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 Bullet Foundation, and Heming's Motor News, the Bible of the Collector Carhavi,
1-800-C-A-R-H-E-R-E.
Your host is Peter Burley.
Thanks Thomas.
Coming up on this week's Environment Show, some businesses combine environmental activism
with merchandising and make money doing it.
The Army has started incinerating its stockpile of chemical weapons.
Some say it will expose the public to dioxin, we'll hear a debate.
An Environment Show success story as the endangered Kirtland's war blur makes a comeback.
And in our Earth calendar, we celebrate the Muscox mating season.
These stories and we're coming up on this week's Environment Show.
Corporate executives have told me that mixing policy-making in business is a bad idea.
But some companies are using a portion of their profits to help the environment while
adding to their bottom line because of rather than in spite of their environmental activism.
We look at three national firms in such diverse fields as hairstyling and beauty products,
retailing gifts, and producing yogurt and ice cream.
All are supporting environmental causes and making money doing it.
The Nature Company based in California has 132 stores in a substantial catalog business.
It has a full-time naturalist on its staff checking the environmental quality of each product
and the manufacturing processes which go into it.
The company sells environmentally friendly educational gifts for the family and donates
a portion of its profits to groups such as the National Audubon Society and Earth Force,
a nonprofit educational group that helps kids organize for a cleaner environment.
Edward A. Strobin, president and CEO of the company, says supporting the environment makes business sense.
We believe that it is in fact very good business and we believe all businesses should be environmentally friendly.
It's just the right thing to do.
You can make a profit doing that and you also sleep much better at night.
He also caution that to succeed you have to be price-competitive first.
Giving to the environment will differentiate your company but only after you meet your competition on price.
We have done some studies over the last several years and the indication is in general.
The customer looks at price, the price of value relationship, and then the environment as a second issue.
So what I really think is if it really is not a, if the price of value relationship is not correct,
then you really never get to worry about the environment but many customers.
And then the flip side of that of course is if it is correct then this is the added value.
Sure. And now it makes a difference.
Sebastian International, headquartered in Woodland Pills, California, has a network of 60,000 beauty salons in the United States
and 40,000 overseas.
It also sells its own brand of beauty and haircare products.
In recent years it has contributed over a million dollars to the rainforest alliance,
a nonprofit group dedicated to protecting the rainforests of the world.
Sebastian also helps to maintain a medical barge that services indigenous people in the Amazon.
Their little green campaign is described by James Cousenza, Sebastian's international senior vice president.
Before returning to the family business, Cousenza had been Peace Corps director in Brazil.
Through its salons, Sebastian runs an environmental art contest for kids and awards prizes to the winners.
Our ultimate prize is that the winner from each region gets an all expensive paid trip to the rainforest.
The child and one of the parents, I think it's very important for the parent to go with the child.
And I personally have taken these groups for the first four years to the Amazon
and in the last two years to the rainforest of Costa Rica.
Sounds like a great experience.
It's a great experience.
I think that what we have found is that the children of course come from different parts,
different economic backgrounds.
And it's the one opportunity in their life that they have with a parent to really bond.
The one opportunity where they actually have an adventure together,
they want opportunity to be able to discover silence.
To hear the voices of silence in the jungle, it's just amazing what happens.
These kids when they go back usually become spokesperson for what they've seen.
They are to begin with, I think, just natural leaders and they are the best folks people
for the environment, I believe, and for what we're doing together with many other organizations
for the environment.
Cousenza says these programs make good business sense.
It's an expense that we have been part of our cost that we call a
instead of doing advertising.
This is a cause awareness cost which is part of our own balance sheet.
Stonyfield Farm is based in London area New Hampshire and it goes a step farther than other firms.
In addition to sharing 10% of its pre-tax profit with environmental activists,
it recruits its own customers to be the activists themselves.
Stonyfield manufactured yogurt and ice cream in cells in all 50 states.
Its children's product, dubbed Planet Protector's Yogurt, has a round lid with a message on it.
Gary Hershberg urges his customers to use the lid to send Congress a message.
The primary inspiration for starting the company is that we use our packaging to advocate
for environmental causes.
I have in front of me one of your newsletters that you sent to my granddaughter.
It's called Moose from the Farm.
That's right, all the moves that fit to print.
And it says Congress has flipped its lid when it comes to the environment.
Says Stonyfield President Gary Hershberg.
Cutting funds that protect the earth and ensure our children's future is short-sighted.
Our Flip Your Lead campaign will tell Congress that activists, consumers, and businesses
all want the government to be more efficient but not at the expense of a polluted planet.
This sounds to me like political action.
You're urging your customers to use one of the lids of your product to send a political message.
Is this hazardous from the businessman's point of view?
Actually not at all.
In fact quite the opposite.
The Flip Your Lead campaign, if anything,
one of not only praise but also one of the new accounts out there.
In this world, selling to the supermarket world in the 90s, it's so vertical and it's so controlled
by the big players who have obviously far more money and resources to throw around than we do.
Anything that you can do to set yourself out and distinguish yourself from the crowd.
And particularly in gender some loyalty among your consumers can only be a plus.
It's to be sort of a banal and even cynical for a moment.
It's just very, very good marketing.
The bottom line is that some entrepreneurs have found that running their businesses
in an environmentally sound manner and supporting environmental activism is good for their own balance sheet.
They're also proving that within some limits consumers are glad to buy things and help save the planet
all at once. I'm Peter Burley.
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And now it's time for locking horns and envshow debate.
In the next seven years the United States is planning to incinerate its stockpile of 3.3 million
chemical weapons. Just one of these weapons could leave large numbers of people dying and
agonizing death. Congress ordered that they be destroyed by 2004 at eight incinerators across the
country. Only one site in Tuele, Utah has opened and it shut down only three days after opening
because of a small leak. Critics say incineration may expose to citizens around the site to
dioxin, a poison link to birth defects. Proponents argue that incineration is the best way to dispose
of the chemical weapons which pose more of a threat in storage. Joining us are Cindy King with
a Sierra Club which is mounted a legal fight against the Tuele incinerator. And Frank Harken Rider,
Mayor of Hermiston, Oregon, which is near one of the proposed incinerators. They lock horns over
the question is incineration the best option for disposing of our chemical weapons.
Is King? No incineration is not an economic benefit for any community to dispose of chemical weapons.
The better method would be an alternative batch technology that is cost of cost about one
tenth of what our facility costs of three or four of a billion dollars. It does, batch technology
includes taking care of the thirty two million dollars per year of waste byproducts that would
be an additional cost of community. We believe that the Tuele facility can be retrofitted to any
alternative technology, take less cost and less time. Mr. Harken Rider.
Yes. Okay. On incineration, the ten best scientists in the world said that incineration is the best way to get rid of the M55 rocket.
It's the only proven technology. It's worked on Johnson Island. And as far as spending money,
they started out here ten years ago. We've been studying it to get rid of it here. It's still
an innocent and they can't move it. They've got to destroy it. So the best way is incineration.
It's still the only proven technology and the alternatives are proven not to work.
Cindy and reply. And reply that incineration only works if you have a maintain to pressure and
temperature. Incineration does not do that. Alternative technologies are being paid by the US Congress
to get rid of Japanese stockpile. Why are we experimenting on the populace in the state of Utah?
On other sites, beyond my comprehension.
Mayor Harken Rider, the last word.
Okay. And answer that. Again, the ten best scientists in the world has proven incineration is the best way to destroy the M50 rocket.
It's worked on Johnson Island. It is now working in two other Utah. The first rocket the other day,
there was nothing but ash left in it. The alternative method does not work because it doesn't get rid of all the chemical agents
in the earth gas. In other words, there would still be in the rocket they'd have to burn. You'd still have the agent
in the rocket part. Again incineration is the only proven technology to this state. August the 27th,
1996 beyond a reason of a doubt. Thank you both. We've enjoyed by Cindy King from the Sierra Club and
Frank Harken Rider, Mayor of Hermiston, Oregon. Thank you both.
Thank you. Bye-bye.
We hear an environment show success story from producer
Thomas Lally.
Harold Mayfield is an avid bird watcher and one of the world's experts on the Curtains Warbler.
He says the birds have very specific requirements for nesting. They only live in young jack pine trees
which grow after forest fires. Mayfield says this has left the warbler susceptible to a number of threats.
There's always room for argument about complex issues this kind. In nature you rarely have single causes and single effects.
You have a blending of several causes and disentangling them may be difficult indeed.
But a major factor were convinced with the depredations of the brown-headed cowbird.
Cowbirds are parasitic and the warblers have no defense against them. The cowbird populated northern
Michigan in the late 1800s when farmers cleared the forest. In recent years the US Fish and Wildlife
Service has trapped cowbirds cutting their numbers successfully. Mayfield says the most significant
ally of the warbler has been strong regulations protecting the bird and its habitat.
Today controlled burns are conducted to encourage jack pine growth and land is set aside specifically for the birds.
The endangered species act put a great impetus and a muscle behind the public efforts to do something for all nature species
including curtail and shrubber. So it stimulated all the efforts that we were already doing to some extent.
But it caused the various government agencies to dig into it much more energetically.
Harold Mayfield is a retired businessman from Toledo, Ohio and one of the world's experts on the
curtail and warbler. His dedication to the species led to numerous conservation and research initiatives.
For the Environment Show, I'm Thomas Lalley.
In this political season the speeches about family relationships have been endless. David Grimes is
an author living in Alaska. His most recent work appears in from the island's edge, Asitka Reeder.
He shares his views of how a larger family is tied to his special place.
I am a child of rivers. I love the drink of their living music and I love the flowing
mystery of what's down around the next bend. I grew up on the spring-fed rivers of the Ozarks
near the banks of the Missouri River. A river whose most recent incarnation began 10,000 years ago
as she drained of the great receding continental ice sheets of the Pleistocene.
When I was a kid, the ice had been gone for millennia, but more recently gone were the wolves and
bears and buffalo, hunted out only a few generations earlier. I could feel their spirits still
lingering down in the forested river valleys where there was an aura of wilderness.
I like to think all those creatures will show up again in body some day soon, maybe before the ice
returns. Today I live far from the Ozarks in a little fishing village on the Alaska coast.
Ironically, I'm surrounded now by the animals and ice fields that disappeared long ago from my
childhood home. Every summer, a merry band of friends and I loved to raft down the nearby copper
river. Rising above the river valley are immense summer green mountains, glaciers hanging like polar
bearcapes from their shoulders and waterfalls leaping down their sides. The river cuts right through
the mountains to the sea, running at the end a gauntlet of glaciers, great rivers of ice that with
the sound of thunder drop ten story icebergs to crash and bobble alongside us in the current,
which sweeps us out into the wide open spaces of the copper river delta.
We place summer wildflowers in a vase on our camp kitchen table. With the rafts tied up to
willow roots, we forage for wild cucumber greens, cloud berries and chan trells. We fashion
blow guns out of the hollow dried stalks of cow parsnip, perfect for launching cranberries, which
with the red splats solve the age old question of who got who. For supper we feast on copper river
red salmon, best in the world. We thank the salmon for coming to camp with us and ask their spirits
to make a good report of us to all the other fish. The wild creatures are everywhere, making free.
Moose and wolves brown bear three times bigger and ten times stronger than any football player
that ever lived. They love the salmon just as much as we do.
Uncle Remus used to say that there was a time when all the creatures used to
segasuate together, just like there ain't been no fallen out, just like there ain't been no hard times.
It's true. One day on the river a pack of wolves out on their morning errands drifted close by our
camp as curious to see us as we were them. To our everlasting delight they leaned their heads back
and we all began to howl together in euphoric cacophony. I realized then that I'd always been a
member of the pack. The next day we were chased by a couple of monstrous teenage bears, covetous of
the salmon frying in our skillet until mom, big as a tornado rescued us by rounding up her kids
at high speed and shewing them off up river. We couldn't stop laughing later, you get giddy after
cheating death and kids will be kids. But I reckon my favorite encounter with the creatures was a
simple rainy afternoon sitting under the tarp, plucking the guitars usual. When a fox sparrow in a
nearby alder began to sing with liquid breath-taking beauty, a melody and perfect synchrony with my own.
It was over and less than a minute. The loveliest musical do-at-I shall ever hope to hear.
Things that seem like such a miracle, extraordinary acts of grace, are really just what it feels like
to be a normal human animal again, back at home on the river in the big family with all the other
creatures just like there ain't been no fallen out. That's community, that's family values.
David Grimes is an author living in Alaska. The just published from the island's edge as Sitka
Reader contains his most recent work.
And now it's time for the earth calendar. On the Arctic tundra in the northwest territories of
Canada, the peak of breeding season for the musk oxen is occurring right now. Musk ox are members
of the cattle goat and sheep family. According to John Nishie, regional biologist at Canada's
Department of Resources Wildlife and Economic Development, it's at this time of year that the
bulls are busily displaying their dominance to see who's worthy of breeding the females.
As Nishie says, timing is everything. The breeding season is just at the peak now and it'll
start to taper off like the breeding activity will slow down. As more and more of the cows
conceive, the rut usually ends around in September and that's important because if they don't
conceive by a certain time then their calf is going to be born later in the year, the falling
springer and it'll have a harder time to reach weight for the fallen winter. So it's very much
tied to their ecology. Most people picture musk oxen defending themselves. When they feel threatened,
Nishie explains, they form a defense circle. With their backs to the inside, the musk ox turn to
face their foes in an attempt to intimidate predators with their sharp horns and strong necks.
The musk oxen themselves are herbivores, living on the nutrients of grasses and sages and willows.
Nishie says that as grazing animals, they play a very important part in the ecosystem.
The other role that musk oxen play in the ecosystem is that they're an important prey species
and they provide an important source of food for predators like wolves and grizzly bears and
and people and they also provide food for scavengers that eat the remains like foxes and ravens
and even small mammals will not on the bones to get some of the calcium.
In the late 17th and 18th centuries, musk oxen were killed in large numbers as they were
hunted for food, hide and tools by explorers traveling across the tundra.
Faced with near extinction, the Canadian government placed a ban on hunting musk ox in the 20s.
Since then, their numbers have steadily risen and today their population has reached 145,000
across northern Canada. Musk oxen once inhabited England, France and Germany in parts of the
United States. Unlike the musk oxen who stand silently in a circle when threatened, the humans that
have taken their place went in danger and went in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. That's how
you can tell them apart. 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 348.
The Environment Show is a presentation of national productions which is solely responsible for
its content. Dr. Alan Chartuck is the executive producer, Thomas Lally is producer, and Stephanie
Goyceman is the associate producer. The Environment Show is made possible by the W. Alton Jones Foundation,
the Bullet Foundation, and Heming's Motor News, the monthly Bible of the Old Car Havi, 1-800-CAR-HER.
So long and join us next week for the Environment Show.
