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. Alton Jones Foundation,
the Packard Foundation for Coverage of Fisheries Issues, the Bullet Foundation, the furthermore
division of the Kaplan Fund 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, long-line ocean fishers take steps to save the
Albatross.
We go trough fish in a creek in northern Michigan.
The environment is a major factor in the appalling war in Rwanda.
And Amory Lovers plans a pollution-free car and eliminates the electric utility industry
all at once.
These stories and more coming up on this week's Environment Show.
Approximately 180,000 seabirds are being killed each year because they're being caught
in fishing lines.
A major portion of these birds are all 13 species of an Albatross, some of which are close
to extinction.
The entire population of a short-tailed Albatross is down to about 700 birds.
10% of the wandering Albatross population is being killed annually.
The problem is fishing lines, known as long lines, which are used primarily in the Pacific.
These lines are strung out behind boats and are many miles in length.
Hooks which can number in the thousands are attached at intervals on the line and then
bait it.
As the line strung out behind the ship and before they sink, birds will come down, grab
the bait, and get caught by the fishhug.
One group of long-line fishermen who ship out of Seattle and freezer ships and bottom
fish of the Bering Sea for Cod have formed a group which they call the North Pacific
Long-Line Association.
Unlike most trade associations which spend their time fighting or trying to eliminate regulations,
the Pacific long-liners are drafting regulations which they want to have implemented to protect
the birds.
Thornt Smith is executive director of the North Pacific Long-Line Association based in Seattle
and he describes their approach.
Last year we caught something called a short-tailed Albatross.
I quite frankly had never heard of a short-tailed Albatross nor had any notion that we even
caught birds.
I went over to the Alaska Fisheries Science Center and spoke with the director who informed
me that this was an endangered species.
I'm going to, well, it used to be a federal fisheries lawyer and had responsibility for
enforcing the Endangered Species Act and needless to say that set off some lights in my
head.
So we began to study the issue and discovered that there had in fact been some regulations
implemented pursuant to a treaty under something called the Antarctic Marine Living Resources
Convention Act of 1984 that imposed a number of bird avoidance techniques on fisheries
taking place in the Antarctic for vessels of the countries that are signatory to the
treaty.
So we developed some regulations modeled on those which would require that we do some
pretty obvious things like use adequate weight to make our hooks sink rapidly so birds can't
get them.
Using only minimum ship lights at night so we don't illuminate the bait and track birds
to the lights themselves.
This charge of awful from fish processing has to be discharged on the other side of
the boat from where we're hauling our fish in or behind the hauler so we don't draw birds
in that way.
And we're going to come up with some regulations to prescribing how you could carefully
release birds if you do happen to catch one.
So that's basically the course we've taken and we have gone ahead and asked the North Pacific
Council to implement these regulations by emergency rule.
They have responded positively to the National Marine Fisheries Service as already assigned
to staff for to work on this.
So we anticipate that between the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council and the National
Marine Fisheries Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service will probably have regulations in place
early next year to require that we use these bird avoidance devices.
Experts in environmental organizations are optimistic that the bird catch can be brought
under control primarily because it is the fishermen themselves that are looking for solutions.
They do say that one of the major things that got fishermen moving was concern that if
the bird kill was not stopped, the fishery might ultimately be shut down through operation
of the Endangered Species Act as the Albatross populations diminish.
I think with the long lines and the birds in the North Pacific and in New Zealand, we're
going to find that fishermen by using both technology and operating procedures both will
figure out a way to not capture birds.
That was Suzanne Udicello, Vice President for Program at the Center for Marine Conservation.
Concerned about a random killing of the Albatross is not new.
In 1798, poet Samuel Taylor Colbridge wrote the poem The Ancient Mariner, who was
becombed in a scorching sea for killing an Albatross.
Audubon Ornithologist Susan Drennan says Colbridge described the wandering Albatross as species
now under great stress from long line fishing.
Colbridge's message should inspire modern long line fishermen.
English teacher Dick Nunley from Berkshire Community College prepared this commentary.
To Samuel Taylor Colbridge, we owe the image of an Albatross hanging around a man's neck
to signify the persistent consequences of a morally heedless act.
In the rhyme of the ancient mariner, the mariner recounts how he wantonly sharpened
Albatross.
When as a result, the ship is becombed and their water runs out and the sailors begin
to drop dead, the crew hang the Albatross around the mariner's neck.
He alone does not die.
Only when spontaneously one day he feels love for the water snakes, writhing on the ocean
surface, does the Albatross fall from his neck, and he returns to spend the rest of
his life enroving to tell unwilling listeners he prayeth well, who loveeth well, both man
and bird and beast.
Dick Nunley teaches English at Berkshire Community College.
You're listening to the Environment Show, and I'm Peter Burlett.
H.S.H.O.W.
Fishers on the high seas need to catch a lot of fish to stand business, but there are
millions of other fishers who are satisfied with a nice day, clean water, and an occasional
rise.
Jerry Dennis is the author of The Bird in the Waterfall, a natural history of oceans, rivers
and lakes.
This special place is a tiny creek in northern Michigan.
One afternoon, not long ago, I walked along a creek I know well in its lower reaches,
where it flows through a valley of cedars and hardwoods before merging with one of northern
Michigan's most famous trout rivers.
It is Brook Trout Water, and I was fishing it with a fly rod rigged with a short leader,
a split shot, and a hook baited with a worm.
I fished slowly upstream to unfamiliar water, through cedar groves and small hidden meadows,
until the creek grew smaller and colder, the pools shallower and less promising.
I caught trout, brilliant seven inches that came out of the water, gyrating so madly
I could not get a hand on them, but they were fewer than downstream and smaller.
When the creek grew too shallow for even small trout, I stopped being a fisherman and became
an explorer.
I knew from maps that the creek began somewhere above me in springs.
As I walked, I imagined a dramatic origin, a bubbling pool cradled among cedars with
the creek gushing full grown from it.
I was only a little disappointed to discover that, like most streams, this one is formed
by the confluence of a dozen minor tributaries, each dividing and dividing again until it
becomes so small it is scarcely noticeable, littered with leaning grass, slipping out of
sight beneath the moss covered humps of old trees in the swamp.
At each confluence I took the strongest tributary, following first one, then another, then
another until finally the one I chose had no more tributaries.
It became too shallow to hide even a fingering trout, barely deep enough to wet a shoe, and
ended finally in a narrow, dark, aromatic gully among the cedars, where the ground was
so wet I left a trail of slowly filling footprints.
There in that tiny valley, with sides so close that trees leaned across and touched overhead,
I found the springs that formed the creek.
It begins with whispers and tears, gentle, nearly inaudible trickles, seeping from the
bank like wounds on a tree, each oozing enough water to nourish patches of swamp butter
cups and wild peppermint and hummocks of moss thick as couch cushions.
The seaps trickle downhill and gather at the bottom of the gully.
It is there that the creek begins.
Six inches wide, half an inch deep, a rivulet trickling over rust-colored pebbles in a skinny
bed line both sides with moss.
A hundred feet downstream the rivulet gathers the flow from a dozen other seaps in the
water begins to fill with life.
Only big things could easily notice.
If we value just what is worthy of mentioning newspapers and on television it is easy to
believe that nothing much matters unless it is large enough to shake the earth.
Standing in that gully crowded with growth and dampness, with newborn water leaking from
the banks around me, I was reminded that great things often come from humble beginnings.
In many ways it is the creek that makes the river.
Jerry Danis is the author of The Burn in the Waterfall, a natural history of oceans, rivers,
and lakes.
You're listening to The Environment Show and I'm Peter Burley, still ahead.
The tragic war in Rwanda has its roots in an overstressed environment.
Amory Lovens drives us into the future in his hypercar and even the endangered wood
story is on the map.
This story is still ahead on The Environment Show.
Central Africa, especially Rwanda and the eastern Zaire, is close to total meltdown.
A brutal war has made international boundaries irrelevant and chaos as the rule of law.
The situation has its roots in years of social and political strife, but environmental degradation
has also played a major role.
Now some environmentalists are calling for a new definition of national security, one
that places the environment and society on the same level as politics.
Environment Show producer Thomas Lalley reports.
Not long ago Rwanda was known as the Switzerland of Africa.
Its hilly and pastoral terrain made it one of the most beautiful areas on the continent.
Today the country is in disarray, fueled by environmental decay, tribal conflict, and
an antiquated political system left over from the days of colonization.
Two and a half years ago when violence broke out, an estimated 500,000 to a million people
perished.
The current situation now threatens an area which extends well beyond Rwanda and into
surrounding nations.
Dr. Bill Weber directs international conservation programs for the Wildlife Conservation Society,
and spent many years on Rwanda studying guerrillas.
He says the land just can't handle the population anymore.
One of the problems is that ever since early in the colonial period people have been predicting
a disaster for that region and saying that it's overpopulated what comes from that, there
are no living Rwandans or people in the region who have ever heard anything but that and
it's a bit like hearing that the sky has gone to fall and it's never fallen.
Maybe this time it has and maybe now we're finally seeing that the system can't hold up
and that the pressures have finally gotten too great and we've gone beyond stress to deep
fractures and an ultimate breakdown in the system.
Although Rwanda may represent the most extreme example of conflicts stemming in part from
environmental degradation, many other examples exist.
Michael Renner is with the World Watch Institute and author of the new book Fighting for Survival.
He argues countries must adopt a new definition of national security where environmental and
social issues are priorities equal to military might.
Many conflicts are not between different countries now but they're taking place within
countries.
In other words, where some kind of guerrilla force may fight against the government or
different ethnic groups may be hostile to each other and engage in violent conflict.
And I think not only is it in that sense a different kind of conflict but often it's
not so much a matter of how much in terms of weapons is there to a traditional fear.
Rwanda had begun to address its environmental and social ills before the massacres in 1994.
But it's among the world's poorest and least developed nations.
Dr. Weber says Rwanda relies almost entirely on agriculture and when space ran out the
country exploded.
You're talking about the most purely agricultural society in the world I think.
Over 95% of the people live off of what they can produce on very small farms.
These farms average about an acre in size less than half a hectare.
And at that point it's really hard to even call it farming.
They've basically become gardeners.
You simply can't feed a family for a year on less than an acre.
Weber says when the land went beyond its carrying capacity young and mostly male Rwandans were
forced to find work in cities.
But little work existed and Michael Renner says they were caught between urban unemployment
and rural starvation.
Soil erosion and soil depletion has played a major role in Rwanda in terms of making it
virtually impossible for a growing number of people to basically feed themselves, feed
their own family, feed their own community.
And the dislocation that resulted from this growing inability to do that I think has been
clearly one of the central pressure factors in that country making people more desperate,
making them more willing to listen to the extremist voices that I think prove very adapt
in saying, well look, all these problems that you're facing is really due to this other
population group over there.
And if you can get rid of them, if you can drive them out of the country, if you can kill
them off, that will be your salvation.
And the Rwandan conflict already having spread to Zaire has the potential of engulfing
other countries in the region as well.
In response to increasing environmental stresses such as those that set off Rwanda, Michael
Renner says the global community must begin to view natural resources and social cohesion
as key elements to a stable nation.
For the Environment Show, I'm Thomas Lalley.
Cars that could go from coast to coast without refueling.
Cars that are so efficient that they collapse the coal, steel, and electric utility industries
all at once.
Cars that can do all this on the market by the turn of the century.
Aemri Loven's a physicist who is director of research at the Rocky Mountain Institute
at Stomach, Colorado, thinks it's all possible.
He calls it the hypercar.
A concept he's been working on for a number of years, both on his own and in conjunction
with the manufacturers.
We are going to improve dramatically the efficiency, cleanliness, performance, and competitiveness
of cars that are now after decades of devoted effort only able to turn 1% of their fuel energy
into moving the driver.
This is really not very ratifying.
The key to unlocking several layers of further improvement is to start by making the car several
full lighter weight than now.
That doesn't mean making it smaller.
It means making it out of extremely strong crashworthy materials like carbon fiber composites.
We're also making the car very slippery, more aerodynamic and with better tires, so it
takes very little power to make it go.
In fact, four to ten times less.
Once we've done that, then it becomes very attractive to use what's called hybrid electric
drive.
That means the wheels are driven by special electric motors, but instead of hauling around
half a ton of batteries that you recharge by plugging in, you make the electricity on
board from fuel as needed.
This gets the advantages of electric propulsion without the disadvantages of batteries.
Once you've done that, the next leapfrog, which is coming at us very quickly, is to make
the electricity on board not in a tiny engine or gas turbine, but rather with fuel cells,
which use hydrogen or natural gas changed on board into hydrogen to make electricity, hot
water, and nothing else.
The oven says the way the car would work is small electric motors would power each wheel.
When the car is decelerating or going downhill, the motors could be generating electricity
instead of consuming it.
The fuel cell, which burns hydrogen for fuel, keeps generating all the time, so the motorists
could park and plug into the grid.
All of the way according to Lovens, the nation's fleet of privately owned cars would
displace the big utility plant as the primary source of electric power.
The next trick you can do is consider your hypercar to be a 20 kilowatt power plant on wheels,
which is clean and silent and reliable, and is parked 96% of the time, usually in the
individual places.
So some entrepreneur or the gas company is going to start providing a natural gas or hydrogen
and electric hookup that you plug into at your parking place, swipe your credit card, go
off to work, and while you're at work, your second biggest household asset, which was
previously idle, is earning you a couple of thousand bucks net per year enough to pay
probably over half the cost of financing and depreciating it, which is something like
55% of the cost of owning it.
So when you get all through, you've got a hypercar fleet with ultimately five times the
generating capacity of the national grid, and it's a red-a-power plant on wheels.
It sounds pretty good.
In that formulation, what does the fuel cell use for its own fuel?
We'll be able to use liquid or gaseous fuels renewable or non-renewable, and even if we
cart hydrogen around in tanks, it'll be a lot lighter and not much more bulky than if
we were carrying gasoline in tanks to get the same driving range.
The reason is that the fuel cell car is, or hypercar is so extraordinarily efficient, you
get three or four times as much wheel motion or wheel power out of it per unit of energy
as you do out of gasoline in today's cars.
The basic problem, says Lovens, is to get auto manufacturing out of the technological
niche where it's been stuck, a stagnation similar to what happened to the mainframe computer
manufacturers whose market got swapped by the small personal computer or PC.
He does admit that while substituting the hypercar for what you drive today may stop
auto pollution, the other major environmental problems caused by auto's remain with us,
namely too many vehicles using up too much space in cities and on highways that use
up too much land.
Aemory Lovens is a research director of the Rocky Mountain Institute, and I'm Peter
Burley.
And now it's time for the Earth calendar.
Woodstorks are faraging in the coastal swaths of Georgia and South Carolina.
Black and white they stand almost chest high.
Unlike their cousins, the eagrets and herons, which can stay on the side of a pond and pluck
fish out as they go by, the woodstork picks his way with his bill in the water, snapping
up everything he touches that seems to be a fish.
But the woodstorks' enthusiasm for South Carolina and Georgia can be limited.
If it grows too cold, the birds head farthest south.
Larry Bryan is a researcher with a Savannah River ecology lab.
What woodstorks do this time of year is they're generally they're faraging on the coastal
plane of Georgia and South Carolina.
This is kind of an interesting time for them and that woodstorks generally don't tolerate
cold weather very well.
So we're kind of keeping an eye out on all of the cold fronts that are moving into the
area and what usually happens with this species is once cooler weather hits this region,
these storks will shift to the south, going as far south as southern Florida and the
Everglades.
Woodstorks are protected under the Endangered Species Act.
They're only about 6 to 8,000 breeding pairs left but this is substantial increase from
the 3,000 pairs that existed five years ago.
Bryan is working on a project which for the first time ever will track the travels and
whereabouts of four woodstarks via satellite.
The data will go on the lab's website and you can watch it on your home computer.
Once you figure it out, you won't have to read the paper to decide whether it's too
cold to go to South Carolina for your winter vacation.
If the woodstorks have bailed out and gone to the Everglades, change your reservations
and go to Florida instead.
Thanks for being with us on this week's Environment Show.
I'm Peter Burling.
For cassette copy of the program, call 1-800-323-9262 and ask for show number 359.
The Environment Show is a presentation of national productions which is solely responsible
for its content.
Dr. Alan Sharkduck is the executive producer, Thomas Lally is producer, and Stephanie
Goichman is the associate producer.
The Environment Show is made possible by the W. Alton Jones Foundation, the Bullet
Foundation, the furthermore division of the Kaplan Fund and the Packard Foundation for
coverage of fish resistions, and Heming's Motor News, the monthly Bible of the Old
Car Hobby, 1-800-CAR-HRE.
So long and join us next week for the Environment Show.
