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Warning, controversial ad ahead:

Um, okay. What is controversial about this ad? According to the MBTA, criticism of Brown’s vote is too much for T riders to handle.

“The MBTA only rejects about two ads a year–usually ads containing drugs or borderline nudity–but they’ve decided that a citizen-funded attempt to hold Scott Brown accountable for his vote to gut the Clean Air Act is unacceptable for public consumption,” 350.org’s Jamie Henn said in an email.

Ads that have NOT been pulled by MBTA include an ad that’s currently up featuring half-naked women and alcohol (state legislation banning liquor ads on publicly owned property is currently being considered for the 2nd time in three years), and a Judgment Day ad paid for by a vehemently anti-gay group (see below):

Although the move seems to be pretty clearly politically motivated, rather than take on the MBTA, 350.org is opting to go around them. The group has found a local agency willing to pull billboards of the ad around the city on bikes, and the media coverage of the MBTA’s decision is likely to have more people seeing the ads than would have initially.

In fact, the MBTA may already be re-thinking its decision. “After a week of no responses (and many messages later) the MBTA folks called us back and said that they never made an official decision about banning the ad because it’s too political (though that’s what they told us last week – hmmm) and are re-opening the ad for review,” 350.org’s Phil Aroneanu says. “That doesn’t mean they won’t ban it anyway, but at least they’re taking a second look.”

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Last month at the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Cooking for Solutions Conference , the emergence of genetically modified salmon on the U.S. market was a matter of great debate. After three days of listening to speakers and chatting with colleagues, what stood out most to me was that we have a major disconnect when it comes to informing the public in this country, with companies touting “innovation” on one hand, environmentalists crying foul on the other, and consumers in the middle with no one–certainly not the government–looking out for them, or giving them honest, unbiased information.

In other words, hey, FDA, if genetically modified salmon is perfectly safe for human consumption, why can’t I know which salmon are genetically modified? The answer, of course, is that the genetically modified salmon people would probably have to worry about their business model if they had a big GMO label slapped on their product, but why should their business be more worth protecting than the public’s rights, or the environment?

Part of the problem is figuring out which food labels make sense for the most stakeholders. “What do we do, label products with the most dire environmental impact? Or use labels that consumers are most likely to respond to, or that consumers tell us they want? Or do we go with the labels that businesses can most easily make money off of?” Jason J. Czarneszki, law professor at the Environmental Law Center at Vermont Law School, asked a crowd of journalists in Monterey.

These are the questions the government is grappling with, unsuccessfully, with each agency passing the buck to the next. The FTC is supposed to deal with labeling, but they’re fond of declining to step into an area–like food–where another government agency has authority. And while the FDA can say whether a food product is or isn’t safe for consumers, they have no labeling authority, which is why in the case of genetically modified salmon, they’re throwing up their hands and saying they can allow it to market but they can’t require that it be labeled.

“They can, they just don’t want to,” Dr. Urvashi Rangan, direct of technical policy for Consumers Union says. “It’s a real problem, because every time we ask consumers, the majority say they want GE and GMO to be noted on labels, so it’s always strange to hear the discomfort federal agencies have with it.”

But the labeling issue is just one part of the information problem. Even before we get to the issue of GMO salmon, most people still don’t understand the difference between farmed and wild salmon. In a completely unscientific study, the majority of people I asked over the weekend thought farmed fish was probably better for the environment than wild-caught fish. In the lion’s share of cases that’s not true, but the public is given little to no credible, easily digested information on the matter (for the record: fish farms often erode marine environments, harm biodiversity, and introduce hormones, antibiotics and disease into waterways). Before the public has even begun to wrap its collective head around what “farmed fish” really means, it is just about to surpass wild-caught.

The story of salmon is yet another cautionary tale about what happens when humans mess with nature. The demise of wild salmon stocks has led to a surge in farmed salmon, which has in turn bred a situation wherein the frankenfish GMO salmon seems like an okay idea. Paul Greenberg, author of Four Fish, points out that salmon used to be wild-caught on the east coast. “People have totally lost that memory, but they were initially knocked out by dams–not big ones like the ones on the West coast that you want to fight, but thousands of tiny ones,” he says. “Connecticut is a tiny state, but it has 5,000 dams. Connecticut’s chi is totally blocked! And those dams knocked out salmon runs throughout east coast.”

Habitat destruction accounts for part of the problem, but then there’s over-fishing, a problem that can largely be traced to the post-World War II period. “Europe was hungry and war technology could suddenly be applied against fish,” Greenberg explains. “In the 1940s and 1950s, Faroe Island fisherman found a spot near Greenland where all the Atlantic salmon go. As soon as they identified that patch of water, they fished it hard. They told their friends in Denmark and Norway and pretty soon there was a lot of pressure on Atlantic salmon.”

Overfishing and dams have also put pressure on West coast salmon and now Bristol Bay, Alaska is home to one of the last giant wild salmon runs in the country. Unfortunately it’s also the proposed site of the Pebble Mine, which would mine copper at the headwaters. Salmon navigating using their sense of smell, and two parts per billion of copper in the water would be enough to mess with that sense, severely impacting the salmon run. The mine is said to be worth $300 billion, but how do you put a price on one of the last natural salmon runs?

The other side of the story has to do with farmed salmon. The first attempts at farming salmon go back to the 1400s. Salmon eggs are big and nutrient rich, so when they hatch, they have some nutrition to live on, which makes it relatively easy to transition a larval salmon onto industrial feed pellets. As time went on, fish farmers began to breed for traits like feed efficiency, and by the 1960s and 1970s what started to emerge was a sort of farmed sub-species. “They doubled the efficiency of salmon and doubled it again,” Greenberg says. “And efficient farmed salmon got cheap.”

Now we have not only overfishing, habitat destruction, and aquaculture, but also technological advances that have enabled the creation of genetically engineered salmon. The U.S. company AquaBounty grows and filets its genetically engineered salmon in Panama, then ship it back for U.S. consumers, thus avoiding having to do an environmental impact report on its aquaculture practices. Without intervention, and it looks as though there won’t be any, the AquaAdvantage salmon will simply be labeled Atlantic salmon. Rather than provide a cheap protein for the poor, Greenberg says AquaBounty is likely to use the technology to control salmon farming. “Should salmon farming come to be dominated by the AquAdvantage fish, farmers could become dependent on a single company for their stock, just as soy, corn, and wheat farmers must now rely on large multinationals like Monsanto to provide seed for their fields year in and year out,” he wrote in a recent essay.

Which has me wondering, when are we going to figure out that trying to own or engineer nature tends to have dire, unintended consequences? Monsanto’s infamous “Round-Up Ready” seeds have already sparked the emergence of so-called “superweeds” resistant to herbicides, and the emergence of unaccounted for hybrids (created when the genetically engineered RoundUp Ready genes are transferred to wild plants by pollen). We’re just now finding out…or being told…about the diseases caused by the various chemicals we’ve used to try to dominate nature. Our obsession with antibacterials has created a superbug. And now we’re embarking on a journey with genetically engineered animals, which we plan to feed to people without telling them–probably poor people because that’s how these things always go–and then just hope for the best, even though we know better.

The post The Frankenfish Should Be a Wake-Up Call appeared first on The Faster Times.

Elliot Margolies, Flickr, Creative Commons

In the 1980s and 1990s Big Tobacco, mostly led by Philip Morris, spent millions of dollars trying to stop two things they were convinced would ruin their business: regulation of smoking and how cigarettes are marketed, and the dissemination of information about the health effects of smoking. Today, a similar story is playing out around another everyday sort of product mainstream America has been led to believe is relatively harmless: plastic. In particular disposable plastics (bottled water, straws, and so forth) and plastic food packaging.

When the tobacco industry wanted to gain control over the messages the public was receiving about smoking, it set up a dummy nonprofit called the Center for Consumer Freedom, run by notorious lobbyist Richard Berman. Berman launched the Center for Consumer Freedom with a $600,000 “donation” from Philip Morris; the company continued to make charitable donations to CCF throughout the 1990s, funneling 49 to 79 percent of its charitable funding to the Center between 1995 and 1998. The CCF took that money and turned it into ad campaigns about the “right to smoke” and push polls aimed at “proving” that Americans didn’t want smoking regulated.

Flash forward a decade and the Center for Consumer Freedom has a new consumer product to protect: plastic. Like Big Tobacco, Big Plastic is at a turning point: Although its deep pockets have been able to stave off statewide or nationwide regulation thus far, it is in danger of losing its grip. In California, when a state ban on plastic bags was narrowly voted down thanks in large part to the millions spent by the ACC and various plastic bag manufacturers in the state, counties and cities quickly took matters into their own hands and began passing local bills. Following in the footsteps of San Francisco, the cities of Santa Monica, Long Beach, San Jose, and Calabasas all passed bans in the year following the defeat of the state ban, as did Los Angeles and Marin counties. Now state bag bans are up for a vote in Oregon and Vermont, the California ban is back on the docket, and major county bans are being hotly debated in Hawaii. At the same time, more and more information is coming out about the toxicity of the few chemicals known to be used in plastic. Bisphenol A (BPA), pthalates, and dioxins have all made headlines as toxic villains in the past few years, and pressure is rising for national and state legislators to regulate them for consumer safety. The rest of the chemicals used in most plastic materials are kept hidden from consumers as “trade secrets.”

In a desperate attempt to stop the flow of information about the environmental and public health impacts of plastic, and thus to squelch any regulatory attempts, the plastic industry is taking a few pages from the Philip Morris playbook. In the last several months, lawsuits have been filed against all of the cities and counties passing bans in California. Every time a ban passes, the Save the Plastic Bag Coalition, a nonprofit that counts several plastic bag manufacturers as members (although it refuses to disclose which ones) sues the county or city, typically to require an Environmental Impact Report. This tactic worked with earlier bans that solely banned plastic (the increased use of paper bags was an environmental problem), but modern bans are aimed at all single-use bags, making it tougher for the lawsuits to stick. Plastic bag manufacturers have also ganged up to sue a small reusable bag maker in Chico, CA (ChicoBag), claiming “false advertising” because the company includes facts about the environmental impact of plastic bags on its website, and filing the suit in North Carolina to avoid California’s corporate bullying laws.

On the health front, the industry is working to push de minimis clauses on BPA legislation, which would allow products to sport the “BPA-free” label if they have below a certain amount of BPA in them; this is problematic with any toxic chemical, but it is especially so with BPA given that it has been proven to cause health problems even at doses lower than the amount currently deemed “safe” by the EPA and the FDA; this is particularly true of fetuses in utero, which have been proven to suffer developmental damage as a result of even very low exposure to BPA.

And in the midst of it all, the Center for Consumer Freedom is trying to keep Americans focused on plastic bags and, most importantly of course, their right to them. The CCF has begun running ads calling into question the safety of reusable bags, and releasing push polls that claim Americans love their plastic bags and don’t want to see their right to plastic infringed upon. When the Center for Environmental Health followed up on the CCF’s claims that “most” reusable bags had lead and bacteria in them, they found only two bags with dangerous levels – one type was made out of recycled plastic, the other had a plastic liner.

Big Plastic’s tactics go a giant step further than Big Tobacco’s in one key way: The plastic industry has successfully managed to use environmental messaging to promote an activity that is 100 % negative for the environment, the continued use and disposal of throwaway plastics. There are several examples of this, but the most insidious are the industry’s use of recycling as a justification for the continued use of disposable plastics, and its sponsorship of various research expeditions and conferences around ocean plastic pollution (which it euphemistically calls “marine debris”).

Recycling is fantastic for paper, cardboard, aluminum and glass. For plastic, the case is harder to make. Oftentimes, plastic can only be downcycled (turned into another type of product) not recycled, which means that unlike, say, glass recycling, plastic recycling in most instances does not stem the need for virgin plastic. There’s also little market for recycled plastic goods; one recycler in Oregon recently told the local paper that they’re sitting on two years worth of old plastic they’ve picked up that nobody wants. According to the EPA, only 9% of U.S. plastic packaging is recycled. Much of the used plastics picked up in the U.S. and Western Europe is shipped to China, where workers are subjected to various toxics in the course of breaking down and, in many cases, incinerating the stuff to make new materials. Unfortunately, by tapping into the environmental movement’s historic love of recycling, the industry has managed to spin a tale of plastic recycling that all but eliminates the impact of disposable plastic goods.

Similarly, by supporting projects like Project Kaisei, which is researching the effects of garbage on the ocean, and Earth911, a website that provides environmental information about various topics, including plastic, the industry has managed to associate itself with the very people who should be railing against it. In this way it has managed to largely control and manipulate the stream of information reaching the public. The latest instance of this is the American Chemistry Council‘s sponsorship of the largest international conference on ocean plastic pollution, happening this week in Honolulu. Convened by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the 5th International Marine Debris Conference is filled with panels focused on various aspects of plastic pollution. Yet, two of its largest sponsors are the American Chemistry Council and Coca Cola, and low and behold, the public commitments coming out of the conference are filled with the terms “marine debris” or “marine litter,” and no mention of plastic at all.

At the end of the day, this is a story that should piss off every consumer. Whether you consider yourself an environmentalist or not is irrelevant. The fact is that a group of companies are producing products that contain known carcinogens and other toxics and they are making every effort and sparing no expense to manipulate that information, hide it, discredit the researchers producing it, and stop any regulation of the chemicals. They are effectively robbing consumers of the very freedom they purport to support, by endeavoring to keep important information out of the public’s hands. That is a crime and it ought to be stopped.

This article originally appeared on the EnvironmentaList.

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First things first: It’s great that companies are looking for alternatives to plastic, and there’s huge potential for bioplastics to be a big part of the solution to our single-use plastic problem. On that note, Pepsi and Coca Cola deserve kudos for putting their money where their press releases are and investing in research for new materials. At the same time, if companies get a big pat on the back for new packaging materials that come with the same old problems, then they stop trying to do better and we all lose. Furthermore, if we replace one disposable item with another, how is that really a solution?

Unfortunately, this is where we’re at with the Pepsi “plant bottle” announced yesterday. The headlines were filled with praise for the company for using nothing but cast-off plant parts in its bottle (plus points for not using a food-based crop as the feedstock), and for beating Coca Cola to the punch by delivering a 100-percent plant-based bottle. The problem is that the bottle is still PET, just like regular old plastic water bottles, it’s just that Pepsi’s plant-based PET is made from agricultural waste and non-food crops like switch grass, while the average plastic bottle is made from petroleum.

What was not included in Pepsi’s announcement, nor in any of the subsequent articles about the plant bottle, was the fact that the disposal issue remains the same. Whether plant-based or petroleum-based, PET still poses a waste management problem. In fact, in some ways it might even be worse. As Captain Charles Moore, of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, points out, switching the source material from petroleum to plants just means that plastic water bottles will continue to be a problem once oil runs out. In that sense, Pepsi’s move to a plant-based bottle looks like more of a supply chain solution than a particularly “green” business practice.

“A plastic such as PET, or high-density polyethylene HDPE, can be 100 percent bio-based (for instance 100 percent organic hemp), and yet still be non-biodegradable,” says Manuel Maqueda, of BlooSee. “The public, however, is led to think that any bio-based plastic is biodegradable, which is not at all the case.”

It’s this end-of-life issue that concerns Daniella Russo, executive director of Plastic Pollution Coalition. “A 100-percent plant-based PET bottle would be great along with a recycling system to capture and process the material,” she says. “Otherwise they will all end up in landfills, incinerators and the environment……most composters do not want the material.”

Despite Pepsi Co.’s claim that its plant bottle exists in a “closed loop system,” Russo argues that the company has effectively dodged end-of-life responsibility for the bottles by passing that responsiblity off to consumers. “The claim of a closed loop system is not justified without the consumer end of the loop being closed,” she says. “The onus is still on consumers to turn in the bottles.”

Moreover, a recent study found that in some cases the process of creating plant-based plastics is actually more polluting than the traditional plastic manufacturing process.

So, thanks for trying, Pepsi, but we think you can do better. In fact, we’re certain you can.

This post originally appeared on Plastic Free Times.

The post Surprise! Pepsi’s New Plant Bottle Is Good Old-Fashioned Greenwashing appeared first on The Faster Times.

In the 1990s, Janine Benyus, a natural sciences writer and the author of several wilderness guides, began to pay close attention to how various organisms adapted to the ecosystems around them. That led her to wonder if similar strategies couldn’t be applied to the human problems of the day, and whether any such strategies were already being used. Benyus discovered that while people were looking to nature for advice sporadically, it was not a formal part of any design process.

“I began collecting examples, as writers do, and at first it was a folder and then it was a drawer, and pretty soon it was an entire file cabinet, and I was looking at it, thinking this thing is getting pretty big and it doesn’t even have a name,” Benyus explains.

She called this emerging discipline “biomimicry” and in 1997 gathered her various examples of it in a seminal book called Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. Now, just over a decade later, it’s fair to say that biomimicry has changed how many people think of both biology and technological innovation. The process has informed the design of everything from solar panels to ceiling fans.

Following the publication of her book, Benyus began to get calls from companies and organizations wanting to consult her on various ways in which they might look to nature for solutions. In 1998 she started both the for-profit consulting firm, The Biomimicry Guild, and the nonprofit, education-focused Biomimicry Institute. Today, Benyus and her colleagues are building a network of consulting hubs throughout the country, helping to create biomimicry-focused programs at universities, and launching the Biomimicry Institute’s own online education program. The goal is to get humans asking one simple question as a first step to designing any product or tackling any problem: What would nature do?

How did you make the leap from noticing how nature handled various things to thinking about mimicking nature’s approach?

What I started to think about was: What is it that we’re really trying to do here? And then think about how nature would do it. How would nature filter water here? Or how would nature protect from impact here? You know, how would nature manufacture this? How would nature ship? How would nature package?

Then I started wondering, does anyone ask that question? How would nature gather sunlight, turn it into energy and store it?

Actually on that question at least I thought, Well, if there’s one thing that we’ve probably mimicked, it’s a leaf in a solar cell. And then I researched it and I realized we didn’t even consult the leaf in the making of solar cells; they’re nothing like leaves. The solar cell is a space-engineering thing, but it has nothing to do with how life happens on Earth. And this was such a blow to me. It was like, wait a minute, isn’t this just part of first principles in design and engineering? And it’s not. As much as you read about Leonardo DaVinci and how he looked at birds, and how Wilbur and Orville Wright looked at birds, we weren’t doing it consciously and there was no formalized practice around it.

That made me kind of crazy, and I thought, It’s gotta be somewhere. So I began looking through scientific literature and started to see faint signals – this was in 1990 – of scientists who indeed were studying leaves and were trying to come up with ways to consciously emulate life’s genius.

When you first started out, what sort of outcome were you hoping for?

Our real, internal mission statement was to increase respect for the natural world through the practice of taking nature as a model for design and decision-making. And that’s still our North Star. That still guides us.

What I realized as a conservationist and as a biologist was that our emotional connection to nature had become rather weak. For the most part we were in a guilt relationship or we were pitying nature. And I realized, when working with people in biomimicry, that through the process of studying a leaf and trying to emulate it… I mean, there’s nothing like trying to emulate a leaf to make you tremble every time you walk through a forest. You just go, “Oh my God this is so astounding.” So what it did was increase people’s respect for these organisms and ecosystems. They saw the false boundary between them and this organism fall away and they realized that at the heart of it, we’re all trying to perform certain functions to allow us to thrive on this planet. If you bring it down to the level of function, you realize that these organisms have been trying to work these functions out for 3.8 billion years, some of them, and we’re new at it at 200,000 years.

So you’ve got this very young species trying to figure out technologies that are well adapted. And here you’ve got all the models sitting right there that we’ve been autistic to all these years, as Thomas Berry says, and all of a sudden we woke up to it. And what happens when people do that is they become ardent conservationists. At least that’s what I’ve seen. So for us respect for the natural world was something that we thought was a turnaround strategy, you know, for the human race. That it began with a sense of respect and we then became students rather than conquerors, and began to learn some things about how to live and, at the end of the day, we viewed and valued nature in a different way. That respect of a peer or an elder, I think, translates into good behavior, into policies that also are respectful of the natural world. I mean, that’s our hope.

At the same time, biomimicry is a very practical process by which lots of companies are now coming out with more sustainable products that use less energy and materials, and fewer toxins, because they’re based on organisms that have had to fit those criteria for millions of years. You know, the design brief that a modern-day designer now has looks a whole lot like what organisms have had to do all this time.

Biomimicry seems like such a common-sense approach. Why hasn’t it been embraced before? Why do you think that now seems to be the right time for it?

It’s one of those things that seems so obvious, and I ask myself that question a lot: Why now, why not always? I think we’re in a humbled state as a result of seeing our unintended consequences. You know, all that excitement and enthusiasm in the fifties when the atomic symbol was a really respected brand symbol that everyone would want. We had this period of just cluelessness. And as we realized the situation we’re in I think that we’re finally open for some help. Even if it comes from an octopus or a rhinoceros instead of a Rhodes scholar, we’re open to it. And then there’s also all this science that’s been gathering and snowballing all these years about how nature works. Not that we’re anywhere close to understanding or comprehending it completely, but there’s a little more knowledge and there are enabling technologies that now allow us to actually mimic what we see, or at least the design principles of what we see. You know, when we try to mimic spider silk we’re not trying to actually mimic the silk. We’re saying: What are the design principles that allow the spider to make a high-performance fiber in water instead of organic solvents – toxic solvents? And at room temperature or body temperature, not 1400 degrees Fahrenheit? And with common raw materials like crickets and leaves? We’re at the point where we’re able to look at that biochemistry and go, I wonder if we can mimic that? It’s existing proof that fibers can be made in ambient temperatures with benign green chemistry.

Has there been any use of biomimicry that you’ve been disappointed to see?

Of course. Biomimicry’s an innovation process, right? So it can be used to make anything. Including studying penguins to make a better torpedo. We started to think about this question and said there’s really shallow biomimicry and deeper biomimicry. We talk about three levels of biomimicry. First, there’s form, and it’s pretty easy to mimic form, like you can mimic the form of the penguins in your torpedo, right? Or let’s talk about another example: fan blades. There’s a company in Canada that has taken the shape of the scalloped edges of a humpback whale, and when you put them on a fan blade or turbine blade it can rotate at low wind speeds that it wouldn’t have turned at before. That’s mimicking form and it’s really, really cool. However, if you really want to get biomimetic, you’ve got to look at process too, which is: How do we manufacture this fan blade? What do we manufacture it from? What’s the lifecycle of the material choice? Am I making something useful for the whole? And then, how am I packaging it, marketing it, shipping it? Is it really affordable for everybody? You start to get into the ecosystem level of thinking that says, what are the other repercussions of doing what I’m doing? And is this truly well adapted at the whole-Earth level and not just in my particular market and for my particular need?

When you talk about a torpedo from a penguin, there’s another thing we talk about and that is the role of nature in the process. It’s nature as model, but it’s also nature as measure, and nature as mentor. So you go, okay, if nature is model then what would nature do here? Then when you’re thinking about nature as measure, you think: What wouldn’t nature do here? That’s important as well. Is this necessary? Would nature create this torpedo? Why? Why not? That’s when you start to get into nature as mentor – why would you do it this way, or why don’t we see this in nature?

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This is the cover story of the latest issue of OnEarth Magazine, graciously shared in advance with The Faster Times.

On a Saturday morning in late November in Kotzebue, Alaska, a village 33 miles north of the Arctic Circle, two Inupiat men nursed cups of coffee at the Bayside Inn. They stared out a window at Kotzebue Sound, an arm of the Chukchi Sea at the southern edge of the Arctic Ocean. Outside it was 35 degrees and raining. “Too warm,” said one of the men.

His companion let a long silence pass. Then he nodded. “Too much rain,” he said. Indeed. In Kotzebue, November temperatures normally hover in the single digits. But these aren’t normal times. This is the time of “the changes”—a term used by Caleb Pungowiyi, former president of the Inuit Circumpolar Council and one of Kotzebue’s most respected elders, when talking about the effects of climate change in the Alaskan Arctic. “Some events like this happen occasionally,” Pungowiyi told me as we sat looking out at the rain. “But for something to happen that’s this warm, in November, for a number of days—these kinds of temperatures are not normal. We should be down in the teens and minus temperatures this time of year.”

A few days of rainy weather isn’t climate, but it is a powerful data point. You get enough warm, rainy days like this, and pretty soon they add up. This is how climate change happens in the far north: one warm rainy day at a time.

The thawing of the far north is one of the signal ecological events of our time. Global temperatures rose an average of 1.18 degrees Fahrenheit from 1905 to 2005, but that increase wasn’t evenly distributed. The Arctic took the brunt of it, warming nearly twice as fast as the rest of the planet. Since 1980, winter sea ice in the Arctic has lost almost half its thickness. In Kotzebue, the mean winter temperature has climbed more than 6 degrees in the past 50 years. Permafrost is thawing in patches all over the Arctic. “What we’re doing with climate change,” says Brendan Kelly, a former University of Alaska biologist who is now deputy director of the National Science Foundation’s Arctic Sciences Division, “is carrying out a long-term scientific experiment at continental scale.”

To get a sense of how that experiment is unfolding, it’s helpful to take a look at one of the most fundamental acts of life: eating, the passage of energy from one living organism to another. Predators and prey form a food chain, plant to insect to rodent to carnivore to apex predator. Those chains interlock to form webs. “To protect Nature,” the conservation biologist Stuart Pimm wrote in his seminal book Food Webs, “we must have some understanding of her complexities, for which the food web is the basic description.”

Basic is an apt word. Many Arctic organisms are extremophiles— specialists adapted to thrive at temperatures so low they would kill most other species. It’s a club with few members. Species diversity is low, so Arctic food webs are simple. And in the age of climate change, simple is not a good thing to be.

“The more complicated and interconnected the food web, the less damage you can expect if one or two species are lost,” explains Deborah Bronk, a biological oceanographer and specialist in nutrient cycling at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science at the College of William & Mary. “In these very simple food chains, if you lose one species you can really mess up the whole thing.” Complexity yields resilience.

Without resilience, there’s risk of a crash. Scientists who study trophic cascades, in which the loss of a single species sets off a reaction throughout the food web, report that this sort of crash generally happens in low-diversity ecosystems, where one or a few species exert great influence.

That describes the Arctic marine and coastal food web.

During the past few years a number of disturbing reports from the Arctic have appeared in scientific journals. Increasingly acidic seawater may be affecting the ability of crustaceans to form their shells. Warmer-water fish are invading waters traditionally inhabited by cold-water fish. More seal pupping dens are collapsing because of earlier springs and diminished snow cover. Starving polar bears have been seen scavenging berries, grass, moss, and goose eggs. As ice disappears, walrus colonies are increasingly hauling out on land, where polar bears—also on land because of the lack of ice—have been observed attacking them. Humans, a big part of the Arctic food web, are experiencing impacts as well. Their hunting seasons are changing, their travel routes becoming more dangerous and unpredictable. The resilience of the Arctic food web is now being tested. To paraphrase Brendan Kelly: In an ecosystem perfectly adapted to sea ice, snowfall, and permafrost, what happens when those elements begin to disappear?

Kotzebue seemed like a good place to find out. Its 3,200 residents—almost three-quarters of them Inupiat—aren’t mere observers. As Caleb Pungowiyi told me, people in Kotzebue are acutely aware that ice and snow are to the Arctic what soil and rain are to the temperate latitudes.

“We depend on ice freezing up in the fall and the snow accumulating on top of it in fall and early winter” for everything to work, he said. “But now we’re seeing a lot less of both.”

It all depends on ice

Standing in the rain on Kotzebue’s Front Street, a gravel boulevard that curves along the shore, Pungowiyi surveyed Kotzebue Sound. The frozen expanse usually buzzed with snowmobiles. On that day it was silent. “Ice should be a lot thicker,” he said. “Most folks would be out ice fishing for cod and smelt here on the bay.”

What worried Pungowiyi, though, was the action within the ice itself.

Arctic sea ice is a living platform. “When the ice forms, it sustains many things in its own food web,” he explained. “It harbors nutrients and microscopic things. There’s food in there for tiny organisms and little animals. Krill graze on the ice. The ice becomes a critical part of the productivity of the Arctic Ocean.”

What makes that possible are brine channels, networks of needle-thin cracks and tubes that allow hundreds of species of bacteria, fungi, and other single- and multicelled organisms to thrive within the ice. Even during the full darkness of the Arctic winter, bacteria survive by feeding on specks of waste from algae and other organic material trapped in the ice. Sea ice nurtures such a varied menagerie that astrobiologists study it to see how extraterrestrial life might survive in extreme environments.

The real action happens in spring, when the reemergence of daylight triggers a bloom of ice algae, which begins as a thin web and can grow into 10-foot-long strands that sway like curtains from the underside of the ice. If ice is the soil of the polar sea, ice algae are its most important plant—the organic machine that converts the sun’s energy into food.

The ice algae fuel explosive growth among tiny zooplankton, which feed on them. Larger zooplankton like amphipods, pteropods, copepods, and krill all feed on the algae and the smaller zooplankton. At this lower level of the food web, the shrinking summer ice pack is beginning to change things, but not in the way you might expect. Winter sea ice still forms, but ever later in the season, and come spring the algae strands still grow. What’s changing is the chemistry of the sea itself. In particular, ocean acidification is making it more difficult for shelled plankton to form their shells.

Scientists have long believed that sea ice acts like a giant pool cover, limiting the Arctic Ocean’s uptake of atmospheric CO2. Although some researchers question that assumption, it’s true that as summer ice cover has retreated, Arctic waters have become more acidic. And the process is going to accelerate, because cold water takes up CO2 more readily than warmer water. That’s bad news for creatures like shelled pteropods, an abundant and critical food source in the Arctic, because as the ocean acidifies, it becomes more difficult for them to grow their shells.

On the pH scale of 0 to 14, neutral is 7—pure freshwater. Zero is like battery acid. Most seawater is somewhere around 8, slightly alkaline.Pteropods, pea-size mollusks known as “sea butterflies,” grow their shells by absorbing aragonite. But as seawater acidifies, it becomes undersaturated in calcite and aragonite, forms of calcium carbonate vital to shell formation.

Several years ago, Victoria Fabry, an oceanographer at California State University at San Marcos, noticed that if you drop pteropods in extremely acidified seawater, their shells would begin to dissolve. In 2008, Steeve Comeau, a researcher with France’s Laboratoire d’Océanographie de Villefranche, scooped up some Arctic Ocean pteropods off the coast of Svalbard, Norway. He maintained a control group at the natural water pH of 8.09 and kept a second group in seawater lowered to 7.78, a level of acidity that climate models predict will occur in parts of the Arctic Ocean by 2029. Over six hours, both groups continued to grow their shells—but the pteropods in the more acidic water grew 28 percent more slowly.

The year 2029 may seem remote, but as climate change continues to speed up, long-range predictions have a way of becoming short range. For example, a paper published in March 2009 by scientists at the University of Berne, Switzerland, predicted that aragonite undersaturation would start turning up in Arctic surface waters around the year 2016. But just eight months later, Canadian researchers announced that it was already happening. They had discovered mildly acidified seawater—strong enough to cause concern for pteropods—in the summer of 2008 in the Arctic Ocean above the Canadian archipelago.

That acidified seawater shows up only during summer, when the ocean north of Canada is ice free. But climate modelers predict that aragonite undersaturation will become more widespread. As more of the Arctic Ocean becomes ice free in summer, more acidic seawater may make it harder and harder for some of the most critical feedstocks of the Arctic ecosystem to form the shells that keep them alive.

The amazing blood of the arctic cod

The Arctic Ocean is so cold that only a handful of fish and marine mammals can survive there. Subsurface temperatures range from 37.4 degrees Fahrenheit on a warm summer day to 28.76 degrees, the freezing point of seawater. In those extreme conditions, one fish species in the center of the Arctic food web is uniquely equipped to thrive: the Arctic cod.

A slender and smaller cousin of the Pacific and Atlantic cod, the Arctic cod is often seen near the underside of the ice, feeding on pteropods, copepods, krill, worms, and small fish. It uses cracks and seams in the ice much as tropical fish use a coral reef: as a refuge from predators. Its survival in these heat-sapping waters depends on two things: blood and fat.

Arctic cod blood is a biological marvel. The fish survives thanks to a special protein that acts as an antifreeze, preventing the blood from crystallizing at temperatures below freezing. As for the fat, it is hard to overstate its importance to the health of the entire Arctic food web. Pound for pound, Arctic cod contain nearly twice the energy of groundfish like pollock, which thrive in the subarctic region of the North Pacific. For animals in the Arctic, where every calorie is dearly earned and spent, that’s a massive bang for the buck.

The Bering Strait acts as the border between the Pacific and the Arctic Ocean. But man-made distinctions mean little in the biological world. What really separates Arctic from subarctic species is the Bering Sea cold pool, a tongue of near-freezing seawater that constantly expands and recedes south from the strait. During warmer summer months, some subarctic species like pollock and flounder can move into Arctic waters, but the winter cold pool eventually drives them back south.

Since the early 1980s, though, the cold pool has been in retreat. Rising air temperatures and the shrinking ice pack have pushed warmer waters more than 140 miles north of the cold pool’s mid-century baseline. At least 23 species in the Bering Sea have marched north, following the warming water. Pollock and arrowtooth flounder migrated 30 miles north. Arctic cod retreated, unable to compete with larger subarctic species.

Not all the news is bad, however. Arctic cod represent a most critical nexus point in the Arctic food web, and their place in the ecosystem has so far been well protected by both human and natural systems. In the past four years, the cold pool has regained some of its lost ground (possibly because of a shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, an El Niño–like pattern of climate variability), but over the long term, fisheries scientists expect the cold pool to continue its northward retreat. There is a limit, though. “Above a certain latitude it still gets dark and cold enough in winter for seasonal ice to form, and that creates the cold pool,” says Franz Mueter, a University of Alaska fisheries biologist who studies the state’s Arctic and subarctic marine systems. “It’s going to be a long time before you see the full year-round expansion of Bering Sea groundfish into the Arctic.”

Also in the Arctic cod’s favor: a fishing ban. To prevent a free-for-all in newly ice-free waters, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council in 2009 banned all large-scale commercial fishing in American territorial waters above the Bering Strait. Perhaps most important, the ban covers not just fish but “all other forms of marine animals and plant life.” That may forestall the kind of trouble now brewing in the waters around Antarctica, where a fast-growing industrial krill fishery (it’s sold as food for farmed salmon and pressed into oil for omega-3 supplements) threatens the base of the food chain in the southern ocean. Krill are less abundant in the Arctic, but the growing demand for the crustaceans could lead krill processors to turn their eyes to northern waters.

“Fishermen are frontiersmen,” said Caleb Pungowiyi, who was among those who fought for the ban. “They want to expand their territory. Before you allow any industrialized fisheries in the Arctic, you need to know the science on the stocks, how they can be sustainably fished.”

The ban isn’t written in stone. It’s designed to prohibit fishing until biologists can get a better handle on the Arctic Ocean. But for now at least the Arctic cod—and the creatures it eats—won’t have to dodge any trawl nets.

Why the seals need snow

To follow the web to the next trophic level—seals—I hopped a plane to Fairbanks, about 400 miles east of Kotzebue, and met with Brendan Kelly at the University of Alaska. Kelly has been studying Arctic pinnipeds (seals and walrus) for more than 30 years. I caught up to him in a forest of white spruce at the edge of the campus, where he was training one of his seal-sniffing Labradors. Every spring Kelly uses a team of dogs to locate ringed seal pupping dens, which are hidden in snow caves on sea ice.

“Nachiq!” he called out, using the Iñupiaq word for ringed seal. “Find the nachiq.” A young Lab bounded through the trees, trying to pick up the scent of a seal flipper Kelly had hidden. The dog found the flipper and presented the slobbery treasure to the professor.

“See these growth rings?” Kelly said, pointing to faint stripes on the inch-long flipper claws. “They indicate this seal was…let’s see…five, six…seven years old!”

Ringed seals are small, as seals go, but they are the most numerous and widely distributed pinnipeds in the Arctic. They’re one of the few animals whose range extends from Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, in the North Pacific, all the way to the North Pole. They eat just about anything in the water column—worms to pteropods and krill—but they prefer fish like Arctic cod.

The ringed seal’s numerical and territorial success can be chalked up to those sharp, tough claws. “They use them to maintain breathing holes in the ice,” Kelly told me. During autumn and winter, a ringed seal will maintain six or more breathing holes, sometimes visiting them several times a day to poke and scratch away the ice.

Ringed seals can claw through ice, but they can’t create ice. Or snow. Two weeks after we spoke, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) proposed listing both ringed seals and bearded seals as threatened under the Endangered Species Act—a proposal based in large part upon Kelly’s research. The two species would be the first after the polar bear to be listed as a direct result of global warming. NOAA, which is responsible for threatened and endangered marine species, is expected to make its final decision on the listing later this year.

How did the ringed seal go from healthy and abundant to threatened, seemingly overnight? Loss of sea ice, of course—but also loss of snow.

Ice is important to ringed seals because they almost never come ashore. They use sea ice for resting, molting, escaping killer whales, and nursing their young. “The seal’s situation with ice is kind of analogous to a large population of fish in a lake,” Kelly explained. “Start draining the lake, and at any given point the fish may remain numerous. But so long as the lake continues to drain, you reasonably would have to conclude that the fish are threatened.

“It would be unwise to wait until the fish were in low numbers to conclude that further draining was a serious conservation concern,” he added.

The surprise with seals is how reliant they are on snow cover. In early spring, a pregnant ringed seal will hollow out a snow cave around one of her breathing holes. “They can haul up onto the ice and still remain completely encapsulated in the snow,” Kelly said. Ringed seals give birth and nurse their pups in these cozy subnivean—that is, under snow—lairs. Outside it can be a killing 60 or 70 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, but in the lair it’s a comfortable 23 degrees above.

Of course, carving out a snow cave requires deep snow. “And that,” said Brendan Kelly, “is the problem.”

Arctic snow cover in June—when seal pups still need the protection of their lairs—is about half what it was 45 years ago. Rain and warmer temperatures in the spring bring an earlier snowmelt, which destroys the lairs and exposes the pups to extreme cold and predators like polar bears, Arctic foxes, and even ravens. With their powerful sense of smell, polar bears can sniff out intact lairs, too, but it takes time for them to dig through the snow, giving pups a chance to escape. In years when lack of snow cover has forced ringed seals to raise pups in the open, nearly every pup has been eaten.

A large portion of the Alaskan Arctic snowfall comes in late autumn, in November and December storms. When snow falls on ice, it sticks and accumulates. But during a warm autumn, it falls on open water.

Nearly an inch of rain fell on Kotzebue during my five-day visit. Instead of falling as 10 inches of snow, that precipitation was all lost as water. Worse, the warm air and rain melted three feet of existing snowpack, leaving a net loss of nearly four feet—that much less snow for pupping lairs six months from now. Come spring, that weather anomaly could be a death sentence for a seal pup.

The bears’ race against time

Ringed seals and other ice-associated pinnipeds aren’t merely the polar bear’s prey. They’re its raison d’être. Fossil and DNA records suggest that the white bears began diverging from brown bears around 200,000 years ago. “Some brown bear populations figured out that all these little sausages were available out there on the ice,” said Kelly, “and with their powerful noses, the bears could easily smell out the seals.”

Brown bears, especially the North American grizzly subspecies, are famously omnivorous. Their food web ranges from roots and berries to salmon and deer. Diet largely determines their size. The Kodiak subspecies is the largest—they rival polar bears in size—because Kodiaks consume massive amounts of southwestern Alaska’s protein- and fat-rich salmon.

Polar bears, by contrast, subsist almost entirely on Arctic ice seals, chiefly ringed and bearded seals. No other food comes close to providing the amounts of fat the bear needs to survive the Arctic’s extreme cold. “To a polar bear, seals are giant fat pills swimming around out there,” says Steven Amstrup, a former U.S. Geological Survey wildlife biologist who is now the chief scientist for Polar Bears International. Amstrup has been studying the Alaskan population for more than 30 years. The Department of the Interior relied heavily on his research when it conferred threatened status on the bear in May 2008. Amstrup has predicted that two-thirds of the world’s polar bears could disappear by 2050 if greenhouse gas emissions continue to climb at their current rate.

If polar bears evolved from brown bears, and brown bears thrive in a land-based food web, it’s natural to wonder whether polar bears could adapt by expanding their diet. Researchers have, over the years, recorded a number of instances of gastronomic experimentation by these innately curious creatures. They have been seen feeding on white whales, narwhals, walrus, little auks, Brent geese, thick-billed murres, and ptarmigan. Biologists in Svalbard, the Arctic archipelago north of Norway, have reported polar bears stalking and killing reindeer. During late autumn, when the bears of Canada’s Hudson Bay gather near the water’s edge in Churchill, Manitoba, to await freeze-up, they’ve been observed eating berries, grass, moss, lichen, and marine algae. Canadian researchers recently reported that in the springtime the Hudson Bay bears are increasingly raiding eggs and chicks from the nests of snow geese and thick-billed murre.

The polar bear’s food web may be expanding, but experts like Amstrup see the bear’s behavior as an expression of desperation, the equivalent of a polar explorer eating his shoes. Fat is the key. Even if skinnier, less insulated polar bears were to survive, reproductive rates would plummet. Female polar bears only bear cubs when their bodies have sufficient fat stores; when the fat’s not there, the bear’s body reabsorbs the embryo.

Looking for the polar bear to survive by expanding its food web, Amstrup concluded, was a fool’s gambit. “We just don’t see any evidence that suggests there’s any prey on land that’s abundant enough to support polar bears in anything like their current population,” he says.

Could polar bears adapt through interbreeding? Reports of polar bear–grizzly hybrids obtained from hunters in the Canadian Arctic have raised questions about a possible increase in interspecies breeding driven by climate change. A recent article by Kelly in Nature highlighted confirmed reports of two “grolar bears.” One was a second-generation hybrid, which indicates that the cross-species bears can survive and reproduce. “The rapid disappearance of the Arctic ice cap is removing the barrier that’s kept a number of species isolated from each other for at least 10,000 years,” Kelly told me. Pinnipeds, he believes, are especially strong candidates for hybridization, because many species have a similar number of chromosomes. “By melting the seasonal ice cap,” he said, “we’re speeding up evolution.”

Does that leave a way out for the polar bear? They are spending more time ashore, after all, where they’re likely to encounter brown bears. Prior to the mid-1990s, more than 60 percent of the Beaufort Sea population of polar bears along Alaska’s northern rim denned on sea ice. Now about the same proportion den on land.

Both Amstrup and Kelly say that scenario is unlikely. “Polar bears will starve long before they’re flooded by grizzly genes,” Amstrup told me.

“People often talk about species adapting to climate change,” Kelly added. “But the kind of adaptation that’s necessary is a change toward genes that fit the new climatic environment better than the old genes. Individuals don’t adapt genetically. Populations do. That requires generations, which requires time. Bears, seals, whales—these are long-lived animals. They need centuries to adapt. But we’re talking about losing the Arctic summer sea ice in a matter of a few decades. So the time for adaptive response may not be there.”

The human habitat

Back in Kotzebue, water ran off roofs as if poured from pitchers. The warm rain made the sea ice so dangerous that the town’s radio station, KOTZ, broadcast a public warning. “We have a matter of life and death with the thin ice,” the announcer said.

At the Nullagvik Hotel, a once-proud establishment frayed with rough use, William Berikoff waited for a bush pilot to take him home to Noatak, a village across the sound and up a recently unfrozen river. He had come across the ice a few days earlier on his snowmobile. Now, like many, he was stranded. “Nobody’s going anywhere,” he told me. “Ice is too soft. Hit a weak spot and ptuu,” he said, his hand tracing the arc of a snowmobile sinking to the seafloor.

I walked down Kotzebue’s slushy Front Street to Alex and Siikauraq Whiting’s house, a modern rambler with an Arctic Cat snowmobile parked out front. Alex is the environmental specialist for the Kotzebue tribal government. His wife is the mayor of the Northwest Arctic Borough, a county-level municipality that encompasses an area the size of Indiana. For more than a decade, Alex has been both using modern scientific tools and tapping the memories of elders to mark the effects of climate change in the Arctic.

“Come on in,” Alex said. “I’m cooking some moose stew for lunch.”

He stirred the stew while Siikauraq finished up a phone call. “This is where the food web meets the pot,” Alex said, lifting a spoon to his lips.

People in Kotzebue are extreme locavores. More than two-thirds of their diet comes from the Arctic Ocean and the frozen tundra. The average Kotzebue household harvests 3,000 to 5,000 pounds of wild meat, fish, and eggs every year. That represents more than one million pounds of biomass. “Caribou and moose, those are our beef,” Siikauraq told me. “This moose that Alex harvested, we’ve got 400 pounds of it in our freezer. It’s what we use in tacos, hamburgers, and spaghetti sauce.”

Alex set a bowl of moose stew before me. It tasted like mild venison.

“Our traditional foods are a big part of our culture and identity,” Siikauraq said. “Our elders, when they are sick, they don’t want microwaved pizza. They want fish broth. They want food from the land and sea. I feel it myself. The other day I was desperate for seal oil, my body just craved it. It’s not just food. It’s a medicine for your soul.”

“Seal oil?” I said.

“You should try it,” she said, putting some frozen white fat on the stove to melt. Alex hadn’t hunted seal in a while, so her supply came from a friend.

A lot of food gets distributed like that in the Arctic. John Chase, a colleague of Alex’s, often hunts caribou. “Sometimes I’ll trade the meat for herring eggs or halibut,” he told me one day, “but mostly I give it away to the elderly folks.”

The subsistence harvest isn’t just about culture. Economics plays a big part. Shipping costs are so prohibitive that a gallon of milk costs $9.79 at the AC Value Center on Bison Street. Most families, like the Whitings, fill their freezers with wild caribou, moose, and seal meat.

The warming of the Arctic, especially the late freeze-up of sea ice, hasn’t cut humans out of the food web. But it has warped things. Seal hunters, who work from skiffs, now have a longer autumn season. The late freeze-up means ice fishers miss the big smelt run in early autumn. On Kotzebue Sound, incomplete freezing can allow storm winds to push loose ice on top of other ice, causing it to stack and refreeze into piles similar to pressure ridges. That makes travel by snowmobile and dog team rougher and riskier.

In native villages like Kivalina and Point Hope, just up the coast from Kotzebue, people use ice cellars (root cellars dug into the permafrost) to store frozen whalemeat and muktuk (whale blubber). Now those staple foods are beginning to turn rancid as the permafrost thaws. Locals can either forgo the food or invest in chest freezers. But diesel-generated electricity costs 50 cents per kilowatt hour—about four times what most people pay in the Lower 48. The ice cellars are—well, were—free.

The most fragile web

In The Diversity of Life, E. O. Wilson described the removal of a single bird species from a temperate marsh as a way of illustrating the resilience of a complex food web. “That food chain is broken, but the ecosystem remains intact, more or less,” he wrote. “The reason is that each species in the chain is linked to additional chains.” The larger web can absorb the loss of a single link.

That may not be so true in the Arctic. The world’s most biodiverse temperate and tropical forests can contain 10,000 to 45,000 species of vascular plants. In the Arctic, there are about 2,200. In Central America, there are more than 2,800 species of non-fish vertebrates (mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians). In the Arctic, there are 322. Nearly an entire trophic level—seals—is dependent on ice, so if the ice goes away, so do the seals. Polar bears depend on three species of seal for survival. That’s it. There is not a lot of redundancy built into the system.

Much of what we know about food webs comes from the study of past top-down interruptions. In the American West, ranchers and farmers extirpated the gray wolf, resulting in a boom in deer and elk populations, which in turn changed vegetation patterns across the landscape.

What we’re seeing now is something new. Near the top of the Arctic food web, polar bears and ice seals are facing dire pressures from humans, but not from hunters with rifles. Our industrial gases are undermining the top of the food web by destroying habitat, melting the sea ice and thinning the snow cover. That results in few direct hits, of course. Some adult bears starve, but mostly it’s an invisible decimation of the next generation. Skinny polar bears don’t produce cubs. Ringed seal pups without snow cover get eaten.

At the bottom of the food web, where species populations are usually checked more by food supply than by predation, the pulse of change is faint but ominous and steadily quickening. The base of the Arctic cod’s food supply—pteropods and other plankton—are finding it more difficult all the time to create shells from seawater. At a certain point, pteropod larvae may be unable to form them at all, and then they will simply wither and die. Whether other plankton, more adaptable to acidified seawater, are able to take their place in the food web remains to be seen.

In Kotzebue today, all that’s visible to the naked eye is the rain. Incessant, warm, dreary rain. It came down in a light spatter as the Whitings and I sat through the afternoon, talking and eating celery dipped in seal oil. Thicker and more buttery than olive oil, it has a gamey tang that reminds you it came from a wild creature raised on fish. It hits the body like a shot of pure fat. In the Arctic a shot of pure fat is a shot of energy, of survival.

We finished off the seal oil. Daylight bled out of the sky and the rain continued to fall, melting more snow with each passing minute.

OnEarth contributing editor Bruce Barcott is a former Guggenheim fellow and the author of The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw (Random House). This article is provided by NRDC’s OnEarth magazine. It appears in the magazine’s Spring 2011 issue and online at onearth.org

The post The Arctic Food Web Is Unraveling, Endangering Polar Bears and Humans Alike appeared first on The Faster Times.

By Elizabeth Grossman, The Pump Handle

As I’ve watched the hearings House Republicans have been holding over the past couple of weeks on the economic impact of environmental and occupational health and safety regulations, I’ve been thinking about what I’ve learned about and seen of the working and environmental conditions in places that are now the hub of world manufacturing. I’ve been picturing the smog that hangs over Chinese cities. I’ve been thinking about the fatal despair of young high-tech workers at Foxconn and Samsung factories in China and South Korea, about the depressed wages and severe working conditions at factories in the Philippines, and about the electronics workers I met in Indonesia this past fall who overflowed with questions about the health effects of their working conditions.

During the weeks of February 7 and 14 – in the run-up to the February 19 vote on the FY2011 budget bill – the House Education and Workforce, Energy and Commerce, Judiciary, Oversight, and Rules Committees have all held hearings examining how environmental and workplace safety regulations impact job creation.

The House Republicans’ premise is that the regulations created to implement current United States environmental and occupational health standards are costly impediments to job and business growth, and prevent the U.S. from fully competing as a manufacturing power in the global economy. These regulations, we’ve heard from Republican House members and from witnesses representing business associations and manufacturing companies, have caused the U.S. to lose jobs to foreign countries, particularly to developing Asian nations, like China. Without such regulatory obligations, these speakers imply, domestic manufacturing could be booming.

Michael Friedrich, president of a Wisconsin company called MCM Composites, gave this assessment in testimony before the Oversight Committee on February 10th:

We cannot compete on labor costs…The total cost of production labor (hourly wage plus health care, payroll taxes, unemployment compensation, etc) in China, India, East Asia, and Mexico is only a fraction of the cost in the US. What costs $30 per hour to produce in the U.S. costs $15 per hour in East Asia and $5.00 in Mexico. The only way we can compete – and we can compete – in the world economy is through higher productivity coupled with lower overhead burden. The current burden includes the compliance costs of federal regulations, and with the threat of additional burden the U.S. is moving entirely in the wrong direction.

By contrast, Democratic members and witnesses from academic institutions, non-governmental organizations, and also some businesses maintain that government regulations that safeguard occupational, environmental, and public health result in net benefits (including financial benefits) that outweigh any upfront financial costs of implementation – for instance, see University of Maryland law professor Rena Steinzor’s testimony before the House Energy & Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Environment and Economics. They also maintain that the regulations and the standards they implement can produce and preserve jobs – and are essential to basic public safety. “I defy you not to think about regulations the next time you get on a commuter airline or the next time you drink tap water in Chicago. Think about it in the morning when you have your eggs,” said Representative Mike Quigley (D-IL) during a February 10th House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing.

The hearings’ exchanges have largely been long on rhetoric and principles, and short on legislative specifics, with each side – and their witnesses – citing competing studies to prove their points.

From what’s been voiced by House Republicans, their goal appears to be removal of what they consider regulatory obstacles to industrial productivity – the legally enforceable occupational and environmental safety standards designed to protect workers and the public from adverse health effects of industrial processes. Regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency to enforce air-quality standards and by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to address workplace noise are among their top targets.

While U.S. House leaders have been calling for these rollbacks ostensibly to compete with China, it’s worth considering environmental and working conditions are like in what is currently the world’s manufacturing hub. Here is some recent news to bear in mind when considering what life is like in the absence of rigorous environmental and occupational safety standards two generations after The Great Leap Forward, China’s rapid industrialization campaign (led by Mao Zedong starting in the late 1950s) that did begin to transform the country from a rural agrarian to urban industrial society but at devastating human cost:

Thanks to implementation of the Clean Air Act and Occupational Safety and Health Act in 1970, hundreds of thousands of premature pollution-related deaths and thousands of work-related fatalities have been avoided. So the question policy-makers need to be asking as they consider the current attack on environmental, health and safety regulations is do we want to make a great leap backward?

Elizabeth Grossman is the author of Chasing Molecules: Poisonous Products, Human Health, and the Promise of Green Chemistry, High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health, and other books. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including Scientific American, Salon, The Washington Post, The Nation, Mother Jones, Grist, and the Huffington Post. Chasing Molecules was chosen by Booklist as one of the Top 10 Science & Technology Books of 2009 and won a 2010 Gold Nautilus Award for investigative journalism.

This post appears courtesy of The Pump Handle.

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The Obama administration’s announcement yesterday that it hopes to make a six-year, $53 billion dollar investment in high-speed rail networks is bound to win big applause from green groups that have been less-than-impressed with the President lately. If enviros were the only folks pleased, the effort — viewed from a crass political standpoint — would still be worth it, a chance to shore up support from a key liberal constituency. But chances are good that a broad range of voices are also going to pleased with the announcement. And that makes high-speed rail a political trifecta.

Here’s the thing about high-speed rail: It’s not just for greeniacs. Labor unions will be psyched by the President’s proposal since the new rail lines will lead to a construction boom and a load of good jobs. Manufacturers will like the idea because its “Buy America” provisions will result in a ton of new contracts for steel, aluminum, parts, and other equipment. Commute-stressed suburbanites will likely appreciate the idea of a kind of travel that doesn’t involve sitting in traffic. And swing voters hungry for vision — the very people Obama’s “futurama” State of the Union Address was pitched to — should like the boldness.

And it is bold. Obama is hoping that within 25 years, 80 percent of Americans will have access to trains that go more than 250 miles per hour and connect to the rest of the country’s rail networks. The bullet trains (which are already old hat in Europe, China, and Japan) are seen as vital to maintaining the United States’ economic competitiveness in the twenty-first century. As Vice President Joe Biden put it a press event today in Philadelphia announcing the initiative: “We cannot compromise. The rest of the world is not compromising.”

Some of the first reporting on the Administration’s announcement predicts Republican opposition to the plan. I have to wonder if standard horse-race journalism hasn’t clouded the early analysis. It seems obvious to me that this is a slam dunk that will wind up garnering bi-partisan support. If the White House didn’t think it had a winner on its hands, it wouldn’t be making this a top item of spending expansion in budget negotiations that are bound to focus on cuts.

This is a progressive priority that’s going to pass. It enjoys strong support from two pillars of the “professional left” — organized labor and the green groups. An effective DC insider, Transportation Secretary (and Republican) Ray LaHood, to spearhead Capitol Hill lobbying. And, perhaps, most crucial, the assent of big business, which only has only has contracts to gain and nothing to lose. You’re not going to see the Chamber of Commerce twisting arms to get people to vote against the provision.

High-speed rail is not only the very epitome of smart growth — a sound investment that boosts the economy by actually reducing resource consumption in the long-term — it turns out that it’s also smart politics.

This post originally appeared on The EnvironmentaList.

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Last month IBM announced a big project in Rhode Island, and at first I just skimmed over the announcement as one of a dozen or so releases about the company’s various “smart” endeavors. But on a closer look, the project looks a lot like a model for collaboration that other states should pay attention to, particularly as they’re trying to tackle everything from climate change to healthcare with fewer resources than ever.

It all started with some of the state’s universities wishing they could get their hands on a super computer. “No one had really thought about sharing computer infrastructure,” Dr. Nicholas (Nick) Bowen, VP of Technology for IBM, said. “I said why don’t you get together and buy a super computer? Super computers are expensive, but if you divide it by 10 it’s a lot less.”

So Brown bought the computer and shared the cost and benefits with nine other schools. At the same time, IBM was just launching its Smarter Planet initiative, and Bowen got to thinking that the Rhode Island super computer could be used to improve a lot of the state’s services, not just to conduct research at the schools. “We were starting to see that by instrumenting any process that hadn’t previously been instrumented, you could find and eliminate about 30 percent of waste right off the bat,” Bowen said.

After seeing how simple IT solutions that incorporated wireless sensors and data analysis had improved things like traffic in Stockholm or quality control at a food company, Bowen began talking to the folks in Rhode Island about some of the ways they could use their new super computer to address major issues around the state. Together, they began bringing together stakeholders of all sorts into a group eventually called the Ocean State Consortium of Advanced Resources (OSCAR). Comprised of stakeholders from the local and state government, various public agencies, private businesses and the universities, OSCAR managed to pinpoint four initial projects that could benefit from the sort of research and analysis the new computer.

“Early on weren’t sure where this would go, but we felt the conversations were powerful and we were talking about projects that, if we could really do them, would have a huge impact,” Bowen said.

Interestingly, Bowen’s involvement in OSCAR after the purchase of the super computer has been all volunteer work. “It’s a community service relationship at this point,” he says. “IBM has a unique program called the Partnership Executive Program (and you know we love acronyms, so it’s the PEP program), and I had been assigned to be the PEP for both Brown and the State of Rhode Island. It’s a unique program in the sense that it’s really about building relationships; it’s not about selling, but about understanding the needs of a partner and providing a single voice to the client if they’re ever really happy or upset with their local sales people. It’s a safe place to turn if they’re not getting exactly what they want or if they want to talk about deeper, longer term things.”

Of course, Bowen admits that those relationships could lead to more business in the future, but that’s not the focus of the project. Right now the focus is launching the first of four OSCAR projects: Greening the Knowledge District.

Providence, Rhode Island is considered by many to be the birthplace of the industrial revolution in the United States. The city used to be a manufacturing hub, and at one point produced much of the country’s jewelry. Then routes 95 and 195 were built, effectively cutting the manufacturing district off from the rest of the city. As manufacturing began to decline, the district became more and more of an eyesore. At the same time, the area’s universities and other institutions built right up to the border between the rest of Providence and the industrial area. In the past five years the state has moved the intersection of these routes, reintegrating the district with the rest of the city, reclaiming 300 acres of land and officially naming the area the “Knowledge District.”

“Now imagine you’ve got ten institutions of higher education and hospitals sitting on the edge of a condemned area, and all of a sudden that area is opened up and the state and city say hey, you can start putting buildings here,” Bowen says. “That’s going to spark a lot of revitalization. In addition to new buildings, the area has a lot of great existing buildings – classic original factories that are now getting refurbished.”

OSCAR plans to make sure the revitalization of the Knowledge District is as energy-efficient as possible. The idea is to go and measure electrical use today (get a baseline), with the assumption being that, for the most part, these are inefficient buildings, and then to drive projects over the next few years to monitor their energy usage and get people to use less electricity.

It’s the first of a handful of projects the group has planned. There are four initial projects, each led by a different committee. According to Bowen, the “green” project is going first because that committee had a particularly passionate and dedicated leader and because it’s the project that the general community seemed most interested in. “They actually had to turn away volunteers,” he says.

Students from Brown and Rhode Island School of Design began measuring buildings in the Fall 2010 semester, and will continue to monitor buildings through this year, recommending various improvements.

Other projects the group will roll out include the Generations project, which will monitor children born in Rhode Island to begin to get a sense of how the environment affects a person’s DNA over time. “We know that changes in the environment can cause DNA to change during a human lifetime, and that people with certain kinds of cancer have certain things in their DNA, but researchers have not been able to make correlations because don’t have year after year DNA to study,” Bowen says. “So they don’t know if that chromosome was that way when you were born, or when you were 10, or the week before you were diagnosed with lung cancer.”

The Rhode Island study will take samples of DNA from babies when they are born, along with samples from their mothers and from their umbilical chords and placentas. Researchers will then take samples from this group for 80 years. It will be the most comprehensive longitudinal study of environmental health impacts ever done.

What makes Rhode Island the perfect place for such a study is that one hospital generates about 90 percent of births in the state, and people born in Rhode Island don’t tend to leave. A study of people born in the state in 1960 revealed that 85 percent of them were still in the state. “If you’re a scientist who wants to do a longitudinal study on how DNA changes based on environmental changes, that is the perfect situation,” Bowen says.

It will be interesting to see how the OSCAR projects progress, but in a certain sense it’s already a success story. Stakeholders from a variety of institutions, all with a different horse in the race, have managed to come together to share resources and make decisions based on what they can feasibly do, and what might be best for the greater good. It’s not a government group dictating the way things will go, or a nonprofit coming in and telling the community what’s best for it, it’s a community group comprised of both government and nonprofit members, along with business people and students, and that group has managed to inspire other members of the community to get involved.

“We’ve seen this a lot with the smarter planet initiative: There’s a lot of pent-up frustration and passion out there because people actually really want to participate, they just often don’t know how.”

By bringing people together and strategizing four real, achievable goals, OSCAR has harnessed that passion for the good of the community. Which is pretty darn smart.

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