By Elisabeth Kwak-Hefferan

The elusive Pacific razor clam, in all its glory. (Photo: Ted Alvarez)

You know what would make supermarket food taste better? Making grocery shopping more like clam digging. Imagine having to paw through a bin of wet sand to find your onions, or thrash through icy waves for a chunk of Parmesan. Challenging, yes, but think of the feeling of accomplishment as you sit down to dinner.

I thought about this last Sunday as I stood knee-deep in the Pacific, wind-whipped and sandblasted. I’d come to Washington’s Roosevelt Beach on the second clam-harvest weekend of the year to up my foraging game: Having already tackled blackberries, mushrooms, and dumpster donuts, the coveted Pacific razor clam seemed the logical upgrade. The animal kingdom is a whole new ball game, even if the animal in question does look kind of like a stray pancreas.

My boyfriend, Ted, and I had done our homework. We knew all about the clam show — a dime-sized dimple in the sand that’s as good as a neon arrow screaming, “Clam! Get your razor clam here!” We’d read tutorials and watched YouTube videos in which rugged hosts demonstrated digging technique, casually unearthing clam after clam.

Armed with a new clam shovel (basically, a long-handed trowel with a canted blade), a bucket, and a $19 season license, we cockily strode out on the beach as the tide receded.

“Ready to meet your meat?” Ted asked.

Pacific razor clams — six-inch-long beach dwellers found along the coast from California to Alaska — are one of the more sustainable protein options out there. Farmed clams of all stripes earn a Best Choice rating from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch. And wild clam harvests, like the one we were going to partake in, are carefully managed by state fish and wildlife authorities; because the clams are individually caught using simple tools, harvesting them has minimal impact on the environment.

And don’t forget the appeal of local, totally unprocessed food that you earn with the sweat of your brow. Diggers can savor these high-protein, low-fat, vitamin A-, B-, and C-packed morsels with minimal qualms. That is, if they can catch ’em.

Open season on clams, Washington state (Photo: Mike Murry)

A block-party vibe waited at the water’s edge. Hundreds of other diggers lined the surf in both directions. Hipsters in flowered galoshes hunted side-by-side with guys in waders and waterproof camo; little kids splashed through the waves; one old couple sat in the surf in lawn chairs.

It was all very encouraging: Pre-dig, I’d wondered if clammers were as notoriously tight-lipped and competitive about their favorite stashes as backcountry skiers and mushroom hunters tend to be. Would we be elbowed aside as longtime clammers defended their territory? Would the harvest devolve into a Hunger Games-style free-for-all, with diggers bludgeoning each other with shovels to get at the precious bivalves?

I shouldn’t have worried. Too few beaches are open to digging, and harvest limits are too small (15 clams per licensed digger) for anyone to get possessive. Besides, when you’re all sloshing around in February ocean water with your arms shoulder-deep in the sand, you can’t help but feel the camaraderie.

This was a lucky break for us, as our clam feast would’ve been a nonstarter without a little help from our friends.

Turns out, digging a razor clam is damn near impossible with a mere shovel, at least for a neophyte. The little buggers flee deeper into the sand much too quickly for that.

For the first 30 minutes, Ted and I played out a ridiculous routine: See the telltale dimple. Dig frantically on the seaward side of the dimple. Drop to our knees and plunge our bare arms into the cold, wet pit. Root around, occasionally just grazing the tip of the clam’s neck, until a wave inevitably crashed over the pit and soaked our pants.

“Maybe we just need more practice,” I said after my fifth or sixth attack failed.

“Maybe this just sucks,” said Ted.

That’s how it would have gone all afternoon if not for the intervention of a bona fide clam angel. His name was Kenny VanEtten, and he started by pointing out a show for us to dig. “I’ve already got my take,” Kenny told us cheerfully. “This is so much fun, I just don’t want to go home yet.”

Hoover clam: demonstrating the proper use of a clam gun (Photo: Laurel Fan)

After watching a few more of our slapstick attempts, he gently offered us the use of his clam gun.

Yes, clam gun.

You see, there are two ways to dig a clam: the old-school clam shovel and the fancier clam gun. Resembling a jackhammer made of PVC, the “gun” works through brute force and suction to pull the clam to the surface. (What, you were hoping for tiny mollusk bullets?)

Guided by Kenny’s five-year-old daughter, Makena, who was an excellent clam scout, and armed with the gun, our prospects went from bleak to red-hot. Suddenly, clams seemed to be everywhere. We’d plunge the gun over the show (tilted ever so slightly seaward), twisting to help it slide deeper into the sand, then cover the small hole on the top with our thumbs to create suction. Next, we’d wrestle the gun back up and dump its column of sand. Almost every time, a juicy razor clam tumbled out with it.

All around us, our neighbors rode the same groove. People called out to their fellow diggers whenever they found a pocket of clams, creating mini-gunning parties full of cheering and attaboys.

We hit our 15 all too quickly. What a strange and wonderful experience, this communal enthusiasm about food — it gives off the same sort of buzz you find around neighborhood gardens, homebrewing classes, and county fair bake-offs. Anytime people gather to put a little extra effort into what they consume, that warm and fuzzy feeling follows.

When’s the last time you got that from buying tortilla chips?

We thanked Kenny the clam angel and reluctantly turned our backs on the sea. Just as well. My waterproof boots, long ago swamped by the surf, had gone squishy with seawater, and my hands were frozen into clam-scented claws. We carefully braced the bucket in our backseat; the clams floated serenely inside, seemingly resigned to their fate.

With the thrill of the hunt fading, Ted and I looked at this bounty of fresh clam, then at each other. Now came the hard part: figuring out what to do with these little delicacies.

Next time: How 15 fresh razor clams took over my kitchen, and the clam hangover that followed.

By Sarah Goodyear

Meet your new neighbor. He's got lots of friends. (Photo by Pip R. Lagenta.)

Raccoons are going to take over the earth. Or at least move into your apartment.

OK, they probably aren’t, but that was the impression I got while watching the Nature documentary Raccoon Nation, which I caught one recent night on PBS. (You can watch it here.)

The premise of the show is that urban habitats could actually be making raccoons smarter. Omnivorous, curious, intelligent, and super-adaptable, raccoons are turning out to be really good at overcoming every challenge that people throw at them. Cities are like giant playgrounds for them, filled with puzzles that they can solve with surprising ease — and learn from in the process.

In Brooklyn, N.Y., where I live, one family came downstairs in the morning to find a dead raccoon wedged in their silverware drawer. The resulting picture (yikes) got passed around local blogs for days. It’s a horrible image, but it got a very different reaction than a similar picture of a rat or a snake would have elicited: People felt bad for the raccoon as much as they did for the person who stumbled down for breakfast and encountered its furry corpse.

Because here’s the thing about raccoons: Unlike other animals that people encounter rummaging through their garbage, they’re freaking adorable.

Just borrowing the fax. (Photo by Pip R. Lagenta.)

Their masked mugs are just so wildly cute, as is the way they use their front paws (which are incredibly sensitive, allowing the animal to take in enormous amounts of information about its environment). In the same building where the dead-raccoon-in-a-drawer incident took place, residents couldn’t keep from videotaping and cooing about the antics of other raccoons that were doing their best to bust into the house.

“People have a different kind of relationship with raccoons,” says Stanley Gehrt, associate professor at Ohio State University, one of the raccoon researchers featured in the Nature show. “People kind of identify with them. There’s an increased comfort level. People are actually feeding them and adopting them.”

Which is not such a great idea. In Toronto, which according to Nature is “the raccoon capital of the world,” the animals are causing lots of problems. There are concerns not just about property damage, but also about the spread of diseases such as rabies and raccoon roundworm. One homeowner got so fed up with the raccoon family that was destroying his garden that he attacked them with a shovel — and got arrested for animal cruelty. The episode provoked a small rally, complete with pro- and anti-raccoon camps.

The Nature show included segments on how the furry critters are destroying centuries-old Buddhist temples in Japan, where they were introduced after a ’70s TV show called “Rascal the Raccoon” convinced people that they would make cute pets. Owners dumped them once they grew up and got vicious, and as a result Japan is filled with raccoons that are basically turning some of the country’s most historic buildings into toothpicks by nesting in them.

Look who came to dinner. (Photo by ImageMD.)

People try all sorts of things to get rid of raccoons: rags soaked in ammonia, mothballs, cayenne pepper, coyote piss, strobe lights, ultrasonic noise machines, you name it. And guess what? To quote the honey badger, raccoon don’t care.

Removing food sources, trapping and relocating the raccoons, and sealing up any available hole where they can enter are the best strategies, but they don’t always work. In Japan, they’re just killing them: A biologist interviewed on the Nature program estimates she’s done away with 10,000 of the beasts. She looks like it has made her pretty sad. But still they come.

In Germany, raccoons were imported for hunting and fur, and there’s a thriving population in German cities like Kassel, where there are today about 100 raccoons per square kilometer (0.39 square mile). Characteristically, the Germans have tried to solve the problem through engineering, creating ingenious shields to keep raccoons from climbing up drainpipes and into houses. Except the raccoons seem to figure them out as soon as they’re created.

Gehrt is not totally sold on the idea that cities make raccoons smarter, saying that much more research needs to be done. What’s clear, he told me, is that people and wild animals are coming into contact more and more frequently. Cities are getting greener, providing habitat. People are more tolerant of wildlife than they used to be, seeing the presence of wild animals as a life-enhancing glimpse of nature rather than as a menace. And for hyper-adaptable animals like the raccoon, the city is a safe haven, with no hunting or trapping and no predators. Figure out which streets are too busy to cross safely (which they seem to be able to do pretty quickly), locate your local garbage can, and you’re living the raccoon high life.

The crux of the issue is that raccoons are a lot like people: clever, opportunistic, adaptable, and fiendishly persistent. Also, street smart as all hell. They like cities almost as much as we do.

For better or worse, we have unwittingly hooked up with raccoons for the long run.

It speaks to the gross ignorance of the overwhelming majority of Americans — or else the deep cynicism of our politicians — that we even have to address this, but for the nth time ever, here we go!

Unless the world economy crashes or intercessory prayer starts working, no one on the planet has the power to significantly lower the price of gasoline at the pump. Especially not Newt Gingrich.

Here’s some explanation from CBS Evening News.

Don’t miss the point at 1:55 when some reporter asks “Is the rise in gas prices the president’s fault?” and the White House press secretary issues the appropriate response: a derisive laugh.

Bryan Walsh at Time is also on the case:

Recession depress economic demand, and when demand is depressed, fewer people drive — which in turns leads the price of gas to fall like any other commodity would when demand falls. As the economy recovered and economic activity picked up — both in the U.S. and elsewhere — the price of gas rose as well. If future President Gingrich were to somehow be able to deliver $2.50-a-gallon gas, it would probably mean the economy had tanked again.

It’s hard to understand why this isn’t as ingrained in our national psyche as, say, the relationship between supply and demand. I mean, seeing as how that’s exactly how the price of oil is determined. Are we really so insulated from news about the explosive economic growth experienced by billions of non-Americans in the past decade? Those people buy oil, too, and last time we checked, planet Earth isn’t making any more of it.

By David Roberts

Cliff Stearns in the seamy spotlight.

Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) was a moderate back when GOP moderates were allowed in the House of Representatives. Those days are past, however, and Stearns has had to scramble to adapt to the new atmosphere of Tea Party fruitcakery. He was trounced in the race for chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in 2010, largely because his colleagues viewed him as a squish. Earlier this month, he announced he’s leaving his district to escape a Tea Party primary challenge, jumping to a newly drawn district nearby. Now he’s desperately trying to bank enough money and credibility with conservatives to survive beyond 2012.

The process has not been kind to his dignity or his integrity. Instead, Stearns has wormed his way into one of the seamier niches in the Republican ecosystem: circus ringmaster for show-trial investigations designed to create headlines, the niche Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) had hoped to dominate. The investigation into Planned Parenthood and the investigation into Solyndra are both Stearns’ babies; both have dragged on forever and both have uncovered zero wrongdoing. That hasn’t stopped Stearns from playing partisan warrior with a crude zeal that frequently crosses the line into cringe-worthy absurdity (like when he said Energy Secretary Steven Chu should be fired over Solyndra).

Stearns is not a smooth talker like Paul Ryan (R-Wis.); he tends toward Kinsley gaffes, when politicians accidentally reveal what they really believe. Recall, for instance, in November, when he said, “when somebody is successful, then you give them the subsidies and the tax credit.” Last week, he said something similar when pressed about why he won’t launch an investigation into the $8.3 billion loan guarantee to Southern Company for the Vogtle nuclear reactors: “The loan you are talking about … is for a proven industry that has been successful and has established a record.”

First of all … really? The federal government’s role is to subsidize companies and industries that are already successful?

Second of all … really? The nuclear industry has an established record of success? Not one that inspires confidence. Here’s what Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said in his letter to Chu [PDF] on the Vogtle loan:

The proposed nuclear loan guarantee to the Southern Company is $8.3 billion, far larger than any previous loan guarantee under the DOE program and more than 15 times larger than the loan guarantee granted to Solyndra. Credit rating agencies have spoken loudly and clearly about the financial risk associated with this project. Over the last 18 months, the Southern Company has had its credit rating downgraded by both Moody’s and Morningstar as a direct result of its pursuit of this nuclear project. Private financial markets have shown no interest in financing new nuclear projects because the technology’s long track record of delays, cost overruns, and project defaults. On top of that, wind, solar, and natural gas have recently become much cheaper, further eroding the competitiveness of nuclear power. Just last week, the president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, Marv Fertel, suggested that low natural gas prices would push back construction of nearly all planned nuclear projects by a decade or more.

This is from the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy:

Original plans for Plant Vogtle in the 1980s included four reactors at an estimated cost of $660 million. Only two reactors were built, at a cost of more than $8 billion. This inflated final price tag led to the largest rate hike Georgia customers had ever experienced. The estimated cost of the two new Vogtle reactors is more than $14 billion, but as ratepayers in Georgia are aware, the final price tag could be much higher. Southern Company’s projection is that Unit 3 will become operational in 2016, and Unit 4 in 2017. Georgia Power customers are already paying, on average, a monthly surcharge of $3.73 to finance the Vogtle project, and that figure will likely increase if Southern Company is not stopped.

Meanwhile, a 2011 report from the Congressional Budget Office found that the federal government is substantially undercharging for nuclear loan guarantees and indeed that it may be impossible to charge fees high enough to cover risks, since doing so would scare off all potential borrowers.

With an established record of success like that, what could go wrong?

But never mind all that. Let’s take Stearns at his word: He thinks Southern Company has a strong record.

The day after defending the idea of government loans to successful companies, he had this exchange with Greta Van Susteren on Fox, regarding the DOE’s $1.4 billion loan to a company called Prologis to undertake the largest rooftop solar installation in U.S. history:

Van Susteren: Why were we giving federal stimulus money in a loan to Prologis? I went on the internet, and this is a company that has $43.3 billion in assets. They say they’re the leading owner, operator, and developer of industrial real estate in the Americas, Europe, and Asia, and they operate, apparently, 600 million square feet. Why do they need our money?

Stearns: They don’t. And that’s — that’s really what is the basis of, I think, the investigation of the [Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee] that I chair, is we see favoritism, Greta, throughout the stimulus package.

Hm, $43.3 billion in assets. A world leader in industrial real estate. Sounds like a company “that has been successful and has established a record”! When that happens, “you give them the subsidies and the tax credit,” right?

Unless they want to buy solar panels! Then it’s “favoritism.”

What Stearns is failing to properly obfuscate is that the GOP has no principled aversion to government assistance to industry. What they have is an allegiance to the energy status quo — fossil fuels and nuclear power — and a determination to fend off possible challengers. Fealty to the wealthy and politically entrenched is the motive force behind Stearns’ investigation, and indeed the entire House GOP agenda.

By Jess Zimmerman

At a campaign event in Georgia, Newt Gingrich told supporters that he would maaaaaagically lower gas prices because “you can’t put a gun rack on a Volt.” Shows what the hell he knows.

That’s right, electric cars are totally compatible with hauling your zombie-fighting equipment!

By Christopher Mims

Urban Roots is a documentary about farming within the city limits of Detroit, and as such, it’s a handy way to get an education on the subject in something like 90 minutes.

It’s showing March 6 at the San Francisco Green Film Festival.

Also, Shepard Fairey made the poster for the film, so even if you can’t be bothered to get your hands dirty, at least you can support the cause by spending $60 on a print of someone else’s picture with a Photoshop filter applied.

Urban Roots shows dedicated Detroiters working tirelessly to fulfill their vision for locally-grown, sustainably farmed food in a city where people – as in much of the county – have found themselves cut off from real food and limited to the lifeless offerings of fast food chains and grocery stores stocked with processed food.

By Christopher Mims

Solar probably won’t really take off until it makes more economic sense to slap some photovoltaics on your roof than to continue paying your utility company for their dirty, probably mostly coal-fired power. That day has arrived in parts of sunny California and Hawaii, and it’s coming to (not-so-sunny) Germany by 2013, reports Michael Coren at Fast Company.

Global PV solar installation grew from 0.26 GW to 16.1 GW between 2000 to 2010, while manufacturing costs fell 100 times.

Of course, “grid parity,” as it’s called, doesn’t mean you can just painlessly switch from the old power source to a new one. There’s still the up-front cost of installing solar panels, which is a lot to spend, even on something that is going to save you money in the long run. If you’re paying for them on your own, you’re essentially pre-paying your electricity bills for the next 20 to 30 years, which is something that only a tiny fraction of us can afford to do. (If you can afford it, it’s probably as good or better an investment than basically anywhere else you can put your money, though.)

But with help from a solar installer/financier like SolarCity or SunRun, homeowners and businesspeople can get those solar panels for something approaching no money down, and still save money on their monthly bill.

So what grid parity really means is that as the price of solar continues to fall, conscientious consumers will be able to make the right choice. If it’s a revolution, it’s an incredibly slow-moving one, at least for now. But once it picks up steam, it could still upend how our civilization generates the electricity that is the lifeblood of a sustainable future.

By Greg Hanscom

You can't handle the truth (if you're Homeland Institute).

When someone grabbed emails and documents from the computers of climate scientists and leaked them to the media in 2009, few organizations were as mirthful as the Heartland Institute, an outfit that has worked for years to spread the gospel of climate-change denial. Although multiple investigations into the scientists’ emails debunked accusations that the researchers had subverted science and distorted data, Heartland and its allies used the so-called “Climategate” memos to tar climate science and bully the media into covering their dubious claims.

Last Monday, when an anonymous source (we now know it to be MacArthur-award-winning scientist and climate activist Peter Gleick) released internal Heartland memos to the press, the group had something else to say entirely.

The Heartland documents included details about a plan to introduce climate denial into grade school curricula and a list of major donors that includes a rogues’ gallery of corporate interests. One document contained a summary of Heartland’s work promoting fracking. Surprising? Hardly. Embarrassing? Apparently.

Here’s what Heartland President Joseph Bast had to say back in 2009 about the scientists’ emails, in an op-ed at Investors.com that you can download from the institute’s website:

The release of these documents creates an opportunity for reporters, academics, politicians and others who relied on the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] to form their opinion about global warming to stop and reconsider their position …

Looking at how past disclosures of fraud in the global warming debate have been dismissed or ignored by the mainstream media leads me to suspect that they’ll try to sweep this, too, under the rug. But thanks to the Internet, millions of people will be able to read the e-mails and make up their own minds.

This incident, then, won’t be forgotten. Journalists who attempt to spin it away and politicians who try to ignore it will further damage their own credibility, and perhaps see their careers shortened as a result.

When more emails were leaked to the press in November 2011, Heartland Senior Fellow James Taylor happily piled on with an op-ed in Forbes — this, despite the fact that three separate inquiries had already vindicated the scientists. (The second round of emails did nothing to advance the institute’s cause.)

But last week, when it was their own skivvies waving in the breeze, Heartland staffers weren’t exactly cheering the public’s “opportunity” to form its own opinions or thanking the internet for its openness. Instead, the institute took the offensive, claiming that one of the documents was a fake (although much of its contents simply summarize what is spelled out in great detail in the other documents, which the institute says “were obviously stolen”) and sending legal notices to publications (including Grist) demanding that the documents — and all commentary on, links to, and references regarding them — be taken down.

“We realize this will be portrayed by some as a heavy-handed threat to free speech,” Bast said in a statement on Feb. 19. “But the First Amendment doesn’t protect Internet fraud, and there is no right to defamatory speech.”

In a media advisory issued Feb. 20, Bast called the leak of the Heartland memos “an outrageous violation of ethics and law,” and called on DeSmogBlog and other publications that had reported on the memos to reveal the identity of their source:

It was likely either someone on their staffs or someone well known to them. It is unconscionable and illegal for them to conceal the identity of a person who has broken the law and who has damaged the reputations of many people and organizations, not only The Heartland Institute. At a minimum, they should share what information they do have with Heartland and the FBI …

The Heartland Institute wants to know who in the global warming movement conspired to steal and forge documents. What do the leaders of DesmogBlog and other organizations know? When did they know it? Why are they leaving forged documents on their Web sites?

Gleick came forward the next day. He admitted he had tricked the institute into sending him the documents. He said he’d anonymously received the summary memo (the one Heartland says is fake). The rest of the documents, he said, came directly from Heartland — something the institute has yet to confirm or deny. He sought them, he said, because he wanted some corroboration of the material in the anonymous memo he’d received.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press and New York Times have confirmed many of the details in the memos.

No matter. Heartland has already packaged up its outrage under a name and a new website: Fakegate. In his Feb. 20 media advisory, Bast declares: “Fakegate may be as damaging to the global warming movement as Climategate was.”

By Jess Zimmerman

Sometimes it’s nice to stop worrying about the fate of the planet and just appreciate it for its beauty — and it doesn’t hurt if its beauty is slightly enhanced by being part of a massive environmental art project. Sonja Hinrichsen’s snow drawing looks like it could be a Marimekko fabric design, but it’s actually a large-scale arrangement of snow crop circles that took five people three hours to complete.

By Jess Zimmerman

Photo by cfdls.

Weird things available on Amazon.com in the U.S. include wolf urine, fresh rabbit, canned unicorn, deer butt, and (fake) horse heads. But until yesterday, the company’s Japanese subsidiary was selling something a lot more grisly: whale bacon, whale stew, whale jerky, and canned whale meat. Now, only a day after the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) put out a call to action to boycott Amazon, whale meat products have disappeared from the site. 

EIA had reported that there were almost 150 of these products for sale (although to be fair, we didn’t see anything like that many before Amazon took them off the virtual shelf). Not only that, but the group bought some of the available products and found that many of them violated acceptable mercury levels and Japanese species labeling laws; the latter means that many of the products may actually have been dolphin meat, which isn’t any better.

Until yesterday, searching Amazon.co.jp for クジラ – kanji for “whale” — brought up several different whale meat products. Now it only brings up whale sake, and we’re pretty sure that’s just a brand name. Sure, that whale bacon is undoubtedly being sold somewhere else, but as far as Amazon is concerned, EIA can count this as a total win, and at record speeds.