This OnEarth story was written by Bruce Barcott.

In a creaky wood-floor office overlooking San Francisco Bay, the documentary filmmaker Mark Kitchell removes his glasses, runs his hand through his hair, and glares at a computer screen filled with thumbnail images of film clips. Kitchell, 59, is in the throes of a dilemma. He’s spent the past 10 years making A Fierce Green Fire, an epic documentary about the 50-year evolution of the modern environmental movement. He has two hours and 12 minutes in the can. And it’s good. “The material is vast, and it’s an incredibly dynamic film,” says Cara Mertes, head of the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program, who has seen a rough cut. “It’s shaping up to be the documentary of record on the environmental movement. I think it’ll be hugely successful.” So Kitchell has buzz. What he doesn’t have is an ending. On this beautiful spring day, with a breeze blowing in from the bay, Kitchell is forced to confront his film’s ultimate question: What does the environmental movement mean?

He looks over columns of index cards tacked to the wall. Each represents an interview, a quote, a moment, culled from hundreds of hours of film.

“Let’s try that Paul Hawken clip one more time,” he tells his film editor. “It’s 8:12 into the interview.”

As the editor cues it up, Kitchell turns to me and recalls a recent moment at Hot Docs, an annual documentary film festival in Toronto. During a pitch session where filmmakers present works in progress to prospective buyers and distributors, Kitchell spoke and screened a three-minute trailer. “A guy from the BBC stood up and said, ‘So, what is the moral of the story? The images in the film are uplifting, but your words are pessimistic. Which is it?’”

Kitchell smiles wanly. “That’s the rub, right? Which is it?”

Hawken appears on the computer screen. The author of Natural Capitalism talks about environmentalism as a leaderless movement. “Nobody invented it,” he says. “Nobody created it. Nobody’s in charge.”

Kitchell halts the clip. “Do we cut it here or let him play out the metaphor?” he asks. Silence fills the room. “We’ve got to have the lightest touch. Short and sweet. It is the end of the film!”

Kitchell likes the Hawken clip but he’s not yet sold. He paces. He consults the index cards again. He turns to me. “I think the world is still waiting for the environmental movement’s defining film, a movie that brings the pieces together into a big picture and delivers the meaning of environmentalism,” he says. “It’s got to be done in an intelligent, compelling way. No pounding people over the head. The brass ring is there for us to grab, and I think we’re going to grab it.”

He takes a deep breath and returns his attention to the screen. “All right,” he tells the editor. “Let’s bring up that Carl Pope bit … “

***

In the 1960s, David Brower fought plans to build dams in the Grand Canyon. (Photo by Arthur Schatz/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.)

I first came across Kitchell’s film in April, when he sent me a fundraising email. He was trying to gin up a few bucks through Kickstarter, a website where entrepreneurs of all sorts can appeal to the masses to crowd-fund their projects. The director’s name jumped out at me. Kitchell’s previous documentary, Berkeley in the Sixties, chronicled the stirrings of student activism at the University of California, from early sit-ins to the battle over People’s Park. Released in 1990, the film became a defining document of the ’60s. Berkeley was nominated for an Oscar and won the National Society of Film Critics award for best documentary.

I’d always wondered what Kitchell had done after Berkeley. The idea of creating a film history of the environmental movement struck me as audacious and, frankly, financially insane. Intrigued, I called him up.

“We’re just about done,” he told me. “I’m figuring out how to open and close the film. You’re welcome to come watch us work.”

I hopped a plane to San Francisco and found him in his office, which is in a former military hospital in the Presidio that’s been converted into a warren for local nonprofit groups. Kitchell is a laid-back Californian, melancholy and mellow. He keeps a lot of art on the walls. One arresting piece looks like a whirlpool of trash. “It’s based on the Pacific garbage gyre,” he told me. “Oceans. One of the many strands I had to leave out of the film.”

Before we talked further, he sat me down with a rough cut and a pair of headphones. “I’ll be anxious to see what you think,” he said. “See you in two hours.”

A Fierce Green Fire unfolds in five acts, each following a strand of the modern environmental movement. There’s David Brower and the Sierra Club fighting to keep dams out of the Grand Canyon in the ’60s. The Love Canal saga of the ’70s explores the ravages of industrial pollution. Greenpeace’s “Save the Whales” campaign marks the beginnings of direct-action activism. Chico Mendes and the Amazon rainforest story exemplify the globalization of the movement. And, finally, there’s climate change, embodied by catastrophes both physical (Hurricane Katrina) and political (America’s 20 years of inaction). Five acts to capture the entire half-century of modern environmentalism. It’s an epic work of history. At the film’s heart are the three middle acts — Love Canal, Greenpeace, and Chico Mendes — stories of unlikely heroes who risked their lives (and in Mendes’ case, lost it) to stop profit-driven destruction. We’re so far from Love Canal today that it’s nothing short of shocking to relive the story — the water poisoning and birth defects caused by routine toxic dumping, the uncaring government officials, the radical action taken by housewives. As Kitchell later remarked, “These women took EPA officials as hostages! Can you imagine?”

The film left me emotionally drained and profoundly hopeful. I’ve read a lot of environmental histories — Ted Steinberg’s Down to Earth and Philip Shabecoff’s A Fierce Green Fire are among the best — but none has the power of film. None leaves you with images of early Greenpeace leaders Paul Watson, Bob Hunter, and Rex Weyler putting their bodies between a sperm whale and a Soviet whaling ship firing exploding harpoons.

“I came home from the Oscars in 1991 with a year-and-a-half-old daughter and my wife about to give birth to number two,” Kitchell told me over a lunch of vegetables from the common-area fridge. The success of Berkeley was gratifying but not world-changing. To make rent, he directed TV shows and short documentaries. While scouting for his next big project he kept returning to the idea that had captivated him in Berkeley: people forcing change. In 2001, he said, he found his subject — the history of the environmental movement.

Kitchell is obsessed with movement, whether it’s kinetic energy on screen, political movements in the world, action forcing change. Berkeley in the Sixties opens with a rollicking scene of cops hauling student protesters down a flight of stairs — bumpety-bumpety-bump — over a soundtrack of Little Richard’s “Keep a-Knockin’.” It was Kitchell’s way of telling viewers this would be no sleepy documentary.

“That’s what attracted me to environmentalism — the movement,” Kitchell told me. “I read every environmental history I could get my hands on. They all started with 150 pages of prologue: Thoreau, George Perkins Marsh, John Muir.” He mimicked a man falling asleep. “I decided I wasn’t gonna do ‘em. I wanted a film about the environmental movement, the story of people fighting for change. And that really kicked off in the ’60s, with David Brower fighting dams in the Grand Canyon.”

Greenpeace pioneered a new style of activism with its direct confrontations with whaling ships. (Photo by Rex Wyler.)

Making a low-budget historical documentary means finding archival footage on the cheap. Kitchell spent years poring over previous documentaries, TV station archives, private home movies, searching any closet that might contain crumbling celluloid or videotape. There were some unpleasant surprises. In the decade since he shot Berkeley in the Sixties, the corporations that own local TV stations realized that their old images could be milked for money. “In the mid-’80s, I bought rights to the entire news archives of three San Francisco stations for a dollar each,” Kitchell told me. “By 2001, when I went looking for Love Canal footage, TV stations in Buffalo were demanding $60 per second.”

The project eventually grew into a six-part series. “There were so many great stories,” Kitchell said. “The snail darter and Tellico Dam. The stopping of New York City’s Westway freeway. Even NRDC’s story, evolving from an environmental law firm to this concatenation of expertise and global organization.”

Then in 2003 he traveled to Cambridge, Mass., to see the biologist Edward O. Wilson. Wilson, who has written both dense scientific treatises and more breezy best sellers, gave Kitchell some advice. He could make a comprehensive reference work seen by few or a movie seen by many. But he couldn’t do both.

“The audience does not want six hours, Mark,” Wilson told him. “They will stop watching. They will walk out on you.”

“He was right,” Kitchell told me. “There are hundreds of great documentaries out there that get seen by no one.” When he got home, Kitchell killed everything except the five most gripping segments. Gone was Westway. Gone was NRDC — “I interviewed [NRDC founder] John Adams for four hours,” he recalled, “and had to lose all but a few quotes.”

Modern documentary films can be neatly parted into two epochs: before Michael Moore and after. The Before Moore period was marked by gritty cinema vérité classics such as Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies, Albert and David Maysles’ Grey Gardens, and Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, U.S.A. — brilliant, highly regarded films seen by small audiences in art-house cinemas.

Then came 2002 and Bowling for Columbine. “Michael Moore blew the top off what a documentary could do at the box office,” says Ward Serrill, whose movie about a high school girls’ basketball team, The Heart of the Game, was a minor hit in 2006. “Bowling for Columbine made more than $20 million, and distributors all over the country said, ‘Whoa! Documentaries can make money!’”

Other factors came into play. Netflix made obscure documentaries available to the masses thanks to Ted Sarandos, the company’s chief content officer and a big documentary fan. And reality TV introduced new viewers to nonfiction. “Reality television helped change the audience’s attitude,” says Ruth Hayler, a Seattle-based film buyer for the Landmark Theatres chain. “They realized nonfiction didn’t have to be dry and boring.”

“I’m wary of message-oriented films,” says Andrew Herwitz, president of the Film Sales Company, a New York-based distributor that handled foreign rights for Fahrenheit 9/11, the top box-office documentary of all time (it grossed $119 million domestically), as well as the Oscar-winning Born Into Brothels. “There’s still a tendency for people to feel they’re medicinal.” But environmental films can make money. Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth brought in $24 million, the sixth-biggest box-office haul among documentaries. Eight of the top 10, in fact, are either politically charged (such as Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, Sicko, and Bowling for Columbine) or related to the natural world (Earth, African Cats, and March of the Penguins, the No. 2 documentary of all time with a $77 million gross).

“I don’t know that environmental subject matter works for or against a film,” says Cara Mertes, whose documentary film program, which offers support to 50 documentaries every year, is an arm of the Sundance Institute. Two years ago A Fierce Green Fire was picked from among more than 2,000 applicants for Sundance backing. One advantage for Kitchell, she says, is the existence of “a long list of environmental stakeholder groups and their allies” that could provide a core audience.

Those groups may be interested in seeing the film. But that doesn’t mean they’re eager to fund it.

There are a handful of documentary filmmakers, like Moore, who can walk into a room and line up $1 million with nothing but their name and a good pitch. For filmmakers like Kitchell, though, fundraising is a constant struggle. In 2004, despite the new popularity of documentaries, A Fierce Green Fire ran out of money. So Kitchell had to teach filmmaking at the University of California at Santa Cruz and work as a location scout for film and television. By 2008, he’d scraped together enough cash to restart the film.

“I had enough to pay two editors,” he said. “The bad economy meant we could get a couple of great interns.” But he still needed to shoot the final act, about climate change. That’s when he found his angels. Patricia Matthews, a documentary producer, was a big fan of Berkeley in the Sixties. She asked her husband, Edwin, to watch a rough cut of A Fierce Green Fire. Edwin Matthews founded Friends of the Earth International and now runs the private Gould Family Foundation. He liked what he saw, and persuaded the foundation to give Kitchell $100,000 in grants to help finish the project.

With a five-act rough cut, Kitchell landed more funding from the Sundance Institute Documentary Fund. Then he went after bigger game.

In the past few years a pitching circuit has developed for documentary filmmakers. These confabs happen a few times a year in cities like New York, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, Toronto, and Berlin. Producers and distributors sit and listen as dozens of filmmakers pitch their works in progress. It’s speed dating for filmmakers.

In May 2011, Kitchell pitched A Fierce Green Fire to a roomful of international buyers at Toronto’s Hot Docs film festival. “It’s like being the prime minister during question time in Parliament,” Kitchell told me. “You show three minutes of the film, then talk another three, then nine minutes of questions. Fifteen minutes, time’s up!”

Nick Quested, executive director of Goldcrest Films, was intrigued. His London-based company has financed or distributed a slew of award-winning films, including Gandhi, Chariots of Fire, and Local Hero. Restrepo, the Academy Award-nominated documentary, was finished at Goldcrest’s postproduction studios.

Quested sidled up to Bruni Burres, a consultant for the Sundance documentary film program who had introduced Kitchell onstage. “I can put up the money to finish that film,” he told her.

Kitchell tracked down Quested the next day. “We bonded over our shared love of Marjoe,” a 1972 documentary about a child preacher on the revival circuit, Kitchell recalled.

What’s it going to take to finish A Fierce Green Fire, Quested asked, and Kitchell laid out his completion costs. Twenty thousand for graphics. Ten each for music and narration. Twenty for audio design and mixing. Thirty to dig up and remaster archival footage, and 50 for the rights to footage that didn’t qualify as “fair use.” (Copyright law allows filmmakers to use bits of copyrighted film without permission as long as they’re part of a social, political, cultural, or historical critique.) Thirty for staff, travel, and overhead. Another 30 for the online edit.

Bottom line: With $200,000, Kitchell could have A Fierce Green Fire ready in time for submission to the January 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He and Quested shook hands. They didn’t have a deal, but they had a deal to work out a deal.

***

I continued to follow Kitchell’s progress over the next few months. When I spoke with him in August, his lawyer was talking with the lawyers at Goldcrest. “They’re going over the fine details,” he told me. “My fate may get decided as I sit here.”

Goldcrest’s distribution strategy was turning into a point of dispute. “I’m insisting on right of approval on that,” Kitchell said with a sigh. “It’s the whole rolling-out of the film. It’s the biggest part of filmmaking that some people don’t pay attention to, to their detriment. I learned that on Berkeley in the Sixties. There are two ways to open a film. You can open on one weekend in 40 cities nationwide, and it flies or dies. That won’t work with this film. It’s better to go city to city, cross-promote with local environmental groups, get publicity from local papers and radio stations.”

Six weeks later Kitchell called with bad news. “Well, the Goldcrest deal fell through yesterday,” he said.

“What happened?”

“The main sticking point was my right of approval over distribution,” he told me. “But I think the bigger unspoken reason was money.” Kitchell had asked for half of the necessary $200,000 in cash, and half in in-kind postproduction services — in other words, the use of their equipment. “The deal just got too big for their comfort on the cash front.”

I asked where he went from here. He told me he already had interest from other quarters. A Fierce Green Fire was being considered by the Independent Television Service, which broadcasts documentaries on PBS. And a Bay Area film distributor had contacted him after seeing a rough cut of the film. “He’s got a studio capable of doing the final picture edit,” Kitchell said, “and we’re talking about ways to parcel out the other pieces among people in the business willing to do us favors.”

“So I’ve got Plan A, B, and C,” he said. Plan A required another angel to front $200,000 cash. Plan B could be done on $70,000 and a lot of in-kind contributions from friends and colleagues. Plan C would use $15,000 to take the film as far as Kitchell could on Final Cut Pro editing software and show that version at Sundance, which could lure a buyer. “I’m due to submit to Sundance in 10 days,” he told me. So … for now, it’s Plan C. “If they decide to take the film, the race is on to get it done in time for a January premiere.”

The good news, Kitchell said, was that he’d found the film’s closing. “That question from the producer at Hot Docs stayed with me all summer,” he told me. “What’s the moral of the fable? What’s the meaning of environmentalism?”

“How did you answer it?” I asked.

“I got it down to about 45 seconds of narration at the end,” he said, “but it didn’t have the gravitas and brilliance that I’d hoped for. So we cut it. But that’s okay. Because then I can turn it over to Paul Hawken, and he leaves us with the idea that everybody’s always declaring the environmental movement dead and gone. But it’s not, because it’s not even a movement, in the traditional sense.” He played the clip for me. Hawken describes environmentalism as humanity’s immune response to the industrial despoliation of the planet. It’s an intriguing idea: thousands upon thousands of grassroots groups, causes, and movements acting like so many white blood cells all over the globe.

Kitchell paused for a second.

“It’s always the toughest trick on these films,” he said. “How do you finish them?”

He hung up the phone and returned to the task of doing it.

A Fierce Green Fire will screen at Sundance on Jan. 23.

Will she save the world, or at least help make it a better place?Photo: Andrew Albertson

This post is written by Laura Wright Treadway, a contributing editor at OnEarth.

Elon Musk is something of an eco-superhero: He founded and invested his personal fortune in the electric car company Tesla Motors, intent on changing the way we consume natural resources by remaking the way we get around. He also has five sons, which seems rather at odds with his planet-saving personal and professional mission. And in 2009, the South African-born multi-millionaire told The New Yorker‘s Tad Friend that he isn’t finished spreading his seed. In fact, he said that he intended to have more children with his second wife as part of his duty to see that “we don’t devolve into a not very literate, theocratic, and unenlightened future.”

It’s hard not to cringe or write off Musk as an elitist. But maybe some of you are cringing for another reason, too. In some dark recess of your mind, have you had a shade of that thought, just once? (Be honest.) Sure, you think, maybe my kid contributes to global burdens — resource depletion, global warming, biodiversity loss — but one day his sheer genius will make up for all that in spades. My kid is going to solve problems. He’s going be president of the United States, or at least a senator (one of the few good ones). And solve world hunger at the same time.

Most people I know bring children into this world with high hopes for their futures, but of course not everyone thinks this way. As an editor at OnEarth for seven years, I often read letters from readers who had chosen not to have children, they said, for fear of ushering additional consumers onto an already overburdened planet. Others worried about bringing children into a world rife with more problems than we seem able to manage today, let alone tomorrow, when global population is expected to outstrip the planet’s carrying capacity, if there in fact is such a thing.

Next month, the world’s 7 billionth person is due to be born. I expect to be delivering my first child around the same time. The thought that my kid could plausibly be the world’s 7 billionth living person is a staggering thought.

Just by virtue of her birthplace here in the United States, my child will be one of the most voracious consumers on the planet. It doesn’t matter that my family will make well-meaning efforts to limit our resource consumption and overall environmental footprint. As an American, she will wear regularly washed clothes, bathe frequently, eat fresh produce (bought in a store and shipped from someplace near or far), and probably scarf down the occasional hamburger. All of these things require more water and energy on a daily basis than people living in some parts of the world — say, places where a ruptured pipeline draws hundreds desperate to siphon a bucket of gasoline — could even fathom.

Sure, my daughter will live a relatively car-free life here in New York City, and one day she’ll walk to her elementary school carrying her lunch in reusable sandwich tins. But I’m not kidding myself — no matter what I do, short of leaving Brooklyn behind and heading off to a commune, she’ll still stomp far more heavily on this planet than the average little girl in sub-Saharan Africa.

And so I wonder: Do I in some way need to apologize to the world for this? Do I need to find a way to make up for it?

Part of me thinks I should stop with this silliness and reassure myself that I’ll raise my daughter to be a global citizen who thinks beyond the tip of her own nose, who finds a passion in life for making her world a better place. That’s the Elon Musk in me, the little voice that tells me she’ll grow up to be a wise citizen of this earth; she’ll recognize her good fortune in life and feel compelled to give back.

But surely I’m wise enough myself to know that I can’t determine what she’ll actually set out to do. So at the end of the day, there’s still a chance that she’ll just eat, drink, and be merry, gobbling resources at the expense of her booming global brethren.

Read more on population. Check out our series 7 Billion: What to expect when you're expanding

As the relative proportion of young, wage-earning workers in the First World shrinks, they’ll be forced to deal with the ever-rising cost of supporting their retired elders, who will be sticking around longer than ever before due to health-care improvements. So where does that leave the billions of people in developing nations who still need and deserve a leg up? Will we have the resources to improve access to freshwater or to fund technology-transfer programs that deliver clean energy to developing nations? Or will our ability to help those who are desperately in need simply grind to a halt? Worldwide conflicts have sprung from far lesser problems.

It’s hard for me to imagine how we’ll solve this dilemma — having to support an increasing number of dependents at home as well as abroad – but to continue fretting over the prospect of bringing another little consumer into the world seems to miss the point. Will I have five children in the belief that my DNA will make the world a more enlightened place? Decidedly not. But to make apologies for delivering what may be the world’s 7 billionth person seems to signal a loss of hope for our collective future. Depleted of natural resources or not, a world also depleted of hope is not one that I want to see my daughter live in.

Photo: Min Lee

In the summer of 2007, something strange and troubling happened at the Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery on Netarts Bay in Oregon, which raises oyster larvae for shellfish growers from Mexico to Canada. The hatchery’s “seed,” as the oyster larvae are called, began dying by the millions, for no apparent reason.

Disease isn’t uncommon in a hatchery’s tanks, but that same year, up the coast in Washington, wild oyster larvae also failed in Willapa Bay, which has been the heart of the Pacific Northwest’s oyster industry since the 1850s.

The Willapa Bay growers scrambled to replace their natural beds with farm-raised seed from Whiskey Creek and other hatcheries. But there was very little of it to buy. Washington state’s Taylor Shellfish Farms, the Pacific Coast’s largest grower, also lost most of its larvae that year.

The situation was dire. Whiskey Creek and Taylor are key links in the nation’s seafood supply chain. They and another Washington hatchery provide nearly all the seed for the West Coast’s growers, who in turn produce more than a quarter of the 700 million or so farmed oysters that Americans slurp down every year.

Suddenly, it seemed, seafood lovers might have to do without their slippery delicacies, or at least pay a lot more for them. Growers on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts wondered if whatever was striking the Pacific hatcheries might soon hit them. And when the culprit was finally revealed, it provided the first example of how a worldwide crisis in ocean chemistry could devastate coastal economies and change restaurant menus across the country.

Whiskey Creek is owned by the husband-and-wife team of Sue Cudd and Mark Wiegardt. Wiegardt grew up tending oysters on Willapa Bay, where his family has been farming them since the late 1800s. Cudd, a fisheries biologist, got a job at the Wiegardt operation in 1984 and married Mark in 1989. She began managing the 33-year-old Whiskey Creek Hatchery in the mid-90s, and the couple took over the business together in 2002.

At the sprawling, barn-like warren about two hours west of Portland, where cylindrical plastic tanks serve as incubators for shellfish larvae and algae, a big part of their job is to keep vigilant watch for infections. When the 2007 crisis hit, Cudd and Wiegardt set about solving it according to standard industry practice: by looking for whatever pathogen might be making their “babies” sick.

They eventually found a larvae-eating bacterium called Vibrio tubiashii raging through their tanks. Attacking it with maximum force, they hired an engineer-turned-hatchery manager from Oregon State University named Alan Barton to build a $200,000 state-of-the-art system to filter and sterilize the water they drew from the bay. It squelched the Vibrio but failed to stop the carnage; the infestation, it seemed, was a symptom of some underlying problem, rather than the cause. The larvae were still dying, and Cudd and Wiegardt were facing ruin. So were many of the Pacific oyster farmers who relied on them.

Wiegardt has a farmer’s weatherbeaten face and stoic manner. Like all farmers, he’s used to boom-and-bust cycles. But even he started to despair. “The frustrating thing is people in the industry saying, ‘It’s got to be something you’re doing wrong.’” His colleagues and competitors stopped their scoffing as news of other die-offs began to trickle in. In 2008, in an unprecedented cooperative effort for the industry, the Pacific Coast Shellfish Growers Association declared a “seed supply crisis.” It persuaded its members to donate $40,000 so that Wiegardt and Cudd could keep Barton on the payroll and on the hunt for the culprit, in hopes of helping eradicate it elsewhere.

“We’d done everything we could to eliminate bacteria,” Barton says in his native Georgia drawl. He began to wonder if something more fundamental might be amiss — something in the makeup of the sea itself. “Shellfish hatcheries never worried about chemistry, just infections. I was back to being a 14-year-old kid with an aquarium, worrying about water chemistry.”

Uncovering a killer

In July 2008, all of the remaining larvae at Whiskey Creek died suddenly. At the same time, the water in Netarts Bay (and hence in the hatchery’s tanks) became noticeably more acidic — an indication that it had welled up from lower depths offshore.

This wasn’t entirely unexpected: Each summer, the north wind periodically pushes back the water along the Oregon coast, allowing deep, cold offshore water to surge in toward land. Barton checked federal CoastWatch reports and confirmed that a strong upwelling had been underway at the time the larvae died.

It was the breakthrough Whiskey Creek’s operators had been waiting for. The culprit behind their die-offs, it turned out, was part of a much bigger change in oceans around the world. Called “ocean acidification,” it results from too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The sea is the world’s great carbon sink, holding about 50 times as much of the element as the air. Phytoplankton at the ocean’s surface absorb carbon dioxide for photosynthesis, and when the tiny plants die, they sink and decompose, releasing CO2 into the water column. Dissolved CO2 forms carbonic acid, the same weak acid that gives soda water its tang. Cold water can hold more CO2, so the frigid waters at the ocean bottom are more carbon-saturated, and more acidic, than the warmer surface water above.

Some people think that’s a good thing; scientists and engineers have even proposed pumping CO2 into the deep ocean for storage, as a possible strategy to slow global warming. Trouble is, that acidified water doesn’t stay down in the deep: It rolls back to the surface along the West Coast and other upwelling zones.

These nutrient-rich upwellings, full of sunken organic matter and minerals, support a famously rich marine food chain, from microscopic plankton to eight-ton killer whales. But if the waters become too acidic, they’re lethal to many shell-building creatures — including young clams and oysters, whose formative coverings are uniquely vulnerable in their first week or two of life.

Even as the hatchery folks were struggling with acidifying water inshore, scientists from Mexico, Canada, and the United States were documenting similar changes in the waters further out. They found that the upwellings operated on a time lag: The water rising from the depths today holds CO2 absorbed about 30 to 50 years ago, when expansions in transportation, industry, and other human activities began pushing increased amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.

Because carbon emissions have continued rising since, future upwellings are sure to be even more acidic. “We’ve mailed a package to ourselves,” says Oregon State oceanographer Burke Hales, one of the scientists who conducted the offshore research, “and it’s hard to call off delivery.”

Adaptation in action

Sue Cudd and Mark Wiegardt didn’t have time to worry about future deliveries; they had to protect t
heir oysters now. That meant rethinking their operation from the sea bottom up.

“We used to think cleaner water was better,” Cudd says, and so they purified and filtered relentlessly. But seawater chemistry is devilishly complex and hard to manipulate. Cudd and Wiegardt decided they had to learn to make better use of the water the ocean was giving them, but to do that they needed to know precisely what was in it. Unfortunately, their monitoring gear, like that of most in the industry, was minimal and crude. “We were driving down the road blind,” sighs Wiegardt.

Hales turned on the lights. In 2010,    he lent Whiskey Creek a gizmo that looks like a hospital heart monitor, but is actually a seawater monitor that he built in his lab at Oregon State. The colored squiggles snaking across its twin screens measure the vital signs of the incoming water: temperature, salinity, and dissolved carbon dioxide.

Cudd and Wiegardt call their monitor “the Burkalator” and watch it like day-traders tracking their stocks. Once, Hales tried to borrow it back for a research cruise. “No, you can’t!” Cudd exclaimed. “If you take it, I’ll go out of business!”

The Burkalator revealed a striking pattern: Carbon dioxide and acidity levels tended to peak in early morning. They fell off through the day as the algae in the bay did what green plants everywhere do when the sun shines: take up CO2 for photosynthesis. When night fell, the photosynthesis ceased and the pattern reversed itself. The readings often varied dramatically in a single day, Wiegardt said, from the aquatic equivalent of as many as 800 parts per million of CO2 to as few as 200 parts, and from a lethal pH of 7.5 to a luxurious pH 8.5. (Because pH is measured on a logarithmic rather than an arithmetic scale, 7.5 is 10 times as acidic as 8.5.)

Thus informed, Cudd and Wiegardt could time their draws to take only sweet, low-CO2 water, avoiding the sour morning blend. This entailed compromises; to draw less often they had to reduce production and recycle used water. But as Cudd says, “It’s worse to put in bad water than to reuse mucky water.”

Hales and his colleagues installed another Burkalator at the Taylor hatchery in Washington. They found that pH and CO2 levels varied just as widely there, but by depth rather than time of day. Taylor’s hatchery sits on a deep bay whose waters are stratified like a layer cake. Cold, sour upwelled water tends to slide under the warmer, sweeter surface water. Again, the solution was simple: Taylor now draws from a shallow pipe rather than from deep water.

A temporary reprieve

The results are bracing. After a dire 2008 and 2009, Taylor has had its best years ever in 2010 and in the first half of 2011. Whiskey Creek isn’t out of the woods — Cudd and Wiegardt had to resume buffering their water this spring, and the upwellings this August have again made it difficult for them to find times when the water is suitable for incubating baby oysters — but they are shipping seed again.

“Here’s 2 million oyster larvae,” Cudd says, showing me a swatch of white muslin wrapped around a gob of what looks like black sand. “I just shipped 40 million this morning.” She has even volunteered to send 10 million larvae to help replenish a Japanese hatchery ravaged by the March tsunami. That same hatchery helped supply the West Coast oyster industry’s original seed decades ago.

The hatcheries crisis offers both a foretaste of how the seas are changing due to acidification and a model for how industry and science can work together to mitigate it, says Lisa Suatoni, a Natural Resources Defense Council staff scientist working on the issue. “It’s our first good example of the potential economic impacts of ocean acidification,” she says. “And it’s a perfect example of people adapting to the crisis.”

But even the scientists and hatchery operators who have collaborated in this success admit that it’s a stopgap. In the long run, only reducing carbon emissions into the atmosphere will keep ocean acidification from getting worse and threatening more shellfish.

Alan Barton, who diagnosed Whiskey Creek’s chemistry problem, isn’t waiting around for that to happen. He wanted to get as far away from souring seas as he could, so in late 2009 he left Oregon to start an oyster hatchery on North Carolina’s Intracoastal Waterway. “I looked at a map of the world and tried to figure out where ocean acidification was least likely to be a problem,” he says. “I picked here — and I was wrong.”

Already, Barton sees the problems that nearly shut down the West Coast’s hatcheries settling in on the East, thanks both to local conditions and, he believes, to bigger changes in the sea itself. That’s good for his business, at least in the short term; natural oyster beds have failed in many East Coast estuaries, just as they did on Willapa Bay, and Eastern oystermen are turning to hatcheries like his for seed.

But his current success will be cold comfort if carbon emissions don’t abate and the sea undergoes catastrophic change.

“I’m afraid the ocean will be dead long before we have to worry about the other implications of global warming,” Barton says quietly. “I didn’t believe any of this stuff three years ago. I was always skeptical about our global models … But ocean acidification is pretty cut and dried for me now. You see it every day. You can’t escape it.”

This article was syndicated with permission from OnEarth.

This OnEarth column was written by Laura Fraser.

We all know that Americans — leading the way for the rest of the developed world — are getting fatter. We hear about the “obesity epidemic” on the TV news, with footage of people depicted from the waist down shuffling around in XXL sweatpants and carrying supersized sodas. The majority of us are overweight, complaining about how our jeans are getting tighter and wondering why, despite all our efforts to diet and go to the gym, the number on the scale keeps edging higher.

For years, the explanation for weight gain was straightforward: it was all about energy balance, or calories-in versus calories-out. This Gluttony and Sloth theory held that obesity simply came from overeating and underexercising, and the only debate was about dieting — whether it was better to join the low-fat or the low-carb camp. Some scientists explored genetic differences associated with fat, but others said genes couldn’t possibly explain the rate at which Americans were gaining weight: “We just aren’t evolving that fast,” one obesity expert noted.

Environmental scientists have long suggested that there were likely external factors at work, but until recently, the traditional obesity-research community rejected such claims. Now it seems that the tide is turning: This month’s issue of Obesity Reviews features an extensive look at the accumulating body of research linking the environment with obesity.

The idea of our surroundings contributing to weight gain is nothing new, of course. But past discussions about the role of the “environment” focused mostly on the fast-food culture that we live in, where highly processed, highly caloric foods are constantly available, eating times are chaotic, kids run around drinking sugar-saturated sodas all day, no one has time to cook, fruits and vegetables are scarce in low-income urban areas, a venti frappuccino has 760 calories, and muffins are the size of melons. Add to that our changing physical environment — the fact that everyone sits in front of computers every day, instead of working out or working on the farm — and the “calories in” excess of the weight equation seems obvious, and obesity over-determined.

But even allowing for such influences, something wasn’t adding up. There are plenty of people out there who eat well and exercise like Gwyneth Paltrow and still feel like their weight is out of control. Then there are those annoying people who eat everything they desire, never work out, and stay thin. There had to be more to it than calories. We know that hormones — the chemical messengers produced by our endocrine system to control things like blood pressure and insulin production — can fatten up animals for slaughter; that some drugs increase your weight; and that a change in hormones at midlife shifts where your fat is distributed. Researchers began to recognize that obesity is much more complicated than calories in and out, and that a lot of other mechanisms involving the hormonal regulatory system are involved in our bodies’ delicate weight balance.

Paula Baillie-Hamilton, an expert on metabolism and environmental toxins at Stirling University in Scotland, was among the first to make the link between the obesity epidemic and the increase in the chemicals in our lives. “Overlooked in the obesity debate,” she wrote in 2002 in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, “is that the earth’s environment has changed significantly during the last few decades because of the exponential production and usage of synthetic organic and inorganic chemicals.”

Exposure to those chemicals, said Baillie-Hamilton, can damage the body’s natural weight-control mechanisms. She calls toxic chemicals that act as endocrine disruptors — mimicking hormones, and blocking or exaggerating our natural hormonal responses — “chemical calories,” and those in question include Bisphenol A, phthalates, PCBs, persistant organic pollutants such as DDE, a breakdown product of the insecticide DDT, and pesticides containing tin compounds called organotins. Many studies have shown that endocrine disruptors have been linked to early puberty, impaired immune function, different types of cancer, birth deformities, and other diseases. Now obesity and metabolism are on that list.

Environmental researchers call these chemical calories “obesogens.” Bruce Blumberg, a University of California at Irvine professor of developmental and cell biology, studies the effects of endocrine disruptors on obesity in mice and sees clear differences between those who are exposed to them and those who aren’t. “Pretty much anyone who observes people knows that obesity is way more than eating and exercise,” says Blumberg. Instead, metabolism, appetite, and the number and size of fat cells you have come into play, all of which are affected by hormones, and therefore by hormone disruptors. Blumberg has shown that the organic pollutants tributyltin and triphenyltin derail the hormonal mechanisms that control the weight of mice. He’s found that when pregnant mice are fed a dose of organotins that is equivalent to normal human exposure to those chemicals, their offspring have 10 percent more fat cells than normal mice, the fat cells grow bigger than normal, and they end up, overall, 10 percent fatter than your average mouse.

Other compelling research that fat is not just about eating and exercise comes from studies that show that animals that live in human environments get fatter just by virtue of being around people. Researchers at the University of Alabama recently found that chimpanzees, macaques, mice, rats, dogs, cats, and other species that lived in proximity to humans got fatter than animals that didn’t live in an industrialized environment — even when their lab chow and exercise was highly controlled. The authors suggested that endocrine disruptors were one likely culprit in this cross-species obesity epidemic.

For her article in the new Obesity Reviews, Jeanett Tang-Peronard, of the Institute of Preventive Medicine in Copenhagen, looked at some 450 studies on endocrine disruptors and obesity and found that nearly all of them showed a correlation between exposure to those chemicals — particularly in utero and in early childhood, when hormonal mechanisms are vulnerable — and an increase in body size. She says that in early life, chemicals seem to alter the epigenetic regulation of certain genes, disrupting the programming of hormonal signaling pathways that affect fat storage, fat distribution, and appetite. (The epigenome governs patterns of gene expression.) This reprogramming could explain how we are indeed evolving so fast.

Tang-Peronard says that it is impossible, now, to tease out how much of obesity is caused by chemicals, and how much by energy balance. They’re intertwined, anyway, with imbalances in appetite-regulating hormones like leptin and ghrelin causing us to want to eat more of the available food. “Endocrine disruptors may play
a significant role in obesity,” she says. But the research is in its infancy. She also points out that only a few of the tens of thousands of known environmental chemicals have been tested for their association with obesity. “We are only scratching the surface,” she says.

What to do about the problem of endocrine disruptors and obesity? It’s hard to say, given that virtually all humans have been exposed. Pediatrician Maida Galvez is involved in the Mt. Sinai “Growing Up Healthy” study of 330 children in East Harlem, monitoring their exposure to endocrine disruptors and their body weight. “Even if these chemicals play a small role in obesity, it’s a preventable exposure,” she says, explaining that if certain substances can be determined to have deleterious effects, we can avoid them at critical stages of development and ultimately replace them with safer alternatives.

For now, Galvez recommends that parents steer clear of Bisphenol-A — present in many plastic water and baby bottles, and in microwavable and dishwasher-safe food containers. (If you find a printed “7″ on the bottom, get rid of it.) She also suggests avoiding shampoos, cosmetics, and soaps containing phthalates — up to 70 percent of “top-selling products,” according to a 2002 report by the Environmental Working Group. (Look for fragrance-free products, which are less likely to contain phthalates, or for anything from the Illumina Organics range or The Body Shop.). And, she says, eat fresh fruits and vegetables, instead of foods that are processed and/or packaged in plastic.

That’s one point on which traditional obesity researchers and environmental scientists agree: Eat plenty of fresh, organic vegetables. And while you’re at it, get out into the fresh air and get some exercise.

I don’t spend a lot of time listening to Rush Limbaugh. But driving through Wyoming recently, I chanced upon his distinctive cadences on my car radio. I couldn’t find a reliable signal for NPR, I don’t like Mötley Crüe, and I was getting tired of listening to the preacher on a Christian station who was giving listeners his interpretation of the stream of crazy weather events and disasters this spring — raging wildfires in Arizona, floods on the Mississippi, epic tornados in the Southeast, record snowfall in the Rockies. The preacher told them not to be concerned. It was all foretold in the Good Book, and these were simply signs that the End Times were approaching.

I found Rush one notch up on the FM band and decided to swing into the parking lot of a nearby supermarket to listen to the nation’s pontificator-in-chief for a few minutes. It turned out he was sniffing out heresy in the Republican Party. Any Republican who failed to understand that global warming was a scientific hoax and a plot to find a pretext for strangling the U.S. economy was ipso facto unfit for high office. True believers should recite these articles of faith at every opportunity; past sinners should immediately recant; those who persisted in the error of the ways should be cast out of the one true church. Old Rush sounded like Pope Paul V as he handed Galileo over to the Inquisition.

THE EDGE: George Black on climate, energy, and culture 

So “climate change” is a fevered secular-socialist conspiracy to do in the American way of life. That raises an inconvenient question for Republicans: why then is the U.S. military one of its leading protagonists? Here I was in the most Republican state in the nation (Obama got 32.5 percent of the Wyoming vote in 2008), and traditionally that equates to being stridently loyal to all things military. The mud-spattered pickup parked next to me had a Marine Corps sticker and an American flag on the rear windshield. The supermarket had posted a sign that declared it to be a “Proud Supporter of the Wounded Warriors Project,” and another that said, “Budweiser: Here’s to the Heroes.”

There was, to put it mildly, a disconnect here: the military were heroes, Rush Limbaugh had papal authority, and global warming was a hoax. Yet the Department of Defense has been actively promoting that hoax since 2003, when a much-heralded report by two Pentagon consultants, Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, warned that catastrophic climate change “would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately” and constituted a threat “greater than terrorism.”

Since then the drumbeat has only grown stronger, to the point where the U.S. military has become more aggressive about combating climate change than any other part of the hated “Washington elite,” right up there with the Environmental Protection Agency — which many Republicans in Congress regard as the Employment Prevention Agency and would like to abolish.

I wondered if the driver of the pickup truck with the Semper Fi sticker knew that the Marines are using solar panels to power their forward operating bases in Afghanistan, that military bases in the United States are introducing building codes and energy efficiency measures even more stringent than California’s, or that the Navy is pioneering a new generation of biofuels that may one day radically cut the carbon emissions of our civilian airplane fleet. The Pentagon’s most recent Quadrennial Defense Review vows to cut the military’s greenhouse gas emissions by 34 percent between 2008 and 2020. Indeed, the Pentagon has become so environmentally conscious that it plans to buy 200 million rounds of a new, lead-free “green bullet” that will kill enemy soldiers without harming wildlife. (This is not a joke.)

Once upon a time — in fact for most of its modern history — the Republican Party liked to prove its conservative credentials by stressing unswerving allegiance to the military and its values. Now its leaders seem bent instead on establishing their bona fides by kow-towing to the most extreme know-nothing fringe of American politics. Whatever happened, I wondered, to the “Party of National Security”? These days it feels more like the Party of the End Times.

This article was syndicated with permission from OnEarth.

In her new book Asphalt to Ecosystems: Design Ideas for Schoolyard Transformation, Berkeley-based environmental planner Sharon Danks explores the ways in which landscape design, architecture, child development, and nutrition converge in the schoolyard. OnEarth sat down with Danks, whose firm, Bay Tree Designs, Inc, is helping redevelop some 29 San Francisco schoolyards, to talk about how communities are transforming the asphalt playgrounds of the past into green spaces conducive to better learning, eating, and playing.

Q. How have playgrounds changed since we were kids?

A. Playgrounds these days are influenced largely by liability concerns. Swings are disappearing, bars are getting lower, structures are becoming less challenging.

My 4-year-old recently broke her arm on a play structure meant for 2 to 5-year-olds because she found it so boring. She was walking on the outside of the bridge and sliding down the handrail and fell off. These structures are so unchallenging that kids are making up their own activities, which are often 10 times more dangerous.

Q. What’s your vision of a better playground?

A. We want to give kids something more than play structures and ball games. We call them “ecological schoolyards,” environments that combine diverse ecosystems with varied play environments and hands-on learning experiences. Richard Louv, the author of Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, says that playgrounds based on ballgames and athleticism are home to more bullying. In more natural environments, it’s less about who’s the strongest and the fastest and more about using the imagination. It changes the dynamic of who’s in charge. And there’s less conflict because the kids aren’t as bored.

The Perkins Elementary School before and after its makeover by the Boston Schoolyard Initiative. Photo: Boston Schoolyard Initiative with permission.

Q. How can kids learn from playgrounds?

A. You can embed a curriculum into the landscape by allowing students to see natural systems as they function. So instead of studying a watershed in a book, for example, they can see rainwater falling off their roof into a pond. Most students would shrug if you asked them when it last rained, but here they can run to the window and see how dry the pond looks.

Q. Can the schoolyard help replace the nature that’s vanishing from most of our lives?

A. I read an article that chronicled how far each generation of kids in a single family ventured from their home to play. As an 8-year-old, the grandfather roamed four to six miles to go fishing. The father wandered about two miles from home, and the son about half a mile. Our kids are lucky if they walk to the end of the block. In many cases, school grounds are their only exposure to outdoor play, and if all they have is asphalt and some liability-engineered version of climbing, I’d say they’re missing out.

Q. Tell me about the work you’re doing for public schools in San Francisco.

A. We work with the teachers and parents, and sometimes the students, to do collaborative brainstorming and design that results in long-term plans to transform each school’s grounds. We help gather the communities around the projects and make sure the plans reflect their educational and recreational needs. Hands-on involvement builds a sense of ownership and also gives communities more bang for their buck.

Q. What are some of the changes you expect to see?

A. Many schools are putting in play environments with boulders and logs for kids to explore. There are ponds going in, some with solar-powered pumps. Others are experimenting with pollinator gardens, with native plants to attract butterflies, bees, and hummingbirds. And almost every school is changing the standard seating arrangement of benches in a row — designed for passive observation — and moving toward cluster seating, so classes can engage in interactive teaching and conversation.

Q. What sort of long-term effect do you think this playground renovation will have?

A. I see these schoolyards as models of ecological design for our cities. If a school treats water responsibly, produces some of its own energy, has space for wildlife habitat, and makes some of its own food, kids understand from an early age how these things work and learn to value them. That makes for more informed, responsible citizens.

Q. You mention in the book that ecological schoolyards send a positive message about the environment.

A. Kids are often asked to save the environment before they’ve learned to love it. It puts a sense of fear into them: The polar bears are going to die, and you’re 5 years old, so what are you going to do about it? A schoolyard is empowering. Flowers are blooming where there was once lifeless space, more birds are coming, there’s less flooding when it rains. They can see their actions translating into improvement.

Q. What are some of the coolest schoolyards you’ve seen?

A. There’s a school in Berlin that used to be entirely paved, and they put in a dry creek bed that fills when it rains, with a hand pump and a sandpit. I saw 15 kids working together to dam a puddle, and at the end of recess, with great excitement, they opened the dam and let the water flow into the creek. And there’s a guy in Norway who builds Tarzan play environments involving telephone poles with metal bars set on valleys of stacked tires. Kids swing across the chasm on rope swings to the other side, and the swings are set so they can bump into each other. Here we think it’s too dangerous for swings to interact that way, but no one there seems to be getting hurt.

Q. This stuff is big in Europe and in California, but will it ever fly elsewhere in the States?

A. There are thousands of American schools doing habitat and garden projects. There’s a Boston Schoolyard Initiative, and groups in Fort Worth, Portland, Boulder, and Chicago. At Sidwell Friends, in Washington, D.C., where President Obama’s kids go, they have a blackwater [sewage] treatment wetland right at the front entrance. You walk through that to get into the school. So we’ve come a long way.

Q. How can I get my kids’ school started on a project like this?

A. The first thing is to get a committee of parents and teachers together and make sure the principal is open to the idea. Engage people, show them what’s possible, and then start to envision. Evergreen, in Canada, puts out a publication called “All Hands in the Dirt,” which includes a step-by-step process for designing schoolyards. Divide your plan into priorities and do one project at a time. Maybe you start with an edible garden and then turn it into a wildlife habitat, so you pull out the edibles and put in native plants. That way you continue to engage the community, and you make it sustainable financially, so you don’t have to raise a huge amount of money at once.

Learn more about green schoolyards:

This article was syndicated with permission from OnEarth.

Jim Cochran on the farm in 2004.Photo: Swanton Berry Farm

Along California’s rugged coastal Highway One, just north of Santa Cruz, a yellow vintage pick-up truck and tidy rows of strawberries mark the entrance to the Swanton Berry Farm. Inside the cheerful farm stand, decorated with old photos of the region and fluttering United Farm Worker flags, locals gather at blue picnic tables, sipping coffee, eating strawberry shortcake, and chatting with Jim Cochran, the owner.

The air is scented with the first berries of the season. They’re fresh and sweet, intensely red and fragrant, and firm — not pumped up with nitrogen like most commercial strawberries. Cochran, 63, a silver-haired man with an easy manner and quietly fierce intelligence, takes evident pride in watching a visitor savor one. He was California’s first organic strawberry grower, harvesting his initial crop more than 25 years ago.

“From the start, everyone said it was impossible to grow a commercial crop of strawberries without chemicals,” Cochran says.

Over the years, he has proven them wrong, showing the $2 billion California strawberry industry — which accounts for 88 percent of U.S. strawberry production, and 20 percent worldwide — that it is economically viable to grow strawberries on a large scale without using toxic fumigants and pesticides. Cochran’s success flies in the face of industry claims that farmers need to use harmful chemicals on strawberries in order to stay in business. Environmentalists and public health experts are trying to stop California from allowing farmers to apply a known carcinogen to their fields (as a replacement for another chemical that damages the ozone layer), and Cochran’s big flats of beautiful berries — and his healthy balance sheet — are proving crucial to that fight.

Cochran says that he initially grew strawberries just like everyone else: using pesticides and fumigants. Then, in 1981, he was poisoned. One early morning he was standing in a field wondering if the cropduster had sprayed pesticides overnight. When the sun came up, he found out in the worst way: the heat and light activated the chemical, turning it into a cloud of tear gas. The next year, he was doused by methyl bromide — as, he says, are most of the workers who lay and pull up tarps that enclose the gas in the soil. Those episodes left him feeling sick and shaky, with temporary respiratory problems. They faded after about a month, he says, and he never went to the doctor or reported them to the health authorities — it was just considered a hazard of working in the fields. But he didn’t want to permanently damage his health, so he decided to try farming organically.

“This was when it was becoming obvious that pesticides were way more harmful than people had been led to believe,” he says. At the time, Cochran was working for a co-op that didn’t want to take the financial risk of trying to grow berries organically; the owners said that without fumigants, they’d likely lose the whole crop. Strawberries are far more expensive to grow per acre than most crops — about six times what broccoli costs, for example — and they’re very finicky, prone to soil diseases, mold, and other maladies. So Cochran and a partner decided to start their own strawberry farm, but hedged their bets by planting half the crop using conventional pesticides and fumigants and half without them.

At first, the organic crops didn’t do as well, but it was no disaster. Cochran and his partner saw a decreased yield of about 20 percent in the organic crop, he says. They sold those berries at a 20 percent premium, but because of other costs involved in organic growing, such as rotating crops and using more labor-intensive techniques to control weeds and pests, they were barely breaking even.

Cochran’s partner left, but he continued the experiment. He was single and could afford to live cheaply, building a small cabin by hand, in order to save money for his crops. He tried various methods of increasing yields, using different composts, planting methods, and organic fertilizers, pesticides, and fungicides. He discovered that rotating broccoli and cauliflower with strawberry crops improved the health of the soil, and he found that planting strawberries in single rows, instead of the usual multiples, allowed more air to circulate, thus decreasing mold.

Cochran also began working with researchers at the University of California at Santa Cruz to perform randomized studies of his organic and fumigated crops. During the late ’80s, he says, it was difficult to get funding for such research from the industry group, the California Strawberry Commission. “The industry blockaded our efforts to get money to research alternatives, and spent a lot of money in Washington making sure our proposals didn’t get funded.” (The commission began funding such research ten years later). In 1989, Cochran and the Santa Cruz researchers published a study showing that growing strawberries organically was economically viable with the techniques he had developed, since the premium for organic berries covered most of the increased costs of farming. The study piqued other farmers’ interest.

“They saw that it’s possible to grow organic strawberries,” he says. “It’s not that it’s a hugely amazing technical advance, it’s just that somebody had to go out and do something differently and not get killed financially.” In 2002, Cochran was awarded the EPA’s Stratospheric Ozone Protection Award for his techniques. On Thursday, the Natural Resources Defense Council will honor him with a Growing Green Award.

Still, a quarter century after Cochran harvested his first crop of organic strawberries, only 4 percent of California strawberries are grown that way. The rest — some 34,000 acres — still rely on fumigants and pesticides that are hazardous to the environment and to human health.

Under the 1989 Montreal Protocol, an international treaty designed to save the ozone layer, and an amendment to the 1998 Clean Air Act, the ozone-depleting fumigant methyl bromide, which conventional strawberry growers depend on for sterilizing their soil to control weeds and diseases, was supposed to have been phased out by 2005. It has survived with “critical use” extensions from the EPA, based on industry claims that there are no technically and economically feasible alternatives to the chemical.

Now there is, but while it’s better on the ozone layer, it appears to be even worse on human health. Methyl iodide was approved by the EPA in 2007, under the Bush Administration, despite widespread scientific reports — including studies produced for the EPA and the California Department of Pesticide Regulation — that it is toxic to humans. California, which has its own additional review process, approved the fumigant last year under outgoing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, though with more stringent regulations than the federal ones, including greater buffer zones between the crops and human activity, and smaller amounts used per acre. The approval bucked the advice of the California Department of Pesticide Reform’s own scientists and a committee of independent university experts. New Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration has suggested it will take a fresh look at the fumigant; so far, no growers have been issued permits to use methyl iodide, but the state Department of Pesticide Regulation says that could change at any time.*

“Methyl iodide is a very potent mutagen and genotoxic chemical,” says Dr. Gina Solomon, a senior scientist and public health expert at NRDC. “It damages DNA.” If inhaled by farm workers or nearby residents, says Solomon, the gas could cause neurological damage, cancer, and fetal toxicity. Thyroid poisoning could occur if the iodine seeps into groundwater. “The science is quite clear on this chemical, and there’s a dramatic disconnect between the science and the California policy.”

Cochran testified before a committee of the California State Assembly in 2009, saying that it’s perfectly possible to produce strawberries without either methyl bromide or methyl iodide and make a profit. “Last year, I was probably one of the most profitable [strawberry] companies in the entire United States,” he says.

Other farmers are beginning to listen. The California Strawberry Commission, made up of the state’s 500-plus strawberry farmers, is now funding research on alternatives to the two chemicals, says spokeswoman Carolyn O’Donnell. “We really are trying to find some solutions here; we’re not just taking the next thing off the shelf.” The group has funded studies on alternative fumigation techniques, such as crop rotation, mustard-seed meal, and sterilizing the soil with solar energy. “We’re trying to find a mix of things — it isn’t one size fits all.” O’Donnell says that methyl bromide use has declined 50 percent in California since the Montreal Protocol, despite the extensions, and that farmers are increasingly looking at alternatives.

But going organic, she says, is expensive and time-consuming. It takes three years for land to be certified organic, during which time the farmer can’t sell the crop at a premium to cover the increased costs of production. “So you’re taking a loss in yield potentially and unable to recoup it with a higher price,” O’Donnell says.

But Cochran has little sympathy for growers cowed by the transition process. “It’s surprisingly easier to grow strawberries without chemicals than the industry would lead you to believe,” he says, adding that there are “plenty of competent farmers” demonstrating as much. Meanwhile, farmers have known for 25 years that methyl bromide would need to be phased out and are just now playing catch-up. “They’re 15 years behind where they should be,” he says, “and it’s their own damn fault.”

Cochran acknowledges that it will probably take a generational shift for strawberry farmers to fully come around to organics. Most farmers his age, he says, are too comfortable with their methods, and too old to want to change. But he’s optimistic that their children will make the shift, and that more and more consumers will understand the risks posed by conventional berries.

Cochran looks out across his fields, where birds are pecking at fruit, and he scowls at a gopher popping his head up close to the succulent berries. It’s true that his strawberries take a lot more work and cost to produce, and the bottom line is that organic farmers like Cochran can only survive — and other conventional farmers will only risk a transition — if consumers are willing to pay an extra dollar a basket for their product. But biting into one of Cochran’s strawberries, it doesn’t seem to matter for a moment that the air in these fields is clean, and that the berries don’t harm the ozone layer or people’s health. They just taste better.

This article was syndicated with permission from OnEarth. Read more about NRDC’s Growing Green Awards and this year’s winners.

Jim Cochran was one of Grist’s “40 People Who Are Redefining Green” in 2010.

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* Correction, April 28, 2011: The article originally stated incorrectly that Governor Jerry Brown’s administration has put the use of methyl iodide on hold pending further review.

Will we follow the Irish elk’s strange evolutionary path toward extinction?

In my unending (and thus far, I have to confess, largely fruitless) attempts to figure out why Americans aren’t more alarmed about climate change, one of the more intriguing ideas I’ve heard recently was put to me by a psychologist named Andrew Shatté.

Shatté, a professor at the University of Arizona, is best known for his work on resilience — the ability of humans to deal with adversity. His thesis on climate change, in a nutshell, is that we are hardwired for extinction. He compares us to the Irish elk, which went extinct about 11,000 years ago. The male of that species evolved to grow big antlers — I mean really gargantuan antlers, racks up to 12 feet wide, designed for the usual reasons of aggression, defense, and sexual display. Over time, the antlers got so big that the elk couldn’t consume enough calories to sustain their growth, so instead the antlers began to feed in auto-parasitic fashion on the calcium in the animals’ bones. If galloping osteoporosis didn’t kill them, they got their antlers impossibly tangled up in the overhead branches and starved to death.

So why are we like the Irish elk? The problem is the human brain, Shatté says. Our evolutionary development has not yet caught up with the change in our circumstances. More specifically, the problem is our brain’s fear triggers. Our instincts are still paleolithic; our fear reflexes respond to all the wrong things. They lie dormant in the face of climate change, no matter how ominously scientists predict its probable consequences. But we’re programmed to pump adrenalin at the sight of spiders, snakes, and other mortal threats slithering into our caves. We still run a mile from snakes, although they only kill about five or six Americans a year. The most recent annual figure for fatalities from lightning strikes is 58, but would you go anywhere near a golf course in a storm?

For the past year or so, where climate is concerned, our human fear triggers seem to have become even more anesthetized. Some of the reasons seem obvious. The global economic crisis has shunted many other fears into the background, and the climate deniers have done a scarily effective job with all their manufactured “scandals” about the integrity of science.

But wait a second: let’s not generalize about human fear reflexes. What we’re talking about mainly is American reflexes and American deniers. Concern about climate change has diminished almost everywhere in the past year, in inverse proportion to the gravity of the warnings from mainstream scientists. But alarm in the United States remains much lower than in any other developed country. You can argue about the reasons — the enduring belief in American exceptionalism, a cultural distrust of scientists, Rush Limbaugh, whatever. Some people explain the gap by invoking the power of the fossil fuel industry. But in that case, why haven’t the climate skeptics set up shop in Norway, where the oil business accounts for half of the country’s export earnings?

Another common argument — and this is implicit in what Shatté says — is that we aren’t scared by climate change because the threat seems remote and abstract. Bangladeshis may worry about sea-level rise, and Peruvians may fret about melting glaciers, but for Americans, climate change is still something that is happening only in a galaxy far, far away.

I don’t really buy that. I spend a fair amount of time in the West, which is experiencing at least three spectacularly visible impacts of global warming: prolonged drought, raging forest fires, and the destruction of forests by the mountain pine beetle. Sit on your front porch in Wyoming or Idaho and you can almost see the trees dying in front of your eyes — and then hold your breath to see if they will burst into flames come summer. The conundrum, though, is that these states are among the reddest in the country, the most likely to distrust the science on climate change and the most hostile to any government effort to reduce carbon emissions.

So what’s the problem with Americans? (A question that occupies a good amount of bar, pub, and water cooler time in Europe.) In a widely noted comment last October, Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, pointed out that while conservative political parties in other countries have small pockets of climate deniers, the United States is the only nation in the developed world where a major political party is almost uniformly hostile to the scientific consensus. There are still a good number of skeptics in the U.K., but none of the three major parties there questions that climate change is a huge problem that demands an urgent response. European conservative leaders like Nicolas Sarkozy in France and Angela Merkel in Germany feel the same way.

All of which brings me back to Andrew Shatté’s theory of evolution. Shatté is a remarkably eloquent guy (his recent TED talk on resilience is worth a look). But in the end I wasn’t convinced. If he’s right about evolution, why are Americans so much less fazed by climate change than the rest of the world? Isn’t evolution supposed to be a uniform process in a species? Or does it happen at different rates depending on your nationality or the accidents of birth? Were the elk in the peat bogs of Killarney more unconcerned about their plight than their cousins in Donegal? However, I suppose in the end debating theories about climate change and evolution depends a lot on whether you believe in evolution in the first place. But let’s not go there. After all, this is America.

This article was syndicated with permission from OnEarth.