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 Heming's Motor News, the
monthly Bible of the old car hobby from Bennington Vermont, 1-800-CR-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 Burley.
Thanks Thomas, coming up on this week's Environment Show, damage to the environment affects us all,
but minority communities say they suffer the most.
We'll meet the people who are seeking to bring the environmental and civil rights movements together.
Then we'll visit the Colorado River in Arizona, where a spring flood was created when millions
of gallons of water were released from a dam to help restore the Grand Canyon ecosystem.
Our ear to the ground, Linda Anderson, speaks with the editor of High Country News, a paper in Colorado that watches the health of the land.
And we'll see if comment Yaku Taki will crash into the earth anytime soon.
These stories are more coming up this week on the Environment Show.
In 1987, the United Church of Christ published a report that showed that there was more toxic pollution, and more plants and facilities that generated hazardous waste in communities of color than in the rest of America.
This led some to charge that the United States is afflicted by what has been termed environmental racism.
In 1992, the National Law Journal published another report showing that environmental penalties and fines were less when assessed against polluters and minority neighborhoods than elsewhere.
By then, the environmental justice movement was well underway.
And today, the movement includes grassroots groups and communities of color all over America.
David Hahn Baker, president of Inside Out Political Consultants in Buffalo, New York, describes what environmental justice is all about.
Environmental justice is a movement, first of all, of people all across the country, predominantly people of color and low-income people who are working to ensure that everyone is growing up and living in a safe and healthy environment.
Environmental justice revolves around the disproportionate impact of pollution on people of color and low-income people and also on the processes by which decisions are made about how pollution is created and who suffers from it.
Environmental justice is also about the intersection between broader social justice problems like racism and environmental problems and environmental decision making.
Pat Bryant, executive director of the Gulf Coast Tenets Association in Louisiana, attests that environmental justice is more than dealing with toxics but concerns itself with the totality of community life.
Our concern is that the industries and our state and local governments that are involved in poisoning the land stop-poisoning land now, our concern goes more than that.
Although same firms and those same governments that poison the land, they also rob the people of their labor power, they also rob our people of their health.
They also do not are not good players to provide education for the people.
So we cannot just be concerned about the environment, the air land and the water, but we also must be concerned about the totality of those influences of these corporations and governments on those same communities.
Colorado State Senator Gloria Tanner, who's district includes part of East Denver, is also worried about the sighting of toxic generating facilities in poor communities.
Her bill to require better community notification before sighting a plant, failed by one vote this year, but she says she'll try again in the next legislative session.
My main thing is to make sure not only keep the skies clear and blue and be concerned about air pollution and everything else but hazardous waste.
And I think when you look at these issues, I think the environmental justice would make sure that we do this and make sure you keep it at a level that everybody can be comfortable with.
And in my district, a lot of the hazardous waste sites and everything have been put into that district.
And my concern is that we spread it out and we be fair and have some type of equity in it. And this is what I'm concerned about.
Carlos Melendres is the executive director of Alliance of Ethnic and Environmental Organizations in Los Angeles, California.
He emphasizes that a key principle of the environmental justice movement is its focus on environmental threats that impact human beings directly.
Combining civil rights issues and organizations concerned with neighborhood environmental advocacy gives the movement real strength.
He also alludes to the early conflict between the environmental justice groups and the mainline national environmental organizations.
The justice community did not think the environmental groups were receptive to their concerns.
A lot of environmental issues have been phrased in the past as if there are parts of the human race to where we take care of the environmental issues and the environmental community does not want to become involved in human rights issues.
As if in fact, the human race is separate from environmental concerns.
And what we're trying to do is show the strength of the civil rights movement, so to speak, and get the environmental community to embrace human rights issues that they are also part of the environment.
And at the same time, try teaching the communities of color that in fact a lot of their concerns have been embedded in environmental issues.
The Clinton administration has established the Office of Environmental Justice in the Environmental Protection Agency.
In 1994, the president issued an executive order on environmental justice which is described by Clarice Gaylord, director of the office.
There is an executive order by President Clinton which was issued on February the 11th, 1994, which says that any federal agency that has the mission of public health protection or environmental protection in their mission has to integrate environmental justice principles into their daily operations.
Since EPA was the agency that was dealing with environmental justice issues two years before that order, EPA became the lead agency amongst the 13 agencies that are affected by the order.
As it stands today, environmental justice organizations are organizing on a regional basis.
In the Midwest, people for a community recovery in Chicago is sponsoring a Midwest summit starting May 17. Relations between the national environmental groups and the environmental justice community seems to be improving and the movement is continuing to gain in numbers and in strength.
The linkage of civil rights, health and community environmental concerns is growing and environmental justice organizations will have an increasing impact on community development throughout the country. I'm Peter Burley.
I'm Linda Anderson and this is Ear to the Ground with stories about people affecting change in the environment. This week, a small newspaper that keeps its watch on the West.
High Country News as described by its editor, Betsy Marston, is like one of those gravity-defined trees that grows horizontally out of a rocky mountain side. It's found, it's niche.
Described by some as a window on the West and others as a watchdog, Marston says the newspaper's motto is, a paper for people who care about the West.
From the tiny rural mountain town of Peonia, Colorado, High Country News covers 10 Western states. Marston says it's an enormous amount of area to cover, about 1 million square miles, with a wide range of issues.
Our turf is mainly the rural communities of the West, the public lands, wilderness issues, wildlife, endangered wildlife, mining, logging, grazing, the traditional extractive economies here.
High Country News is considered by many environmental reporters as one of the best news organizations for environmental coverage. Marston says being a nonprofit organization supported through subscription has allowed them to take the high road, meaning they can print longer, more complex stories, or other papers, might have to have a refrigerator add.
The diversity of the paper's 18,000 subscribers is what Marston believes to be the key to its survivability. They cover the gamut.
There are elected officials, and that can be county commissioners who are like gods here in the West, to congress people, public land managers, both on the ground here in the West and back in Washington.
Environmental activists from all sorts, I mean from the bottom to some national reps, and in ranchers, there are 27,000 public land ranchers in the country.
We've got some. We like to think that in every small town, somebody is reading High Country News and leaving it in the laundromat.
High Country News, Marston explains, emerged when a rancher, Tom Bell, became disgusted by what he saw around him.
He saw his fellow ranchers shooting eagles. The ranchers thought the eagles were killing lambs. The beginning of enormous strip mines, and he didn't see any environmental response.
Bell began running High Country News from lander Wyoming in 1970. Marston says through the years the paper has undergone many financial and human losses.
Bell sunk his entire ranch into it. But despite the difficulties, High Country News has never missed a publication date or stuck anyone with an unpaid bill.
In 1983, the paper moved to Peonia, where it's been operated ever since by Marston and her husband, Slash Publisher Ed, whom she credits with being the intellectual heart of the paper.
26 years old, High Country News is still going strong, and is the place to go to get the paltz on the West.
With ear to the ground, this is Linda Anderson.
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Still ahead. For Eons, the Colorado River has flooded every spring. But that all ended when it was damned earlier this century.
Now, scientists have recreated a flood by opening up the gates of the Glen Canyon Dam to help restore the Grand Canyon ecosystem.
And we'll examine whether Comet Yakutake will crash into the Earth anytime soon. These stories still ahead on the Environment Show.
The Colorado River has been a part of the Colorado River for many years.
Dam's have stopped the Colorado River from running free for many years. While the dams provide cheap power and flood control, they disrupt the river ecosystem.
The interior department conducted an experiment recently to see if it could recreate the natural flooding to restore ecosystem health.
Karen Kelly reports.
The Colorado River runs through some of the most arid areas of the United States. It's an oasis that creeps through oddly configured windy canyons.
Every so often, the river is damned. Behind the dams, enormous lakes contrast sharply with the surrounding desert.
They stand as a symbol of just how altered the landscape is. Today, the Colorado is relatively tame, even in the spring, when raging floodwaters traditionally roared down the canyons.
This interruption in natural cycles has imperiled many species dependent on spring floods.
For this reason, the US Interior Department recently created an artificial flood by releasing water from the Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona upstream from the Grand Canyon.
Barry Worth is with the Interior Department. He says the river's health depends on floods like these.
The purpose is to essentially re-estore the river in environment along the corridor through the canyon, both to re-establish the sandbars and beaches of the system, and to flush out clean and rejuvenate the backwaters that are critical habitat for endangered species of fish called the humpback chub.
So we are actually using the force of the water to achieve this purpose of picking the sediment that's in the bottom of the river channel and re-depositing the pie on the banks, and to overtop these backwater areas and flush them out their areas that have silted in over the last 10 years and become unusable for the endangered fish.
The ecosystems beneath the dam have been dying of slow death since Glen Canyon opened over 30 years ago.
Seeing this, the Interior Department initiated studies to see what was required to restore damaged habitats.
The ecosystem probably was that it's very worst in the 1980s, so our whole goal over the last half-dozen years has been a way to find a way to achieve the water conservation and power generation needs from the dam, but still operated in a far more environmentally friendly manner.
And that's what we're attempting to test out right now.
The week-long flood affected 292 miles of the Colorado. Afterwards, water levels were dropped to study the effects. If results are favorable, the hope is that releases like this might be repeated below other dams in the west.
Barry Worth is with the US Interior Department. The Glen Canyon flood took 13 years of preparation and $60 million, but this is just the first of similar measures expected for management of facilities like dams.
Researchers say if this works, there's no reason why similar projects won't happen on other rivers. For the Environment Show, I'm Karen Kelly.
And now it's time for the Earth calendar.
Comments are rare and awesome spectacles. Many of us will be lucky if we see half a dozen in our lifetime.
Come at Yaku Taki now, soaring above the Earth might be the most visible comet this century.
Environment Show producer Thomas Lalley examines where Yaku Taki came from and what it means for society today.
Our solar system is a busy place. Troyons of comets are right now cruising around it. Every once in a while, one of them gets close to the Earth and puts on a spectacular show.
Don Brownlee is a professor of astronomy at the University of Washington. He says comets are pieces of the universe that might even be older than the solar system itself.
Comets are bodies composed of rock and ice that formed in the outer regions of the solar system where conditions were cold enough that ice has been preserved throughout the age of the solar system.
That's about 4.6 billion years. And what makes a comet a comet is that when it comes close to the sun, roughly between the orbit of Mars and Jupiter, solar heating starts evolving.
It's also rising in the ice. And this releases gas and dust which streams off the nucleus of the comet and produces a tail and coma that can be seen at great distance.
Given the right conditions, comets can be seen from just about anywhere on the planet. Compared to other objects in the solar system, they're relatively small.
But the tail can stretch for over 100 million kilometers. Brownlee says Yaku Taki is about the size of a mountain.
He says don't worry, it won't crash into the Earth. But collisions with comets are nothing new for this planet.
The last 10 kilometer diameter comet that hit the Earth hit the Earth 65 million years ago at the so-called Coutaceous Cherturary Extinction Time when a large fraction of the living matter on the Earth died.
Also the time when the dinosaurs disappeared from the Earth's history. So anyway, comets and asteroids do hit the Earth frequently on geological time scale. But nothing you have to worry about too much on a personal level.
While comets can cause massive destruction, they also have played an essential role in the development of the Earth as we know it today.
Among other things, comets contain water and carbon, two basic building blocks for life. Over billions of years, water and carbon piled up from successive bombardments of comets and other objects from the universe.
But while millions, perhaps billions of people saw Yaku Taki, we still don't know much about comets. Brownlee is now working on a project called Star Dust, which will send unmanned space probes up to take samples of a comet starting in a few years.
He says he's excited to see what they find.
In the case of comets, which have always been cold and always been far from the sun, we expect that these interstellar grains will have survived the whole process of solar system formation.
In a sense it's like having a sample return from another star system, even though we're just doing a comet.
The comet, fortunately, brings these samples into the interstellar system and delivers them to us. And it's just a matter of us flying by and catching them and bringing them back to the Earth.
And I imagine there's probably a bunch of stuff that you'll discover that you can't even begin to anticipate now.
Oh, yeah. I mean, in the... This is the first sample return mission since Apollo is a wonderful example, because most of the science done on the Apollo samples, which many people are still diligently working on, most of the key scientific questions, people hadn't even framed at the time of the samples return.
But science can only tell us so much.
Comets have enchanted and scared the Dickens out of humans for as long as we have records.
They've often been viewed as gifts or omens from the heavens, but in our mechanized modern life, what could Yakutake mean?
Daniel Madd is a professor at the Graduate Theological Union and author of the new book, God and the Big Bang. He says Yakutake reminds us of our origins.
Something like this, I think, is so fascinating to everyone around the world. First of all, binds us all together. It's one of the few things that we actually can share with just about everyone else on the planet.
And I think it evokes something a little bit unexplainable, so we're searching here about how to make sense of it or how to discuss its significance.
But I think the first thing is just an overwhelming sense of the wonder of it all.
I guess one thing that's really remarkable is that there's something new and ancient at the same time in the phenomenon.
It's something which no one on Earth ever knew about until I gather a few months ago.
And yet the comet's been coming and going regularly for quite a while. Every 16,000 years, I'm not sure how far back in history of the solar system, but probably for several million or even billion years.
So that the combination of something radically new for us humans and yet very ancient.
And it's a chance for us to fit into, to see how we fit into a cosmic order. And it gives some order to what we often think of as a chaotic existence.
Matt says, Yakutake reminds us that we are connected to the universe, but that's about where he stops. For him, comets are too mysterious and beautiful to solid with human reason.
They are to be left alone, admired and perhaps feared. He reads from his book The Essential Kabbalah, The Heart of Jewish Mysticism. This passage was written by Moses Cordeverro in the 16th century.
An impoverished person thinks that God is an old man with white hair, sitting on a wondrous throne of fire that glitters with countless sparks.
Imagineing this in similar fantasies, the fool corporealizes God. He falls into one of the traps that destroy faith. His awe of God is limited by his imagination.
But if you are enlightened, you know God's oneness. You know that the divine is devoid of bodily categories. These can never be applied to God. Then you wonder, Estonach. Who am I?
I am a mustard seed in the middle of the sphere of the moon, which itself is a mustard seed within the next sphere. So it is with that sphere and all it contains in relation to the next sphere.
So it is with all the spheres, one inside the other, and all of them are a mustard seed within the further expanses. And all of these are a mustard seed within further expanses.
Your awe is invigorated, the love in your soul expands.
Daniel Matt is a professor at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. For the Environment Show, this is Thomas Lalley, a small mustard seed and a sea of stardust.
Thanks for being with us this week on the Environment Show. I'm Peter Burley. For cassette copy of the program, call 1-800-747-7444 and ask for program number 326.
The Environment Show is a presentation of national productions, which is solely responsible for its content. Thomas Lalley is the producer and Dr. Alan Shartog is the executive producer.
The Environment Show is made possible by Heming's Motor Doors, the monthly Bible of the Old Car Hobby, 1-800-CAR-HRE.
So long and join us next week for the Environment Show.
