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Welcome to the Environment Show, exploring issues and events of the planet.
I'm Thomas Lalley.
The Environment Show is a national production made possible by the W. Alton Jones Foundation,
the furthermore Foundation and Hemmings Motor News, a monthly Bible of the old car
hobby, 1-800-C-A-R-H-E-R-E.
Your host is Peter Burley.
Thanks Thomas, coming up on this week's Environment Show.
A Democratic poster tells us how the environment is an issue in the presidential campaign.
Life without plants, animals and kids is bad for your health.
Bringing the mid-adversing homes is changing the environment and the lives of the people
who live there.
Indigenous people relate to plants in ways we hardly comprehend.
They've chewed coca leaves and made plant medicines for centuries.
We climb them out in Pennsylvania and watch the hawks circling as they begin their journey
south.
These stories and more coming up this week on the Environment Show.
During this campaign season, we've been talking periodically to Democratic and Republican
pollsters about what role if any environmental issues are having in political campaigns and
the upcoming election.
This week we hear from Solinda Lake, who is a Democratic pollster.
Are you seeing areas or segments of the population where the environmental issue is particularly
strong and are there any surprises for you since you've been following this for so long?
There are a couple of areas where it's strong.
It's very strong in upscale suburban districts and it's very strong in Oregon, Washington,
California and of course Oregon and Washington are real battlegrounds at both the presidential
level as well as below the presidential level.
It's also one of the many issues that matter to the so-called soccer moms, the married
women with children in the suburbs who are Republican and they're leading but voting very strongly
for Bill Clinton right now.
We also find that when we combine the environment with campaign contributions, you voted to
relax toxic dumping standards while taking $50,000 from chemical companies that it matters
to blue collar voters and one of the surprises to parole voters who are both very anti-big
money and politics and also strong conservation because they tend to be hundreds and anglers.
At the presidential level, Solinda Lake thinks the environment is a factor with respect
to the generation gap and is helpful to Bill Clinton on the character issue.
The thing that's very, very interesting about the environment at the presidential level
is because Bob Dole doesn't mention very much, it's one of the issues that reinforces
the age distinction between these candidates and I think it's one of the reasons you see
Bill Clinton talking about it more.
We found that when we raised the environment in ask candidates to talk about it or voters
to talk about the candidates in the presidential context, they said Bob Dole wouldn't understand
these issues, he's too old to understand these issues, he's our grandfather's age, we
taught our grandfather's about recycling.
The environment has perceived to be a baby boomer issue.
It's also very interestingly an issue that people think standing up for the environment
shows character and it's one of the places where Bill Clinton can show that he has the right
values.
Solinda Lake is a Democratic pollster, next week we'll hear from a Republican pollster.
The indoor environment is important to everyone, but if you're confined to a nursing home,
the indoor environment is your only environment.
For many that means sterile institutional halls, no companionship and few living things
to relate to, either plant or animal.
A new philosophy is taking hold across the country that seeks to bring new life into nursing
homes and thus enhance the environment and the life of the people who are there.
Our civilization has separated us from the plants and animals that once were part of our
being.
Now we're bringing them back for our own survival.
Environment show producer Thomas Lalley has this report.
The Taioge and Nursing facility in the western New York town of Waverley doesn't fit the
mold of an average nursing home.
The atmosphere inside is lively.
Residents and staff move around amid dogs, bird cages and cats.
Plants are everywhere.
Two years ago Taioge adopted a plan called the Eden alternative.
It calls for treating residents by treating their environment.
Prior to the implementation of Eden, this facility was pretty bare, very sterile, like
a normal nursing home.
In the period of about four months, we brought in a thousand plants, 350 birds, six dogs,
six cats, and we've recently added 98 kindergartners to our campus.
It was extremely radical because we have no more quietness.
It is lively, it's chaos.
Sometimes the kids are chasing the dogs, so we're chasing the cats, so we're trying to
eat the birds and the residents are laughing on the side.
Maria Landy is the assistant administrator at Taioge.
He says that by nearly all accounts, the move to the Eden alternative has been a good
one.
Medically, the results have been impressive.
In homes using the Eden alternative, death rates dropped 25% in two years.
Use of medicine came down 75%, and infection rates were cut in half.
The Eden alternative was created by Dr. Bill Thomas, author of the new book Life Worth
Living.
He says the concept is simple.
The problems in the nursing home are not really medical problems.
They're spiritual problems.
People have lost their mooring or their connection to the world around them, and they suffer
from loneliness, helplessness, and boredom.
What we're trying to do here is to create a complex environment where things happen.
People take care.
People have moments of companionship.
We create a very rich, vibrant environment that supports just the organic development of
caregiving and companionship and warm social relations between people.
The residents at Taioge say they're pleased with the program.
At first, some were skeptical.
Some even sued the animals out of their rooms, fearing they'd catch fleas.
But today, nearly every room has birds and plants.
Claire Bell Smith has lived at Taioge for about a year.
Her room has about 10 different kinds of plants.
You know a lot of their companies.
They are.
And they say if you talk to your plants or have music, it feels grow better.
And I believe it because my injury is so good.
And if you speak to your plants the same way with your pets, you got company.
Claire Bell Smith's room looks out over fields where children from a nearby school play soccer
and football.
Next to the fields is Taioge's garden, which is tended by both residents and staff.
The food is used in the facilities kitchen and per pets.
So millet and sunflower are used and then fed to the birds that accept that kind of food
inside the nursing home.
And it's again a part of the cycle of regeneration and taking care that's so important.
You know, in many ways it seems that what's going on here is really obvious.
The woman inside at lunch called you the genius and that's what I'm doing.
Did you say I was sort of like, but in some ways it is, but then again in some ways it's
so obvious.
It is so obvious.
I was delighted to graduate from Harvard Medical School.
I got a wonderful training there, but this has nothing at all to do with my medical education.
This has to do with responding in a common sense way to the needs of the human beings who
live inside a nursing home.
These are basic fundamental issues, just as as important as your blood sugar or your blood
pressure, and we need to attend to them.
A couple of flights above the garden is yet another part of the Eden alternative.
Kindergarten teacher Stacy Johnson greets us at the door.
Hi.
We don't want to disturb you.
Just want to come in for a minute.
When the local school district was short on space, administrators at Teogas saw a golden
opportunity to bring children together with residents.
It connects them with a part of a real life, a life worth living, to have touch with the
vibrancy and excitement of the kids is again that's something I cannot prescribe.
I can't write in order.
I can't hold the excitement of watching kids play.
You know, can't do it.
It's got to be provided in a real organic sense of real sense of human community.
And that's what we're trying to create with the kids and the older folks.
Although the kindergarteners have their own wing, their mere presence is enough to list
spirits.
In the lobby, Harold Armrein watches the activity.
He says when he came here, he didn't think he'd lived through the first year.
Now he's one of the most socially active residents at Teogas.
It does help an awful lot to see you through bad time.
It sees you through.
I know it has me because I love animals.
I love flowers and plants.
And my apartment, I had all of this had some around it on hanging baskets and whatever.
And they're part of my life.
Armrein seems to thrive amid the disorder.
He greets people as they walk by and keeps a close eye on the home's birds.
Dr. Thomas says this is just how the program should work.
Every time we turn around, we're seeing a cat or we're seeing a bird or there's plants
along the hallways here.
If we look out the window, you can see the kids from the kindergarten having recess.
And there's a real sense that life is everywhere you turn.
We don't want to sprinkle little bits of life on people.
We want to submerge them in.
We want to surround them.
We want to create a world where they turn is some part of life, a life worth living.
Before I left, Ioga, Harold Armrein made sure to show me his birds and plants and the
view from his room of the playground.
He says there was much more to see and do, but I was worn out and ready to head home.
For the Environment Show, I'm Thomas Lalley.
American researchers are introducing plants to nursing homes to humanize them.
The whole process seems pretty primitive in comparison with the deep relationship indigenous
peoples in Latin America have had with plants for centuries.
Wade Davis is an ethno-botnist and anthropologist.
An ethno-botnist is someone who studies the interaction between human societies and plants.
Davis has just written a book called One River in which he tells the story of his research
and the adventures of two plant explorers in the Amazon, Tim Plowman and Richard Shulties.
He says it's impossible to understand a culture in the rainforest unless you know and understand
the plants that play a vital role in the lives of the people who live there.
Davis has special meaning because of the way they're used.
Davis describes medicinal plants sometimes called drug plants.
It's important to understand that four indigenous peoples' disease concepts are very different
than ours.
And for most indigenous peoples of the Amazon, certainly in many indigenous peoples from
around the world, disease is not defined by the simple absence of presence of pathogens,
but it's defined as a certain state of sacred equilibrium or disequilibrium in the terms
of disease.
And treatment therefore occurs on two very different levels.
On the one hand, there are a series of ailments that are treated symptomatically, much as
we would in a rather mundane way, only instead of using medicinal products, they use pharmacologically
active plants.
But real healing in the mind of these shamans occurs at a level of consciousness and the
real act of medical intervention.
It occurs when the shamans invoke some technique of ecstasy to soar away on the wings of
trans to get into the distant metaphysical worlds where he can work or she can work their
deeds of medical rescue.
And these plants which are dismissed as quote unquote drug plants so cavalierly by the
West so often, in fact are never seen as drugs by these societies.
They're seen as sacred medicines.
Ayahuasca, the famous vision vine of the Amazon, for example, is always called El Ramello
in Spanish, the D medicine, the medicine of all medicines.
But ultimately the use of these plants is not only done in a society-positive way.
The plants themselves show no evidence of toxicity, certainly no evidence of addictive
potential.
And rather they're used not as a form of to reinforce the alienation in the culture,
but by contrast to reinforce social solidarity in the group itself.
Davis also says that research on cocoa plants done by his colleague Timothy Plamen and
financed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture gave a whole different perspective on the
plant and its importance to people who chew its leaves.
The use of these leaves is the most profound expression of social and cultural and certainly
spiritual life in the Andes.
You know, in the high Andes you don't shake hands with something you trade leaves.
Distances are measured not in terms of miles, but in terms of coca-chews.
They're in higher societies where the societal ideal is to abstain from sex eating and sleeping
and do nothing but chew the sacred leaves and chant the ancestors.
And when Tim finally did the first nutritional study of the plant in 1974, he found to
his astonishment that coca turned out to be one of the most nutritious plants ever examined
by the USDA.
It was particularly high in vitamins.
It had more calcium in it than any other plant that had ever been studied, which made
it perfect for a diet that traditionally lacked a milk product, especially for lactating
women.
It also had enzymes in it which enhanced the body's ability to digest carbohydrate at
high elevation, which made it perfect for the Indian potato diet.
So suddenly we showed that this plant, which had been completely castigated as a kind
of a demon plant source of cocaine and all that, turned out to be a very mild stimulant,
which had been used without any evidence of toxicity for at least 4,000 years by people
living in a very harsh environment, not only as a mild stimulant and as a sacred plant,
but also as a vital part of their nutrient regime.
And that put into perspective the kind of draconian efforts to eradicate the fields, a campaign
that has been propagated by both the Latin American central governments and also by, of course,
the U.S. government and the war on drugs.
Davis found that indigenous peoples have used plants and combination from medicinal purposes
which have taken individually or indigestible or toxic.
Given the number of variables, he finds it impossible to believe that native peoples
discovered the combinations by trial and error.
Now you ask the native people how they made their discoveries and they always say, well
the plant's sunk to me.
In fact, the certain Indians, like the Cionus Acquia of the Upper Puthamayo and the Jason
areas of Ecuador and southern Columbia, has as many as 17 kinds of ayahuasca, all of
which to R.I. is modern taxonomists are identical.
And yet they consistently identify them from some distance in the forest and you ask them
how they form their system of classification and they say, well, you take the plant on
the night of a full moon and each species sings to you in a different key.
What this probably means, says Davis, is sensitivity to the resonance of nature led to a mysterious
zone of metal awareness.
This in turn led to the discovery of these plant combinations.
It seems that humans of many cultures have used the plants around them to improve their
health and enrich their lives.
Davis shows that when it comes to understanding this process, those of us living in the developed
western world are probably the most primitive and ignorant of all.
I'm Peter Burley.
As summer begins to fade, all kinds of birds begin their annual trek south.
In the northeastern United States, raptors are migrating along the ancient ridges of the
Appalachians.
Scott Whiteensall is the author of Raptors, the Birds of Prey.
Each year at this time of year, you can find them banding hawks and other birds, high
atop a mountain in Pennsylvania.
He presents a portrait of that mountain and later will talk to him in our Earth calendar
about the migration.
There's a piece of sandstone I keep on my desk, gray as a foggy morning and lumpy with
chunks of white quartzite.
The rocks a physical reminder of my favorite natural place, a boulder-stroon mountain top
in the Pennsylvania Appalachians where I watch and catch and band hawks each autumn.
It's a long hard climb to the top through forests of oak and tulip trees, but once
you're there you can look north over the ridges and valleys to the hazy distant pokenos
across a sky dotted with migrant hawks.
The raptors come by the tens of thousands each year, funneled down the Appalachians by
wind and geography, and we stretch our nets to catch them.
And no matter how many hundreds of times I do it, I'm never prepared for the almost electric
experience of holding a wild hawk in my hands.
I remember one in particular from last season, a female Cooper's hawk, a blue-gray hunter
the size of a crow that we lured into our mists nets.
She was furious, not frightened as far as I could tell, just angry.
I held her gently high on the legs so I could keep her long sharp talons well away from
me.
It was cold day in mid-October, and beneath the feather's hawk's body was hot and I could
feel very faintly the rhythmic bump of her heart.
She glared at me, the feathers of her head flared out like a warrior's bonnet, and her
red eyes were shining with indignation.
Around her right leg I attached a lightweight government band, stamped with a series of
numbers and a brief address.
After taking her weight into dozens or so measurements, I left the hawk go.
If anyone finds her again, maybe hit by a car or stunned after colliding with the window,
and if they report the band number to the government, we'll learn a little bit more about
where hawks go and how they live.
It's long odds that any one hawk will ever be found or caught again, of course, the usual
recovery rate as it's known is only 2 or 3%.
So we play a numbers game, banding as many hawks as we can, hoping that a few will turn
up again someday in the future and fill in a little chink in our knowledge of birds.
So that's the science.
But science doesn't provide the astonishing sense of chained lightning that comes when a
red tail hurdles down on us, wings folded, legs outstretched, tearing the sky apart with
its dive.
There isn't science that makes my hand tremble when I release that hawk again to the northwest
wind.
The very first hawk I banded, a beautiful adult red tail with eyes the color of chocolate,
was also my first recovery.
I banded it with nervous fingers, stroked its brick-arunched tail, and returned it to
the sky with a silent prayer.
Maybe I should have prayed harder.
Three months later in Central North Carolina, someone found the same hawk broken and battered
along a highway.
It was still alive when they found it, but it died a short time later at a wildlife rescue
center.
Where are the others I've banded through the years, I wonder?
How many have died anonymous deaths?
But how many are still flying, stitching the continents together with their travels?
Every year from Labor Day until the first snowfall, we sit in our cramped blind, looking
out over the gentle, sway-backed mountains beneath the sky alive with birds.
Some science found a hidden great leap, but more often the progress is slow, a long
series of tiny steps.
One more hawk, one more band, one more day on a chilly mountain top, watching the autumn
flow by like a river.
Joining us now for the Earth Calendar is Scott Wyden Saul, author of Raptors, The Birds
of Prey.
Broadwinged hawks are in the peak of their migration through Pennsylvania this week.
He tells us what we'd see if we look into the sky above Hawk Mountain now.
Well, if you picked a day when there was a nice northwest wind blowing, you might see
a nice selection of hawks.
This is the beginning of the fall migration.
Things are really starting to roll along now in mid-September.
You'll see a fair number of offsprays and mostly bald eagles from Florida that are heading
back south basically after a summer vacation.
You'll also see a lot of broadwing talks.
The broadwings are the real main actors in the fall, hawk migration in September.
They move in tremendous numbers.
It's not unusual to see groups of 0, 2, or 3, or 400 of them flying in flocks called
kettles at this time of the year.
Now have there migration roots and patterns changed over the years?
Well, that's one of the things that hawk watchers love to speculate about, especially on
those slow days when hawks have pretty much vanished out of the sky.
Here in the Appalachians, there's a fair bit of speculation that broadwing hawks have
shifted their migration pattern somewhat.
Back in the 30s and 40s up to the 1970s, the broadwings seem to be following the rich
tops for the most part.
But rich counts have gone down quite a bit in recent years.
It doesn't seem to be because the population of broadwing hawks have gone down.
One of the favorite bits of speculation is that suburban parking lots down in the more
heavily urbanized valleys are actually lowering the broadwing hawks off the ridges.
I mean, if you've got 40 or 50 acres of asphalt in a giant mall parking lot, that's going
to produce an awfully good column of rising hot air.
And it may just be that the broadwing hawks are hopping from parking lot to parking lot
down through the megalopolis here on the east coast.
The population of broadwings seem to be maintaining itself, but there is concern as the forests
are becoming fragmented in northern South America where the birds winter, and in the northeast
and Canada where they nest.
If indeed the broadwings are changing their migration routes to take advantage of rising
hot air generated by parking lots, I propose that we postpone national political conventions
in the future to mid-September.
I think of how all the hot air that's generated could help a raptor's on their journey
south.
If we located the conventions in the right places, we could hawk candidates and help hawks
migrate all at once.
Thanks for being with us on this week's Environment Show.
I'm Peter Burley.
For cassette copy of the program, call 1-800-323-9262 and ask for show number 350.
The Environment Show is a presentation of national productions which is solely responsible
for its content.
Dr. Alan Shartuck is the executive producer, Thomas Lalley is producer, and Stephanie Goetchman
is the associate producer.
The Environment Show is made possible by the W. Alton Jones Foundation, the Furthermore
Foundation, and Heming's Motor News, the monthly Bible, the Old Car Habie, 1-800-C-A-R-H-E-R-E.
So long and join us next week for the Environment Show.
