Welcome to the Environment Show exploring issues and events of the planet I'm Thomas
Lally.
The Environment Show is a national production made possible by the W. Walton Jones Foundation
and Hemings Motor news, the Bible of the collector car hobby, 1-800-CAR-H-E-R-E. Your
host is Peter Burley.
Thanks, Thomas.
Coming up on this week's Environment Show, wolves are no longer the evil beasts portrayed
in little red riding hood.
Today, wolf recovery programs are being considered in all parts of the United States.
Author Kent Nurburne greets the first snows in Wolf Country in Minnesota.
We speak with Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman upon his return from the World Food
Conference in Rome, and right whales are heading for warm waters in Georgia.
These stories are coming up on this week's Environment Show.
Wolves once roamed over most of North America, but nearly all were killed at the hands of
humans.
Until quite recently, it was an accepted and encouraged practice in most places to exterminate the
wolf.
They were seen as threats to livestock, wild game and public safety.
Today, we're working hard to bring the wolf back.
Recently, wolf experts from all over the United States gathered in Albany, New York to
discuss their efforts to speed wolf recovery.
Environment show producer Thomas Lally has this report.
In Little Red Riding Hood, the big bad wolf eats grandma and tries to make the story's
namesake dessert.
In the three little pigs, a gluttonous wolf blows down houses going after dinner.
These kind of stories have been told for centuries, but you won't hear them here at the annual
Wolf Conference.
Roger Slik Eisen is the president of Defenders of Wildlife.
He located the conference in Albany, New York to make the case for returning wolves to the
Adderondack Mountains in the northern part of the state.
Well, if you look at wolf recovery in the United States, it's kind of like a plane taking
off.
I think we've already had liftoff.
I think liftoff occurred when we got the wolves back into Yellowstone and Central Idaho.
And now it's beginning to be a cent, and it's rising faster now.
And I think there is probably no statement that could be made that better benefited wolf
conservation initially and all wildlife conservation eventually than one that could be made by New
York, where the citizens of New York voluntarily saying that they want to return the wolf to
their state.
And I think that's a real possibility now.
A wolf recovery program in New York has the advantage of being the most recent in a
spade of such programs.
The first wolf to be reintroduced was the Red Wolf native to the South Eastern United
States.
It was extinct in the wild before the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began a reintroduction
effort nine years ago in a vast wilderness area in eastern North Carolina.
Jennifer Gilbreath is with the Fish and Wildlife Service.
She says the progress has been slow but fruitful.
The Red Wolf was extinct in the declared extinct in the wild in 1980.
About 14 red wolves were captured in the southeastern United States.
They were the remaining population.
They were bred in captivity.
Fortunately wolves will breed relatively well in captivity.
And in 1987 a release program was initiated on alligator river national wildlife refuge.
And this was the first attempt ever to restore carnivore species declared extinct in the
wild.
And it's been a biological success.
So we feel like a real flagship for lots of endangered and threatened species.
The Red Wolves have the advantage of living in a wild area nearly detached from civilization.
But in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming the Wolf Recovery Project has not been so easy.
Their wolves will likely roam well outside the park boundaries and some local residents
fear livestock and their safety will be threatened.
Mike Phillips directs Yellowstone's program for the park service.
He says the gray wolf population he oversees will be closely monitored.
The fact is wolves living on private land.
Even in of itself shouldn't be a problem.
In this country wildlife are publicly owned.
A landowner cannot unilaterally decide.
I don't want wolves in my property.
I don't want rabbits on my property.
I don't want deer on my property.
It doesn't work that way.
And so just the mere presence of a wolf isn't a problem.
Now if the wolf causes a definable problem it kills a cow, it kills a sheep, it knocks
over a garbage can, it becomes a genuine nuisance.
And we have the means by which to stop that problem.
The one place in this country where the wolves need no reintroduction is in the upper midwest.
Adrian Whitevin is with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
He says although Wisconsin has relatively few wilderness areas, wolves are barely
noticed by most people.
There's some minor depredation that it does occur on livestock.
Normally we have maybe one or two cases per year but it's not very frequent in the last
16 years we've had only I think 15 or 16 cases of depredation.
Although individual cases may in some cases be a lot of animals because we had one wolf
to kill 100 turkeys.
But in general the frequency of depredation is quite low.
Impact and deer herds, 100 wolves in Wisconsin would probably utilize about 1800, 2000 deer.
Our state deer population is about 1 and a half million so it's a very minor portion
of the deer population.
In the southwest a program to restore the critically endangered Mexican wolf may get
going sometime next year.
The recovery program will be carried out by both the U.S. and Mexican governments.
David Parsons is with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
He says the program is a radical change from the past.
In fact it was ironically the precursor agency to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service which
was called the U.S. Biological Survey.
That was the agency that removed wolves, that operated the control program for wolves at
that time.
That was the politically correct thing to do at that time and we did a damn fine job of
it and essentially removed all the wolves from the southwest.
Parsons and others in the government say it's important to bring the wolf back because
in many cases it's required under the Endangered Species Act.
The fact that wolves occasionally cause minor trouble is not enough to keep them from
being reintroduced.
Dr. William Weber is with the Wildlife Conservation Society.
He says Americans need to make sacrifices for predators like wolves.
If we expect Indians to live with tigers and Latin Americans to live with jaguars then
we can't keep fighting the reintroduction of the wolf and I think we really have to stand
up and demonstrate a much higher form of leadership.
We really have to try and set some kind of example in this country for conservation.
If we don't, if we can't do a better job of managing our parks, of protecting our ecosystems
then we really can't expect the world's poorest countries and really the poorest to the
poor, the people living around those protected areas to continue to make the sacrifices they
are for the greater good in conservation.
Wolf attacks on humans are almost unheard of.
You're more likely to get hit by a meteorite.
By comparison domestic dogs kill more than 20 persons each year.
Ecologists say the benefits far outweigh the risks.
They say wolves are an integral part of the ecosystem but it's an open question whether
populations will continue to grow a limiting factor being the level of human acceptance.
For the Environment Show I'm Thomas Lalley.
With the help of biologists, federal and state officials and vociferous supporters and
opponents across the land, the wolf is coming back to America.
In some places it's reintroduced at great cost and effort but in northern Minnesota the
wolf was never completely driven out.
Kent Nurburne paints a portrait of that land as it looks in this season and tells us what
the first snow means to him.
He reads the story Benediction which is published in his new book A Hauteing Reference Meditations
on a Northern Land.
The snow came last night.
She left before the dawn, be stowing in her wake a benediction upon the earth.
Now in morning light she greets us gently, a prayer shawl dawned upon the land.
Here and there a whirling gust whipped up by some angry and isolated wind rises tiny
and intense like a petulant child trying to start a fight.
But this is not his day.
The world is silent and at peace and the tracks and markings we have made upon the earth.
The endless measurements and passages are again forgiven.
I hold my breath, all is white and still.
The pines stand in steeple reverence against the sky.
The alms reach out their fingers and naked supplication.
And the birch, kindred spirits to the winter earth, show off their white and graceful elegance
against the mantle of their sister, snow.
Far in the distance the thin line of forest is a lacework tracery, flashing diamonds of
crystal light against the cold brilliance of the day.
A fox breathes the brightness of the morning sun and rushes across the fresh eternity for
a moment immortal like the first shooting star that ever cut across an evening sky.
He bounds and scrabbles crazed by his blind exposure, then disappears into the distant
woods.
But he is not followed.
This is not a time of hunting.
The world still wakes and gentle wonder.
It is not yet a time of passions and of fears.
It makes the heart gentle this snow burying the sharp edges of life and cutting us off
from time.
Our traces on the surface of the land are gone, our lives devoid of history once more.
All is singular, all is one.
We are children at the dawn of time.
Begin again, begin again.
This snowfall says begin again.
Use the purest absolution and falls, invest forgiveness on us all.
You're listening to the Environment Show and I'm Peter Burlet.
We hear from agriculture secretary Dan Glickman upon his return from the World Food Conference
and Rome.
And right whales head for Georgia and shed their blubber.
These stories still ahead on the Environment Show.
Last week, the World Food Summit Conference was held under the auspices of the United Nations
Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome.
Twenty-two years ago, at a similar gathering, Henry Kissinger representing the United States,
all but proclaimed that World Hunger would be brought to an end in a decade.
Unfortunately, hunger persists.
And according to figures released by the World Watch Institute, things are worse now
than they were then.
World population is increased from 4 billion to 5.8 billion.
World fish catch has stopped expanding and many fisheries are badly depleted.
Expansion of the world grain harvest is a fraction of what it was.
Populations in Asia, growing in number and affluence are putting incredible pressure on
all natural systems that are necessary to produce food.
Furn farmland is an increasingly short supply.
Leading the American delegation at Rome was United States Secretary of Agriculture Dan
Glyckman.
We asked him what message he brought to the delegates.
Well, the United States has been the primary in leading supplier of food aid and technical
assistance to the world since the Second World War.
And we are committed to continue that food aid and food assistance.
But we are predicating our future involvement on an effort to try to get individual countries
to improve their political and economic and agricultural systems so that they can become
more self-sufficient.
That the world just can't rely on gifts of food forever.
While we are there to provide humanitarian assistance when needed, the goal is try to
get more countries particularly in sub-Saharan Africa to become more food self-sufficient,
which means technical assistance, agricultural reforms and necessary infrastructure to get
that done.
Secretary Glyckman takes some solace in the fact that despite the fact that population
is 30 percent more than at the last summit, the actual number of malnutrition people is
about the same as it was 25 years ago.
He caution that there is no single solution.
There are several answers to try to increase food production.
One of the things, of course, is the use of science, sound science and biotechnology,
whereby what you are able to do is to develop crops that are more pest resistant, more
able to produce the same amount of production with far less water using sustainable agricultural
techniques in the process.
Also, to what I call science enhancements to increase yields and to decrease the use
of water and pesticides and herbicides.
Now, that has become somewhat controversial because the new science involves the use
of biotechnology.
The same way medicine is involved biotechnology whereby we do a variety of genetic work and
other kinds of biotechnological work to get that done.
I do not believe that there is any way that we are going to feed another 2.5 or 3 billion
people in this world without going down that road.
The alternative to that is to tear up land that shouldn't ever be produced, tear up rain
forests, tear up the soil and just have an absolute disaster on our hands.
One debate that surfaces in all discussions about food production today is the role of
bioengineering, that process by which genes are transferred in the laboratory across biological
barriers to produce the super plant that may be higher yielding, pesticide resistant,
or able to grow with less water.
Here is Secretary Glickman's take.
You just can't put all your eggs in one basket.
What I tend to find as I look at this problem is some people in industry see the only answer
is in biotechnological improvements in row crops and then some people on the other side
of the ledger in the environmental community see all of the answer in let's say sustainable
agriculture techniques.
Well, the truth is you probably need to blend of both ways of thinking in order to make
any real dent on world hunger.
Dan Glickman is the United States Secretary of Agriculture.
An environmentalist who has the skepticism about biotechnology that Glickman describes is
Margaret Mellon, the director of agriculture and biotechnology program at the nonprofit
organization Union of Concerned Scientists.
She caution that biotechnology is not the silver bullet and there are other more effective
ways to increase food production particularly in Africa.
Well, I think we need to invest right now in a much larger way than we're currently doing
in agricultural research that is targeted to help developing countries of the world to
produce their own food.
That's the first and the most important thing that we need to do and I think that that
research, that the agenda of that research investment ought to concentrate on infrastructure,
and using traditional breeding on recovering lost agricultural biodiversity as a basis
for increasing agricultural productivity.
We also need to develop an ability to bring cheap fertilizers to developing countries.
That would be another part of the pie.
I think in addition we want to think about some of our trade policies and whether the industrialized
countries ought to continue to subsidize their own agriculture in such a way as they
produce very depressed commodity prices that have the effect of driving farmers off the
world, off the farm and other parts of the world.
Debate at the World Food Conference emphasized once again that hunger, like the environment
itself, has many facets, population growth, climate, land and stewardship, plant and
animal genetics, seed, fertilizer, trade, political organization, transportation, pollution,
culture and more.
Perhaps we need to attack it not with a silver bullet, but with silver buckshot.
The environment show is going interactive in a new segment called Talking Green.
We want to hear from you about environmental issues, call us or email us and we might
ask you to join us in the air.
Our phone number is 1-800-323-9262-extension-600.
That's 1-800-323-9262-extension-600.
You can email us at ENVSHOW at AOL.com.
In our last Talking Green segment we heard from listeners in a panel of experts about
the effects of mountain biking on the environment.
In response, one listener, John McDonnell, a student at the University of Massachusetts
writes, mountain biking is certainly good exercise and a great entertainment.
But this sport is just another example of how this country views the bicycle as a toy
rather than a cheap, efficient source of transportation.
There are almost always no racks at workplaces or safe paths for commuting.
This is one of the most important things to do with the bike.
This attitude is just one of the ways our affluence and comforts if undermined so-called
common sense.
And the Sierra Club rides.
The Sierra Club reaffirms its support for the prohibition of mechanized modes of transportation
including mountain bikes from entry into designated wilderness.
They say the trail should be studied and periodically checked to see if they are suitable for mountain
bikes.
The significant damages occurred, the trail should be closed.
You can check our webpage for current topics.
The address is www.enn.com-envshow
That's www.enn.com-envshow
And now it's time for the Earth calendar.
Pregnant right whales are now departing from their summer feeding grounds off Nova Scotia
and heading for warmer waters.
Sarah Mitchell is with the Grae's Reef National Marine Sanctuary in Georgia.
They leave the areas around Nova Scotia and New England and they start the migration all
the way down the East Coast United States ending up around the Georgia Florida border.
So they would start leaving now and some of them will start arriving in the next week
or so in this area and some won't arrive until the middle or the end of December.
And they'll stay down here until March or sometimes early April and then they'll swim
back north up the coast with their calves.
And that also teaches the calf what the path is to come down.
So we think that it's also part of the learning process for the mothers teaching the young.
While we know where the pregnant right whales go, Mitchell says we have no idea where the
males, juveniles and non-pregnant females go.
Only about 300 of these whales remain in the northern hemisphere after having been
hunted extensively in the 19th century.
So tracking them is no easy task.
It's really surprising how little we know about where the non-pregnant females and the adult
males and most of the juveniles go in the winter.
Here we have approximately 300 of these animals that are 45 to 50 feet long and weigh about
40 tons and they simply disappear and they do it every single year.
So we truly have no clue about where they're ending up.
There are no historical records of where they have been seen.
And we're just now beginning to with studies through the New England Aquarium.
We think some of these animals so that we'll be able to see an annual cycle.
Mitchell says the females choose the waters off Georgia and Florida because the water is warm and calm.
This is important for the calves who haven't developed a blubber layer to keep them warm.
They'll feed on their mother's milk which contains the most fat and calories of any mammal species.
The problem with the area is there is very little food for the mothers.
The mothers stop feeding or the pregnant females stop feeding when they leave the Nova Scotia Bay of Fundy Area.
And we don't have any records of them feeding until they go back up the following April.
So here you have this very large marine mammal.
They might weigh 40 tons and they're eating nothing or close to nothing from November until April.
So it's very remarkable for a mammal that size to be able to do that.
The other thing is since the waters are warmer in this area, they actually need to shed some of that blubber
so that they won't overheat.
Whales don't have sweat glands like we do.
And they actually get too warm inside and cause many problems as if we overheat.
In stark contrast to the calving right whales, my friends in Georgia spent a lot of time this season gorging themselves around the holiday dinner table.
They seem unable to shed blubber the way the whales do.
But of course, if whales had relatives that had been taught by humans to give them fruit cakes, they might not lose weight either.
They would say that they learned from the landlubber that their blubber comes from grandmother.
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 program number 360.
The Environment Show is a presentation of national productions which is solely responsible for its contents.
Dr. Alan Shartuck is the executive producer, Thomas Lale is the producer and Stephanie Gwichman is the associate producer.
The Environment Show is made possible by the W. W. Alton Jones Foundation, the Bullet Foundation, the Furthermore Foundation,
and Heming's Motor News, a monthly bottle of the old car hobby, 1-800-CAR-HRE.
So long and join us next week for the Environment Show.
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