a biodiesel pump,” he says. “Let’s have this be a grassroots thing. I want to create an icon. I want to give people a vision of what an incredible alternative energy station could be.” He plans to have a promotional website (www.grassolean.com) up and running by the end of the summer. (In the meantime, more information on biodiesel is available online from the National Biodiesel Board, a Missouri consortium of soybean growers, and the Hawaii-based Pacific Biodiesel, which makes fuel from recycled vegetable oil.)

Ford’s methods of getting the word out about biodiesel are refreshingly unconventional. “The first time I met Charris he had on this huge black wig and big sunglasses,” says Ken Hodges, “and I thought, ‘Oh no.’ He got into rapping right away, and I knew this was something different.”

By rapping, Hodges means rapping. When Run DMC released their first rap album, Ford was in high school in St. Petersburg, Fla., and he was taken with the way his African-American classmates would free-rap in the halls. A few years later, working alone in the fields of his Tennessee farm, he found the rap sound still stuck in his head, and he began making up verses about the world around him.

His first rap was about eating bugs; he tried it out on the Amish farm family down the road. “They liked it,” he says. “They tend to frown on music, but this didn’t have any instruments.”

Today, Ford raps on request and to audiences at his speeches on biodiesel, accompanying himself by knee-pounding and various ad hoc instrumental-esque vocalizations:

We could get driven to extinction just for spinnin’
   our wheels
Up an offing ourselves with our
   automobiles
And like them dinosaurs that died out, that
  technology’s old
And while they profit from pollution, we’ve been
  getting sold
Multi-national corporations lobby for
  their greed
And they can grease the palms of politicians at light speed
But think fast — that’s just Big Brother and big business
   blowin’ smoke up your ass
Brainwashin’ us to believe the drama, bloodshed,
  and greed
That we keep on creatin’ in the Middle East is
   completely removed
Oh yeah has nothin’ to do with our out-and-out addiction
   to the flammable goo
Oil, that is
Well nice try, I hear it chirpin’ but it just don’t fly

People who’ve been around biodiesel vehicles frequently comment on their smell, often likened to french fries or popcorn, and I’d wanted to get a whiff ever since I introduced myself to Ford. Now, with evening settling in, he pulls the Scout over near a small guest house beside a spring, a place he sometimes stays when his ranch’s California owner comes to visit. It is a beautiful spot.

I get out of Ford’s truck, head to the tailpipe, and breathe deeply. It hardly smells like anything at all. It is, simply, clean.

Udall runs a unique, two-and-a-half-year-old program in Aspen and surrounding Pitkin County, Colo., that charges new homeowners up to $100,000 if they exceed the “energy budget” allotted to their property by the local building code. The money collected under the Renewable Energy Mitigation Program is invested by Udall in energy efficiency and renewable-energy projects.

REMP’s goal is to keep three tons of carbon out of the air for every excess ton of carbon spewed on behalf of profligate new homeowners in Aspen. People can still build heated, snow-melting driveways, but they’ll pay the price for it — and on balance, fewer global-warming gases will be released. In the nascent world market of carbon trading, glitzy Aspen has become a pioneer.

“Maybe what we’re doing is a Robin Hood-like approach to environmental problems,” Udall says.

In its first two years, REMP generated $1.5 million, 10 times the revenue administrators expected. That money is administered by the non-profit Community Office for Resource Efficiency, of which Udall (yes, he’s one of those Udalls) is director. Working with city and county elected officials who approve his investments, Udall so far has spent $667,000 on 15 different projects that he calculates will keep 12,000 tons of greenhouse gases out of the air — the equivalent of what is produced by burning 6,000 tons of coal, or enough to power 1,000 average Colorado homes for a year.

HardCORE

The REMP carbon tax is an example of what happens when a progressive community decides to tax bad behavior for good causes — and there’s plenty to tax. During the 1990s, Pitkin County commissioners capped house sizes at 15,000 square feet after the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States built himself a 55,000-square-foot vacation bungalow in the area.

Catching rays: an Aspen home with
solar panels.

Photo: Donald Aitken, NREL.

In a place like this, with its spare-no-expense culture, the cost of energy isn’t even on some homeowners’ radar screens. But the environmental impact of energy use is important to elected officials and to many of the town’s residents, who perceive themselves as eco-friendly and forward-thinking.

So in the late 1990s, the city and county adapted a California energy code to the mountains of Colorado. They concluded that a typical Pitkin County house could be well served by an annual energy budget of about 40,000 British thermal units (Btus) per square foot. So that’s how much homeowners got, total. If they wanted a heated driveway or an outdoor swimming pool (major energy sinks at 8,000 feet, but still quite common here), they had to squeeze the juice for it out of the household budget — or from renewable sources, such as a solar hot water heater installed on the site.

Some homeowners simply didn’t want a solar installation, however. “People started suggesting they’d be willing to pay somebody else to put up solar panels, or to get wind power, or whatever it was,” recalls Aspen-Pitkin County chief building official Stephen Kanipe.

REMP was cooked up to allow that to happen. If Kanipe’s staff calculates that a homeowner will go over his or her energy budget, the owner is hit with a one-time fee based on calculations of how much carbon that excess energy demand will dump into the atmosphere over the next 20 years. The calculations assume that if a home is built outside the city limits, 90 percent of the energy will be generated from coal, 10 percent from renewable sources. Inside the city — which buys or produces a lot of local hydropower — those numbers shift to 55-45, meaning a lower tax for home-builders in Aspen proper.

Going solar to avoid the Aspen
taxman.

Photo: Aspen CORE, NREL.

“It’s effectively $340 per ton of carbon dioxide,” says Udall. “It’s the highest carbon tax in the world.”

On top of the steep price (by comparison, carbon currently trades on the world market for between $1 and $2 per ton), the law’s got some additional oomph. If a planned home is 5,000 square feet or larger, the homeowner must install a moderate photovoltaic or solar hot water system, or pay a $5,000 fee. If it’s larger than 10,000 square feet, the system — or the fee — doubles in size.

Cash has come pouring in faster than CORE has been able to spend it. “We had no expectation we’d get this much money,” Udall says. “Spending it wisely is a challenge.” Among the local projects CORE has funded so far:

• Zero-interest loans for homeowners who want to install solar hot water heaters and photovoltaic (PV) panels.
• A cash payment for grid-connected PV systems. “We pay you 25 cents per hour for all the energy you produce for the first four years,” says Udall. This program has produced more grid-connected PV systems (20) in the local electrical co-op than in any other co-op in the nation.
• A solar hot water heater for a local affordable-housing development.
• Installation of a cogeneration turbine at the Aspen community pool and ice rink complex, which will increase the building’s efficiency from 35 to 75 percent.
• A car-sharing program that allows participants the occasional, cheap use of a car when they need it, without actually having to own one.

It’s getting hard for CORE to find worthy local projects. The day I spoke with Udall, he’d just sent $4,000 to a local school, which was going to use it to buy and protect 100 acres of Brazilian rainforest.

Carbon Copies?

Although it’s broadly supported in the communities it serves, REMP’s Robin Hood strategy can be criticized for legitimizing wasteful energy use, allowing the rich in Aspen and Pitkin County to do as they please.

“In another county, it [the tax] might make people think differently,” says Olivia Emery, principal of A4 Architects in nearby Carbondale. “I hate to say it, but in Aspen I don’t think even a $90,000 check means that much if it means you can do what you want.”

Still, Emery says the program is an important one, and has helped put energy questions on the table when property owners think about building a house. “You really have to consider energy from the absolute first thinking about a project,” she says, or the result can be both inefficient and aesthetically unsatisfying.

Not everyone’s happy to just write a check to REMP; Kanipe says that some homeowners, when faced with the dollars-and-cents decision of paying a $60,000 fee or installing and owning a $30,000 solar power system, decide the smart move is to build the system. Either way, the bottom line is that a lot of solar heating and PV projects are being built in the region. Udall estimates 400 solar hot water heating systems are scattered across the Roaring Fork Valley, which encompasses Pitkin County and parts of two neighboring counties.

So far, REMP is a one-of-a-kind program. Kanipe says he has had few inquiries from other communities about how to emulate Aspen’s carbon tax, but would be happy to field them: “I think the same principles would apply no matter where you wanted to regulate energy use.”

The idea that growth can be good is anathema to most environmentalists. Yet that’s exactly the argument made by William McDonough and Michael Braungart in Cradle to Cradle. Take a look at nature, the pair says, and you’ll see that growth is not only good, but necessary — that nature’s very abundance is what environmentalists (and the rest of us) depend on and celebrate. The key is the right kind of growth — and the key to that is better design.

Cradle to Cradle
By William McDonough
and Michael Braungart
North Point Press,
193 pages, 2002

McDonough, an architect, is the founder of McDonough + Partners and has received a slew of awards for his environmental designs. Perhaps most impressive, he was hired by the Ford Motor Company to turn the firm’s original manufacturing plant into a green automobile factory, a $2 billion undertaking. Braungart, a German chemistry Ph.D., cut his teeth leading Greenpeace’s chemical division, then went off to found the German Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency, which helps companies design products with an eye to their entire life cycle.

To understand what that means, take the book itself: The pages of Cradle to Cradle are made of a plastic from which the ink can be easily washed and captured for reuse. The plastic itself can be reused at the same or a higher level, rather than “downcycled,” which is what a lot of recycling really is. (Downcycling is reusing a product at a lower quality level, usually because of degradation or contamination by other materials. Office paper becomes toilet paper, for instance.)

Despite the unusual materials, reading McDonough’s and Braungart’s manifesto will be a familiar experience to environmentalists, because the book, like the larger struggle to preserve the environment, is alternately remarkably encouraging and deeply depressing. Take the authors’ analysis of recycling. Recycling is good, right? In fact, they say, it is often very, very bad. For example, recycling plastic bottles into that groovy fleece jacket means bringing toxic antimony into contact with your skin. Oops. Or how about being more efficient? We know that’s always good, don’t we? Um, actually, no: “Being less bad is not being good,” McDonough told the National Press Club last spring. “If you want to go to Mexico, and you’re driving toward Canada, even if you slow down you’re still going to Canada.”

But just when you’re beginning to despair about environmental solutions, you encounter an idea that makes you sit up in your recycled plastic chair beneath your compact fluorescent light bulb. Take this: “We see a world of abundance, not limits. In the midst of a great deal of talk about reducing the human ecological footprint, we offer a different vision. What if humans design products and systems that celebrate an abundance of human creativity, culture, and productivity? That are so intelligent and safe that our species leaves an ecological footprint to delight in, not lament?”

McDonough and Braungart.

To McDonough’s and Braungart’s credit, much of their book is devoted to explaining how to translate that theory into practice. Their strategy is eminently graspable, for it is based on the straightforward principles that waste is food, that there is no “away,” that everything is part of a cycle. Of course, these are hardly new ideas; indeed, there has been a recent proliferation of voices arguing that a sustainable economy must mimic nature’s ways. What McDonough and Braungart add to that chorus is a cogent argument for designing our way toward that economy.

According to Cradle to Cradle, waste (which is what most pollution is) is a product of bad design. Regulations are enacted to control waste, but the message of regulation is, “Be less bad.” Good design, the authors argue, says, “Be good.” Traditionally, designers of economic processes tried to increase profits and reduce costs. The easiest way to do that was to “externalize” waste as pollution. But as “away” gets closer to home, that becomes less acceptable. Change the game, say McDonough and Braungart, by changing the objectives; don’t seek only to profit financially. Ask yourself, “How can we love all the children, of all species, for all time?”

That’s a little woo-woo, perhaps (and happily, there’s very little of that in this book), but it sums up the paradigm shift proposed by Cradle to Cradle. Impressively, that shift is being implemented in material ways in decidedly non-woo-woo companies such as Herman Miller, Steelcase, Ford, and Nike.

McDonough and Braungart are careful not to be too glib about technical cure-alls, noting that the sort of change they propose is going to be incremental, spurred on by individual commitments to environmentally sound living. Consumers increasingly recognize that the dollars they spend support a whole system, and that they can choose between organic food and factory farms, coal burning plants and wind generation, fair trade and exploited Third World workers. Today, we can learn a lot about the companies behind the items we purchase, and once we know, it’s hard not to make conscious — and conscientious — choices. Companies are starting to grasp this, and Cradle to Cradle is one blueprint for how they, and the rest of us, can profit from that consciousness.

Cradle to Cradle builds on the work of Amory Lovins, who pointed out during the 1970s that people want services like cold beer and hot showers, not raw energy like barrels of oil. Lovins launched an entirely new way of addressing the ongoing energy debate. McDonough and Braungart offer a similar perspective shift. Perversely, their book may lead you to stop recycling your SoBe bottles and start buying virgin printer paper — but it might also drop sustainability issues right onto the CEO’s desk, which is precisely where they need to be.

The Pinnacles in the Red Desert.

Photo: Erik Molvar, Biodiversity Associates.

Udall liked the idea, but encountered a Wyoming congressional delegation that didn’t. More than 30 years later, Bell, a World War II veteran who founded both High Country News and the Wyoming Outdoor Council, is still fighting to preserve the Red Desert. But now the landscape is more threatened than ever, thanks to the rising popularity of coal bed methane extraction.

The Red Desert, which is mostly owned by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, lies north of Interstate 80 in the heart of southwestern Wyoming’s Green River Basin. The basin is believed to hold 314 trillion cubic feet of coal bed methane (CBM), a form of natural gas. Coal bed methane exploration has boomed in the state’s Powder River Basin, where almost 11,000 CBM wells have been drilled in the last two years.

CBM exploitation, a recently perfected technology, is much more intensive than traditional natural gas extraction. CBM wells in Wyoming are spaced every 80 acres, serviced by power lines, roads, and pipelines, and interspersed with compressor stations. The BLM estimates that Powder River Basin could see 80,000 wells by 2010, and ultimately as many as 139,000, blanketing a region larger than Vermont and New Hampshire combined.

Environmental advocates in the Red Desert and across the West fear the Powder River Basin coal bed methane boom is just a taste of what’s to come. The BLM expects southwestern Wyoming, including the Red Desert, to become “the major natural gas producing region in the United States by 2015.”

Where the Deer and the Antelope Play

The Red Desert is remote to the point of being frightening, a vast area that appears empty yet is paradoxically rich — and not just in buried gas. “I would challenge anyone,” says Mac Blewer, outreach coordinator for the Lander-based Wyoming Outdoor Council, “to find a landscape in America that has such a convergence of nature, culture, and history.”

Elk in the Great Divide Basin.

Photo: Erik Molvar, Biodiversity Associates.

President Clinton’s Interior secretary, Bruce Babbitt, wanted to declare parts of the Red Desert a national monument, but a 1950 amendment to the U.S. Antiquities Act prohibits any such monuments in Wyoming. The Red Desert is the highest desert in North America and home to the largest migratory ungulate herd in the Lower 48; 50,000 pronghorn antelope wander through it each spring and fall, traveling as far as 140 miles. Elk descend from the Wind River range to winter here, and it is home to one of the nation’s healthiest populations of sage grouse, a vanishing species.

Here the Oregon Territory, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Republic of Mexico once came together. A half-dozen historic wagon trails cross the desert, and Bell’s practiced eye can still find them. The Red Desert is also home to the largest collection of BLM wilderness study areas in Wyoming, totaling 117,000 acres.

Nevertheless, says Dan Heilig, executive director of the Wyoming Outdoor Council, “We’re fooling ourselves if we think we’re going to stop mineral development in southwestern Wyoming.” For now, he says, environmentalists are simply trying to keep CBM drillers out of the most striking and sensitive parts of this landscape.

Well, Well, Well

If the nation’s appetite for natural gas grows as expected, it’s only a matter of time before drill rigs show up here — and in New Mexico, Montana, Utah, Colorado, and Washington. Not to mention Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Iowa, Arkansas, and Alaska. Gas fields may spring up in all these places — anywhere there is sufficient coal.

A rig problem.

Photo: BLM.

“It’s going to happen around the world,” predicts Walter Merschat, president of Scientific Geochemical Services in Casper, Wyo. “I think any place there’s coal there’s a potential for extracting methane.”

On the eastern edge of the Green River Basin, near Rawlins, the Bureau of Land Management plans to permit 4,000 new CBM wells. More wells are proposed near Pinedale, in the north. The Wyoming Outdoor Council insists that the development of all CBM in the state is illegal, because BLM resource management plans don’t envision it.

“There’s a great history in Wyoming of open abuse and fraud in the oil and gas program,” says Travis Stills, research director for the Oil & Gas Accountability Project. “I don’t think it’s unfair to characterize the current BLM program as suffering from many of those legacies.”

BLM officials counter that they take oil and gas exploration and development into account in their resource management plans — including coal bed methane, even if it was not specifically envisioned.

The Republican-backed energy bill that passed the House in 2001 includes provisions to revive the energy tax credit that first stimulated CBM development. That credit, which was created in 1979 and expired in 1992, was intended to jumpstart unconventional energy sources. The credit still applies to wells drilled before 1992 and funnels about $1 billion per year to the gas industry. A revived credit would produce a $7 billion yearly subsidy, according to OGAP, and accelerate an industry that doesn’t need it.

Black-and-Blue Warrior Basin

CBM was first developed during the late 1980s and early 1990s in Colorado’s northern San Juan Basin and Alabama’s Black Warrior Basin. For those who lived there, it wasn’t pretty.

“This has been a tale of acrimony and lawsuits, environmental degradation, people being displaced from their homes,” said La Plata County, Colo., Commissioner Josh Joswick at an Aug. 31 congressional hearing. La Plata County tried to control CBM development by passing regulations to allow the county to determine where wells would be sited. The gas industry sued to overturn the regulations, but they have been largely held up by the courts.

Now, near Bozeman, Mont., county officials are scrambling to develop similar CBM-drilling rules after several companies leased mineral rights on 78,000 acres. That may be wise.

People who live in places that have coal reserves should “understand it can happen to you,” warns Stills. “We’ve talked to lots of folks who just see coal bed methane as a minor threat out on the horizon. Once the rigs start rolling in, it’s bordering on too late.”

Rice as rice can be.

In the humid hills of China’s Yunnan province, rice farmers make their living from plots of land smaller than many American yards. High, cool, and wet, the country here is rich, yielding almost a thousand pounds of rice per acre. But farmers face a perennial scourge: rice blast.

Rice blast is caused by a fungus that cuts off nutrients to the rice seed head and destroys crops. It thrives in rice monocultures and particularly favors the short-grained, or sticky, strains of rice that bring the highest price at Yunnan’s markets. By 1998, many farmers had given up growing sticky rice altogether, even though there was significant market demand. That’s when researchers from Yunnan Agricultural University in Kunming began attending village meetings in Jianshu and Shiping counties. They explained how a local farmer had almost no rice blast when he mixed his crops, planting rows of sticky rice between rows of long-grain rice. Although monocultures were susceptible to the blast, mixed plantings seemed to resist it.

Oh, blast! The fungus leaves
its mark in a paddy.

Photo: University of California
at Davis.

That year, hundreds of other farmers adopted the technique, planting 1,800 acres in mixed rows. Sticky rice yields per acre skyrocketed, jumping 89 percent, and blast almost disappeared. By the end of 1999, many farmers in the two counties had stopped using expensive (and toxic) fungicides to control blast. Overall yields were up by about 17 percent, and costs were down. This year, more than 224,000 acres of Chinese rice paddies are being planted with mixed rows.

The success was summed up by a farmer who said, “More rice, more money.” But it was more than that: The mixed plantings were also much better for the environment. No longer were the rice paddies a toxic, fungicide soup. This double-whammy benefit underlies “ecoagriculture,” an emerging strategy that blends farming and environmentalism.

Old MacDonald Had an Eco-farm

“There’s been a history of adversarial relations,” says Sarah Lynch, senior program officer in the Center for Conservation Innovation at the World Wildlife Fund. “But I think a lot of us are coming to the conclusion that many farmers love nature and wildlife, and under other circumstances, they’d be called environmentalists.”

Size small.

Lynch has worked for several years with Wisconsin potato farmers to reduce their ecological footprint while improving their earnings. Hers is the sort of project that attracted the attention of the Swiss-based World Conservation Union (IUCN) and the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit group Future Harvest, which recently released a joint report on ecoagriculture called “Common Ground, Common Future.”

The problem is straightforward: Farming is one of the leading threats to biodiversity. Clearing of forestlands for pasture and crops, farming on marginal lands, herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers, and habitat fragmentation all degrade biodiversity. Yet, demand for food is rising — as much as 60 percent more will be needed by 2030, according to one projection.

So what to do about all this? Enter ecoagriculture. The idea behind ecoagriculture is to rearrange market incentives so that farmers can make more money and feed more people, while protecting biodiversity and providing other “ecosystem services,” the term used by economists to sum up the benefits of clean air, clean water, open space, and so on.

Coffee made in the shade.

Photo: Francisco Osuna, Elan Organic
Coffees.

Some of this is happening already; you can pay extra at your grocery store for shade-grown coffee, which provides habitat to migratory songbirds. Lynch sees real potential in this sort of consumer-driven demand for value-added food products. Just as consumers pay a premium for organic beef and dolphin-free tuna, encouraging ranchers and fishers to do good by the environment, so can they also play a role in rewarding farmers who do the same.

This strategy is a shift away from the top-down mandate — the sort of government interference devoutly resented by many people and epitomized by the strictures of the U.S. Endangered Species Act — and toward a market-oriented approach to conservation. “I think there’s a misconception that farmers are not conservationists,” says Sara Scherr, a fellow at Forest Trends, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit. Scherr wrote “Common Ground, Common Future” with Jeff McNeely, a researcher with the World Conservation Union.

What farmers aren’t willing to do, Scherr says, is “sacrifice their livelihood for conservation.”

Show Me the Money

“People want to farm this way,” McNeely says. “We’re not going strongly against the tide.” But because there is no single solution, ecoagriculture is hard to define. Success, McNeely says, “looks like diversity.” He and Scherr have identified six broad ecoagriculture strategies:

1. Reduce habitat destruction by increasing productivity and sustainability on existing farmlands. In Brazil, dairy farmers reforested former pastures in exchange for technical assistance that improved fodder and silage on remaining grazing lands.
2. Enhance wildlife habitat on farms and link uncultivated spaces with wildlife corridors. Costa Rican farmers planted windbreaks to shelter cattle, reducing calf mortality and providing a preferred food to wild parakeets, which had been raiding coffee plantations. Both beef and coffee yields improved.
3. Enhance wildlife habitat on farms and link uncultivated spaces with wildlife corridors. Costa Rican farmers planted windbreaks to shelter cattle, reducing calf mortality and providing a preferred food to wild parakeets, which had been raiding coffee plantations. Both beef and coffee yields improved.
4. Establish protected areas near agricultural lands and fisheries. Philippine fishers established “no take” reserves, where all fishing was banned. In nearby waters, the size, number, and species diversity of fish caught by commercial fishers went up sharply.
5. Mimic natural habitats by integrating productive perennial plants. In Indonesia, rubber farmers mimicked wild forests by planting complex mixtures of trees, shrubs, and food crops. The result was an economically sustainable production of multiple crops and forests that contain significant biodiversity — up to 300 plant species.
6. Use farming methods that reduce pollution. The rice farmers of Yunnan province cut fungicide use by mixing species.
7. Modify farm resource-management practices to boost habitat quality in and around farmlands. California rice farmers have been flooding their fields each fall, rather than burning rice straw. The straw decomposes, air pollution is avoided, and millions of wetland migratory birds stop to feed and rest.

Hanging out above a shaded
coffee farm.

Photo: Francisco Osuna, Elan
Organic Coffees.

The trick behind implementing ecoagriculture is to line up the incentives so that both farmers and biodiversity come out ahead. Currently, about $375 billion a ye
ar is spent on farm subsidies, says McNeely, much of that in the form of price supports that encourage farmers to overproduce, glut the market, drive down prices, and hammer the environment in the process. “It’s not realistic to say ‘let’s do away with those subsidies,’ but we could redirect them,” McNeely says. “We’re beginning to see some of that.” For example, the European Union is subsidizing organic farming on 1.3 million acres.

Achieving ecoagriculture won’t be easy, though, because at bottom it is about teaching people new ways to farm — albeit the new ways often borrow from traditional farming methods that worked with nature rather than against it. “This is the beginning of a long-term initiative,” says Scherr.

Proponents of ecoagriculture admit it has limits. But they also think this is a teachable moment, a time when many farmers around the world are desperate for alternatives to a system in which they depend too heavily on chemical and petroleum inputs, produce a glut of food, and abuse their surroundings.

“There’s a great deal of desperation in the agricultural world,” says Scherr. “The real breakthrough will be in developing a new production system in which society enjoys the environmental benefits, and the farmer gets the benefits of a greater income. It’s really got to come from finding ways to kill three birds with one stone.”