This is the Environment Show. It's about our stewardship of the Earth and the beauty
and mystery of life in all its forms. I'm Peter Burley.
Coming up, in Ohio, they're going to pave over the bottom of a river with a new kind
of gunk to keep the PCBs from moving downstream. 96 species of fish in American Ocean
waters are classified as overfished, but plans are underway to restore them. We hear
from our listeners, and we chat with CNN's Barbara Pyle. She's the first journalist ever
to win the United Nations Sasa Kawa Environment Prize. And the Earth calendar, bugs, are
preparing to hibernate even in Florida. These stories are more coming up on the Environment
Show.
Officials in Toledo, Ohio have approved a plan to use experimental pellets to cover the
bottom of the Ottawa River, a waterway heavily laden with PCBs. The experimental pellets
are aquablock, as the product is called, have only been used once before. But as the Environment
Show's Stephen Westcott reports, company officials are hoping aquablock will provide a
natural remedy to a very unnatural problem. The Ottawa River, located in the northwestern
tip of Ohio, is believed to be one of the largest sources of PCB pollution in Lake Erie. Officials
at Ohio's Environmental Protection Agency say, much of the contamination is a result of
landfills located in the Ottawa's floodplain. The River is considered to be among Ohio's
top five polluted waterways, according to Chris Yoder, manager of the ecological assessment
unit with the state EPA.
The levels, I think, in the sediment or in the parts per million range, which is very
high, I think it's in some cases in the hundreds of parts per million. And then fish tissue,
we've tested fish there that have had contaminant levels of highest 25 to 30 parts per million.
And that's well in excess of any safe eating guidelines that we have.
Yoder emphasizes the Ottawa River is an urban stream with a long history of industrial
impacts as well as sewer overflows. In the meantime, Ohio's Department of Development is
hoping to clean up the river enough so that a new, jeep automotive plant can be constructed.
The river is too contaminated to be dredged, so officials have decided to try an experimental
product called aquablock. John Hall is president of Hall & Associates, an environmental engineering firm
based in Toledo. He says aquablock is the brainchild of his partner Tom Nockman, who was contacted by
federal officials to help solve an environmental problem in Alaska. Hall says a waterway at Fort
Richardson had such high phosphorus levels in 1993 that ducks were dying in large numbers.
In his typical fasion, he thinks outside the box a little bit. He thought, well, maybe the problem
isn't that you need to keep the ducks away from the area. Maybe you need to keep the contaminated
sediments away from the ducks. So he turned around the whole idea and came to me and said we need a
barrier layer that we can place easily, something from the air initially because of the difficulty of
using conventional technology in that area. And we worked together and came up with aquablock.
Hall says survival rates among the ducks has increased since aquablock was applied at Fort Richardson.
New waste concepts, the production company of Holland Associates, is also pointing to aquablocks
all natural features as one of its benefits. Tim Johnson is the company's general sales manager.
Well, bednets is a product that is a natural clay that expands very readily in water.
And what we did is we attached that around rock so that we created a ball or a sphere that would
drop into water and not immediately disperse. And when dropping a volume of these into water,
they lay on the bottom next to each other and as they start to expand, they start to basically
kind of push against themselves. And as they do that, they form a sealed surface.
Johnson says the company uses concrete mixing equipment to process the product. About three acres
of riverbed, some of the auto is most contaminated areas will be covered with about five inches of
aquablock that will expand to create a layer approximately 12 inches thick. Another unique feature of
aquablock is that unlike other sheet or panel type products that cover toxic materials, few if any
can be applied from above the water. In Alaska, they dropped aquablock from black hawk helicopters to
protect themselves from rounds of ammunition located in the pond. In the Ottawa River,
stirring up the PCBs when aquablock is dumped from a barge or by some other method, it's just one
of the obstacles the company faces. Again, John Hall. That's why we're doing column testing and
bench scale testing to determine what size of particle needs to be manufactured for different water
columns and different sediment thicknesses, different sediment characteristics. We would not
recommend anyone to go out willy-nilly and throw the stuff in the water. You have to determine what
your sediment column and makeup is like. What is the contaminant of concern? What are the flow
characteristics? When is the best time of year to place this material? Hall says aquablock will also be
tested in an area with less contaminated sediments to monitor the product's long-term effectiveness.
He admits that aquablock isn't the solution to every problem, but says it might help better a bad
situation until other solutions are found. The EPA's Chris Yoder agrees. Natural stream sub-strates are
function best when they're very penetrable and not sort of a semening. There's a lot of
poor water space that a lot of function takes place with bacteria and other organisms that
really form the base of the food chain. In a normal situation this probably would not be a good
thing to do, but in this particular case given the severity of the problem and the urgency of
the problem, this probably is on balance. A good approach. New waste concepts is expected to begin
applying aquablock in the Ottawa River in late winter or early spring. I'm Stephen Westcott for the
Environment Show. Last October on the first down of nursery of the reauthorization of a
Magnusenak, which governs the way we manage fisheries in the United States waters,
the National Marine Fisheries Service released a report indicating about 20% of the species they
examined are overfished, which means they could become commercially extinct. We identified some
86 species that are currently overfished and 10 more that are anticipated to be approaching
overfishing within the next two years. So there's some 96 out of a total of about
over 500 species that we looked at that are currently overfished. That was Gary Matlock,
director of the Office of Sustainable Fisheries of the National Marine Fisheries Service.
His office is in charge of seeing that the eight regional fisheries councils around the country
draw up and implement plans to ensure the recovery of those stocks occurs within the next 10 years.
The plans themselves are to be completed by the second anniversary of the reauthorization
or October 1998. The Revised Magnusenak has a number of new requirements which are designed to
put an end to the consequences of overfishing. Kim Davis, regional fisheries project manager for
the Center of Marine Conservation, which is a non-profit and environmental group, describes the
changes. There's three big improvements to the act. They deal with overfishing, by-touch,
and habitat protection. Whereas the act previously said that we shouldn't be overfishing,
it actually required some wiggle room there and allowed it to happen. It allowed fishing levels
to be set based not only on biology, but also on social and economic concerns. The act now says
we'll end overfishing. It also says that we're going to rebuild depleted stocks. It says we're
going to start doing it in the next two years. It says we need to finish rebuilding by the end of
the next 10 years where possible. Second big change was respective by-touch. As you may know, there's
a lot of waste in our fisheries. There is a lot that is harvested or rather caught and killed,
but not harvested and sold. For instance, in the shrimp fishery, there's a tremendous amount of
by-touch. In the Gulf, more than 80 percent of what's caught and killed in shrimp nets isn't shrimp.
The act now says that by-touch will be minimized previously with silence, so this is a great change.
It's going to be really meaningful to a lot of our fisheries. And the third one is also very
exciting, whereas the act was previously pretty silent on the topic of habitat. It now says that
we're going to describe and identify the habitat which is essential to fish. Between now and
next October, the regional councils have to revise plans for each species to ensure their recovery.
This involves publishing a draft plan, holding public hearings, and then securing approval from
the council, which includes people of widely differing perspectives. Patricia Fiorelli,
Public Affairs Officer for the New England Fish Re Management Council, located in
Sagas, Massachusetts, lists some of the strategies being considered by her council to bring back
fish populations. She says in the New England area, there are 13 overfished species which include
groundfish, scallops, and lobster. We will, I'm sure, use the same kind of management measures we
have before. Area closures, restrictions on the amount of time people can spend fishing for those
species. We have what you call trip limits, how many, how many pounds the fish you can bring in at
a time, perhaps some kind of quota. There are a number of different tools and it's kind of hard to
project because we try to tailor those measures to each fishery. While the New England council has
been criticized in the past for moving too slowly to take stringent measures opposed by some of
its fishermen members, significant areas off Georgia's bank were declared off limits for fishing
starting in 1994. Fiorelli says recovery is beginning for Gulf of Maine cod, yellowtailed flounder,
and haddock. An unintended but welcome result of closing the area of fishing has been the recovery
of scallops as well. Sonja Fordham, fisheries project manager for the Center of Marine Conservation,
says there have been other successes in New England waters. To save fisheries, it's important to
reduce bycatch, which of the fish and animals thrown away are killed because they're hooked or
netted while the fisher is attempting to catch something else. In New England, particularly, they
have a bycatch success story in the northern shrimp fishery, fish is for the small type of shrimp in
the Gulf of Maine. A number of years ago they put in what's called a finfish excluter device,
it's called the Nordmore Great and it excludes larger finfish flounders and so forth that are often caught
in the trough. So we look towards technology to look at fish behavior and ways to exclude the fish
that are other marine life that are unwanted. There are also in New England working on
these devices called pingers that are put on gill nets that are intended to avoid marine mammals
or to term marine mammals so that they don't get caught in the catch. Shrip bycatch is a
significant problem in the Gulf of Mexico because it threatens another important fish stock.
Kim Davis who follows the Gulf Council for the Center for Marine Conservation says the problem
is not going to be easy to solve. In the Gulf, the real action is can be with respect to the red
snapper fishery. The red snapper fishery is a real important fishery of the Gulf region economically,
socially there are a lot of people involved and biologically it's a fish that should be very,
very plentiful in the Gulf. However, it's been over fish pretty severely and not just from the
directed fishery but also in sort of an interesting twist of events by the shrimp fishery because as I
said a lot is caught in shrimp nets that isn't shrimp and a lot of juvenile red snapper are caught
in shrimp nets. So actually restoring the red snapper fishery is going to require some changes
in the shrimp fishery as well as the red snapper fishery and the truth of the matter is that
the shrimp fishery is very powerful politically so that's going to be a struggle. So a year after
Magnus and reauthorization there are some positive signs. Strategies are being put in place to reduce
fishing pressure off American coastlines and the next milestone comes up a year from now when the
new management plans covering all U.S. waters are supposed to be in force. I'm Peter Burley.
The Environment Show has been receiving email and calls from all over the place.
Rachel Phillips has more. Thanks Peter. A talking green discussion on the auto industry and its
role in reducing carbon emissions caught the attention of one listener. He sent us a lengthy
email on how the auto industry has avoided using the best technology to reduce emissions
over the years. Ralph Kenyon of Massachusetts wrote,
The auto industry representative on your show exhibited the typical resistance that I saw
from them and from government during my letter writing days in the late 80s and early 90s.
Even Saturn, a supposedly technologically advanced car still uses the worst possible propulsion
system gasoline internal combustion reciprocating. Larry Holman contacted us by the internet to say,
I heard your radio program today on WSNY from Columbus, Ohio. It sounds as if freedom is the cause
of all the environmental problems. If we take them away, the environment would be better off. I don't
agree. Thanks for all your comments. We want to hear what you think. You can reach our comment line
anytime by calling 1-888-49-green that's 1-888-49-green or you can drop us an email at greenatwaamc.org
For the Environment Show, I'm Rachel Phillips.
This is the Environment Show and I'm Peter Burley. The Environment Show is made possible by the
W. Alton Jones Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the Turner Foundation, the J.M. Kaplan Fund,
and the Oliver S. and Jenny R. Donaldson Trust, Bob and Marilyn Schumann, and Heming's Motor
News, the monthly Bible of the collector car hobby, 1-800-CAR-HER.
To save our ocean fish stocks, a lot more controls are going to be put on how, where,
and how many fish are being caught. Should the government do more to help the fishers who
use to rely on the catch to make a living? If so, what? Give us a call. Our number is 1-888-49-green.
That's 1-888-49-green. Our email address is greenatwaamc.org
.
Barbara Pyle, Vice President of Environmental Policy and CNN's Environmental Editor,
has been awarded the 1997 United Nations Sasa Kawa Environment Prize.
It's the first time a journalist has ever won the prestigious award. I recently spoke to Pyle
about the prize. Barbara, you are the first environmental journalist ever to win the Sasa Kawa
Prize. How's it feel? Well, actually, Peter, it's the first journalist period to win this prize.
This prize is usually reserved for very prestigious and brilliant academics and scientists,
such as Leicester Brown and Paul and Anne Ehrlich. I don't know how it feels, quite honestly.
I'm in shock. I don't really feel yet. When I got the news, it was sort of, this can't be happening.
I guess I really won't believe it happens. It's happening until it happens.
Barbara, you've been involved in trying to educate the public about the environment for many years now.
A long time, Peter. How do you think we're doing?
We go sort of up and down. I actually believe that the public is more informed
than programmers give them credit for. I'm very impressed with some of the recent surveys that I've
seen about the public interest in climate change issue. I believe that we're doing a lot better
than I ever dreamed we would do. When I embarked on this mission 17 years ago to try to create an
informed constituency on environmental issues, I never dreamed that we would get as far as we've
gotten. I never dreamed by even the beginning of the 90s. People would be recycling or even caring.
Increasingly, we hear particularly in the print side of things that editors are saying to
folks that used to cover the environment full-time, well, maybe we'll split you between the
environment and sports or whatever. The number of people dedicated to environmental reporting
is not growing, is it? I just attended a society of environmental,
journalist, annual meeting. In fact, there is a tremendous amount of pressure on the journalist
to do fewer stories. I think it's unfortunate because I really do believe that the public
now more than ever want more stories about the future of the planet. I think the public is
starting to understand the concept of intergenerational equity and that what we do now
will impact future generations and that these issues are real issues that the environment is not
something that is just a bunch of left-wing lunatics that we have to live in it. It's part of us.
We're part of it. That was Barbara Pyle, CNN's environmental editor. She's the latest winner
of the Sasakawa Environment Prize.
And now it's time for the Earth Calendar. It's late fall. In bugs of all kinds, you're preparing
to hibernate for another winter season, even in Gainesville, Florida, where you wouldn't expect such
hibernation to occur, insects, et cetera, diapods phase, which halts their development.
Mark Hustler, Professor of Zoology at the University of Florida, says insects, diapods, and a pupa
or larval form. With moth larvae, often finding their winter homes in tree bark and waiting for warmer,
longer days. You know, even through the winter of Florida, you have periodic warmings where you get
insects flushed out. You have butterflies almost all winter long coming out hatching and
flying about and laying their eggs. Bees typically will go into a sort of hibernation where they
gather all the honey during the summer, store it in all the combs, and you just hunker down there
during the winter and come out during the spring when the flowers come out. So insects are doing
lots of things right now. People always think, well, what do mosquitoes do during the winter? I mean,
when it really freezes a lot of the eggs that the mosquitoes lay can tolerate these freezes.
And as soon as it warms up and water comes back, they hatch out and you get mosquitoes all again.
So there are lots of things that are happening right now, but you don't see as many insects
flying about now as you do during the summer or spring. Hustler says different insects hibernate
for different periods of time, with some hunkering down for a fixed period and others responding to
warmer temperatures. You know, moths, uh, uh, uh, uh, a lot of them are in a pupa stage now where they've
metamorphosed and they've just gone through a diapause where they don't develop until it gets warmer.
So moths, wasps, um, some of the butterflies do this too, although pier ockin we feel warming
a period they will come out hatch out early before spring comes out. And one species of love bug,
people think, you know, they come out in May and September in Florida and people like,
where the heck do these love bugs come from? And why, you know, do they come out in May and September?
And what's going on is that, uh, the love bugs lay their eggs in rotting, decaying, organic matter.
And when they lay the eggs in May, it's hot enough that they develop really fast into the larval stage onto
the adult stage. And so they come out in September. But then September all the way to the next
May is a cool period. And so they don't develop as fast. So they're in the soil still eating and
munching and doing the things that the RV love bugs do, but they do it at much slower rate so they
don't actually, um, made it more efficient to adult until, um, May comes around.
After hibernating, Hostettler says love bugs spend five or six months underground,
eating decaying matter. They come out to mate for three days to a week and then they die.
This compares with bees, which can live for a number of years.
For this bug lover, it's one of the most fascinating parts of the animal world.
It's neat to think that, you know, um, they reduce their development rate where they just use
very minimal amounts of energy. They just essentially, you know, kind of think of bears that
just go into where their heart beats slows down to, you know, almost very slow poles.
Their use of fat and sugars and stuff is very, very reduced. And it's just, it's just neat to
think that the insect can just also cut all that out and then get reactivated when warm air,
warm airs, you know, warmth comes back into the environment and, you know,
its humans can't really do that, but insects have a neat way of doing that.
Professor Hostettler says insects, like most other animals, use whatever means necessary to pass
along their genes from one generation to the next. It's natural selection at work.
So it's no wonder that love bugs made in such a short period of time.
If you spent half the year underground eating decay matter, your love life would be short too.
Thanks for listening. This is the Environment Show, and I'm Peter Burley.
You're listening to the Environment Show, and I'm Peter Burley. Coming up, we visit a laboratory
ship frozen far up in the Arctic Ocean where scientists are studying the ice. Saman farming,
young fish are raised in a hatchery and then kept in pins of the sea. Two experts lock horns
about whether this is a good idea. European farmers swap their pitchforks for the internet.
And musician Paul Witter takes us to a special canyon where he plays his soprano saxophone.
More than 50 scientists from five countries have converged on a remote part of the Arctic Ocean
to conduct studies of large ice packs. The temperatures are cold and the harsh environment makes it
difficult to do anything, let alone conduct scientific studies. But the rewards could be great.
As part of the Environment Show's continuing series on global warming, Steven Westcott reports
on how the research could help scientists better understand the effect climate change will have on
the Arctic. The surface heat budget of the Arctic Ocean project, also known as Shiba,
is the largest science experiment ever supported by the National Science Foundation in the Arctic Ocean.
The project, supported by the NSF and the Office of Naval Research, includes a fleet of ice
breakers, research aircraft and balloons, a naval nuclear submarine and satellites. The research
vessel is an icebreaker that has been frozen in the Arctic pack ice and left to drift for a year.
A sort of floating science station located 300 miles north of the Alaska shoreline,
which means little if any daylight and very very cold temperatures. Richard Moritz, a researcher with
the applied physics laboratory at the University of Washington, is at the station. And he says temperatures
have already reached minus 32 degrees Celsius. We expect during the winter to see
temperatures at least down to minus 45 if not lower. The area around the ship where we're studying
and deploying our instruments is pack ice and it's covered with snow now, there's about 16
centimeters of snow on the ground. And it's undulating with a lot of interesting variations in
thickness and the surface shapes on the ice. The ice ridges and breaks and melts during the summer
and all this makes a wonderful landscape. And we walk around on it as if it were solid ground and do
our work even though we're sitting on top of a two meter thick ice sheet over a 3000 meter deep ocean.
Moritz adds that as winter progresses colder temperatures and darker days will make the working
environment difficult to say the least. But the sacrifices are well worth it. The research being
conducted there will give scientists a better idea of how global warming is impacting the Arctic
environment. Richard Moritz says the project began about two and a half years ago and has three phases.
In phase one we were studying the existing datasets concerned with the heat budget of the Arctic.
We were looking at climate models trying to determine what the most important things
were that needed improvement in those models. And we were also developing technology that could
be brought to bear in phase two. We're now in phase two and that's the field experiment phase.
The third phase will begin in about a year and involve the intensive use of the datasets they collect
and climate modeling studies according to Moritz. He says researchers are trying to understand the
Earth's climate as a whole taking into consideration the atmosphere of the ocean, ice cover, snow,
plants and chemicals. One way in which we do that the most comprehensive tool we use is the
global climate model sometimes referred to as a GCM. And this is a model that has much of the physics
of the climate system cast as a bunch of differential equations which are solved by a computer.
It's a little bit like a weather forecasting model but it's dealing with processes on a much
longer time scale. So my particular specialty is the study of the processes that go into these
models and in particular the ones that are associated with the Arctic Ocean and Pac-Eyes and
Arctic processes in general. Moritz says scientists will be mapping ice patterns and measuring such
things as ice thickness, heat conduction, isolinity and other factors which will enable researchers to
make better predictions. He says current models are unreliable because of a lack of information
and they can't take into account unpredictable events that can affect climate such as volcanic
eruptions. But I think as far as the effect of the greenhouse gases I tend to think they're
pretty much on the mark that there will be warming. On the other hand when you look at the Arctic
there's a real wide variation in the predictions of these models which is one of the reasons we're
here. Some of the models predict that the Pac-Eyes here will ultimately disappear completely within
a time span of maybe 50 or 100 years. Other models have a relatively much more modest effect.
If it were to disappear it would be a huge impact on the Arctic Ocean ecosystem.
Moritz says the payoff of the Sheba project will be that researchers will have more confidence
in the predictions of how global warming is affecting the Arctic environment.
I'm Stephen Westcott for the Environment Show.
Almost the third of the salmon on the worldwide market is now grown in farms
and salmon farming is a growing industry. While salmon farming produces a prized food it raises
substantial environmental questions because of the waste produced its impact on native fish
and its use of resources. I have two experts with me one is Michael Weber. He's the formal special
assistant to the director of the National Marine Fish Reservice who joins us from California
and Joe McGonagall. He's the executive director of the Maine Agricultural Association
and it turns out that in Maine salmon has become the second most valuable fishery after lobster.
So they lock horns over the question, is salmon farming a good idea? Joe McGonagall, what do you think?
Oh I think it's a terrific idea. In Maine for example it has made a major difference in
one of the poorest counties east of the Appalachians Washington County where for the first time
in generations people have full time year round high paying jobs that the jobs average about 35,000
dollars a year which is above average in Maine. They pay full benefits retirement, health care
etc. So it's been a tremendous boom economically to the regions where salmon is farmed.
And like Weber what do you think? Well salmon farming is whether or not it's a good idea. It has
been growing very very rapidly and it's been growing largely without very careful scrutiny both for
environmental and economic impacts. And I think we all know that we need to grow more food in the
future. My question is whether or not this is the way to do it and we'll get into the impacts later
on. And that's really the main concern I think that we have is with the rapid growth in the lack
of scrutiny. Well let's go direct to our next question and that is is salmon farming acceptable
with respect to the risks and hazards that it produces. And Michael let's start with you.
Well let me just identify some of those risks and they are perhaps less though in Maine than
in other areas. Maine is a relatively small producer but in places like Chile,
Puget Sound, British Columbia, Norway in particular there are major problems that have developed in
Norway every year roughly one in a third million salmon escape from pins and they take with them
diseases which have caused problems to wild runs of salmon. They've also basically
competed out competed wild salmon runs in two dozen rivers. There are problems with waste that
are generated by salmon farms although these are relatively efficient converters of feed into protein
they still produce quite a bit of waste anywhere from 270 to a thousand tons of waste are produced
for each thousand tons of salmon. And they also have impacts on marine wildlife in British Columbia
500 seals and sea lions are shot every year because they are attracted by salmon pins.
Okay Joe McGonagall and reply. Well that's an awful lot of information to respond to in 20 seconds
but let me just focus on the disease issue. Thank you I appreciate it. The idea that wild
or cage salmon spread diseases to the wild population is really something that is more speculative
than real. There has never been anywhere in the world a documented case of a farm salmon
transferring disease to wild. It's an area of concern because you're growing highly concentrated
in a small area and so that if a disease breaks out then you certainly have the risk of an epidemic
occurring and a lot of pathogens and duchess into the water but truthfully the fish that we're
putting in the water are actually cleaner than the fish that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
puts in the water all over the West Coast and here on the East Coast is Welfare Atlantic salmon.
These fish are vaccinated they are kept in certified disease free hatcheries we pairmate the
brood stock we leafly sample the brood stock we do 100% leafless sampling to test for diseases.
There is no disease in these fish when they go in the water and they're typically vaccinated
vaccinated against the most significant endemic diseases in their local areas so I think that's
really a red herring. I think the issue of waste is also I think maybe Mike may be dealing with
some outdated information from Norway there were certainly problems in the early days of the
industry in the late 70s early 80s when it was not entirely clear what the pattern of feeding
ought to be. Today for example in Maine we have we do baseline environmental surveys of the
bottom and the water column before CKG is recited and we do biennual surveys every year there after
and year after year after year now since 1990 the state of Maine has dived and filmed under
the CKG and they find in fact that there's no significant biochemilation under the under the
10s. Okay. Mike in response. In response I would just say that there is a very clear correlation
between the spread of salmon farming and the spread of certain kinds of diseases in
areas like Scotland and Norway and while there is no smoking gun the correlation is very very
strong. The second thing is that I believe that Maine has very very strict controls but this is
Maine is an exception in this regard those controls are not the kinds of controls that you find
elsewhere where salmon is being farmed. I don't disagree with that and I think maybe a much of
this debate could be minimized if most of the other salmon farming areas followed Maine standards.
I think it's interesting that British Columbia after a year of review in fact has put out a list
of about 80 recommendations that virtually duplicate Maine's careful site selection and careful
monitoring. Now just one brief question to conclude Mike Weber you wrote an article in which you
questioned the value of raising predators generally. Again 30 seconds your comments on raising
predators and whether it's a good idea. Well salmon farming depends to a large extent on the use of
fish meal and fish meal is produced from generally from oily fish such as anchovies and sardines
about five pounds of sardines to produce a pound of fish meal. So basically we're catching one kind
of fish grinding it up processing it and feeding it to another kind of fish. If we're trying to feed
the world which I think is a goal that everyone believes and I don't think that that's the highest
or best use of fish that is to be converting it into fish meal for salmon. Jody you want to comment
on switching the world of a sardine diet instead? Well yes I mean the fish meal itself is only about
60% of the volume of fish feed and the waste that's lost in creating the fish meal is primarily
just the byproducts it's the skeletons and things like that. I mean frankly you don't want the bones
in there because it increases the phosphates that are wasted essentially in the fish feed. So
I really don't think that you really have that poor conversion factor and the salmon themselves
are very efficient at converting the feed they do receive into into flesh it's moving into the
vicinity of one pound of feed produces one pound of harvestable weight. So I really don't think
it's an inefficient way of using these industrial fish sources. I want to thank you both. We've been
talking with Mike Weber who is former special assistant to the director of the National Marine
Fish Re service and Joe McGonagall who is executive director of the main agricultural association.
They've been locking horns over the question of salmon farming.
You could hear the environment show anytime when your personal computer via the internet.
Go to our webpage it's www.enn.com slash envshow.
You can also use the page to tell us what you think otherwise just call us up. The number is 1-888-49-Green.
This is the environment show and I'm Peter Burley. The developing world doesn't just need money
for development it also needs access to resources and expertise. Since 1980 this has been the
aim of the International Service for National Agricultural Research or ISNAR. ISNAR helps developing
countries gain self-sufficiency through agricultural research and improved resource management.
Now ISNAR is using a new tool. It's the internet. Janet Anderson of Radio Netherlands reports.
So you go through into the links it gives you lots of different things to choose from
information systems. The US National Agricultural Library genetic engineering news. What's
on the genetic engineering news? They are home pages from other organisations.
Okay. For someone who's never used the internet at all it may all sound a bit confusing.
But with the help of a computer, a modem and Andrew Sokolowski from ISNAR I was looking at a whole
set of pieces of information on scientific subjects specifically designed to give help to
scientists from agricultural research institutes about policies and management.
There are real case studies which you can follow with lots of questions. You can suggest your own
solutions. There are links to other institutions with tons more information and there's space for
scientists in developing countries to ask questions directly and get expert answers.
Kathleen Sheridan is in charge of publications for ISNAR. She told me about the kinds of help
that currently give agricultural institutes in developing countries and how the internet will help.
We can tell them how to use the resources they have in the most effective way and we try to have
them focus on priority areas. Often what we find is countries are trying to do too much with too
few resources. So we give them advice on how to get better financing and better funding to make
contact with the policymakers in the country to try to establish priorities that are feasible
considering their circumstances to focus on what the population needs. According to Kathleen Sheridan,
the new internet project should also help ISNAR target its work better, more according to the
priorities of the institutions themselves. Rudolf Content is one of the scientists who've been
working on the project. He told me why he thought it was needed now. Everybody is setting priorities
all the time. So institutions have to set priorities that fall within their resources and this
demand with increasing fund scarcity, scarcity in terms of human resources which everybody is facing.
Big choices have to be made especially when we talk about agricultural production,
there are many environmental problems that have been grafted onto the previous agendas.
Things are much more complicated to increase yields for instance. It's much more complicated
than it used to be when there was less population pressure, when land was less degraded and so
false. So the agendas of these institutions is getting and countries are getting more complicated,
costs have gone up and therefore the setting of priorities could become quite agonizing.
Is this a comment altogether to suggest that ISNAR's work in the past hasn't been able to have
that kind of discussion and that really you've been sending the stuff out and have no idea whether
anybody's made any use of it at all? Well this is not a question for ISNAR. This is a question
worldwide for almost every organisation including the big international organisations.
It's a common problem that they have a mailing list, some of which is out of date. It's
extremely difficult to keep mailing lists up to date. This is a worldwide problem. Apart from that
the material once you've published it in book form it is fixed and it is dated and out of date
fairly quickly, particularly in this type of area that we work in. Furthermore it's extremely
costly if you send things out to a very large number of people and you haven't got the slightest
idea how many people will use it. So by using the two approaches together, first of all you do not
expect anything that goes on the internet to be there forever. You keep changing it all the time.
Your questions keep coming in, your answers keep flowing back and for the material that has a longer
value you can put that out in published form and you are also sure that the people who do want to
receive it are actually going to use it. It's not just a matter of cost and number of copies that
send out some of which reach no destination at all. It's also the fact that by having this
interactive means we have a much better idea of what's alive, what are the real issues. So I
bet you that the pertinent of our publication could improve, the relevance is going to improve.
That was Janet Anderson of Radio Netherlands reporting.
We all have places that are special to us. For summits at City Street, for others it's deep
in the wilderness. Paul Winters, a musician and a composer who uses the sounds of nature and
natural settings to make his music unique. He presents a portrait of his special place, playing
his soprano saxophone in a hidden canyon off the Grand Canyon. I had the opportunity to talk with him
about his latest work. Paul you've got a new album out. It's called Canyon Lullabot.
I'd like you to describe for me the place it was that you recorded it.
There's a very special side canyon of the Grand Canyon that I just discovered in the mid-80s after
a number of river expeditions through the canyon. That has the most sublime sound of any
place that I've found yet on earth. It's a cul-de-sac canyon. It doesn't have a name as far as we know.
Properly a box canyon, but we spell it BACH apostrophe S. We have to clamber up over a small cliff
and use ropes. We finally come to this amazing temple at the end of this site canyon that
has an 800-foot wall that curves around to embrace the space. It feels like a great carved
sanctuary and it of course has been carved by water over millions of years.
And what does all this rock do to the quality and the sense and the emotion of the sound that
you're able to create as you play? Well it does magic to it and I'm not sure that I understand
exactly what happens, but it was the first place that I had discovered in all of the years of
of trekking through the canyon and playing in different acoustic places that had the kind of sound
that gives you when you close your eyes and listen the sort of majesty that one sees with your eyes
when you look out from the edge of the south rim at the vast panorama. It adds a richness.
It gives you a sense of the vastness of the space and the ambient sounds that then come into
whatever you're playing from the birds to crickets to different creatures that are there.
It very much gives you the feeling that you're right there in the middle of the Grand Canyon.
The canyon lullaby includes sounds of rinses, housefinches, frogs and crickets which were singing in
the canyon when winter was playing. In other compositions, winter has taken the melodies of
specific creatures and used them as a basis for a musical composition. He was inspired by the voices
of whales. It struck me that probably the most interesting thing I could do would be to see if I
could find a pattern in their song which I could play on my instrument, the piano sax or on the
cello in our ensemble or some other instrument. So that a scene, even a short seed theme,
upon which we would grow a piece would actually be the composition, so to speak, of the creature,
of the whale or the wolf or whoever it was. We could then symbolically say that we actually
collaborated with that creature in making the piece and share publishing royalties with the
organizations working to save those creatures in their habitat. So the first one was from a whale
piece and we found a melody that I could play and we harmonized it with human harmonies. That has
been a kind of pattern that we have used over the years in creating a number of pieces.
For our listeners who may not have heard you before, could you just hum and make this may not be
possible? A theme that comes from one of these animal sounds that you've been used to
all grant a piece of music? That's a great challenge. I haven't been asked to do that before.
I'm sure people will be grateful that I play soprano sax rather than sing to these creatures,
but the eight note theme of the humpback whale song that Roger Payne had recorded is part of a much
longer 20-some-minute piece that I used and that I play in the sax has these notes, which I hope
you'll be able to hear.
Finally, I asked Winter what impact he wanted his grand canyon music to have on people that
heard it. And he replied that he hoped to awaken the sense of gratitude and love that comes with
feeling reconnected to the larger family of life on earth, a feeling that comes to him in his
special Bach canyon off the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River. Paul Winter is a composer and
musician and his latest album is Canyon Lullaby, distributed by Earth Music Productions.
Thanks for being with us on this week's Environment Show. I'm Peter Burley. You can't
raft down the Grand Canyon without Paul Winter and his sax. Get a copy of the show by calling
1-888-49 Green and ask for show number 412. Dr. Ellen Sharktalk is the executive producer and
producers are Rachel Phillips and Stephen Westcott. The Environment Show is a national production which
is solely responsible for its content. It's made possible by the W. Walton Jones Foundation,
the Packard Foundation, the Turner Foundation, the Oliver S. and Jenny Ardonelson Charitable Trust,
Bob and Marilyn Schumann and Heming's Motor News, the monthly Bible of a collector car hobby,
1-800-CA-R-H-E-R-E. Be good to the earth and join us next week for the Environment Show.
