Garbage Land:
On the Secret Trail
of Trash by Elizabeth
Royte, Little Brown
and Co., 320 pgs., 2005.

Our soda man delivers. He comes bounding up the steps, easily cradling an ancient-looking wooden crate under one arm. The contents are 24 seven-ounce bottles of cola and birch beer, for which we hand him $7, and last month’s crate. The thick, wavy glass bottles bear an old-fashioned logo that reads, “Castle Soda: Food for Thirst.”

Bottled in a declining industrial town in Connecticut, Castle is like some visitor from another time. The idea of returnable, refillable bottles seems quaint and archaic in the age of plastic. Indeed, the bottler tells us it’s impossible to find anyone who makes seven-ounce glass bottles anymore, so the company’s crates are dotted with outcasts from other local bottlers that went out of business in Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania.

I buy Castle not because it’s better than Coke, but because I love seeing those empties taken back to their source. Like Elizabeth Royte, author of Garbage Land, I’ve wondered and worried about what happens to all that non-returnable waste I generate. With me it’s idle curiosity; with Royte — who sets out to track down just where trash ends up — it becomes an obsession.

It turns out that following your garbage wherever it leads is, like compost, darkly rich material. This is probably the best book ever about trash. Usually, garbage is too much “out of sight, out of mind” to make a lively subject, and what little coverage exists is dry and technical. But Royte, author of the much-lauded The Tapir’s Morning Bath, knows how to orchestrate telling statistics and vivid description to illuminate every dirty corner of the business (though if you were expecting the gory details of mob infiltration, you might be disappointed).

Where do we go from here?

Americans generate more than four pounds of trash per person, each day — more than twice the per capita rate of Oslo, Norway. We have gifted the world with Styrofoam, non-returnable soda bottles, and innumerable forms of redundant packaging, all of which now litters every corner of our planet and is found washed up on even the most remote beaches. And now here’s Royte to tell us that even the most conscientiously managed landfills leak and leach and pollute.

The author lives in New York City, which for decades sent about 13,000 tons of trash a day to the largest landfill in the world, Fresh Kills on Staten Island. Intrepid to a fault, she refuses to be kept out of Fresh Kills — closed to regular use since 2001 — and ends up paddling around it in a boat. (Garbage Land is not for the squeamish, and you may not want to read it over dinner. Royte is very good at evoking the sights, sounds, and especially smells of the landfills and waste-processing plants she visits all over the New York metropolitan area, in rural Pennsylvania, and as far afield as San Francisco.)

Talking to an endless series of experts who seem glad that someone cares about what they do, she learns that the retaining walls in place at Fresh Kills can allow the daily release of one million gallons of toxic stew (a mixture of such chemicals as cyanide, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, and mercury) into New York Harbor.

Many of us assuage the guilt over our contributions to such planet-trashing by embracing curbside recycling programs, feeling virtuous every time we fill up the blue bin. But is it worth it? Royte sheds light on the process — and the drawbacks — of recycling everything from plastic bottles to electronic gadgets.

Ever feel a warm glow about hauling your old desktop down to electronics recycling day at the local high school? Did you imagine highly trained workers carefully disassembling your old components under surgical conditions? Think again. Imagine instead a Chinese village, where men, women, and children wearing no protective gear extract copper yokes from our exported monitors with chisels and hammers. “Squatting on the ground, they liberated chips and tossed them into plastic buckets while acrid black smoke rose from burning piles of wire,” reads a report cited by Royte. After using a mix of hydrochloric and nitric acid to coax small amounts of gold out of the components, they “dumped the computer carcasses and the black sludge in nearby fields and streams.” Many other recyclables are similarly shipped overseas, where their handling is unrestrained by environmental regulations.

If that’s true, then what’s the point? Garbage Land is a reporter’s book; it’s highly readable and exhaustively documented, but not very prescriptive. We’re left with the distinct impression that there’s no clean answer to the trash problem. Europe’s wide-ranging recycling laws, bio-waste plants, and emphasis on manufacturer responsibility (all detailed within) offer one way forward, and the concept of zero waste (now a national aim in New Zealand and a publicly stated goal in San Francisco and Seattle) offers another.

But in the U.S. — where only 11 states have bottle bills, and 95 percent of the 12 billion magazines produced every year are printed on virgin paper — we have a long way to go. In fact, with her merciless revelations of the hard realities of garbage and its processing, Royte leaves the clear impression that there’s only one real solution: use less stuff.

Mosquitoes have Hawaii all abuzz.

Photo: WHO/TDR/Stammers.

On an airport runway in Hawaii last fall, a sparrow nearly became a canary. State officials testing captured birds got one positive result for the West Nile virus, which had yet to arrive from the mainland. Hawaii and Alaska remain the only states in the U.S. that haven’t had cases of this rapidly spreading global disease — which has infected more than 16,000 people and killed more than 650 in the U.S. since it first appeared in New York City in 1999 — and they’re anxious to keep it that way. When further tests on the sparrow came back negative, scientists and doctors who had been working together to keep the mosquito-borne virus away from the Aloha State’s people and native birds breathed a sigh of relief. “Once one mosquito slips through,” said one researcher, “it will be only a matter of days before West Nile is all over the island.”

A year before that scare, researchers studying several U.S. deaths from hantavirus — a disease transmitted to humans through mouse saliva, feces, or urine — pinned it on climate issues. A six-year drought in the Southwest had affected natural predators of the deer mouse, they concluded, contributing to a boom in the mouse population, which increased human exposure and helped trigger the lethal outbreak. They added, “It is not known how many viruses or other infectious agents in the environment, potentially harmful to man, are being held in check by the natural regulation afforded by biodiversity.”

In other words, the delicate web of species that we value so highly — and disrupt so frequently — is quietly helping to protect our health. It’s not a new idea, but it’s a threatened truth taking on ever more urgency. On our incredible shrinking planet, a bold mouse or a busy mosquito can make hundreds of people sick. And in a new global collaboration, a growing cadre of scientists, public-health officials, veterinarians, and physicians is working together to understand new patterns of destruction and disease — and to do their best to keep us well.

Knowing Me, Knowing You

In the 19th century, health-care practitioners were expected to have training in the natural sciences; the dictum turned out such well-rounded students as Charles Darwin. But specialization in the 20th century drove the two fields apart. Today, doctors rarely talk to veterinarians, and neither has much interaction with wildlife biologists. Conservation medicine (or “ecological medicine”) is an attempt to bring them back together.

The adorable, disease-ridden deer mouse.

Photo: MSHA.

“We need to get the vets out of the barn,” says Mark Pokras of the Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine. “We need to change the mind-set of all the groups — vets, physicians, scientists, conservation biologists, environmentalists — to be more broadminded and visionary.”

To accomplish that goal, conservation medicine needs a well-organized champion, able to synthesize vast amounts of new scientific data from disparate sources. Enter Wildlife Trust.

The Trust, based in Palisades, N.Y., is not just the “go to” organization on conservation medicine; it virtually launched the discipline. In 1997, it cofounded the Consortium for Conservation Medicine (CCM) with Harvard Medical School’s Center for Health and the Global Environment and Tufts University’s Center for Conservation Medicine. CCM, which the Trust houses and administers, works to understand the connections between animals, humans, and emerging diseases. From the Rocky Mountains to Rwanda, it conducts research on infectious diseases, pathogen pollution, climate change, marine systems, and endangered species, bringing together teams of physicians, vets, ecologists, wildlife epidemiologists, and public-health officials. The consortium also works with veterinary and medical students and promotes conservation medicine at workshops and conferences, as well as to policy makers.

Down the road, Wildlife Trust President Mary Pearl envisions master’s programs that would offer public-health scientists and wildlife biologists a certificate in conservation medicine; she wants to see public health departments hiring veterinarians, and park systems hiring public-health officials. “We need an arsenal of public officials, increasing our observation of sentinel species to find hot spots of new disease emergence,” she says.

While still a small field, conservation medicine is gaining recognition from mainstream funding sources such as the National Science Foundation, the World Bank, the National Institutes of Health, and private foundations. “For too long, the environmental movement has been perceived as an elitist, esoteric pleasure for the well-to-do who want to preserve scenic landscapes and don’t have to concern themselves with real problems,” says Pearl, an editor of the book Conservation Medicine. “[This field] demonstrates how healthy ecosystems are the basis for human well-being, and it can really engage people who didn’t see the relevance before.”

Weapons of Mouse Destruction

In Malaysia, workers on a pig farm become sick with a virus transmitted by the porkers — a virus that originally came from bats. In Peru, forest clearing results in an explosion of malaria-bearing mosquitoes. In Rwanda, measles and giardia run rampant through the local population of mountain gorillas, animals that are a favorite with tourists.

These cats got sick as a dog.

Photo: Jungle Graphics.

Three quarters of all emerging diseases are “zoonotic,” shared by animals and humans. West Nile and hantavirus are well-known examples; others include monkeypox, HIV, avian influenza, Ebola, Lyme disease, and SARS. “Diseases are moving from animals to humans and from one animal species to another at an alarming rate,” says Lee Cera, a veterinarian at the Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine and a principal with the Conservation Medicine Center of Chicago. “When I went to school we were told, ‘This disease won’t go from a dog to a cat.’ Then all of a sudden a dog virus decimated the lions of the Serengeti. How did it happen? When did it happen?”

Conservation medicine aims to answer these questions. At the heart of the problem is the usual suspect: humans. Loss of animal habitat and increasing human incursion into wilderness areas, often spurred by human population growth, set up new points of contact. International trade in exotic species breaks down barriers. Climate change causes species migration. Global travel, including ecotourism (which emphasizes wilderness visits), can move exotic jungle viruses into the modern world, as dramatically documented in Richard Preston’s best-selling book The Hot Zone. In 1950, 3 million people a year flew on commercial jets; by 1990, 300 million did. Two million people cross international borders every day, many carrying agricultural products, animals, soil, ballast water — and disease-causing microbes.

“Most viruses are pretty good at moving from one individual to another in a population; that’s what they’re designed to do,” says Peter Daszak, executive director of CCM. “Some viruses can also jump species pretty easily. A great example is canine distemper, which killed lions in the Serengeti and infected seals in Antarctica and black-footed ferrets in the American Southwest. Now we have a huge increase in contact between animals and humans, partly through the processes of deforestation and urbanization. Somebody building a road through the rainforest in Brazil is allowing viruses to get into the human population, and from there into global circulation.” Daszak adds: “With an unprecedented level of travel and trade, we’re going to see more and more of these viruses emerge from obscure and difficult-to-predict species.”

Peter Daszak.

Photo: CCM.

Laurie Garrett, author of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance, writes that in the post-World War II environment, powerful medical weaponry (antibiotics, vaccines, water treatment, anti-malaria drugs) gave scientists confidence that they could eradicate infectious disease from viral, bacterial, or parasitical sources. In 1900, nearly 800 Americans out of every 100,000 died each year of infectious disease. By 1980, the number was down to 36 per 100,000. The World Health Organization’s “Health for All” accord, signed in 1978, set a goal of preventing and controlling many international scourges by 2000. But amid all this optimism, the numbers started rising; in 1995, it was 63 people per 100,000.

“The grandiose optimism rested on two false assumptions,” Garrett wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs, “that microbes were biologically stationary targets, and that diseases could be geographically sequestered.” Scientists, she wrote, “have witnessed an alarming mechanism of microbial adaptation and change … Anything but stationary, microbes and the insects, rodents, and other animals that transmit them are in a constant state of biological flux and evolution.”

Flux, you say? Let’s talk global warming. The congressionally mandated “National Assessment of Climate Change and Health,” issued in 2001, foresaw greater incidence of heat stroke, malaria, yellow fever, and respiratory disease as a result of global warming. As countries like the U.S. become more “tropical,” it said, insect- and rodent-borne diseases may be seen more often. That same year, the American Journal of Public Health reported that 68 percent of waterborne disease outbreaks studied came after major precipitation events, which are predicted to occur more frequently because of global warming. Drought is just as bad, drying up flowing rivers and leaving stagnant water, a mosquito-breeding haven.

“As we encroach on and modify natural habitats, these outbreaks will increase,” says Richard Ostfeld of the Institute of Ecosystem Studies. “The evidence is very convincing that we’re engaging in risky behavior. We need the political will to change how we modify the environment. I’m hopeful that we can stop habitat destruction, because if we reduce habitat fragmentation there’s an immediate positive effect. Disease risk can be reduced in decades.”

Paging Doctor Green

Like any medical issue, these are not simple. Sometimes they are decidedly unglamorous. For instance, CCM has met with key health and military officials in Hawaii to discuss preventing West Nile. Although they encountered support, “it’s a difficult agenda to push proactively,” says Daszak. “If we’re successful, nothing happens.”

And the road to making nothing happen is paved with complexities. For instance: an oft-touted fix for malaria — one of the diseases WHO expected to be eradicated by now — is DDT. Some argue that the chemical, whose dangers were illuminated in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and have been debated in these pages, need not create environmental disasters if used in low-volume, localized indoor spraying. Its long-lasting power makes it the most cost-effective treatment, experts say. Although banned in the U.S., DDT is still produced in other countries, and WHO has designated it acceptable for certain public-health uses.

Then there’s the question of funding. According to author Garrett, the World Bank replaced WHO as the world’s largest public-health funder by 1997. But this is the same World Bank that provides $2.5 billion in loans for nonrenewable energy projects, most of them based around global warming-aggravating fossil fuels. Since WHO estimates that 160,000 people die annually because of the effects of climate change, these loans are very much a health issue.

There’s also the risk of demonizing animals, says Pearl, which could lead to calls for extermination. “We’ve found over and over again that when a species is eliminated, there are unanticipated consequences,” she says. “Every organism is not harboring just one virus or just one parasite. So by eliminating a carrier species, we may unwittingly be encouraging another virus to look for a new livestock or human host. We have to see the full picture … We can’t play games with ecosystem dynamics, and we can’t kill a hydra by cutting off only one of its heads.”

Meanwhile, the issue underlying every part of conservation medicine is the challenge its practitioners face in working together. This includes literally learning to speak the same language; the word “ecosystem,” for example, has different meanings for the different groups. But in the face of constantly emerging diseases in an increasingly interconnected world, those involved agree it’s necessary.

“We see the world in a different way,” Tufts’ Pokras acknowledges. “It’s like the five blind men and the elephant. But we need to overcome this problem, because conservation on a global scale is so complex … no one group has the knowledge, skills, and perspective to grasp it all and [find] solutions.”

This is an excerpt from a longer article published in E Magazine; the full article can be found here.

Feeling the Heat:
Dispatches From the
Frontlines of Climate
Change

Edited by Jim Motavalli,
Routledge, 176 pages,
2004

The Indian city of Mumbai, formerly Bombay, is home to one of Asia’s largest slums and endures among the worst air quality on earth. Half the city’s population lacks running water or electricity, and the smoke from countless wood-burning cooking fires joins with the acrid haze from two-stroke auto rickshaws, diesel buses, and coal-fired power plants to all but choke the city. Breathing Mumbai’s air, reports the Lonely Planet travel guide, is equivalent to smoking 20 cigarettes a day. Comparable air quality wraps New Delhi, Bangalore, and 69 of India’s 70 principal cities year-round, according to a 1997 study by India’s Central Pollution Control Board.

But the nation’s air-pollution problem doesn’t stop at street level — or, for that matter, at the level of city, region, or even nation. U.S. military pilots flying over the Indian Ocean in the 1980s were the first to detect a large, dense cloud of soot floating far above Asia. Since then, the so-called Asian Cloud has shown up regularly in satellite photographs.

In 1999, a team of scientists funded by the National Science Foundation began a $25 million surveillance of the Indian Ocean. The team discovered that the Asian Cloud hangs at an elevation of one to two miles above the earth’s surface and covers 6 million square miles* — about the size of the continental United States, and only slightly smaller than the ozone hole at its peak in 2000. The cloud floats over the northern Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea west of Mumbai, and the Bay of Bengal. The source is air pollution from India and China, produced by hundreds of millions of wood, coal, and oil fires — a dense haze blown out to sea during the winter monsoon season.

When the cloud was first discovered, scientists were astounded by its size and troubled by its composition. Its tiny sun-blocking particles called aerosols — a complicated chemical soup of soot, sulfates, nitrates, ash, and dust — exist in gigantic concentrations and have the power to block sunlight, potentially influencing climate nearly as much as carbon dioxide.

No silver lining on this cloud.

Photo: NASA.

“The local effect is well-known, because wintertime [smog] can sometimes close airports in India and Pakistan for weeks. But it was not known that [the cloud] had spread over the entire ocean. It stunned us to discover how pervasive these aerosols are,” said Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a professor of atmospheric and ocean sciences at the Scripps Center for Clouds, Chemistry, and Climate and codirector of the U.N.’s Indian Ocean Experiment (INDOEX).

In August 2002, Ramanathan and Paul Crutzen of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Chemistry released the first comprehensive scientific study on the Asian Cloud under the banner of the United Nations Environment Program. The report is based on INDOEX studies from more than 200 scientists in Europe, India, and the U.S. The researchers found that the two-mile-thick pollution cloud, though it probably affects everyone on the subcontinent, hits vulnerable people especially hard. It may already be a factor in the premature deaths of a half-million mothers and children under age 5 in India annually, says one INDOEX study. It also contributes to nearly 700,000 air pollution-related deaths worldwide every year — which could climb to 8 million by 2020.

The soot cloud also reduces the amount of solar energy hitting the earth’s surface by as much as 15 percent, interfering with photosynthesis. It could potentially cut India’s rice harvest by 5 to 10 percent — a sobering forecast for a nation where hunger is already an issue and the population is expected to grow to 1.6 billion people by 2050, overtaking that of China to make India the world’s most populated country.

Ramanathan also worries about the unknown effects of the Asian Cloud on life in the world’s oceans. “The haze causes a loss of sunlight striking the surface of the sea, and we are just starting research on how that affects photosynthesis and ocean plankton,” he said. In still another unmeasured impact, aerosols in the cloud get caught up in regional thunderstorms, falling into oceans as acid rain and potentially harming sea life.

The cloud could also aggravate existing environmental problems like the looming Third World water crisis. Aerosols block sunlight that causes evaporation at the ocean’s surface, and thus interfere with natural rain patterns. “In my own work, the most worrisome effect is on the water cycle of the planet,” Ramanathan said. “This is the century for water shortages, and the last thing we need is this particulate effect, but we appear to be stuck with it.”

Ramanathan and other scientists have shown that brown-cloud particulates are likely to be affecting and complicating global warming, though in ways that are not yet fully understood. We do know that the Asian Cloud “is having a cooling effect on the [earth's] surface, but at the same time is also warming the atmosphere,” Ramanathan said. The cloud may already be adversely influencing regional climate. Barry Joe Huebert, a University of Hawaii atmospheric chemist, thinks that the loss of ocean sunlight may be dramatically altering Asia’s whole hydrological cycle, disrupting the monsoons and contributing to a pattern of severe droughts, storms, and erratic rains in Asia over the last decade. According to The Guardian, the disruption of once-predictable monsoon rains is having an impact on agriculture “and adversely affecting the health and livelihoods of up to 3 billion people throughout Asia.” In May and June of 2003, southern India endured an unprecedented month-long heat wave with temperatures of 120 degrees Fahrenheit that claimed more than 1,500 lives, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

There is also bad news for the U.S. and other nations: The Asian Cloud doesn’t stay put. Scientists say that it can probably travel around the world in less than a week, carried on upper atmospheric winds. According to David Parrish of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Aeronomy Lab in Boulder, Colo., recent research reveals that Asian soot particles are “piggybacking” on immense Asian dust clouds, catching a free ride to the West Coast of the United States. “When [dust and soot] particles run into each other they tend to stick together,” he said. “It’s all being transported on the same air mass.”

The implications of the global transport of air pollution are still uncertain. “We’re beginning to feel our way around the elephant,” Parrish said. “Only a relatively few episodes have been studied in detail.” But the net effect, he believes, is an increase in both global warming and coastal pollution. “The dust tends to scatter solar radiation back into space, while the soot absorbs it, heating the atmosphere.”

Parrish notes that a study of springtime ozone levels in California showed that they had increased by a third between 1985 and 2002. “We can point to Asia as the likely cause, but we have no clear evidence,” he said. “The increase was larger than we had expected, and it reduces the latitude we have to mess up our own air.”

Don’t Blame Me!

The political response to revelations about the Asian Cloud by Ramanathan and others has been largely hostile. Ramanathan’s studies of the phenomena were made public in the summer of 2002, and his future, and the future of Asian Cloud research, has since been threatened by Indian politicians who were incensed that their country was being singled out.

India’s environment and forests minister, T.R. Baalu, even defended the Asian Cloud with a rather twisted bit of environmental-justice illogic. He claimed that India’s stupendous emissions are a “necessity” because its people are poor and have no choice but to burn animal dung, wood, and charcoal. True enough — but it hardly explains why the minister stayed silent regarding India’s lack of rigorous auto-emission controls and the related health problems stemming from poor air quality and borne largely by the poor.

The political outcry has thus far resulted in turning a blind eye to the cloud — and in a loss of funding for the U.N.’s INDOEX work. Some United Nations research will likely continue, but the U.N. has cautiously replaced the term “Asian Cloud” with the generic phrase: “Atmospheric Brown Cloud” so as not to implicate any nation — or even continent — as the source.

Meanwhile, India’s citizens have made several mostly fruitless attempts to clear the air. The country’s best-known tourist attraction prompted one such effort. Over recent decades, tourists have watched the Taj Mahal’s marble facade fade from dazzling white to dingy yellow, and its dome begin flaking away under a relentless attack by acid rain.

Mahesh Chandra Mehta, a prominent environmental lawyer in India, filed suit in the Indian Supreme Court in 1984, claiming that pollution was ruining not only the Taj, but also the health of the people of Agra, the city where the monument is located. Twelve years later, in 1996, the court ruled in favor of Mehta. Coal-based brick kilns were ordered shut down. The biggest factory in Agra, Sterling Machine Tools, switched from coal power to natural gas. Some 292 coal-based industries were asked to switch to gas fuels or close by the spring of 1997. For all this, Mehta won the Goldman Environmental Prize.

But the health of the Taj and of millions of Indians is still in serious danger. Despite the court order to clean up Agra, progress has been slow. Many small companies lack the funds to make the costly switch to natural gas. The basic cost for each conversion, according to UNESCO, is $75,000 to $100,000 — a quarter of annual sales for many companies. Agra’s Iron Founders Association has also fought back, claiming that natural-gas technology isn’t ready yet and that shutting down foundries would idle 30,000 workers. Faced with closure, factory workers burned their bosses in effigy.

By 2000, Agra had moved cars and some small shops away from the immediate vicinity of the Taj, but few factories were shut down. Tourists, 1.8 million of them annually, now reach the landmark in a small fleet of electric vehicles, a belated and probably futile attempt to preserve Shah Jahan’s 17th century palace from pollution.

Cloud-Cuckoo Land

While the environmental impacts and politics surrounding the cloud remain complex and unresolved, the steps needed solve the problem are clear. “There are solutions,” David Viner of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia told the BBC. “Stop burning the forests, switch to less-polluting fuels, and introduce clean-air technology, like scrubbers on power-station chimneys. They’re simple to work out. Unfortunately, they’re rather more difficult to implement.”

As the Asian Cloud’s threat becomes global, some argue that the cleanup bill should be shared, rather than dumped on the backs of India’s poor. In 2000, then-U.S. President Bill Clinton visited the Taj Mahal to sign an environmental agreement providing $45 million for energy-efficiency programs in India — a good start, but little funding has been forthcoming since.

Resolving the problem at the source will require a new infusion of global will, said Margaret Hsu and Laura Yee in a recent online report. They argue that the West must pay attention to the air pollution generated by developing nations: “The obvious, but perhaps less-attainable, solution is to distribute more efficient sources of energy and better technology to the masses,” they write. “Once the majority of India and China is lifted out of poverty, theoretically they will no longer need to burn biofuels, and the dominant cause of the cloud will have been eliminated … [I]f people in the United States believe the Asian Brown Cloud to be a threat and are truly concerned, they also have a responsibility to fix the problem. This may include developing more efficient technology, and … making it more available and affordable.”

Until such a time comes, the Asian Cloud will likely continue growing. Joseph Prospero, a professor of marine and atmospheric chemistry at the University of Miami and an INDOEX participant, acknowledges the power of this dark shroud to do great planetary harm: “Anyone who’s ever been to India knows there’s a lot of pollution there. It’s scary, and it’s the way it will go in all of Asia.”

And as goes Asia — home to 60 percent of the planet’s 6 billion-plus people — so may go the world.

*[Correction, 04 Oct 2004: This article originally stated that the Asian Cloud covers 10 million square miles.]

Hy-wire act.

Photo: DOE.

My daughter Maya, who is 9, saw a picture of the General Motors Hy-wire, the company’s super-sleek experimental fuel-cell car, and immediately decided we should have one. Unfortunately, I had to explain to her that the hydrogen-powered, zero-emission, fossil-fuel-free car would be perfect for us in all respects except one: It’s not available. So it goes with U.S. manufacturers and innovative, efficient automotive technology — all promise, no delivery.

So what’s an environmentally minded would-be car owner to do? First, make sure you really need a car. Motor vehicles take a heavy toll on the environment, consuming half the world’s oil and producing a quarter of its greenhouse gas emissions. Auto-making is now the largest manufacturing activity on Earth, and by 2030, there could be 1 billion cars on the planet. An increasing percentage of them will be in China, which is turning its back on the nation’s traditional transportation choice, bicycles, in favor of car ownership (bikes have even been banned from major roads in Shanghai).

Private cars, convenient though they may be, are mobile pollution factories. In one year, the average gas-powered car produces five tons of carbon dioxide, the leading contributor to global warming. Every gallon of gasoline burned up in an automobile engine sends 20 pounds of CO2 — containing five pounds of pure carbon — into the atmosphere. “It’s like tossing a five-pound bag of charcoal briquettes out my window every 20 miles or so,” writes John Ryan in his book Over Our Heads: A Local Look at Global Climate.

Get on the bus, Gus.

Photo: NREL.

Cars aren’t cheap, either. According to Asphalt Nation author Jane Holtz Kay, it costs an average of $20 a day to operate an automobile, or $6,500 a year. Instead of leaping to buy a car, consider your public-transportation alternatives: carpools, shuttle buses, commuter trains. (Depending on where you live in relationship to work and other destinations, you could also consider walking or biking.) What you lose in door-to-door convenience you’ll save in gasoline, insurance, registration, and maintenance costs — not to mention in long-term damage to the health of the planet and its occupants, including you.

If you decide that you need to own a car despite the environmental and economic implications, be sure the car you purchase is small. Even when equipped with hybrid gas/electric engines, SUVs and pickups can be gas guzzlers — and road hazards. As Keith Bradsher points out in High and Mighty, “The rollover death rate per million registered SUVs is at least double the rate for cars.” (SUV manufacturers have pledged to make future models safer, but that doesn’t help you if you’re in the market right now.) Small cars offer a combination of good gas mileage, low emissions, and practicality.

Second, consider buying a hybrid. Cars with combined gasoline/electric engines get better gas mileage than conventional vehicles and emit fewer pollutants, thereby protecting your health and that of the environment. Right now, no U.S. companies offer gas/electric vehicles, but Japanese automakers have been selling hybrids in the U.S. since 2000.

Used cars are a good alternative as well. New cars depreciate as much as 35 percent in the first year of ownership, so letting someone else bear that cost isn’t a bad idea. And according to ACEEE’s Green Book, an invaluable guide to the clean car marketplace, 9 percent of a car’s lifetime energy use is consumed in manufacturing — so a used car will cut down on the environmental impact of your purchase. (Just be sure you get one that is sufficiently new or upgraded to ensure decent gas mileage and emissions.)

Here are some (relatively) green cars you can buy right now:

Eco-chic: the new Prius.

2004 Toyota Prius. The second-generation 2004 Prius hybrid is “a shining example of the gains possible with advanced technology,” according to Jason Mark, director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Clean Vehicle Program. And Roland Hwang, senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, adds, “Compared to mid-size cars, drivers get half the pollution and half the gasoline bill.”

Unlike the Segway scooter, the four-door 2004 Prius deserved its advance praise. While the wheelbase has been stretched more than five inches to provide more leg room, average fuel economy is actually slightly better, at a combined highway and city rating of 55 miles per gallon. The $20,000 Prius remains a super-ultra-low-emission vehicle, or SULEV. This sharply designed, aerodynamic car comes equipped with power windows and locks, plus a CD player. Add $5,000 to the bottom line if you want a deluxe package including “smart entry” (featuring a key that recognizes your proximity to the car), high-intensity discharge headlights, vehicle stability control, an in-dash CD changer, and voice-activated DVD navigation system. With the storage space of a Camry, the Prius is no compact econobox.

2004 Honda Civic Hybrid sedan. Quite similar to the Prius and well worth considering is the $19,650 Honda Civic Hybrid sedan, which gets 51 mpg on the highway and has been certified in California as an Advanced Technology Partial Zero-Emissions Vehicle (AT-PZEV), meaning it emits 90 percent less pollution than a standard car. If making a statement is important to you, the Civic Hybrid is probably not your choice; it looks just like any other Civic, with only some discreet badges to give the game away. But with its 600-mile-plus range on a single tank, this is definitely the choice for eco-conscious motorists who like zipping past gas stations.

Insight-ful driving.

2004 Honda Insight. The best mileage comes from a sporty hybrid, the Honda Insight, which gets 66 mpg on the highway. A certified ultra-low-emissions vehicle (ULEV), the Insight’s starting price is $19,180. Hybrid owners are eligible for a one-time federal tax break that will be phased out after 2006. The aluminum-bodied Insight is not for everyone: It’s a very small car with seating for two, and it’s so light (less than 2,000 pounds) that it can get blown around on highway bridges. But it’s also cute, cozy, and even relatively comfortable for adventurous, green-minded couples.

2004 Ford Focus PZEV. If you want to buy American, this is the car for you. Even though it is solely powered by a gasoline engine, the 2003 Ford Focus PZEV is California-certified as a partial-zero-emissions vehicle. The PZEV technology, standard in all Focus cars sold this year in California, New York, Vermont, and Massachusetts, will go national in 2004; Ford is already shipping the new models across the U.S. Like the Honda Civic, the PZEV Focus travels incognito — it’s visually identical to standard Focus models, lacking even badges.

Keeping emissions in Focus.

With its special 2.3-liter, four-cylinder Duratec engine, the PZEV emits just one pound of smog-causing emissions over 15,000 miles (using the low-sulfur gasoline sold in California), compared with 10.7 pounds for the regular Focus — and with the 30.1 pounds permitted by the (expiring) federal pollution standard known as Tier 1. Compared with the average 2003 automobile, the Focus PZEV produces 97 percent less hydrocarbon and nitrogen oxide emissions and 76 percent less carbon monoxide. However, it does not reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the leading cause of global climate change.

Still, the potential benefits of PZEVs may be far more sweeping, at least in the short term, than the gains from hybrid cars. PZEVs can be purchased at little or no cost above the sticker price for the conventional gasoline versions of the same cars, and tens of thousands of them are already on the road. New models are coming, and sales are expected to grow steadily. But not all environmentalists are convinced. “PZEVs certainly help improve air quality,” said Bill Moore, editor of EV World, an online magazine about electric cars. “But they do zip for fuel efficiency or reducing oil imports.”

2004 Focus cars begin at $13,915, with miles per gallon at 25 city and 33 highway for the manual transmission and 24/30 for the four-speed automatic.

Aerio out there.

2004 Suzuki Aerio SX. The small but roomy Suzuki Aerio SX (“Sport Crossover”), introduced last year, should please green consumers who might otherwise be tempted to buy an SUV “for the dog” or because “I like to sit up high.” This is a snazzy little vehicle, with cutting-edge “what is it?” styling that’s halfway between a station wagon and an SUV. Starting at $14,499, it can accommodate five with relative comfort, the upright stance creates great headroom and the rear seats fold to create ample load space through the back hatch. With a manual five-speed transmission, the Aerio SX delivers 26 miles per gallon in town and 32 on the highway, much better than most SUVs. It’s also a low-emission vehicle (LEV).

And Don’t Forget Two-Wheelers

If you want fun, fitness, and the most environmentally friendly way to zip around town, get a bicycle. And with a sticker price just a fraction of a new car, bikes are also the most affordable option. Nor do you need to be deterred by winter; commuter bicycles are designed with 365-day usage in mind. (In Europe, commuter bicycles have been available for decades, but they are only just now catching on here.)

Bianchi Milano: minty freshness.

The classic of the field is Bianchi’s Milano, with its mint-green frame, fenders, and chain guard, red-leather saddle, and Shimano 8-speed shifters. The Breezer Town Bike comes with fenders to keep water from streaking your back, a rack for work necessities, a chain guard to protect pants, and a headlamp to penetrate that Daylight Savings Time darkness. And the Broadway Bike is equipped to handle inclement weather year-round, with internal gearing to protect the drive train from ice and slush, alloy rims that respond better than steel ones to braking in wet weather; and fenders to keep off the rain. You can also outfit your bike with studded tires for better riding in ice and snow.

Next year will see the release of new models such as Fuji’s Osaka and Sapporo, Trek’s L300, and the high-tech, chain-free Safety Bike by Biria, which features a built-in electronic lock and, amazingly enough, anti-lock brakes.

Sources:
1. Earth Policy Institute.
2. U.S. Census Bureau.
3. ACEEE Green Book.
4. Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey.
5. Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey.
6. Planet Pals.
7. Progress, February 2003, newsletter of the Surface Transportation Policy Project.
8. Holtz Kay, Jane, Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take it Back (New York: Crown), 1997. Page 16.
9. Holtz Kay, Jane, Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take it Back (New York: Crown), 1997. Page 16.
10. U.S. Department of Transportation data, cited in Motavalli, Jim, Breaking Gridlock: Moving Toward Transportation That Works (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books), 2001. Page 9.
11. U.S. Department of Transportation data, cited in Motavalli, Jim, Breaking Gridlock: Moving Toward Transportation That Works (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books), 2001. Page 9.
12. American Automobile Association, quoted in Nadis, Steve and MacKenzie, James J., Car Trouble (Boston: Beacon Press), 1993. Page 9.
13. Alvord, Katie, Divorce Your Car! (Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society Publishers), 2000. Page 108.
14. The Detroit Project.
15. ACEEE, quoted in Doyle, Jack, Taken for a Ride: Detroit’s Big Three and the Politics of Pollution (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows), 2000. Page 259.

Forward Drive
By Jim Motavalli
Sierra Club Books, 272 pages, 2000

I loved cars long before I knew there was any reason to worry about their effect on the environment or be concerned about the smoke that poured from their tailpipes. In the 1960s, ignorance like mine was widespread in the United States, maintained by a powerful automotive lobby and a complacent federal government. Highway congestion, though already bad, was somewhat masked by an expanding national highway grid, and most people celebrated the migration to the suburbs that the new roads aided and abetted. Cars were equated with freedom, and ads of the period showed happy vacationing families riding in roomy sedans, with the uncrowded interstate stretching out in front of them.

The V-8 engine, dominant since the 1950s, and the “muscle cars” of the late 1960s and early 1970s were symbols of an impatient country on the move. The in crowd romanticized in the Beach Boys’ “I Get Around” could say, “We always take my car ’cause it’s never been beat.” The icon of the age was the AC Cobra, a tiny and barely controllable British sports car with a huge Ford 427 engine.

The AC Cobra — not an eco-icon.

I bought into all of this, subscribed to the car magazines, and put up posters of the Dodge Charger in my room. But on April 22, 1970, because my friends were going, I attended the first Earth Day celebration in Washington, D.C., and it became a turning point — for me and for many other Americans. Since then, our knowledge about the automobile’s effects on the environment has certainly grown. And most of the news we’ve gotten is bad.

All Choked Up?

If ever a human invention has reached a critical moment in its history, it is the internal-combustion automobile, whose 100th anniversary was celebrated in 1996. We are literally choking to death on our enduring love affair with the gasoline-powered car. Since 1969, the U.S. vehicle population has grown six times faster than the human population, 2.5 times faster than the number of households, and double the rate of new drivers. As Matthew L. Wald put it in the New York Times, “They bid fair to become the dominant life form.” Despite being only 5 percent of the world’s population, Americans own 34 percent of the planet’s cars and drive an estimated 2 trillion miles annually. Between 1900 and 1984, we sent more than 640 million motor vehicles to the scrap heap.

Valet parking?

In half the world’s cities, the biggest source of air pollution is exhaust emissions. In Athens, Greece, the death rate climbs 500 percent on bad-air days. In São Paulo, Brazil, dirty air and clogged streets have forced officials to set up a rotation system for drivers that keeps one-fifth of the city’s cars off the road at any given time. Cars are also a huge problem in Tel Aviv, Israel, where smog is predicted to reach Mexico City levels (the worst in the world, with ozone levels three times safe limits) by 2010; already, it has led to outbreaks of asthma and bronchitis in the city and in nearby Jerusalem. In Prague, Czech Republic, smog occasionally forces the police to set up roadblocks and keep all but essential traffic out of the city center.

And traffic congestion and gridlock turn commuting into a daily endurance test. In Bangkok, Thailand, for instance, rush-hour traffic struggles to reach a fast walk, and drivers carry portable toilets with them for the inevitable emergency. In Singapore, drivers pay a premium for licenses that allow them unlimited access to the highways.

In one year, the average gas-powered car produces five tons of carbon dioxide, which as it slowly builds up in the atmosphere causes global warming. Every gallon of gasoline burned in an automobile engine sends 20 pounds of carbon dioxide, containing five pounds of pure carbon, into the atmosphere. Cars and trucks produce by far the biggest share of fossil-fuel emissions (47 percent by one measure). Auto plants are also a significant source of emissions, particularly from their paint shops, though some manufacturers have switched to cleaner water-based paints. According to 1996 EPA data, a single Mitsubishi plant in Normal, Ill., produced 21.6 pounds of toxic chemicals per vehicle.

But even as we’re realizing what our continuing reliance on the private automobile is costing us, we’re adding another 50 million of them to the planet’s burden every year. By 2030, there could be 1 billion cars taking up space on the Earth — an astounding figure that means, in effect, that the auto industry will produce as many cars in the next 30 years as it did in its first century. Car making is now the largest manufacturing activity on earth.

But Don’t Despair …

As I looked at these trends, I found it wasn’t hard to imagine World War III being fought over the last few gallons of Middle East oil. But before despair grabbed hold, I began to hear about some new technologies that offered, if not a way out of auto addiction, at least an alternative to tailpipe asphyxiation, fossil-fuel dependence, and the swift onset of global warming.

The information I came across was often buried deep inside technical journals, or couched in the auto industry’s insider language. But it described a personal transportation revolution that was becoming tantalizingly close. The alternative propulsion systems I heard about weren’t exactly new — the history stretched back 160 years — but rapid technical advances were making them practical for the first time.

The Toyota Prius, a gas-electric hybrid.

Driven by air pollution legislation, the threat of global warming, and a suddenly animated international competition, carmakers were making quantum leaps forward in technology. Here, at last, were vehicles that promised to not only greatly reduce pollution but also to perform better, be more reliable, cruise farther, and last much longer than anything the public had ever seen.

This could be, in short, a whole new evolution of the automobile, at a time when such progress was desperately needed.Automakers are now beginning to deliver cars powered by high-efficiency hybrid drives (with both conventional internal-combustion power and electric motors) and emission-free fuel cells running on hydrogen.

The Honda Insight.

What’s more, fuel cells offer the tantalizing possibility of ushering in an entirely new energy economy. They may soon power our watches, our laptop computers, and our homes. If hydrogen is produced by renewable energy sources, such as photovoltaics or geothermal power, it can be a perfect zero-emission loop, with drinkable water the only byproduct. “It’s like a dream, isn’t it?” one auto company fuel-cell expert told me, and he’s right. The promise of fuel cells can realistically be compared in importance to Thomas Edison’s development of a workable incandescent light.

Progress has been rapid. Fuel-cell cars are on the road right now, and they could be in mass production as early as 2004. On two consecutive days just before Earth Day 1999, General Motors announced a major fuel-cell partnership with Toyota, and DaimlerChrysler unveiled the California Fuel Cell Partnership, which will put 50 of these high-technology cars on the state’s roads by 2003.

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Clean ‘Em

Environmentalists don’t love cars, and they shouldn’t. These “insolent chariots” have had an appalling cost in their first century, and making them “clean” won’t solve all the problems they cause. If transportation is to move efficiently in the new millennium, we’ll have to combine improvements in the personal automobile with a wide array of other reforms, including moratoriums on suburban sprawl, construction of new in-town housing, and development of an interconnected rapid-transit network.

But as America sprawls ever farther out from the city centers, where public transit works best, we’re only adding to our auto addiction. “The car will not vanish, so we must clean it up,” writes Hank Dittmar of the Surface Transportation Policy Project.

At the end of the 20th century, fuel-efficient and hydrogen-powered cars can seem like the answer to a question nobody’s asking. But the auto industry is, for once, looking ahead, and seeing not only the end of the oil era but also a global-warming crisis that won’t be easily solved without changing the way the world drives. The automakers certainly aren’t green, but their new cars represent a giant leap forward in the movement toward truly sustainable transportation.