Welcome to the Environment Show, exploring issues and events of the planet, I'm Thomas
Lalli.
The Environment Show is a national production made possible by Heming's Motornews, the
monthly Bible of the Old Carhobby from Dennington, Vermont, 1-800-C-A-R-H-E-R-E.
Your host is former Environmental Conservation Commissioner for the State of New York, and
former President of the National Audubon Society, Peter Verly.
Thanks, Thomas.
Coming up on this week's Environment Show, we'll look at two communities with waste products
that provide real opportunity.
Cuba could generate all of its electricity with residue from sugar mills, but instead it's
trying to complete a Russian nuclear plant, which presents environmental concerns for
all of us.
Meanwhile in New York City, some say it's an urban forest.
They use waste wood from shipping crates and pallets to make high-quality wood flooring.
Lester Brown, author of State of the World 1996, assesses our future.
And our ear to the ground speaks with folks who are using the urban landscape in a different
way by bringing our DAC produce to those who need it most.
And our Earth calendar looks at the fire season in Florida.
These stories are more coming up this week on the Environment Show.
Recently back from Cuba is an American delegation that included Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and nuclear
and energy specialists from the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental organization
known as NRDC.
They looked at the nuclear reactor whose construction was interrupted three years ago as the Soviet
Union disintegrated.
With help from Russians who arrived in Cuba when the American delegation was there, the Cubans
were exploring ways to restart construction and get the reactor completed so it can produce
energy for an economy that had become completely dependent on cheap Russian oil, which is no
longer available.
Robert Kennedy describes what they found.
The Cubans are now engaged in construction of a nuclear power plant.
90% of the concrete has already been poured.
They've got a tower about 210 feet high.
The nuclear power plant is a prototype model.
It's a Soviet design.
This kind of plant has never been built before.
It's a big concern for the United States.
Primarily because Cuba really doesn't have any experience in managing a nuclear reactor.
The regulatory agency is very young.
It was actually created after construction on the nuclear power plant began.
And therefore it missed the opportunity to review the citing plants, the soil types,
the hydrology, the stability of the site, and also most importantly, quality assurance
and quality control in the construction of the site.
It is not a strong agency.
It has very little experience and there's no public review process.
In our country we would consider that a vital part of assuring the safety of the plant.
Of a Cuban energy agency responsible for monitoring the safety of the construction is in an embryonic
stage.
Chris Payne, NRDC nuclear specialist, says it will take four years to complete assembly
of the reactor components.
The reactor itself, that is the pressure vessel and the steam generating system, has
not been installed.
And so they've got a long way to go before they have a finished reactor, at least another
four years of continuous work.
And so those reactor components, the steam generators and the condensers and the pressure
vessel are sitting on a concrete pad, sort of loosely housed in corrugated tin.
The reactor is not of the Chernobyl variety.
It more closely resembles western designs, but Payne says it is still of concern to the
United States, located 90 miles from the Florida coastline and 250 miles from Miami.
If this plant were to be completed by a country with the low level of regulatory and safety
expertise that Cuba has, and I would be concerned about any nuclear power plant that was built
under mainly Russian supervision at this point.
Because their nuclear complex is in a pretty deteriorated state.
NRDC Energy Specialist Robert Watson says that Cuba has the opportunity to be completely
energy self-sufficient, without the need for oil or nuclear power, if it built co-generation
plants in its sugar mills, and burned the keen residue known as bogus.
Cuba has the potential to be perhaps the first country that can really develop sustainably.
In large measure due to its very large renewable energy resource and high potential for energy
efficiency, there is really no need for them to burn imported oil, nor is there any
need for them to rely on imported nuclear technology.
They really can do it all with the resources that they have.
It's just a matter of allocating sufficient manpower and budget to exploiting the resources
that are sitting right under their nose.
Compared with the nuclear plant, Watson says bogus could conceivably produce 10 times as
much electricity.
The power output from the nuclear plant will represent about 15 percent of Cuba's energy
needs, whereas a full conversion of the sugar industry and the use of other biomass residues
would produce almost twice as much energy as the entire Cuban system produces currently.
So it's almost a factor of two greater than the existing system, which would make it
a factor of 10 greater than the output of the nuclear plant.
Robert Kennedy Jr. tried the bogus idea out on Fidel Castro when they met.
Apparently Castro was interested, but indicated that because of the US embargo, financing
was not available, while the Russians were extending credit for the nuclear plant.
And Castro gave us the time, really, we were three hours with him.
We met him at midnight, and we stayed with him for about 3.30 in the morning.
And he gave us a lot of time and asked us some very detailed questions about our calculations.
And in the end, he seemed very much persuaded that this was a better way to go.
He said to us that his problem was that the Soviets or the Russians were going to give
him financing, or at least partial financing for the new plant.
And because of the embargo, he could not obtain US financing or international financing
for the sugar plant.
Whether the Cubans start the nuclear construction again remains to be seen.
But it is clear that financing options dictated by political rather than environmental considerations
may well decide the issue.
I'm Peter Burleigh.
How Cuba tries to become energy independent?
Places in this country are aiming for sustainability in other ways.
Each day, businesses spend millions of dollars to discard tons of waste products.
While some of this material can truly be described as trash, a lot of it can be used again.
Thomas Lally reports on so-called urban forestry which treats the city as a source of lumber.
Each day, millions of pounds of garbage are thrown away.
Much of it could be used again, but it is often not worth the effort to separate it from
everything else.
But that's changing.
Today, some businesses are beginning to see that material we used to call garbage can
be valuable to them.
So in New York, where small businesses pay for example something on the order of $130
million a year, just to get rid of their discarded wood packaging materials and pallets
and shipping crates, by giving them an alternative place to dispose of those materials and to
turn those materials into high value product, they potentially can save $130 million a year
on their disposal cost.
David Munchnik is the president of Bronx 2000 in New York City.
It's here where materials that used to be thrown out is reprocessed and used again.
One of his projects is turning wood from shipping pallets into high quality flooring.
This way, Bronx 2000 helps businesses taking what had been trash off their hands and putting
people to work and saving resources in the process.
By taking that scrap wood, that most folks we just grind up into turning into wood chips
for boiler fuel or landfill cover or something like that, by taking the wood that's in a
discarded shipping pallet, the oak in a shipping pallet, you might be able to make a new
pallet out of it and sell it for $4.5 for a new pallet.
But if you take the pallet apart and take the nails out and remill the wood and refinish
it and basically remill it and mold it into oak flooring, that $4 worth of pallet wood
suddenly is around $20 worth of oak flooring.
So it creates some jobs and gets some value added in the city's economy.
And if we're in a building program in New York or you're a home developer or commercial
office developer, you don't have to go out and buy virgin oak flooring from somebody
in Arkansas and keep the money in the local economy.
Muchnik says it takes a great deal of labor to make the wood from the pallets suitable
for flooring.
But Bronx 2000 is interested in more than just recycling.
Bronx 2000 is also about training people and putting them to work.
And about 50 people are employed from the pallet operation alone.
Muchnik and others point out that there are many more opportunities to recover materials
that is now being landfilled.
Will Ferretti is the director of the New York State Office of Recycling Market Development.
He says markets are emerging to handle material we have previously viewed as worthless.
And the way that we can take advantage of the so-called urban forest is to realign our
thinking about these kinds of materials that they are not waste or garbage as they are traditionally
viewed.
But they are resources that have a commodity value.
As we start thinking as we align our thinking that way, we begin treating them a little bit
differently in terms of what we do with them at the end of their lives.
So for example, generators of used pallets, companies that have received shipments on
those pallets rather than simply thinking them as a waste material, as a problematic waste
material that has to be discarded.
Now I have the opportunity to see those materials as a product to that they are byproduct
of their own operations that they are generating.
At Bronx 2000, the urban forest of New York City has over 10 years yielded over $15 million
to the local economy, which includes about $4 million in salaries to local workers.
For the Environment Show, I'm Thomas Lally.
I'm Peter Burley.
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Still ahead.
Our ear to the ground speaks for the folks bringing organic produce to those who need it the
most.
Lest your brown author of the State of the World 1996 gives us his views and our Earth
calendar explores this year's fire season in Florida.
These stories still ahead on the Environment Show.
I'm Linda Anderson and this is Ear to the Ground with stories about people affecting
change in the environment.
This week, Green Harvest, Wasteland, WANTNOT.
In 1992, members of the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank found themselves asking
how well they were meeting the nutritional needs of their clientele.
They determined their food bank, which serves 370 agencies that feed the hungry in southwestern
Pennsylvania, needed to supply its agencies with a greater amount of fresh fruits and vegetables.
Thus, Green Harvest was born.
Going beyond merely supplying fresh produce, Green Harvest strives to combat hunger by
making a connection between food and the environment.
Mike Gable of Green Harvest says the environmental factor got figured in because individuals
who set up the program were interested in organic agriculture.
Not only because they believed it to be the highest quality of produce, but also because
they wanted to support small-scale local agriculture, which happened to be mostly organic.
The first year of Green Harvest, the program was quite small and what we did was we actually
leased an acre from an organic farmer.
And that organic farmer grew produce that was then harvested by volunteers for the food
bank.
But we also reached out to other farmers in the community, other vegetable farmers, and
worked with them to green produce that was unmarketable from their farm usually because
of cosmetic reasons.
Other projects include a farm stand project and a community subscription agriculture program
that helps to subsidize some of the programs.
Gable says Green Harvest is very interested in helping low income people have greater control
over their food sources.
Believing that gardening has a very natural way to do that, they have helped develop community
gardens.
We would go into inner city communities and give technical support and assistance for urban
gardeners.
And that is strictly an organic focus.
Organic growing techniques, organic untreated seeds when we can get them using compost, teaching
people to make their own compost.
And also organic techniques contribute to that self-sufficiency kinds of issues that Green
Harvest also looks at because you utilize your waste to create compost to in turn grow
more food.
So it kind of fit very naturally into the ideas that we were looking to germinate.
Today Green Harvest has helped to develop 12 community gardens, gardens that have produced
over 30,000 pounds of organic produce for their communities.
Gable hopes that Green Harvest will help inspire other communities to address both hunger
and environmental concerns by seeking solutions that involve local resources, people, and land
in a manner which respects all.
With ear to the ground, this is Linda Anderson.
Most people would agree that the Earth's environment is in peril.
Each year, Lester Brown, president of the World Watch Institute, documents the condition
of the environment in his state of the world publication.
This year, among other things, Brown focused on thresholds humanity is exceeded.
For instance, most of the world's fisheries are at or beyond capacity.
Greenhouse castes have finally begun to appreciably warm the atmosphere and harvests of staples
crops are going down while population continues to rise at unprecedented rates.
Brown says we may be in store for dramatic changes ahead, both good and bad.
Well, what's going to turn the tide and what's going to get governments to respond to these
issues like the build up in Greenhouse castes, like the addition of 90 million people a year,
like the continuing deforestation of the planet, the loss of plant and animal species, the
depletion of aquifers, the overfishing of fisheries.
And the consensus is slowly emerging.
It's going to take a good scare.
Not unlike the way, I mean, it reminds me a bit of the United States in the late 30s
and the beginning of the 40s when there's a question as to whether we should get involved
in the war in Europe or not, and there was a lot of public opposition to it.
I think President Roosevelt thought that we should, but politely he couldn't and then came
Pearl Harbor.
And overnight, everything changed.
The debate was over and suddenly we were mobilizing literally restructuring the economy,
doing things we couldn't even imagine were possible just a matter of days before.
I mean, men who were working in factories or suddenly in military training camps, women
who had been homemakers were working on assembly lines, one day Chrysler's making cars
and next day it's making tanks.
Suddenly, we were rationing gasoline and tires and sugar and a whole host of goods.
And I mean, we quite literally restructured the economic system.
We deployed the labor force, but the thing that made us do that was we were scared.
We were threatened.
And the question is, what would be the Pearl Harbor in the battle to save the planet?
And if I were to guess, it would be another poor grain harvest, world grain harvest,
well stocks are at the lowest level on record.
And that would trigger price rises that would literally go off the food price rises that
would go off the top of the chart.
At that point, I think the world would begin to think seriously about trying to stabilize
climate, trying to stabilize population issues that are difficult to deal with and that
we won't deal with effectively unless we are scared.
Mr. Brown is the president of the World Watch Institute and each year releases the state
of the world.
We'll hear more from Mr. Brown on future environmental shows.
And now it's time for the Earth calendar.
Over the past two months, more than 1,400 fires have broken out across Florida.
As of right now, the wildfires have burned over 28,000 acres, hitting Central Florida the
worst.
With such unusually cold and dry weather, the danger of war fires continues.
Mike Rucker is the public information officer and meteorologist with Florida's emergency
management office.
In years past, in the last couple of decades, where we've had some pretty hard freezes over
the state, right afterwards we had a breakout of a number of fires around the state.
And so this has happened this year.
We've had four significant freezes that have extended well into Central Florida and the
citrus belt as well as parts of the northern Everglades.
And these freezes have been of course causing the grasses to go dormant, turning brown,
which just adds combustibility to the possibility of fires and that kind of thing.
Historically, Florida has a relative humidity of 40 to 50 percent during the wintertime,
according to Jim Brenner, fire manager administrator for the Florida Division of Forestry.
This winter though, Florida has been experiencing relative humidity down in the teens and the
20s.
It's the drop in humidity, says Brenner, that causes the vegetation to dry out, making
it easier to burn.
But Florida is no stranger to fire.
The grucker of emergency management says December through June is wildfire season.
And in order to cope with this, Florida uses what's known as controlled burning.
These purposely set fires burn the underbrush and get rid of a great deal of kindling.
But even with these preventative measures, Brecker says most of the fires have been caused
by humans due to carelessness and arson.
Despite this, fire in and of itself isn't always bad.
As the Division of Forestry Jim Brenner points out, many people don't realize how necessary
fire is to sustain the diversity of life in Florida.
Florida's ecosystem is without a doubt, for either fire dependent or fire maintained.
One of the things I say about fire in Florida is that if there's a plant growing here that
doesn't burn, it probably didn't come from here.
Our vegetation and our ecosystems, both plants and animals, are dependent on fire.
And I know, and I hope people find that very hard to understand and believe, particularly
after Walt Disney's Bambi and some other films of similar ilk.
But the bottom line is, we know that these plants and animals have coexisted with fire for
many thousands of years.
And to exclude fire from the ecosystem is the same as if you have a forest or a farmland
that's used to about 65 inches of rain a year, then all of a sudden you decide, well,
instead of 65 inches, I'm only going to give it three.
What's going to happen?
Doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that you're going to have pretty disastrous
effects to the vegetation and probably to the animals as well.
And that's what we've done in areas where we have excluded fire from the system.
In areas of vegetation, these plants and animals that have coexisted and developed in conjunction
with these periodic fires are suffering tremendously as a result of fire exclusion that has been
very much a part of our American culture.
With only a little bit of rain in the North Central counties, the dry conditions have not
subsided.
Spring is coming and typically that too is a very dry season.
So until the rainy season arrives in June, Florida will continue to battle one of their
worst fire seasons yet.
But not all fires are bad.
Some keep fire-dependent ecosystems healthy.
And if you are downwind and on vacation, you can save money on Sunblock.
Thanks for being with us on this week's Environment Show.
I'm Peter Burley.
For a cassette copy of the program, call 1-800-747-7444 and ask for program number 322.
The Environment Show is a presentation of national productions which is solely responsible
for its content.
Thomas Lally is the producer of Dr. Alan Shartug as the executive producer.
The Environment Show is made possible by Heming's Motornears, the monthly Bible of the Old
Car Habit, 1-800-C-A-R-H-E-R-E.
So long and join us next week for the Environment Show.
