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-C-A-R-H-E-R-E, the David and
Lucille Packard Foundation for the coverage of fisheries issues and the Bullet Foundation.
Your host is Peter Burley.
Thanks Thomas, coming up on this week's Environment Show.
The future of the last remaining temperate rainforests is sparked a firestorm in Alaska
as well as on Capitol Hill.
The rise of tourism has made decision-makers of forest management take notice, while
there's search for the best way to sustain wildlife ecology raises questions.
Environmentalists and loggers lock horns over legislation to extend a contract for cutting
timber in the Tongas National Forest.
Check out a gardening that feeds a family of five and doesn't have to be planted each
year.
Sound too good to be true?
The technique is called permaculture, which creates an environmentally sound ecosystem
right in your own backyard.
Earth calendar visits Tennessee for a glimpse at the rare but flashy Tennessee cone flower,
a unique treasure which thrives through drought and flood in Nashville.
These stories and more coming up this week on the Environment Show.
A battle rages in Southeast Alaska and Washington, D.C. over the future of the Tongas National
Forest.
Attorneys representing 200 wilderness tourist businesses have secured a judgment which challenges
the way the U.S. Forest Service manages the Tongas.
A hundred miles long and fifty miles wide, the Tongas Forest is one of the largest in
the National Forest System.
It encompasses the last temperate rainforest that includes hundreds of islands along the
Alaskan coast.
Spectacular shorelines are lined with huge trees that seem to appear and disappear as the
Pacific Mists intensify and dissipate.
A biological treasure trove is home for many species of wildlife, including bear, the Alexander
Archipelago Wolf, Blacktail deer, salmon and eagles.
Biologists say the small dark wolf is a distinct subspecies, closer to the Minnesota wolf than
their larger cousins that live in interior Alaska.
It lives on Blacktail deer.
Tom Waldo, staff attorney for the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, explains what the
lawsuit is all about.
In the 1940s and 1950s, the Forest Service entered into two 50-year timber sale contracts
that basically guaranteed these two large corporations 50 years worth of cheap timber in exchange
for building and operating a pulp mill that would employ workers year-round.
In 1993, Alaska pulp corporation, one of the holders of these two contracts, closed its
pulp mill in Sitka and laid off the 400 workers that worked there in response to that, the
Forest Service declared that it was a breach of the contract and terminated the contract.
When the Alaska pulp 50-year contract was canceled, we had high hopes that the Forest Service
would seize this opportunity to manage the Tongas in a more balanced way to provide less
clear cutting and more protection for old growth, for fish and wildlife, and for the
other uses of the Forest like tourism, fishing and recreation.
Instead, the Forest Service continued business as usual and proceeded to offer all the available
timber to other purchasers as if nothing had changed.
So we brought the lawsuit and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with us that the
Forest Service was required by law to go through a public process to at least consider more
balanced alternatives.
The U.S. Forest Service contends that its timber sale program is a bullwork of a permanent
and stable economy in the Tongas.
The wilderness-oriented tourist businesses argue that economic interests favor tourism.
The tourism businesses that brought this lawsuit are getting crowded out by logging.
People don't come to Southeast Alaska to see huge clear cuts.
They come for the beautiful scenery and to see wildlife and catch fish.
There's more and more areas, our clear cut, there are fewer and fewer places to go for
tourism and more people wanting to go to those remaining places.
This is a real concern to the whole region because tourism is much more important to the
economy of this region than timber is.
Visitors spending is currently over $150 million a year in Southeast Alaska and growing
at a rate of over 20% per year.
It's absolutely explosive, phenomenal growth.
Also an issue is the future of Southeast Alaska's fishing industry.
Logging which causes the siltation of streams or destroys habitat and water quality necessary
for fish spawning can threaten the sustainability of the fisheries.
In economic terms, Waldo says about 2,000 jobs are dependent on logging, while commercial
salmon fishing produces 5,000 direct jobs and sport fishing adds 1,200 more.
Like the wilderness tourism industry, the commercial fishermen which did not join in
the lawsuit are reluctant to pick a public fight with the loggers.
Liz Cabrera is director of the Petersburg Vessel Owners Association, a group of full-time
commercial fishermen.
We want to be able to raise concerns that we might have regarding habitat protection,
but we don't want to necessarily be labeled as being opposed to having a healthy timber
industry in Southeast Alaska.
Unfortunately, the issue has become such that it's completely polarized.
You can't bring up a concern without being labeled anti-timber.
I think for most fishermen, that's a really difficult label to accept.
Well, they don't want to be labeled that because they're just as much dependent on a natural
resource and they really sympathize with what's happening with the timber industry.
Three things are now happening at once, which will define the future of the Tongus.
One is a review that the court has required the Forest Service to make before allocating
some or all of the timber allocated under the first of the 50-year contracts which has
now been canceled.
The second is the adoption of a new management plan by the Forest Service.
A draft has been published and public review is underway which has produced intense debate
in controversy from all sides.
Pamela Finney, public affairs specialist for the Forest Service, says that recommendation
which includes a smaller timber cut than in the past should protect all of the competing
interests of the Tongus but not without risk.
The Forest Supervisors in choosing the preferred alternative that is proposed believe that we
can offer 357 million boardfeet of timber a year maximum and still provide enough habitat
for the variety of wildlife as well as protection for the ennadromous fish, which the salmon,
which is very important up here and provide tourism opportunities as well as mining opportunities
in Southeast Alaska.
They believe that that is the best balance and mix all the way around.
It does have a small risk toward wildlife and it does have some risk in the wood products
because it doesn't offer as much as the timber industry would like.
The third factor on the horizon for the Tongus is the proposed extension of the 50-year
contract held by the Ketchakum pulp corporation that operates a mill in Ketchakum.
We hear about that issue and the next segment of this environment show.
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You're listening to the Environment Show and I'm Peter Burlin.
Still ahead.
We meet a man who feeds his family with a permanent garden through a combination of biological
disciplines known as permaculture.
And in our Earth calendar, the once thought extinct Tennessee cone flower blooms.
These stories still ahead on the Environment Show.
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From the road, little distinguishes Christopher Robin Healey's house in Lake George, New York.
But the small garden in his yard will soon supply nearly all of his family of fives food.
The key to its production is a design method called permaculture.
It's a mixture of disciplines. You have appropriate technologies, right?
Solar energy, wind energy, water energy. You've got organic agriculture.
And it's these different disciplines all woven together to formal mosaics carpet, which is permaculture design.
And it's just common sense.
The garden is only about eight tenths of an acre, yet there are hundreds of varieties of plants.
Permaculture is bio-regional, which means that it can be practiced in all climates from desert to woodland.
In Lake George, which is in a hardwood forest typical to the northeast, that means growing plants that can take the long winters and will interact with the surrounding plants.
Permaculture is a sustainable design science that mimics nature's design for a place.
I come here and that nature's design for this area is actually forest. This whole area would normally be forest that people weren't living here.
And so what I do is I marry nature's design for the place with human needs by proper planning, proper functional connections between the elements in the system.
See that the strength in the system lies in the connections you put between elements in the system.
Each plant in a permaculture garden relies on other plants and animals for survival.
What Helia is creating is actually a miniature ecosystem designed to self-reproduce year after year.
What we do is we make harmonious connections between elements in the system, at least three healthy connections.
And actually when you have when you put down three connections consciously, you get about a dozen or 15 more connections after that that you notice in time.
For instance, Helia knows not to plant tomatoes near his walnut trees since they'll release a substance that will kill the tomato plants.
For other plants, the opposite is true. Near an apple rose bush from which he harvest rose hips, he has planted a type of onion, whose central throw off Japanese beetles, the rose's main predators.
As you look around, you realize no plants are alone. Each plant has a role, either to provide food or to complement those that do.
Some plants enrich the soil, others attract pollinators like bees, and still others repel pests.
Helia says this is just how nature works.
Nature seems random, but nature's not really random. Everything is there for a purpose. Everything's created for a purpose.
And these communities are like like rainforests in the tropics, or temperate rainforests, which is just about what we're in here.
These systems are working. The best designer is nature. That's all there is to it.
So what we do is we look at what nature is doing. There's no sense fighting nature and plowing everything up and planting rows and rows of the same thing, which is just going to attract every pest on earth.
It's better to just set up these mixed systems. And if we mimic nature's ways, we see that the systems work better.
The cost of setting up a permaculture garden is relatively cheap. They were originally designed for impoverished areas of the third world.
Helia says he spent about $2,000 over eight years. He says a permaculture garden can be set up for a minimal cost.
Anybody can set this up. You'd have to get a hold of a designer to either teach you, you know, if we do workshops, or the designer can do the design for you.
You sit down, you know, well, what do you like? What do you want to have here? And then the designer designs everything around that.
And once the system is set up, which is we're almost all the 90% of the workers setting the system up. And that's where 90% of the money is also.
Once it's set up, the system pretty much takes care of itself.
Besides the garden, permaculture also concerns itself with other areas of living like energy efficiency, solar energy, and drinking water.
Permaculture is still new to the U.S., but it's beginning to hit the mainstream. Its originator is an Australian named Bill Molison.
He's written two books on the subject, permaculture, a designer's manual, and introduction to permaculture.
Both books can be special ordered through your local bookstore or ordered from good earth publications in North Carolina.
Or for general information, call 518-793-0419. That's 518-793-0419.
For the Environment Show, I'm Thomas Lately.
Music
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Music
And now it's time for the Earth Calendar. You may think that a daisy from Nashville, Tennessee, is a lady who performs at the Grand Old Opera.
But those folk are transplantable. They perform all over the world and are even cloned with impunity by copyright pirates in China.
But blooming now and until mid-July in the cedar glades near Nashville is a flower that looks something like a daisy.
It does not exist anywhere else in the world and probably never will.
Standing a meter high with bright purple rays extending from a golden center is called the Tennessee Cone Flower, or Echinacea Tennisyances.
It is one of these species that is what they call a glade in democorps. Found only within the polymstone glades of Central Tennessee.
Very harsh conditions for any plant to survive in. In the wintertime, the sites are inundated up to sometimes a foot of water. They're in very flooded conditions.
Some are there. They are a desert. They'll be just baked dry and the temperature right off the soil will be up to 120 degrees.
I think it's fairly, fairly parched conditions in these plants. We'll occupy a very small niche between the very rocky areas in these glades.
And then where the forest glades starts, the forest part of the glade starts. And very thin shallow soils.
And they occupy that little zone in there where they get just enough moisture but nothing else can really out-compete them.
So they do quite well right now.
Dave Campbell is the director of science and stewardship for the Tennessee Nature Conservancy.
He says the flower falls within the plant classification genus Echinacea.
It has more to distinguish it than its ability to survive in Nashville.
Plants in this genus were known by Native Americans for their medicinal value and can be found in herbal remedies in health food stores today.
The genus Echinacea is what is harvested for medicinal purposes. They use the extract from the plant for immune system boosters.
This particular plant, you know, it is really rare. So they, of course, wouldn't use it but they use Echinacea papyrilla for the medicinal purposes.
But if you were to take the seeds of this plant, which I have done before in a while to take the seeds to test the viability,
you take them and you see if the seeds are, there is anything in them. If you put them in your mouth and bite on them, they will make your mouth go completely numb within a very short period of time.
So they do have a very strong, very strong chemical scale product inside of them.
It is one of those plants that is really one of life's little treasures. It is a real beautiful plant and it has a very specific niche.
It is really nice to see that it still exists out there.
The flower was rediscovered in 1968 after it was thought to be extinct. As the Tennessee cone flower came at a bloom this year,
the United States went to the brink of a trade war with China, which is reproducing without permission, a lot of copyrighted material from the country music studios of Nashville.
Perhaps if we copyrighted the endangered Echinacea Tennessee ensues, it too would be reproduced.
This technique seems far less complicated than listing the plant under the Endangered Species Act, and it could make the copyright pirates in China feel good at the same time.
Thanks for being with us on this week's Environment Show. I'm Peter Burley. For a cassette copy of the program called 1-800-323-9262,
it asks for program number 338. The Environment Show is a presentation of national productions which is solely responsible for its content.
Thomas Lally is the producer, Stephanie Goysman provided additional production support, and Dr. Alan Shartug is the executive producer.
The Environment Show is made possible by Heming's Motor News, the monthly Bible of the Old Car Hobby 1-800-CAR-HRE.
The David and Lizziel Packard Foundation for Support of Fisheries Issues and the Bullet Foundation.
So long and join us next week for the Environment Show.
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