Hello friends, this is the Environment Show and welcome.
The Red Cross takes care of the damage that the earth does to people in structures.
The Green Cross would take care of the damage that people in structures do to the earth.
You've been getting very good at taking the earth apart, digging into it and scattering
its pieces all over the place.
It's very easy to break things, it's very hard to put them back together.
Some can't be but back together as you lose pieces.
But this is a challenge.
The birth control pill came from a tropical yam in Mexico.
Treatments for childhood leukemia and Hodgkin disease came from a little flower in the rainforest of Madagascar.
The hardwood tables, essential oils and dyes that you'll find in deodorants and toothpaste.
The list goes on and on and on.
David Brower, former head of Sierra Club, now proposing a new project he calls it the Green Cross
and he wants you to join.
And Dan Katz, director of the Rainforest Alliance, there are practical reasons why we should save the world's tropical forests and we'll tell you more.
Two of our guests this time on the Environment Show.
The Environment Show is a production of WAMC, made possible by the J.M. Kaplan Fund of New York.
And this is Bruce Robertson.
David Brower is a name familiar to activists in the environmental movement from his years as head of Sierra Club.
Still active nationally and internationally at 78.
Brower now leads Earth Island Institute and is as passionate as ever about a new project for which we'll have an address at the end of this story, prepared by Joy Newell in Los Angeles.
David Brower is a commanding presence, a common sense voice, an idealist, an activist, and a pro who is used to saying things his audiences will remember.
He's on the media circuit these days talking about the first volume of his autobiography for Earth's sake.
However, Brower's energies are equally consumed with an idea he has taken from a January speech by Mikhail Gorbachev.
The idea is for an international citizens group which would be devoted to Earth Restoration Projects.
Although its names seem to change during our conversation when Brower first talked about it, he referred to it as the Green Cross.
The Red Cross takes care of the damage that the Earth does to people in structures.
The Green Cross would take care of the damage that people in structures due to the Earth.
Even getting very good at taking the Earth apart, digging into it and scattering its pieces all over the place.
It's very easy to break things. It's very hard to put them back together.
Some can't be put back together as you lose pieces, but this is a challenge.
When Brower makes public appearances and he does a lot of them, he asks audiences if they're willing to give their time to the service of the planet.
What I'm trying to do is turn that question around, well what do you think we ought to do to make this work?
But we do want your suggestions. Write them in, call them in.
Because we've got the project. It's an Earth Island Institute project.
We've got a few elements of it going now.
They're quite different. They're all environmental, but then we've gotten more to do.
We don't need to restore only the outdoors, but we need to do better about the indoors.
We need to help the cities. We need to help transportation.
We need to do everything education.
We need to teach people from the bottom grades on up how to put things back together.
Part of what excites Brower is the idea that people of different ages, races, religions, philosophies, colors,
point of view, and so on would come together for the time they would be dedicating to the Earth project.
Brower at this point does not foresee direct government involvement.
Right now we think that it should be a citizen's movement.
And we like to go back to the Eisner-Arco rotation way back.
He said, one day that the people are going to want peace so much that the governments are going to have to get out of the way and let them have it.
And I think that goes with peace on the Earth, but also peace with the Earth.
I think citizen troops have got a great mission ahead of them.
They have to lead governments.
Right now, the Democrats here are not.
Governments hesitate to do things for which they don't think there's going to be a lot of support.
What are you asking people to give with this concept?
Let's call it Green Cross, Green Circle, Green, whatever.
Well, we're asking for a year that they make a commitment for a year.
How we're going to engineer that year.
We don't know. We're going to want their help.
What country would you like to work in without kind of people?
Do you have some people that you'd like to team up with?
What do you want to do?
What excites you?
Do you want to take what's driving an individual person and take all that energy and focus it on restoration?
I wanted to know what will move the concept from conversation to reality.
Our question here is, when we're working on this,
one of my questions, will you need funding or can you fund it?
Or do you know people who can fund it?
And some people can find their own funds and some people certainly can't.
And we would like to make it possible for both kinds to go.
Broward's enthusiasm, energy, and commitment are contagious.
And he knows he's sitting on a wave of public and media interest about the environment,
but the media tire easily.
And so we'll have to continue to think up new, exciting news hooks, because that's what they live on.
And so that's up to us.
We've got to be interesting.
We've got to get the media themselves excited about it.
We've got to get them reporting on it.
What's happening? Who's done what?
Where?
I want a little for openers.
I want a journal that'll talk about it.
I want to call it the healing news.
The general theme is that I've used it again and again.
It's not mine. It's healing time on earth.
Healing earth, as best you can.
Don't be too cocky about it, because the earth has got to heal itself.
We can jumpstart some of the healing of maybe a little like hair transplant.
But we need to get it started, but we also need to heal the relationships with each other.
Broward believes the industrial world must move from destructive to productive industries.
To illustrate, he told me about an interview he had done some time ago on the Dick Cavit Show.
And one of the questions Dick Cavit asked me, after he'd geared Arthur Godfrey and
alligator Shusie was wearing, was, well, a lot of people say that you and
environmentalists are pitting people out of work. What do you say to that?
And then he went on and said, I think I can answer that question.
I suppose a lot of people were put out of work when they closed the furnaces at Dakhael.
And his question shook him up so much that he changed the subject.
And we're still making furnaces, thousands of nuclear warheads to take to the people.
That's a business we ought to get out of. They're better businesses. So let's
let's restore the earth. It's easy enough to blow it up. Let's see if we can put some things back
together. I hope you're somewhere around paper and pencil, because if you're moved to want to
find out more about the green cross or the green circle or whatever it's going to be called,
you can contact David Brower at Earth Island Institute. It's at 300 Broadway, sweet 28,
San Francisco 94133. For the Environment Show in Los Angeles, I'm Joy Nuel.
That address once again is David Brower, Earth Island Institute 300 Broadway, sweet 28.
San Francisco, California 94133. Joy Nuel reports for the Environment Show from KCRW
in Santa Monica.
There is a new phrase describing a new concept developing in the world of environmental affairs,
new environmentalism, describing the awareness many are coming to that environmental concerns
must be balanced with economic needs of a region. Of course, the reverse is also said,
economic needs must take into account environmental concerns. This is necessarily so because often
it is the environment that is the mainstay of a region's economy. This is seen most
dramatically, perhaps, in the tropical forests of South America. Speaking recently at a natural
history conference noted Harvard biologist Dr. Edward O. Wilson said that the tropical forests
cannot long withstand the practice of clear cutting, wherein the forests are cut for their one-time
yield of timber, leaving the region's literally lifeless and barren. The problem Wilson says is not
in the trees, but in the soil. Unlike northern temperate forest soils that are thick and rich
with organic material, tropical top soils are thin and extremely fragile.
In fact, as little as 1 1 1% of the nutrients in a tropical forest reach 5 centimeters or 2 inches
below the actual soil surface. So when you all you have to do is take your fingers and scrape a
little of the clay off the surface and you're already into a sterile zone into which very little
can grow. What is more says Wilson, the composition of the soil is such that heavy concentrations of
minerals quickly wash away in torrential rains up to 80 inches a year. The soil wash out is
speeded when plant life is burned off, leaving no root systems in place. Wilson says the regions are
then left with virtually worthless soil. Then farmers move in and try to grow crops here. They
may have enough ash and residue to go for two or three years and then productivity drops off
drastically. The same is true of cattle ranching. So the only choice they have is to keep cutting
forests, keep rolling it back like a carpet off a bare floor to exploit it mile by mile.
And in the end they have nothing left. Biologist Dr. Edward Wilson speaking at a scientific
conference convened recently at the New York State Museum in Albany. While the harvesting of the
trees in the tropical forests might bring in a substantial amount of income on a one time basis,
once the lumber is gone, that is it. Much more logical says Dan Katz is a policy of sustainable
harvest. Selective cutting or using the forest for economic gain without destroying the ecosystems
integrity. That is using it benefiting from it but at the same time leaving it in a way that is not
damaging it to in a negative way. Katz is the executive director of the Rainforest Alliance. Founded
in 1986, the organization began as a way to focus attention on the rainforest. He says that as awareness
has grown so has the focus of his organization's operations. Now the alliance concentrates on looking
for a viable alternative to deforestation. Katz says the controversy over how to provide for a
healthy economy locally and at the same time preserve and protect the rainforest for a global
environment is best settled on a local level. The rainforest alliance he says is working closely
with rural towns, villages and outposts to help the local residents there develop economically
viable alternative ways to provide for their future. It is a challenge of the first order,
says Katz, who offers this overview of the issues. The rainforest is like a this counterfeit paradise.
It looks beautiful and green, a thousand shades of green and over half the world's living species
can be found there and yet when you try and farm it reacts very poorly. It does not like monocrops.
It likes to be very diverse and it has a very fragile soil that has been leached for thousands of
years. It is tough to use and the people that have been living there for a long time know how to
use it and they know how to use it well and we need to learn from them and because of economic
stagnation, population problems, military issues, people are being forced out of the cities
and transmigrated into the jungles and these people see this as this paradise and yet when they
train eke out of living they do not fare very well and I think that when we look at solving the
problems in the tropics we also need to look at helping to solve the problems in the major cities
because if we cannot do that then there will always be this influx of displaced urban poor
into the jungles. And in the true Buckminster Fuller style, this being a global village,
the problems and the solutions reach far beyond in this case the Brazilian rainforest.
We in the United States account for so much of the world's resources we use and a proportion that
is just unheard of for the rest of the world so I think we are going to need to be better
conservationist here at home. It's not going to be enough for us to just send in a check for $20
and we have done our job for the rainforest, we are going to need to conserve more
be better consumers, eat lower on the food chain. There are a lot of things we are going to have
to do. I think that Earth Day is going to bring a lot of new interest and I am amazed that
how many more people are talking about recycling or buying recycled products or looking at over
packaging. These are issues that are not just going to be trendy for this year, they are the wave
of the future and we need more businesses to jump on this bandwagon and stay on it for the long
haul because really if we expect to conserve forests in the tropics we will need to do a much
better job here at home. Dan Katz, Executive Director of the Rainforest Alliance. Anthropologist
Stephen Schwartzman with the Environmental Defense Fund first came to the problem in 1980 when he
went to Brazil to study the Kranakkori Indians. The destruction of this tribe is the story of the
destruction of the rainforest. Kranakkori are people who between 1968 and 1973 when they were first
contacted by the National Society lost between 80 and 90 percent of their population to new diseases
to which they had no resistance. They passed through a whole across. They were then transferred from
their traditional lands to the Shingupark which was already an established reserve where their lands
were somewhat better protected and on their own initiative they set about trying to reconstitute
their traditional society and very different circumstances. So my first connection was
to the human rights disaster that was going on which is part of the same story that occurred in
America since 1492 of course but I came to see very clearly that this was also an environmental
story. Schwartzman says that the Indians are living on this reserve with a frontier closing in very
rapidly all around them. Loss of this wilderness habitat is threatening the very existence of the
Indians who live off this land but Schwartzman says there are two reasons why we all have a stake
in what is happening. First of all tropical forests occupy about 7 percent of the earth's surface
but they contain between 50 and 90 percent of the species of living things on the planet.
They are the greatest repository of biological genetic diversity anywhere. Biologists who study this
from the biological standpoint say that the species extinction that is going on there perhaps
one species a day disappearing is the greatest extinction that's gone on in the history of the planet.
No one can tell what the consequences of that are reliable to be. The other reason
says Schwartzman is more immediate. The rainforests play a very important role in both local and global
climates. Locally half of the rainfall that falls over the Amazon basin for example is produced
by the forest itself. There is actually work by Brazilian scientists showing this such that
deforesting large areas in the Amazon is going to cause rain fall patterns to change and
as other recent workers shown it's liable to cause local temperature patterns to change
drastically and beyond that cutting and burning the forest releases large quantities of greenhouse
gases into the atmosphere CO2 and others and is contributing to global warming.
According to a recent report released by World Resources Institute the world is losing
its tropical forests at a much faster rate than had previously been thought. In fact 50 percent
faster. Statistically though the rate of loss has actually slowed in Brazil from that
observed ten years ago the nation still leads the world in the rate and the amount of lost tropical
rainforests per year. There are both internal and external reasons why this is so,
says Schwartzman who has recently returned from a research tour to Brazil. The internal
reasons are complex but have to do with land ownership. Since 1964 there has been a concerted
effort by the government to open up the rainforest for settlement and the easiest way to show
ownership of land is to show a profit from it and the quickest way to do that is to clear the land
and throw in some crops or cattle never mind that the land cannot sustain these products.
The other reasons for this rainforest loss lie abroad.
If you look at the satellite data of deforestation in the Amazon it's a very uneven process.
There are very large areas but virtually no deforestation is occurring. There are other areas where
deforestation is occurring very rapidly indeed and those are precisely where large scale infrastructure
project have taken place. Roads, railroads, mining projects and so on.
These projects Schwartzman says have been funded in large part by the World Bank which in turn
receives its largest contribution from the United States. This process of US participation in
multilateral funding of development projects has been brought to the attention of the U.S. Congress,
the U.S. Treasury Department and organizations such as the World Bank in an effort to make the
connection between these projects and environmental destruction. In 1987 the World Bank initiated
a process of reform setting up an environment department to monitor its projects results have been
mixed. These are surely delicate issues at play here not the least of which is that Brazil must
choose for itself how best to proceed and far be it for us to tell the rest of the world how to
preserve natural resources when we destroy much of our own. In any case whether in Brazil or the
United States the balance in this so-called new environmentalism is to develop a sustainable
economy take only what the land can give and put back no more than the land can tolerate.
This it is argued makes not only good environmental sense but stands up economically as well. In fact
results of a recent study undertaken by the Institute of Economic Botany show that the rainforest
is much more productive alive than dead. Mike Ballack the Institutes Director says that the research
was conducted by one of the associates at the institute Dr. Charles Peters in conjunction with
colleagues from the Missouri Botanical Garden and the Yale School of Forestry. Peters who is off
currently in Indonesia researching a similar situation could not be reached for analysis of this study
but director Ballack says that Peters compared the yield of two and a half acres of lot in rainforest
looking at the value of the lumber that could be harvested in a one-time deal comparing that with
the value of the total extractable renewable resources that is fruit fibers resins or oils.
And what they found was very interesting that cutting down the forest for one-time use could bring
a brand of thousand dollars US and the scenario after this one-time use would be burning the forest
perhaps growing crops on it for a year or two and then abandoning it with it so that this
use would be very short term. In contrast they found that the value of a hectare of forest for the
harvest of fruits, barks, oils, fibers, so-called minor forest products was almost 700 dollars US
each year and because these products are harvested in a sustainable way this return that is to say
almost 700 dollars could be harvested almost indefinitely. It should be pointed out that Dr. Peters,
along with Dr. Allen Gentry from the Missouri Botanical Garden and Professor Robert Mendelsson from
Yale School of Forestry, conducted their research in the Peruvian rainforest. Though the names have
been changed in this instance the implications are the same. Again Mike Balak. Certainly an important
point is that while people's consciousness has been raised about the value of the rainforest and
its importance and the importance of stopping deforestation very few groups, very few agencies are
offering alternatives to this deforestation that take into account the local people's need to
exist and survive and meet a standard of living that is appropriate and these alternatives to
deforestation although some of them are, these studies are in their embryonic stages,
this is a key aspect of solving this particular global dilemma. He says that most of the work
conducted by his research group is concentrated in the world's tropical forests because that is where
the greatest diversity of plant and animal life is found and where the greatest crises are found,
crises of plant, animal and human population threatening each other's existences. The
Institute of Economic Botany is associated with the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx.
As Dan Katz of the Rainforest Alliance says it is time to start putting something back into the forest,
investment dollars and research. It is impossible he says to do a day, a half a day, or even a single
meal without using something that derives from the tropical forests.
Well everything from oranges and bananas and peanuts and tomatoes to the birth control pill came
from a tropical yam in Mexico, treatments for childhood leukemia and Hodgkin disease came from a
little flower in the rainforest of Madagascar, the hardwood tables, essential oils and dyes that
you'll find in deodorants and toothpaste. The list goes on and on and on. It is just incredible how
much we have derived from tropical forests and how little we have given back to the countries where
those products came from or to the conservation of those areas. Observers of international politics
and economics are studying with keen interest. They're recently announced a Bush administration plan
to develop a free trade agreement with Latin and South America, similar to the one now in place with
Canada. And one can only wonder whether now is the time when world leaders can bring it all together,
peaceful political revolution, jobs and homes for the homeless and impoverished and preservation of
the delicate and only ecosystem by which all of this is sustained. For the Environment Show, this is Bruce
Robertson.
As we learn more and more about Brazil's tropical forests, we are becoming equally aware of how fragile
and easily destroyed that region is, despite its size and rather forbidding nature. Cutting trees,
growing vegetables and grains or raising cattle, it is becoming clear is not the proper or sustainable
long term use of the region. But there is a way of managing the forests that will leave the
natural ecosystem intact, help the local economy and give us something tasty to eat. The Vermont-based
ice cream firm of Ben and Jerry's has begun marketing an ice cream called Rainforest Crunch,
using their own ice cream and a Brazil nut brittle which is now marketed by Martha Broad,
co-manager of community products incorporated. Rainforest Crunch is a better crunch candy
and we started making it back in August and we are making now about a ton of candy a day.
We started up in an old auto body repair shop in Montpelier and we started out with three people
last August and now we are about 30 people. From August until March of this year, we primarily
sold eight ounce boxes of candy to gourmet food stores and all sorts of different stores,
male order catalogs and then in March Ben and Jerry started buying large amounts of Rainforest
Crunch from us to put in vanilla ice cream and they now are marketing a new flavor of ice cream which
is very popular called Rainforest Crunch Ice Cream. The idea started with Jason Clay head of cultural
survival. Clay reportedly met Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry's at a New York City grateful dead
Rainforest benefit concert. Clay said he was sitting on a stash of Brazil nuts and what can we do?
Clay and Cohen who had been thinking he'd like to try a new flavor spent one Sunday afternoon
together concocting the new recipe so the story has it. Broad says her goal is to fold, produce a
good product and pass along money to the Brazilian economy. She says her corporation, a branch of Ben
and Jerry's, turns 60% of its profits back to peace and environmental groups. Ben and Jerry's a
much larger firm donates 7.5% of its profits. What we do every day we we use and buy nuts as we pass
on more money to the nut harvesters were money that we are paying for nuts. Part of that goes
to cultural survival. We buy nuts through them and we pay them a little bit extra and that money
goes to setting up nut harvesting and shelling facilities that are cooperatively owned by the people
down in the rain forest. Right now the nuts are harvested cheaply in the rain forest but then sent
down river where all the profits are realized during processing. But says broad, the idea is for
the people that are actually harvesting and shelling nuts to be adding value by being able to
process the nuts right in the rain forest and then sell them for a higher price and get more
money for them. What happens now is that they harvest the nuts and they get shipped down river
to a port city at which point you know a larger private concern buys them for very little money and
you know processes and vacuum packs and nuts. Rainforest Crunch Candy is available in many specialty
stores and major department stores. Martha Broad, co-manager of community products incorporated,
tells us she is working on a rain forest crunch cookie. For the Environment Show, this is Bruce
Robertson and that's our show for this week. The Environment Show is a production of WAMC,
Dr. Alan Shartock executive producer. This is Bruce Robertson. The Environment Show is made
possible by the JM Kaplan Fund of New York.
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