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 Heming's Motor News, the
monthly Bible of the Old Car Hobby from Bennington, Vermont, 1-800-C-A-R-H-E-R-E, and the
David and Lucille Packard Foundation for the coverage of Ocean Science and Fisheries
issues.
Your host is former Environmental Conservation Commissioner for the State of New York and
former President of the National Audubon Society, Peter Burley.
Thanks Thomas, coming up on this week's Environment Show, residents in South Florida face tough
choices as the environment there continues to deteriorate.
We'll visit Florida Bay which will take hundreds of millions of dollars to repair.
We'll look at Lyme disease and why there will be so much of it this year.
We'll speak with Senator Marina Silva, a Brazilian who is fighting to maintain the Amazon
forest and the rubber tapers who live there.
And in our Earth calendar, we welcome the summer on Mars.
These stories are more coming up this week on the Environment Show.
The environment in South Florida is in bad shape and repairing it will take hundreds
of millions of dollars.
The problem is with the water which has been drenched, drained or diverted, starving the
area of its lifeblood.
Just below the Everglades is Florida Bay, a shallow sea which lies between the southern
tip of Florida and the Keys.
One of the first clues to an impending ecological disaster in the Everglades was when large parts
of Florida Bay began to die.
Thomas Lally visited Florida Bay and has this report.
With the sun shining brightly overhead, pleasure boats cruising by and palm trees waving
in the gentle breeze, Florida Bay looks like a paradise.
But the Bay and much of the surrounding ecosystem is quickly dying and in just the past decade
the decline has accelerated.
Scientists look at what's left and wonder how much longer it will be around.
Robert Brock is a marine biologist with the National Park Service.
He took me out on the bay to show me a healthy part of it.
This is what Florida Bay used to look like and as we go toward the west you're going to
see the very visual changes.
This was the visual cool that was a major problem.
When the water went from crystal clear to dark green people visually said this isn't
what an estuary is supposed to look like, something's wrong about this.
The Bay depends on fresh water which flows down from the Everglades.
An engineering project there, divert water away from the bay and what water does make
it down as often polluted.
A new plan called the Everglades Restoration Project will spend $250 million to remedy
some of the problems but it will take many years of work and tight regulation to bring
both Florida Bay and the Everglades back to health.
But Brock says the need for restoration is obvious.
The entire middle of South Florida is the wetland, the Everglades wetland which importantly
is South Florida's drinking supply.
We don't have dams and raging rivers.
That is our water supply comes from the ground.
You have to have a recharge area and that's it.
Another aspect of Florida Bay is the economy.
Six million people visit the keys every year and Brock says they won't come if Florida
Bay is dead.
The dive industry is starting to understand that I can come to dive the keys but if the
habitat can use the decline, maybe I'll go to Mexico.
Well then the restaurants say, oh now I get it, the hotels say I get it.
They can understand that being in an island their entire economic future depends on the
quality of the environment.
Dead areas of the bay are just a few hundred feet away.
We boat over to where the water is turbid and green.
Florida Bay is only two to eight feet deep where it's still healthy.
The water is crystal clear.
Sea grass blankets the bottom which holds the sediment down and it also provides habitat
for wildlife.
But where the bay is dead or dying, you can't see any sea grass.
Since freshwater has been cut off in the Everglades, the water here is too salty.
The freshwater coming from the Everglades is often polluted from cities and agricultural
areas.
The combination of salt and dirty water is a one-two hit for the sea grass and die offs
or everywhere.
Once the sea grass goes, everything else follows.
Algae moves in attracted by the fertilizer-rich water and sediments cloud the water.
Half of Florida Bay is under an algal boom.
I talked about, I mentioned the word chlorophyll levels that just is an indicator of algae.
Normal ocean water has a chlorophyll level of say one or less.
Well there's areas in middle Florida Bay of 25 to 30 times that.
That's not normal.
And you have water that looks like green paint.
You know there's a problem somewhere.
Fixing the problem is going to be expensive and difficult.
The ecosystem is extremely delicate and arguably can't handle the people already living here.
Accommodating more people will likely mean higher taxes and much higher prices for water.
When you're in an area like this, it's real hard to manage a natural system when you have
700-800 people a day moving in the Florida.
It's trying to look at a moving target.
One year you can say this is what happened under these conditions but you've maybe added
5-10,000 people upstream in the second year so it's maybe totally different now.
I mean Florida's like a lot of coastal states.
It just has to get a handle on growth.
In the Florida Keys where I live down here in Qargo, that's a major question.
We have no water.
It's piped in from the mainland.
We have no place to put our refuge.
That's solid waste is taken out.
We have no central sewage system.
We're all on individual septic tanks.
How are you going to allow more and more people to add to those problems?
I mean Florida's unique I think in a sense that every potential problem you see nationwide
maybe is magnified here because it's quicker.
More people come here quicker than other places.
We get people building on coastal areas all the time here.
So I think every problem is maybe magnified here.
So that's why this restoration is really interesting.
We've got a lot of real bright people and financial resources and we can restore it here.
Why can't we restore it elsewhere?
Even something as seemingly benign as boating has a big impact.
Nearly all areas of the day where boats commonly travel are dead since the propellers stir
up sediments and drown the sea grass.
This can also tear up the sea grass that they get into water that's too shallow.
The Ranger Station here has what they call a wall of shame where they hang pictures of
boats that have gotten stuck in the sea grass.
Just one boat can cause so much damage that the government has started suing the offending
boaters to cover the cost of reparations.
The most deceiving thing about Florida Bay is its beauty.
The area is today thriving.
Business couldn't be better.
Everywhere you look is assigned for a new store or housing complex.
But none of this will be worth much if Florida Bay is dead.
For the Environment Show, I'm Thomas Lalley.
You're listening to the Environment Show.
Reach us by email at env.
1996 promises to be a year when Lyme disease will be particularly prevalent.
Discovered in Lyme, Connecticut, it's now been identified in 45 of the 50 states.
It's concentrated in the Northeast, Upper Midwest, and California.
The disease is contracted by humans when bitten by an infected tick.
Sometimes a bull's eye rash appears around the bite, followed by flu symptoms when it's
not the flu season.
While most of us know about the tick and the fact that the tick is carried by deer, it turns
out that mice and acorns have as much to do with the disease as the tick.
That's because when the tick hatches out, it's free of a spirochete which is the bacterium
that carries the disease.
Once the tick can't give you the disease, unless it becomes infected itself.
It's a complex process which illustrates how intricate natural systems can be.
Rick Osfeld, animal ecologist at the Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Melbourne, New York
explains.
These ticks, they hatch from eggs in a mass of several hundred to maybe a thousand
or more eggs in the early summer.
When they hatch, they are free of the Lyme disease spirochete.
Although they may be a nuisance to us and be unpleasant to have crawling around on our
bodies, they cannot give us Lyme disease.
Those larval ticks, as they're called, after they hatch out, they then seek a host, which
is often a mouse or some other kind of mammal or bird.
If that host that they feed on is infected with the spirochete, then the larval tick can
pick up the disease.
And when it molts into a nymph and is active the following year, usually in June or July,
if it got infected, it can then pass that disease on to us.
It's from the mouse that the tick gets the spirochete that causes the disease.
Well, the mouse is actually crucial for Lyme disease to exist because the mouse is considered
the primary reservoir for the spirochete, the bacterium that causes Lyme.
Of course, reasons that no one really knows very well, the body of mice is a particularly
hospitable habitat for the spirochetes.
And so ticks feeding on a mouse are much more likely to acquire the spirochete than they
are when they're feeding on some other good host like a chipmunk or a raccoon or a ground
glowing bird that they might have access to.
What Ostfeld says, the best way to protect high incidence of Lyme disease in any particular
year is to look at the acorn crop in previous years.
Acorn production is episodic.
So in some years you have a tremendous bumper crop of acorns produced in other years.
There are almost no acorns produced at all.
What the acorns are, acorns are a delightful food for a lot of wildlife, including the deer.
And whenever acorns are available, the white tail deer appear to aggregate in oak forests,
then they do little besides eat acorns for much of the fall because they're the host for
the adult ticks in the fall.
They bring with them their burdens of adult ticks and that's where these adults tend to lay
eggs and that's where the larvae hatch out the next year because the mice also adore eating
acorns.
The mice grow to peak numbers just exactly at the same time and in exactly the same places
that these larval ticks occur the summer following one of these good acorn years.
So acorns sort of set the stage for the tick and the best host to come into, to come into
synchrony together and they probably increase the risk of Lyme one year later.
For Lyme disease to appear and reappear in various places all the elements of the cycle
have to come together.
What appears to have to take place for Lyme to become a problem is once the stage is set
and there are plenty of mice, there are plenty of deer, somehow a sizable enough tick
population has to be brought in and they have to be brought in because they can't crawl
in their own.
They're almost completely immobile but they're often carried in by migrating birds or by
deer that disperse long distances and if a sufficient number of ticks is brought into
an area once the stage is set then you can have a new little center of Lyme disease that
can then spread.
How should you protect yourself against Lyme?
Ecologists Ossfeld does not recommend chopping down all the oak trees or shooting all the
deer or trapping all the mice.
Vaccines are being tested but none is available yet.
The best way is to protect oneself for one thing to wear light colored clothing and
that's simply to help you see these dark ticks as they're crawling around on your clothing
to tuck pant legs into socks so that the ticks which tend to crawl up as soon as they brush
on your skin they won't crawl up under your pants but rather over them which is better.
To use certain kinds of insect repellents particularly on your clothes sometimes they're harmful
if on the skin or they're thought to be.
And to be very careful in checking yourself after you come in out of the woods to see
if you have any new freckles or other signs that you've got a tick that's embedding in
your skin.
Ric Ossfeld is an animal ecologist at the Institute of Ecosystem Studies.
We're listening to the Environment Show and I'm Peter Burlite, still ahead.
We speak with Brazilian Senator Marina Silva who is fighting for her people and the jungle
they depend on.
And at our Earth Calendar we wait for summer on Mars.
These stories still ahead on the Environment Show.
Cutting the forest is usually advocated by those who claim it's necessary to create
jobs or support an economy.
In the Brazilian Amazon subsidized cattle ranchers have cleared thousands of acres of jungle
for pasture.
Some of that forests had been used for generations by rubber tapers who collected sap from the rubber
trees which grow there.
Ecologists cite the rubber tapers as folk who have given meaning to the term sustainable
forestry.
As the clearing continued the livelihood of the rubber tapers was being destroyed together
with the trees.
A man named Chico Mendes started organizing the tapers to protect their economic interests
their way of life in the forest which supported them.
He was murdered by a rancher in 1989.
But a colleague of his who we meet on the ear of the ground continues the struggle.
The idea that people can live with and in the forest instead of cutting it down lives on.
I'm Linda Anderson and this is ear to the ground with stories about people affecting
change in the environment.
This week, Senator Marina Silva of Brazil.
Born in the Brazilian rainforest and illiterate until the age of 16, Marina Silva spent her
childhood tapping rubber with her father.
Later in the early 1980s with activist Chico Mendes she was one of the central figures
in organizing the now famous peaceful rubber tapers demonstrations against deforestation.
Today she is a senator in the federal government of Brazil and one of the 1996 recipients
of the prestigious Goldman Award awarded to grassroots heroes from around the world.
A person of incredible self-determination, Silva helped her father support their large
family not only by tapping rubber but also by hunting and fishing in the Amazon.
At age 14 she taught herself arithmetic so rubber buyers could not cheat her.
When she became ill with hepatitis at 16, she was sent to a city for treatment.
There she began working as a maid and attended school, completing the equivalent of grade
school, junior high and high school in just three years.
While attending college, she became involved with the student movement opposing Brazil's
military dictatorship.
Silva has dedicated her life to the struggle of human and environmental rights, her famous
grassroots resistance which she has carried on since the assassination of Mendes in 1989,
as resulted in establishing sustainable extractive reserves in the rainforest, a total of three
million hectares.
Speaking through an interpreter, Senator Marina Silva discusses her most recent work.
Well, my recent work has been directed at trying to make the extractive reserves economically viable.
We've won something quite important recently which is creating a special credit line for
the extractive populations, rubber tapers, Brazil nut gathers, the kind of people that live
in the extractive reserves.
This is important because these people have never before had access to credit.
The other thing that we're working on is trying to diversify the production in these areas
so that people don't rely wholly on rubber and Brazil nuts.
There are a number of experiences that are beginning to work out, so introducing agroforestry
systems, planting peach pome, aff it all, and other tropical forest fruits that can help
people raise their incomes in a sustainable way.
She says that the solitary campaigns and governmental organizations and developed countries have
been important to her causes.
People she believes need to re-evaluate their consumption standards so that they don't
buy the wood that is damaging the rainforest, but do buy sustainable products like Brazil
nuts.
Through her work in the Brazilian Senate and among the people of the rainforest, Senator
Marina Silva hopes to keep people's attention focused on and aware of environmental issues
that affect everyone in the long run.
With ear to the ground, I'm Linda Anderson.
You're listening to the Environment Show.
You can write us at 318 Central Avenue, Albany, New York 1-2-2-06.
And now it's time for the Earth Calendar.
This week in the Northern Hemisphere, we experienced the summer solstice, the longest day
of the year.
I was in Katabu, Alaska once for the solstice, and after dinner and some carousing with
my Eskimo hosts, we went out and played badminton in the dusty village street.
It was two o'clock in the morning and broad daylight.
The word solstice comes from Latin, salt for sun and stizz, which means stopping.
The sun stops its northward track and begins rising further south after the solstice, which
marks the official beginning of summer.
What happens is that the seasons are caused by the fact that the sun appears to be more and
more north as the year goes on.
And in the Northern Hemisphere, when the sun comes towards us, then we have summertime,
and it goes away from the Southern Hemisphere and they have winter.
And then after six months it heads back down south and they have the sun coming up.
And then after six months it heads back down south and they have the summer and we have winter.
And so this annual northern motion of the sun and southern motion means that the sun goes up and down every year.
And when it stops, sun stops.
And as far north as it's going to get, well that's June 21st or the 20th of it varies so they are so every year.
That is the solstice.
And it's the summer solstice when it stops as far north as it can get for us.
And so in ancient times this was a particular importance because especially for the winter one definitely wanted to see the sun turn around.
Because this would of course mean that there was going to be a spring.
And so people would watch very carefully to see the sun stopping.
Professor Woody Sullivan is a member of the Department of Astronomy at the University of Washington.
Ancient civilizations paid more attention to the stopping of the sun than we do.
Architects of bygone civilizations in Peru, Mexico and England arranged huge stone structures so the rays of the sun align with them at the solstice.
The earliest civilizations that we know were observing the sun and keeping track of this kind of things go back as far as we have writing.
Because I can say this would be a great importance to people because this determines the seasons. This determines you very livelihood as to how things are happening.
And the way that they would do it in fact would be to watch where the sun rise or sunset occurs because the other thing that happens as you go through the seasons is that the sun rises generally in the east but is not rise due east every day.
In the summertime it rises well to the north of east and then in the equinox it does rise to east and then in the winter time it rises well to the south of east.
And so they would watch this going back and forth on the horizon of the rising sun.
And once again they would see the sun stop in the north at a summer solstice and they would see it stop on the southern end at the winter solstice.
I mean like Stonehenge has definite alignments for instance with the summer solstice sunrise. Stonehenge is the great collection of huge stones in southern England.
And the Stonehenge people which go back at least four or five thousand years was used over several thousand years but the original Stonehenge that there's no writing records of any kind but we can still see that the stones are aligned for these kinds of things.
When we go to Mars we will be able to experience the solstice as well. Mars tilts on its rotation axis as the earth does and so there too the sun will appear to wander back and forth causing seasons to change.
But it takes Mars two years to go around the sun so double the amount of time elapses for the summer solstice to recur.
Personally I don't care much about the summer solstice on Mars because I have not met a Martian yet who could play Badminton after Midnight.
Thanks for being with us on this week's Environment Show. I'm Peter Burley. For cassette copy of the program called 1-800-323-9262 and asked for program number 337.
The Environment Show is a presentation of national productions which is solely responsible for its content. Thomas Lally is the producer, Stephanie Goichman provided additional production support and Dr. Alan Shartuck is the executive producer.
The Environment Show is made possible by Heming's Motor News, the monthly Bible of the Old Car Hobby, 1-800-CAR-HRE and by the David and Lucille Packard Foundation for support of ocean science and fisheries issues.
So long and join us next week for the Environment Show.
