The Environment Show #179, 1993 June 6

Hello friends, it's the Environment Show and welcome.
If you are planning a national park tour this summer, you may want to leave your camera
at home.
A National Academy of Sciences study says, haze and air pollution will fairly obscure
your vistas.
Also this time, Larry Sommecky talks to us while mowing his lawn.
It's real quiet.
You'll hear.
The plant conservationist Faith Campbell urges equal protection for endangered plants
as animals.
They are the canaries in the mind telling us that we have treaded too heavily upon this
particular ecosystem and we're in danger of destroying it.
The Environment Show, a national production, made possible by Heming's MotorNews, the
National Bible of the Old Car Hobby, monthly from Bennington, Vermont, and by the J.M.
Kaplan Fund of New York, and this is Bruce Robertson.
You might want to leave your camera behind this summer if you are planning a trip to
a national park.
According to a study released by the National Academy of Sciences, you won't be taking
many pictures.
If you gaze from any scenic overlook, the vista likely will be fairly lost in a haze of
air pollution.
Robert Deuce at Texas A&M headed up the study.
Overarching conclusion that we came up to is that the problem of visibility in national
parks and the sources of visibility reduction in national parks is not a local problem.
It's a regional problem.
It's not a situation where a significant visibility reduction in a national park is a
result of perhaps one power plant or one waste paper treatment plant or something of this
sort.
But it's a wide area problem with many sources spread over many, many hundreds, even thousands
of square miles.
If one is to solve this problem, you can't go about it by just stopping the emissions
from one or two plants.
It's a much broader issue than that.
Robert Deuce is dean of the College of Geoscience and Maritime Studies at Texas A&M.
He served as chairman of the study committee researching the air quality over the national
parks.
The committee was appointed by the National Academy of Sciences and resulted in a massive
publication titled Protecting Visibility in National Parks and Wilderness Areas.
Deuce says generally air pollution is worst in the east, though he says it is a relative
issue.
If you go to one of the particularly spectacular national parks in the west, like Grand
Canyon, like Geosemite, parks where in essence the primary feature of the park, the people
go for is the beautiful views.
Then a reduction of visibility from say 50 miles to 25 miles is really very significant.
It's taking away from that aesthetic enjoyment of that park in a very significant way.
Whereas if you go to a place where it's along a beach and the major interest in the national
park is in fishing and the visibility might normally be 12 miles and if it goes down to
6 miles, it's really not going to enhance or detract from your fishing enjoyment.
So it's even though the visibility may be much lower than it is in the Grand Canyon.
So it's a very relative sort of thing.
Again, in terms of the absolute visibility, the lowest visibility in national parks are
those along the east coast on the average and on the eastern third of the United States.
Deuce mentions reductions in miles of what you can see.
Using the Shenandoah National Park as an example of a park in the east, comparing what
you can see today with what you could see, say before World War II, the difference is
quite dramatic.
Of course, in any given day you'll have quite a difference in very invisibility, but I
would say on the average, if you talk about before 1940 versus now, the visibility is probably
a third or less on the average of what it would have been in those days.
So that if today your average visibility in that region might be seven miles or so, perhaps
in 50 years ago it would have been 20, 25 miles.
The Shenandoah National Park in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia is particularly struck
by air pollution because of its beautiful yet unfortunate location.
There are two sources, there are two areas that are involved in the reduction of visibility.
One is natural and that hasn't anything to do with human activities and that is all
the missions of organic compounds from the vegetation in that region.
And that will reduce visibility in a natural way from what you would normally expect.
That has nothing to do with the 1940 versus 1990 timeframe, but it does account for much
of the reason why the visibility in general is lower in a natural environment in the
east than it is in the west.
It's because of increased emissions from plants and trees in that area.
As far as human activities and what is causing the reduction in the east in visibility because
of human activities, it's primarily sulfate particles.
These are particles produced by the oxidation of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere and sulfur
dioxide in turn is produced by the burning of coal in particular but also heavy fuel oil.
And there's a number of industries that do this, of course, the electric power generation,
a variety of industries that burn coal and fuel oil that produce the sulfur dioxide.
It might seem puzzling that with all the pollution control devices we have installed in our cars
and our factories and with switching to cleaner burning fuels that we still should be seeing
such dramatic air quality reductions now in the late 1990s.
Do says, be glad we have done what we have.
I think things are not as bad as they would have been had we not been doing a lot of the
things you mentioned.
I think there is good evidence, for example, that the sulfate concentrations in the particles
in the air over the east are not continuing to rise.
In fact, they may be going down some.
And again, because we don't have a long series of data from many of these sites, we're
not as clear, we're not as sure as we would like to be whether or not things might have
leveled off and maybe starting to improve.
I think that probably they're not getting much worse at the present time.
What we haven't seen, though, is a very clear cut increase in improvement in the situation.
I do think there's some reasonable evidence that things may have bottomed out.
Air quality over our national parks has received special citation in the Clean Air Act.
Special efforts to clean the air are mandated by law.
However, Do says his committee also recommends some other steps be taken.
One of the areas that we found was weakest was that we didn't have regional scale measurement
programs to really evaluate the extent of the pollution, the composition of the pollution,
the extent to which the visibility had been reduced.
This goes back to the concern that the problem is a regional problem.
The solutions require regional scale solutions, both in determining what the materials are
that are causing the visibility and then try to solve in terms of controlling the emissions
on a regional scale of the substances that are producing these particles and causing
the reduced visibility.
I think again, in terms of our conclusions, the solution lies on a much larger scale than
just going after individual power plants or individual cities that might be emitting
certain types of pollutants.
It requires a much broader scale, regional scale look with careful research and measurement
over long periods of time of the pollutants and the visibility that's being reduced.
Robert Doos, Dean of the College of Geoscience and Maritime Studies at Texas A&M, a served
as chair of the Committee on Hays in National Parks and Wilderness areas, whose studies began
in 1990 following reports that the Navajo Generating Station near the Grand Canyon was
obscuring the vast vistas in that region.
The committee released the results of its study in the form of a book titled Protecting
Visibility in National Parks and Wilderness areas published by National Academy Press
in Washington.
If you are going to a national park this summer, be advised you may not see very much.
This is Bruce Robertson.
Do you recognize this sound?
Once upon a time this was the loudest noise you might hear in a neighborhood on a Saturday
morning.
This is Larry Samke, mowing his lawn.
He looks like he's actually having fun.
Mori Larry, what are you doing?
Hi Bruce, well I'm mowing my lawn and you'll probably notice that I'm not using a power
mower here and I've got an old-fashioned lawn mower that's making a reappearance now
in environmental lawns around the United States.
This is a real lawn mower.
This one's made by American lawn mower company and remember when we were kids I started out
on one of these old-fashioned mowers.
But now, and you remember they were heavy.
I was going to say this is an old-fashioned but this is not an old-fashioned.
Yeah, this is a redesigned old-fashioned.
The old ones were so heavy and so difficult.
I mean they wore us out.
I was glad to get a power mower when I was a kid.
But now they've come up with some new strong aluminum alloys and lighter weight steel and
these things are nice and easy and lightweight to push around and I'm really kind of sold
on it.
There's no air pollution at all from these.
You know in California and some other states now they're putting regulations on the amount
of pollution that they're letting lawn mowers create.
A typical lawn mower when you run it for 30 minutes creates the same amount of air pollution
as if you drove a car 172 miles.
So a lawn mower can be a significant source of air pollution.
So if you get one of these little real lawn mowers absolutely no air pollution at all.
You never have to buy gas or oil.
They always start.
There's no maintenance.
So if you're looking for a beautiful easy lawn with no maintenance, no cost at all, I
would suggest you looking to get one of these real lawn mowers this year and I know this
one they only cost a little less than a hundred bucks.
I notice there is not a rear bagger here.
I notice you're leaving the clippings right there on the lawn.
Well that's because lawn clippings are a source of pollution if they go to our landfills.
In the United States alone we send as many grass clippings to the landfills as newspapers
and plastic bottles.
And to me that doesn't make a bit of sense at all.
I leave my grass clippings on the lawn and they can provide just by themselves 25 to 50%
of your lawns fertilize your needs 100% free.
And the grass clippings are a good source of natural organic matter that goes back into
the soil, helps make your lawn more disease resistant, more pest resistant and more, you
know, doesn't need as much water during the summer.
Can you adjust for the height of the grass blade?
In other words, can you make a, can you cut real short or could you cut lawn?
You can.
You can cut with these things.
You can cut two and a half inches high down to about an inch high.
And what's the, what's the preferred length?
Well to me, I think you should let your grass glow grow extra high.
Two and a half to three inches high, maybe even a little more.
Tall grass creates deep roots.
It makes the grass stronger, harder, healthier, more water conserving.
So everybody should let their grass grow taller.
And then when you leave the grass clippings on the lawn, the tall grass creates an environment
for the grass clippings to disappear down into and then they'll decompose in just a
matter of days and it creates this wonderful environment where the microorganisms can live.
And you won't have any thatch problem.
That's really the modern way now to cut your grass.
All right, well enough talk.
Get back to work.
All right, all right.
I can do it.
It's actually kind of fun now.
Larry Sommeke, the environmental gardener, author of the newly published book, Beautiful
Easy Gardens.
In between busy chores, Sommeke joins us each week at this time for helpful tips and important
information on environmentally sound gardening.
This is Bruce Robertson.
A reauthorized version of the Endangered Species Act has been reintroduced in Congress.
Much has happened since the bill was introduced in 1973.
The rate of extinction has increased, so have arguments to loosen restrictions placed
by the bill.
Restrictions many say inhibit economic growth.
Faith Campbell, botanist and endangered species specialist with the Natural Sources Defense
Council in Washington says nearly lost in the controversy over endangered animals, birds
and fish is a rather startling fact.
A nearly half of the American species, the US species that are on the list are plants.
46% at this point and the more getting listed every day.
And the act is different for plants in one very important respect.
It does not protect plants on private land.
It does not restrict what the private landowner can do to them.
As I say, he can have them for breakfast if he wants.
He can feed them to his cattle.
He can bulldoze them.
He can build a house on top of them.
And the federal law has no say in the matter.
So half of the US species, nearly now, do not have the protection that some people find
most onerous or objectionable in the part of the law that refers to animals.
Do you see that as a crisis situation?
Well, it is certainly not one that is a plant conservation if I am happy with.
We believe that plants as endangered species, as species, as the foundation of ecosystem
should have better protection.
But we are not looking at this as the politically auspicious moment to try to change that, really.
In the cutting edge of endangered species protection, whether for animals or plants, is a concept
of habitat protection.
Preserve the habitat and you preserve the species.
For this Campbell says, science, not politics, must lead the way.
Plants and endangered plants tend to be found in smaller areas than endangered animals.
They are more limited to a specific habitat.
And so it might be easier in that sense that if you protect a smaller specialized area,
you can protect the plants in it.
But each of these unique habitats is under a different threat, whether it is housing developments
or logging or draining of wetlands or whatever.
There are efforts to study and propagate plants.
And the Center for Plant Conservation based in St. Louis is the leader in that area and
working with the Fish and Wildlife Service and the federal agencies.
A lot could be done if the federal land managing agencies, the Forest Service and the Bureau
of Land Management, took their jobs seriously under the act and really designed their multiple
use programs around these species and avoided damaging activities in their presence.
And that would also cost less money.
But so far they really haven't done it.
There hasn't been a political pressure on them to do it.
One of the campaign promises made by President Bush during the 1988 presidential race was that
there would be no net loss of wetland.
For every acre of wetland taken by development, another would be acquired or even invented
to take its place.
The result overall there would be no net loss.
By extension this policy implies the ability of human engineering to create a natural habitat.
At the time, Congress did not buy the idea.
Neither does the new administration.
The idea lingers.
Campbell is very skeptical.
There's so much we don't understand about the interaction of the species.
The plants, many of them we know very little about who their pollinators are, what kinds
of soils they need, what the water regime should be, and then there's so many other species
involved in any ecosystem.
But there are a lot of damaged ecosystems that can probably be made more healthy because
they're kind of halfway damaged, shall we say.
And there's a lot of work that can be done in that area.
And as I said in some cases, just not doing certain things that are underway at the moment
grazing, mining, logging, whatever it is, draining of the wetlands that would give those systems
a chance to heal themselves.
Campbell takes the position that all species, animals and plants have a right to exist,
which he says we need not go the root of assigning to plants some sort of human characteristics
in order to understand their intrinsic value.
Plants are the basis of the ecosystem in the sense that they take the minerals in the soil,
the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the sunlight, and change them all into starch, which
we and our domestic animals in all wildlife then use as the food that keeps us going.
And wildlife is true that endangered plants are so few in number that they aren't producing
a lot of food and a lot of oxygen for us.
They are the canaries in the mind telling us that we have treaded too heavily upon this
particular ecosystem and we're in danger of destroying it.
So we should step back and protect the species and more importantly the ecosystem and make
sure that it continues to perform these, what we call ecosystem functions, that all of
this depend on.
The New Endangered Species Act enjoys both bipartisan and by-camera support, having been
introduced by Republican Senator John Chafee in the Senate and Democrat Jerry Studs in
the House.
The bill must work its way through both chambers.
Campbell has a wish list to encourage lawmakers to make the act as comprehensive and modern
as possible.
If I could have everything I would want, it would just start out with making protection
for plants equal.
As I said, I don't think this is a suspicious time for that.
Next I would like to see more equality in the expenditure of funds and attention paid
by the government agencies.
Plants, as I told you, make up 46% of the list.
The most recent data I've seen are from 1990 when they were 38 or 40% of the list.
They were getting 2% of all the federal and state money spent on endangered species recovery.
That is the effort to restore them to healthy populations.
That's not a fair division and I don't think it makes sense from any sort of rational
analysis of what the act is supposed to do.
But it will take quite a bit of effort to get that discrepancy improved.
There's a lot of talk nowadays about ecosystem protection.
I think that much can be done under the current act.
The act does refer to ecosystems upon which the species depends, not just the species.
The current Fish and Wildlife Service listing process is trying to list species in groups
often by ecosystem as opposed to one at a time, the way they did it for the first 18 years.
But more could be done in that regard and it makes sense to take groups of species, animals,
and plants that live together and try to protect them as groups.
Campbell says endangered plants are found in nearly every region of the nation, although
there is an especially high number in those regions with highest human population, not coincidental.
The largest numbers are in California, which is a very large state and has a great variety
of ecosystems and also of course has had a lot of development so that there's a lot of
pressure on those unique ecosystems.
That comes to why for the same reasons it has a lot of varied ecosystems and it's also
very isolated so that you have a lot of plants that are found nowhere else, animals too that
are found there where else, and then the heavy development pressures on those ecosystems.
Following California and Hawaii, it's basically the Sun Belt states, particularly from Texas
East and including Puerto Rico.
There are large numbers of endangered plants and then after that Arizona and New Mexico
and up into Utah, Oregon also has a fairly significant number because of a variety from
coastal to desert with mountains in between.
So it's the states with the variety of ecosystems and then the development pressures that have
the numbers.
Campbell says whether we succeed in saving endangered plants or animals will not depend
as much on what legislation we pass as on what frame of mind we develop to define and
understand extinction in all its permanence.
It's not just that this species is gone but what it could have evolved into is gone.
Some people have called it the death of evolution, not just the death of an individual.
So that a whole history comes to an end.
There is no future in that whole line and it's because we did it.
The difference now what the endangered species act is trying to address is these human
caused extinctions and we're aware enough now, we're intelligent enough now to know what
we're doing and I think as the so-called wise and moral beings we have an obligation to
stop and say what right have we to stop this line of evolution that brought this kind of
critter this plant to a particular place, adapted it to a particular environment, gave it
a certain shape and form and now we just toss it out the window.
Goodbye.
Plant conservationists, lawyer and advocate for endangered species, faith Campbell of the
Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington.
Reauthorization of the Endangered Species Act must take its place either alongside of,
not behind, tax and spending legislation, health care concerns and international crises.
Meanwhile according to noted Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, 27,000 species disappear each
year, 74 a day, 3 an hour.
This is Bruce Robertson.
Well, that's our report on the Environment Show this week.
Thanks much for joining us.
We hope you'll see you next week at the same time.
The Environment Show is a program about the environment, the air, water, soil, wildlife
and people of our common habitat.
Coming soon a conversation with Rhode Island Senator John Chaffee who has co-sponsored
the Endangered Species Act in the Senate, also the Rio Summit one year later, a conversation
with Marie Strong.
If you know something happening in your area that you think we ought to know about, or
if you have a question about this week or any week's Environment Show, address your questions
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The Environment Show is a presentation of national productions solely responsible for its content.
Dr. Alan Shartock, Executive Producer, this is Bruce Robertson.
The Environment Show is made possible by the JM Kaplan Fund of New York and by Heming's
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