This is the Environment Show. It's about our stewardship of the Earth and the beauty
and mystery of life in all its forms. The Environment Show's a national production
made possible by the W. Alton Jones Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the Turner Foundation,
the J.M. Kaplan Fund and Hemings Motor News, the Bible of the Collector Carhovy,
1-800-C-A-R-H-E-R-E. Your host is Peter Burley.
Coming up on this week's Environment Show, federal and Oregon officials have designed a flexible
approach to save the Colho Salmon, environmentalist, call it a disaster. We talk green about the
potential danger posed by chemicals which may mimic hormones and humans in wildlife. A portrait
of East Tennessee Hills where the people are wed to the land. And in the Earth calendar,
basin on the tall grass prairie slow down their stampede long enough to give birth. These
stories and more coming up on this week's Environment Show.
Action by the Clinton Administration, an Oregon Governor Kitshaber to save Colho Salmon
are putting an issue the Federal and Dangered Species Act itself. Populations of Colho Salmon
in Northern California and Oregon have been declining. So much so that the National Marine's
fishery service has just gone through a process to determine whether the Colho should be listed
as threatened or endangered. What the fishery service did was to list the Colho and California
and a southern Oregon border but not to listed an Oregon. The service did not list an
Oregon in part because they found that the state protection plan made listing unnecessary.
Some lucky, chief of the Protected Species Division for the National Marine Fisheries
Service for the Southwest Region, explained. Oregon has made a major investment in Colho
recovery and a major commitment implementing their recovery plan. And they get credit for
that and the listing determination. Is the plan which the state put together regarded
as sufficient to at least delay the necessity for listing at this point?
Yes, yes. Combined with the relative health of the coastal population, that's true. The
plan makes major changes in the ocean harvest strategy. It also resolves many of the problems
that have risen out of massive hatchery programs in the past. And it begins to work on
many of the freshwater habitat issues. We think there's room for improvement there and we have
an agreement with Oregon that under which fishery service and Oregon will work to resolve some
of the differences we have about the freshwater habitat part of their plan.
I presume the differences with respect to the freshwater habitat relate to further control
of logging practices. Is that correct?
We would like to see some additional modifications to their forest practice rules.
Paula Bridges, Oregon Governor Kits Harbor's assistant for natural resources, says the
negotiated plan is preferable to listing because the state has gotten concessions from landowners
which could not be achieved through the listing process. And this is where the conflict arises.
Environmental groups charge that the plan is nothing more than an agreement to negotiate with
a timber industry about forest practices like not cutting on steep slopes and long stream beds.
Something the industry has been reluctant to do. Without binding commitments in place,
environmentalists say the plan is inadequate to protect salmon.
Diane Valentine is the salmon protection advocate for the Oregon Natural Resources Council,
an environmental group which is suing the fishery service over its refusal to list the co-ho.
There's promises made that something's going to happen in the future.
And under the Endangered Species Act, under the law, there's no provision for avoiding a listing
based on promises. It has to be based on existing regulatory mechanisms and the adequacy or
inadequacy of those. Basically, this memorandum of agreement that's been signed between
the federal agency and the state of Oregon says that over the course of the next six months,
the federal and the state governments are going to work together to come up with some increased
improved forest protections. And basically, the state of Oregon has two years from today
to actually implement any of those. It is promising to do so in a quick and forthright manner,
but again, these are just promises. It's very hard for us to have faith in promises when during
the whole course of designing this plan. The forest industry refused to cooperate with any kind
of increases in protections. And now we're being told, well, they're going to do it in the next two
years. And if it doesn't happen in the next two years, then perhaps the National Marine Fisheries
Service will list the co-ho. So basically what we're seeing is just more promises and more delays.
Speaking for the fisheries service, Jim Lecky agrees that modifications are needed in forest
practice rules and restoration of streams is necessary, but he does not think the Oregon plan is
inadequate. A similar dispute in Texas resulted in judgment against the government. He says this one
is different. This is a plan that's of much greater proportions than the one in Texas. It has a
much higher level of commitment by the state government and the state actually has been implementing
this plan for a couple of years. So the state, we have, we also, we have signed an
memorandum of understanding with the governor's office in Oregon. And the state legislature has
passed legislation to provide substantial amount of funding to ensure that this plan is fully
implemented. The Clinton Administration approach to enforcement of the Endangered Species Act
by negotiating protection plans with states and landowners as an alternative to listing
is regarded by enforcement agencies and the state of Oregon as an effective and flexible
strategy. Also, it may diminish the pressure in Congress to repeal the Endangered Species
Act altogether. But to the Oregon Natural Resources Council, it's a cynical abdication of
responsibility. I think that the Clinton Administration knows that it's very legally vulnerable here.
I think they really know that they are not following the letter or the spirit of the Endangered
Species Act with this decision and many of their other decisions. But I think they've just made a
conscious decision that they're going to put this on the backs of the environmental community.
That was Diane Valentine. Three things now hang in the balance in Oregon. First, the future of the
coho itself is the Oregon plan strong enough to save it. Second is whether listing under the
Endangered Species Act can be avoided on the basis of a state-negotiated recovery and protection plan.
And third, whether the Clinton Administration's flexible approach to Endangered Species protection
through negotiated settlements can survive legal challenge.
We're talking green and I'm your host, Peter Burley. Today, we're talking about hormones that
interfere with the reproductive systems of animals and humans. They're called endocrine disruptors,
and we want to hear from you. Our number is 1-888-49-Green.
Questions about endocrine disruptors gained widespread attention with the publication a year ago
of book entitled Our Stolen Future. Are we threatening our fertility intelligence and survival?
The book suggests there's a growing evidence that a broad range of synthetic chemicals are
disrupting animal and human or net hormonal systems. Here to help us understand what all this
means and what has happened since the release of the book is coauthored Diane Dumanaski.
She coauthored the book with Theo Culberin and John Peterson Myers.
Diane Dumanaski is reported on national and global environmental issues for the Boston Globe
and she's in Massachusetts. Also with us is Sheldon Krimsky. He's professor of urban and
environmental policy at Tufts University and he's done extensive research on science, ethics,
and public policy. Diane, before we talk about what's happened in the year since the book was
published, tell us briefly what it's all about and why it has stirred so much controversy.
Since Silent Spring, which Rachel Carson wrote in 1962, we've been operating according to a simple
notion that toxic chemicals equal cancer that's really dominated our thinking and our policy.
What our stolen future does is say that we have to move beyond cancer in our thinking and in fact,
it argues that in our obsession with cancer, we've overlooked other important health effects.
These include the disruption of development early in life with consequences that might involve
impaired reproduction, brain and behavioral effects, and suppressed immune systems.
I think the book has caused a lot of controversy because it raises some important questions that
point to alarming symptoms that are being reported in the medical literature such as declining
human sperm count levels. So this obviously sees the public intention and caused a lot of debate.
Well, the scary thing about it is I read the book was that while we have had this huge regulatory
apparatus set up to figure out what doses of what give you cancer, what you're saying is that
there are dangers that really have to do with how life is put together at the very basics,
how we reproduce and so on, that nobody's even thought about while they were chasing down the
cancer path. Is that the message? Yes, that's the message. There are an estimated 80 to 100,000
synthetic chemicals that we put into the environment since World War II, and most of these chemicals have
not been tested for the kinds of effects and the questions that are raised in our stolen future.
Sheldon Kremsky as a student of public policy and ethics and so on, you must have seen
many cases in which scientists have put forward theories and then they kind of go by the wayside.
Is the stolen future book a call to action as Silent Spring was or will it be dismissed as
1990s media hype in a new form? Well, I think that stolen food is already having an important
impact in getting the scientific community to focus attention on many of these questions,
whether it will have the legacy of Silent Spring is yet to be determined. And of course, the spooky
thing about this one is that it may be a generation or even two generations later that the full impact
is understood. Correct, and it also may be the effects are subtle and spread throughout the population.
And it may be difficult to pick them out. Okay, let's go to the phones. Our number is 1-888-49-green,
and we have a call from Natalie and Pennsylvania. Natalie, you're talking green in the
environment show. Hi, I was wondering what social implications you foresee coming out of the
under-cringer-strupter issue, and if you think that people will become more fearful or more
apathetic about these chemicals since they seem to be everywhere. That is a good question.
Let's hear from you both on that. Diane. Well, it's pretty difficult to say whether they're
going to become more fearful or more apathetic. I think it depends on whether they feel they can
do anything about it. And in our stolen future, we do have a chapter called Defending ourselves
where we talk about many steps from personal steps to community steps to steps that might be
taken by national governments, two steps that are going to be required that are going to require
international cooperation and perhaps international treaties. I think people only become apathetic if
they feel there's nothing that they can do about it. And we hope we didn't leave readers in that
position. Natalie, thanks for your question. I have an email question here from Jonathan and
Nashville. And he asks, are you saying that we should ban pesticides? And if we do, wouldn't that
create starvation and disease that would be more difficult than an unproven speculation about
reproductive disorders? Diane, what do you think? Well, our book doesn't call for a total ban on
pesticides. We really talk about a need to screen these compounds to find out which pesticides and
inert ingredients are endocrine disrupting. And in general, we call for a more selective use of
pesticides. We're basically saying that we don't think whether they're endocrine disruptors or
not pesticides or poisons by design. So we're basically urging that people stop using pesticides
for fervilous or cosmetic purposes such as home and garden applications. One of the questions,
of course, is we understand an industry that's going to defend its cash flow. But I'm sure there
are scientists on both sides of this issue that see it in different degrees of severity.
Sheldon, has there been broad splits in the scientific community on these issues?
There are clearly some divisions. I think even the scientists who feel like this is a strong
hypothesis and have to be investigated thoroughly are not convinced that we yet have the evidence
that human exposures to ambient or to the kind of chemicals that have been brought out in the
book. The human exposures are yet known to be correlated with human disease.
And so the argument there is if not known, then we shouldn't act because that might cause the
discussion. Well, not necessarily. We have in the European community something called the
Procursionary Principle. We haven't quite adopted God in the United States yet, but it says if you
have strong suspicion that something is causing harm to animals, even though you don't have
definitive evidence that it's causing harm to humans, that you may want to take precautions.
This raises, I think, a question that came to us from Alice in Atlanta by email. She asks,
as a woman of childbearing age, what should I do to minimize risk from endocrine disruption?
Well, in the chapter defending ourselves, we discussed various measures that individuals can take
and they range from not microwaving and plastic until we have better consumer information about
which plastics are safe because heat will accelerate the migration of these compounds into the food.
The other kinds of actions that individuals can take is to religiously observe fish advisories.
The other thing is that if the dietary recommendations that emerge from this issue
are the same as those that emerge to prevent cancer and heart disease. If one were to eat less
animal fat, eat lower on the food web, more fruits, vegetables, and grains, then you would be
protecting your health because a lot of these, particularly the persistent hormone-disrupting
compounds tend to travel through animal fat. So anything that is fatty and at the top of the
food web is likely to carry a lot of contaminants. Okay, while I'm afraid our time is up,
our guests have been Diane Domenowski, who is a co-author of the book Our Stone and Future,
and Sheldon Krimski, who is Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy at Tufts University.
We want to hear from you. Our number is 1-888-49-Green, and I'm your host, Peter Burley.
We all have places which are special to us. For some, they're city streets,
for others, they're deep in the wilderness. Author Gary Ferguson traveled 4,000 miles across a
handful of the last great forests in America and presents a portrait of the East Tennessee Hills.
His book, Sylvan Path, is published by St. Martin's Press. It celebrates the beauty of these woods
and the people whose lives are firmly wed to them. If I hadn't already lost my heart to the
woods of East Tennessee, I would have lost it again tonight, Saturday. At the end of a long
drive on web of dirt roads, hopscotching past hand-painted signs with big blue arrows pointing me ever
on to the foot of Laurel Mountain and Hillbillies. I park on the grass along with at least 50 other cars,
walk across a patch of open ground below a modest house wrapped in tar paper, to the base of a
grand run of forest. The trunks of the trees were patchy, threadbare coats of light in the color of
olives and chalk. The air smells like ginger and pepper and bags of peat. At the edge of the woods,
some 150 folding chairs are set up in the open air, facing a small wooden stage where six musicians
who live nearby. Five from the same family are plucking and singing great licks of blue grass
every now and then someone climbing up from the audience to belt out a song or two about some
lost darlin' or a homesick tale about missing the sweet hills of Tennessee. Between the stage in the
chairs, 80-year-old men and overalls and six-year-old kids, middle-aged women and cotton dresses and teenagers too,
are all crowded together, spilling out a hearty mix of buck dancing and flat foot, every kick-sending
clouds of cornmeal and grits flying up from the wooden floor. After a while, a couple of old
woodcutters, Frank and Arles join me, and before long they're telling me about the finer points of
song. The balance is a thing, Arles is saying, it's a rock in motion, and the guy dragging the blade
back has to be willing to pull up, and then push down as he moves it forward again. If you don't lift
up when you're dragging back, it damn near kills the guy you're song with. Over the course of an hour,
I hear plenty more. How often you need to sharpen a saw if you're cutting oak or hickory,
as opposed to white pine or poplar, that hitting a hemlock knot is like trying to saw through glass,
and finally how it takes two people to drink moonshine. One holds a shotgun to your head to get you
to take a drink, and then you trade off. The truth is the only thing as good as the music and the
dancing are the stories, enough to fill up a hole holler. Stories about moonshine and midwives
even about church. More churches you have, says one old timer. More split apart people get.
Less they stand together. You make some moonshine here in these woods, somebody turns you in,
it's always somebody from another church. There's no getting on together.
I make camp for the night, my last night. At the end of a rutted dirt road, the twists for a mile
through deep woods, finally pedering out on the bank of the French broad river. The place is
totally without people, completely quiet. Though on the weekends it's clearly a party spot,
one of those hidden corners where rural kids come to drink beer and smash bottles into rocks,
throw up in the sand among the willows. The recent rains have picked up a million arm loads of
dirt from the surrounding hills, and dump them into the river, overwhelming it, turning it into
what looks like a channel of coffee and cream, stirred by the cottonwood snags, it's plucked off
the high banks. It has a heavy sound to it, rolling through this dark night, keeping me awake,
a kind of white noise, gone to black. I try to ignore it, then, out of boredom end up tracing a
trute in my mind, thinking of it pouring out of the hills to join the Tennessee, heading south
into Alabama, finally north again, all the way through Kentucky to the Ohio River.
But in the end, that just leaves me thinking about going, and what I really want to do is stay.
Gary Ferguson, author of the Sylvan Path, a journey through America's forests,
published by St. Martin's Press. Stay tuned, the Earth Calendar is next.
This is Cabing Season for Bison on the Tallgrass Preserve, which runs through parts of Oklahoma,
Kansas, and Nebraska. Bob Hamilton is the director of science and stewardship there, and says they
want to bring the Bison herd up to about 2000. We're probably a little over halfway through
our spring cabing season right now, and they really got to going this year about mid-April,
and we're expecting about 200 calves this spring, so we're a little bit over halfway done right now.
Bison are large animals, bulls weigh in at around 1600 pounds. Despite their size, they can run at 40
miles per hour for sustained periods of time. Adult Bison are stately creatures, with large
mane around their neck, but Hamilton says they look different when they're born.
They're pretty small. They're all in the neighborhood of probably 40 or 60 pounds.
Little red guys, kind of a cinnamon red color when they're first born, kind of an Irish set of red,
and they lose that at about two to three months of age. They go through a fairly awkward sort of geeky
looking adolescent phase where they're molting and changing to the darker adult color.
Bison are nomadic animals, running about three or four miles in a day just by grazing.
When herds are spooked, they can go much farther than that. One herd recently in Canada ran 60
kilometers to get away from a pack of wolves. So when bison cows are calving, they need to do it quickly.
Bob Hamilton says bison calves are easy prey for predators and know they need to keep up with a herd.
They usually give birth laying down. It's fairly quick, sort of enterprise, and
typically what you'll see is a cow that's dropped off from the rest of the herd. They're constantly moving.
I mean, when they're grazing, they're constantly moving. They take a bite, take a step, take a bite,
take a step. The calf typically, you know, immediately is trying to get on its feet, and usually within 30
or 40 minutes or so, they're able to stand up, and within an hour they're moving on with their mom.
The tall grass prairie preserve is over 35,000 acres of which bison have nearly total free reign.
The preserve is not a national park, but is instead owned by the nature conservancy.
Its goal is to mimic as closely as possible the natural conditions which existed before
European settlement. When there were 30 to 60 million bison spread up and down the interior of
North America. Today, there are about 200,000 bison. Bob Hamilton says many of the plants on the
tall grass prairie rely on the animals. The reason we introduced them, when we're interested in
reintroducing them, is because they're such an important part of the historical mechanics of
the ecosystem. If you really want to try to preserve the plants and animals and natural communities,
in a vegetation type like this, you have to put it back under the forces and nature that
originally created and maintained that landscape. And we know historically that was primarily
grazing and fire. And so we brought back both those forces. Bison are well suited to the prairie
because almost their entire diet consists of grass. Unlike cattle, they tend to leave other plants
like wildflowers alone. So if you have grass in your flower beds, try introducing bison.
If they eat the flowers anyway, you can always eat the bison.
Thanks for listening. This is the Environment Show, and I'm Peter Burley.
Still ahead. Cars and trucks account for over half the air pollution in urban areas. Now a generation
of cleaner cars are about to hit the streets, while automakers spend billions of dollars to capture
the market. A conversation with Sidest Gene Lykins, he says while progress has been made, the Clean
Air Act is not strong enough to stop acid rain. We'll hear about Bonobo apes of West Africa. They
share 98% of our genetic makeup, yet we know amazingly little about them, a portrait of a silent
city on the plains of Minnesota. And the musical duo of Peter and Lou Berryman, Toast Mother Nature.
These stories still ahead on the Environment Show.
The race is on. Automakers around the world are competing to make the cars and trucks we drive cleaner.
A new generation of technology is about to reach the market, fueled by concerns over air pollution
and global warming. But critics charge vehicles which run on electricity and other alternative fuels
aren't ready to compete with their gas guzzling counterparts. The Environment Show's Thomas Lallie
catches up with the annual Tour de Salle electric car rally to see what's new for this year.
For the past nine years, people have been gathering in New England to drive their alternative
fuel vehicles hundreds of miles. At first, the Tour de Salle looked like a collection of rag-tag
science projects on wheels. But the technology has improved in a very short time, and entrance
these days represent the most sophisticated things on four wheels. Tom Thompson is the executive
director of the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association, which sponsors the road rally.
We are in Northampton, Massachusetts. And today we're going to do the longest
leg of the nine-day event. We're going to do 107 miles. We're going to go from Northampton
to Greenfield, Massachusetts. We'll have a public display there. And then from there, we had up to
Bellow Falls Vermont for another public display for school children in the general public,
and then we'll finish off the night in White River Junction. From there, the rally will head over
the white mountains of New Hampshire and end in Portland, Maine. The cars will have traveled 400
miles. That may seem like a lot for electric cars, but last year the world distance record was set
at the race by a selectria car at 375 miles on a single charge. Prices for those kind of cars
are still too high for all but the wealthiest people, but as automakers invest billions of dollars,
significantly cleaner cars will become available. For instance, Toyota is spending $800 million
dollars, half of its research and development budget, on alternative fuel vehicles. Thompson says
the challenge now is making sure American companies are not left behind by their foreign competition.
And the same thing will happen in the 90s as what happened in the 70s with the first world
light oil embargo and the Toyotas and the Hondas, which I've mentioned already are either
introducing or have already introduced electric vehicles. The danger is that the United States could
lose the lead to foreign producers. Concern over the environment is the force behind these changes.
The American Lung Association calls air pollution the number one health threat in this country,
and transportation causes 60 to 90 percent of the air pollution in urban areas. Even some rural
areas today have air label unhealthy by the government. Jason Mark is a transportation analyst
with the Union of Concerns scientists. He says the problem is that while cars have gotten much
cleaner over the years, Americans are driving more miles and buying more cars.
And it's not just environmentalists who are saying this. Two major projects are looming on
the horizon, which will make it much harder and even illegal to have bad air. The US Environmental
Protection Agency wants to tighten air pollution laws, and the US is expected to sign a climate
change treaty this December, which may bind us to cutting back on carbon dioxide. The main target
of both these actions will be cars and trucks. Jason Mark says a major shift has to take place
in order to reach these goals. He says the most promising technologies are just now coming to market.
I think there's a small family of promising transportation technologies.
And those all have a sort of a common technological thread. They're powered by an electric
drive system. So in other words, instead of having a set of gears and transmissions and mechanical
wheels and axles, instead they would have electric motors sitting right at the wheels of the car.
But those are the beginnings that I'd say the predecessors to a range of electric drive
technologies that include a hybrid electric car as well as a fuel cell powered car that holds
particular promise both for clean and efficient transportation. Fuel cells, which combine hydrogen
and oxygen, are being touted as the most promising energy source for cars in the next decade or two.
They work by combining hydrogen and oxygen to produce heat. The only byproduct is water.
But even this and other new technology are not totally clean. Fuel cells today run mostly
on natural gas and electric cars are almost always powered by energy from power plants.
Tom Thompson says the goal is to run cars and the rest of the world on renewable energy.
Though that day may be far off, he says cleaner cars are right around the corner.
To the point where an event like the Tour de Sousault won't be necessary soon.
Well what we say here is that the sad news is that the day will come when the tour de Sousault
as we know it will not happen. But when that happens, it will be on the heels of the
reality that the American tour de Sousault will happen every day as Americans all across the country
open up their garage doors and back electric vehicles out of their driveway as they head to work.
The only electric car available in this country is General Motors EV-1.
But this summer a Toyota car will hit the market in Southern California.
Ford and Honda say they will introduce cars soon as well. Meanwhile if investment money is
any indication, the range of options will continue to grow. Germany's Damer Benz recently signed a
half billion dollar contract with fuel cell maker Ballard Power Systems. So after years of
hearing about alternative fuel vehicles, you may actually be sharing the road with them soon.
For the Environment Show, I'm Thomas Lally.
.
Are we making any progress in reducing acid rain?
In 1990 President Bush and his Environmental Protection Administrator William Riley,
pushed by thousands of environmental activists, managed to break the log jam in Congress,
and amendments were passed to the Clean Air Act. Those amendments were designed to put an end
to acid rain, which has been damaging lakes and ponds and forests, particularly in the eastern
portion of the country. Acid rain is formed when sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide are discharged
in the atmosphere. They mix with other pollutants, they're exposed to sunlight, moisture, and then
pushed, usually eastward by prevailing winds. The resulting chemical stew becomes acid rain.
I asked Dr. Jean Lyckons, Director of the Institute of Ecosystem Studies at Milbrooke, New York,
and a research scientist who has been studying acid rain in its effects for decades,
whether the 1990 amendments have had any effect.
Well, we've made a lot of progress, I think, in dealing with acid rain. And again, I think the
science, the input that scientists have made in clarifying again another extremely complex problem
and trying to clarify this complex problem through science, I think, has been extraordinarily
important in guiding our policy and decision makers. So we've made a lot of progress. And as you
know, the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act for the first time focused on acid rain and trying
to resolve this problem. Unfortunately, that act focused most extensively on sulfur.
And we know, and we've known for a long time, that it's more than sulfur involved in this problem.
I think the reason they act focused on sulfur was that it was an expedient thing to do.
But we're going to have to take some other action. We're going to have to reduce
nitrogen oxide emissions to the atmosphere. And that's primarily on the bill exhaust.
That's right. And we're going to have to do that because the nitrogen oxide emissions to the
atmosphere contribute to nitric acid. And that's a co-strong acid in the acid rain issue.
It's sulfuric acid, which comes from sulfur, and nitric acid, which comes from the nitric acid,
the nitrogen dioxide, and other oxide emissions. So that's an important consideration that it's
left undone, really. To further reduce acid rain,
lichens would like to see additional amendments to the Clean Air Act, including a 30 to 50% reduction
of nitrogen emissions to the atmosphere. A further reduction in sulfur and a modification of
the program that allows a polluter, who has reduced emissions more than required by law to sell
pollution credits to someone else. He says that industries that affect the northeast, where acid
rain is a real problem, should not be allowed to continue polluting simply by buying credits
from some other part of the country where acid rain does not exist. If lichens is right,
that a 30 to 50% reduction in nitric oxides will be necessary to completely stop acid rain,
it appears that major changes in the use and design of the automobile will be required.
The Environment Show wants to hear from you. Give us a call at 1-888-49-Green. That's 1-888-49-Green.
Our email address is green at wamc.org. That's green at wamc.org. Tell us what's on your mind
and give us your questions about the environment. You can visit us anytime over the internet where
you can hear the environment show. It's at www.enn.com slash enabshwo.
Joining us now is Stephanie Goishman with an update on your comments.
What have we got this week, Stephanie? Well, Peter, we received quite a few comments over
the past few weeks in response to our talking green segment on mountain lions. This one in particular
was from a man in West Virginia. He says, quote, as a hunter in West Virginia, I could have killed it,
but I realized that my family had been pioneers in that area back in the 18th century,
and I realized man is destroying everything. That's the last time I ever went hunting. We were
face to face. It was in the mountains overlooking the Ohio River, and it was just an incredible
experience coming face to face with a magnificent animal, end quote.
Here's a man who looked into the eyes of the beast and found his soul.
And we received other comments about mountain lions.
Hi, my name is Bruce Percival. I'm calling on a cell phone. My uncle has seen a mountain lion
here in northern New York State. And if the mountain lion and any other larger predators,
even bobcats, which aren't quite so large, but if they're going to continue to survive,
and I think it's important that they survive, we're going to have to have some space where
the humans haven't just torn everything all the pieces and built houses and little parks and
little shopping centers and every other darn thing. And contrary to what some of the
listeners are going to are going to believe, hunting, selected game management through hunting is not.
I don't perceive that as a real problem.
Norma Peterson, Stanford, New York. I come from Bergen County, New Jersey, and a neighbor's
son is a rock town to make his living that way. He told me a story that he was, I believed in the
Carolina's in the mountains camping. And of course rock hunting. And he had moved away about one or
two in the morning from the campsite because he couldn't sleep and he moved into a clearing,
sitting on a stump and for a long time, he said maybe an hour or something like that, sitting quietly,
watching the stars and just absorbing it. Something brushed against his leg and he looked down
and he doesn't know who was more startled. He jumped one way and the mountain, the cougar jumped
the other way but it was such a marvelous experience and unforgettable. I thought I would like to share
it with you. Enjoy your show. Thank you. What else did folks call about?
After a lively segment on nuclear power, our listeners called us with their own radiation.
Hi, my name is Bill Bach. You're my three-go New York. The fact that nuclear power
is one thing that is saving our environment from lots of greenhouse gases. I found it interesting
right before he started nuclear power. You're talking about global warming and all the concerns with that.
Thank you. My name is Mark Nixon, the Kibsey, New York. I want to make a comment on the power
situation. Everybody's getting all concerned about nuclear power. Has anybody ever thought of the
heard of the term combined cycle? This has gone from a massive technology that's been going by leaps
and bounds. It's gone from peaking units to getting into base loads now and burns very clean,
very efficient approach to 70% efficiency ratings. It's a big step in technology and it's
definitely going places. Well, Peter, that's about all we have time for, but we'll be back next week.
Thanks, Stephanie. Our number is 1-88-49-Green. Give us a call.
Living deep in the jungles of the Congo, known until just recently a zaire,
are a little-known species of ape called bonobos. Classified in 1929, they were one of the last
large mammals to be known to science. We still don't know much about them, yet they share 98% of our
genetic profile. In fact, bonobos may be the animal most similar to humans. The environment shows Thomas
Lally, spoke with Francis Duol, author of the book Bonobo, The Forgotten Ape. The only four ape species
the orangutan, the guerrilla, the chimpanzee, and the bonobo. Everyone knows the other three,
but very few people know the bonobo. The bonobos just as close to us as the chimpanzee.
You explain in the book that in everything they do, they resemble us. Just explain what you mean by that.
Well, they have a lot of facial expressions and gestures that are very human-like.
For example, bonobos are very sexy creatures, and so they have facial expressions when they have
sex. They have aggressive expressions, of course, playful expressions that look a lot like laughing,
and when they are playing, they make sounds that sound like laughing. In many ways, when they
communicate with each other, they look extremely human-like. In addition, their sexual behavior is very
human-like. Their social organization has certain things in common with humans and so on.
Now explain their social life. Who is in charge and how is it structured?
That's a big contrast with the chimpanzees. In the sense that chimpanzees are a male-bonded
society where the males clearly dominate the females and the males are extremely territorial and
have big fights with males next to us. In the bonobo, that's all completely changed. The females
seem to be in charge. The females are closely bonded. The males are actually quite competitive among
themselves, more so than chimpanzee males, it seems. The females dominate the males in that they
can claim resources. For example, if a group of bonobos enters a fruit tree in the field,
it's going to be the females first. Now, I know that sex figures prominently in their social life.
Just explain the role of how to sex work in the bonobo society.
Well, the bonobos are probably the sexiest primates that exist. Maybe we would compete with them
for that title. They have very frequent sex and in all combinations of individuals and in all
possible positions. In terms of combinations, you have lots of female female sex. For example,
partly, this power of females, the alliance is that the females form is reinforced by sexual
interactions between them. They use the sex partly for bonding, partly to eliminate tension. A
very typical situation where bonobos will engage in sex is when you throw food into the enclosure
in captivity, for example, and they start competing over the food. But instead of really competing,
they immediately have sex and then they start sharing the food. It seems almost as if the
sexual interaction serves to create some level of tolerance that then makes food sharing possible.
And so we usually describe sex in bonobos as the glue of society. It's the way there
was all tensions and conflict. And that's also why it is used in all combinations of individuals,
because obviously conflicts are not only occurring between a male and a female, but in all possible
combinations. And finally, this is more of a philosophical question. But what can we learn
from the bonobos? What do they have to teach us? Well, what we learn is that there is probably more
flexibility in our lineage, in our direct lineage than we used to assume. We had for 25 years,
since Robert R. Trey and Desmond Morris and Convert Lawrence. For 25 years, we have had these
models of human behavior, human evolution, that heavily emphasized warfare, hunting,
a lot of aggressive male tendencies, in the sense that we conquer the world, you know, by
through genocide. That's sort of the image that has been projected of our species. And
chimpanzees have, to some degree, supported that view. Although I hope to view that chimpanzees
can also be awfully nice to each other. And I've seen many instances of that. And so I don't
want to depict a chimpanzee here as necessarily all aggressive. Now, if you look at the bonobo,
which is equally close to us, as a chimpanzee, you get a completely different image. It's not
how busy and it's more russowy and almost. And so the bonobo is relatively peaceful, sexy,
females are in charge, they get along fine most of the time. And so they put question marks
behind that model, because the original model that emphasized our aggressive tendencies and our
instinctual questions so much really depicted that as a general primate tendency, something that
we got automatically, biologically. And if such a close relative can be so different,
I think that questions that whole model, and we should start rethinking if they're not some
other tendencies like cooperation, for example, and language and morality and so on,
that have been equally important in our evolution.
Frans de Wall and photographer Frans Lanti are the authors of Bonobo, the Forgotten 8.
Frans de Wall spoke with producer Thomas Lally.
The Bonobos are amazing creatures. Few other primates share their zest for peace.
Certainly humans could take a lesson or two from them, though their pension for sex may offend
the moral majority. But while war is foreign to Bonobos, it's all too common for us.
Kent Nurburne is the author of a haunting reverence, Meditations on a Northern Land.
He presents a portrait of a place in his home state of Minnesota called Silent City,
where a war once took place, but now only ghosts remain.
There is a place not far from my home that the Indians call Silent City.
It is just a field, no different than so many others, dotted with the occasional oak and
covered in summer with non-descript done grasses. In the winter snow drifts across it with democratic
impunity. Even it can find no reason to stop here. But someone did stop here. In this field,
so carefully carried in memory by the Ojibwe, two groups of men surprised each other.
The one Ojibwe was seeking room to live and hunt as their people were pushed deeper into
the woodlands by the coming of the European. The other, Sue, were struggling to retain a foothold
in the woodlands as they were pushed ever and further onto the treeless prairies to the west.
Here in this field, two sparse to be called woods, two ordinary to be called prairie,
they met and fought. The Ojibwe, more conversant with the whites, had procured more guns.
The Sue, perhaps sensing that their destiny was in the open west, were fighting and retreat.
All the forces saved bravery and honor weighed in favor of the Ojibwe,
and the outcome saved for bravery and honor went their way.
As the battle closed, so memory goes, in this field lays slain 100 Sue warriors.
Young men dying to protect their families, old men dying to protect their honor,
killed by arrow, bullet and cudgel, dying quickly, dying slowly, dying far from their families
and far from history, committing their spirits to the soil, to the field, to silent city.
Now the Ojibwe say, there are the voices. Here on this desolate part of their land,
so sparsely settled that one goes for miles on gravel roads to even find a house.
Here, where water lives so close to the surface that the rains can turn the field to swamp.
Here, where life is so spare that only the small and scuttling of the animal people can survive,
the voices can be heard, crying, screaming, moaning, speaking not the language of the Ojibwe,
but the language of the Sue. Who is to say how one claims the land?
To plot, to measure, to till. To pay in cash or in blood. To trot the land for a thousand years,
to bury our parents and our children upon it. None of these will guarantee our claim.
It is for the land and the land alone to decide. Somewhere, miles from here, standing lonely on a wind-swept
to Cotopri, a woman lifts her heart and cries her grandfather's name. Somewhere close to here,
in a treeless, barren field, two boys stop their play and hear a moaning in the wind.
Ken Nurburn is the author of a haunting reverence, Meditations on a Northern Land,
published by the New World Library.
Keeping Mother Nature alive and well is a tough job. Businesses complain that environmental
regulations curtail their activities, and good people the world over spend many hours working
to keep the environment healthy. Lew and Peter Barryman are folk musicians from Madison,
Wisconsin. In their song, Here's to Mother Nature. They praise her hard work, but wonder whether the
world would be a better place without her. The song appears in their release, Cal Imagination,
on Corn Belt Records.
Here's to Mother Nature. Here's to Mother Nature. For dream it out the moon and sun.
We better break it gently. It seems that evidently daily all our work is done,
and she's been standing in the way of our breath. Someone on a throne,
except for Cawpaw and the Boxer. She doesn't have a place in town.
We appreciate her effort, but we ought to make it clear. She's been standing in the way of our breath.
We can take it on from here.
Here's to Mother Nature by Lew and Peter Barryman, off their release, Cal Imagination on Corn Belt Records.
Thanks for being with us on this week's Environment Show. I'm Peter Burling.
For cassette copy of the program, call 1-888-49-Green and ask for show number 386.
The Environment Show is a presentation of national productions which is solely responsible
for its contents. Dr. Alan Sharktalk is the executive producer. Thomas Lally is producer and
Stephanie Goyceman is the associate producer. The Environment Show is made possible by the W.
Alton Jones Foundation, the Turner Foundation, the J.M. Kaplan Fund, the Packard Foundation,
and Heming's Motor News, the monthly Bible of the collector Carhawk. 1-800-C-A-R-H-E-R-E.
So long and join us next week for the Environment Show.
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