Hello friends, it's the environment show and welcome.
The Super Tanker Brayer spilled all of its 26 million gallons of oil into the sea.
Who's it fault?
Scott Sterling of the Alaska Citizens Advisory Council says the blame and responsibility
go far beyond the ship's captain.
That you're talking a major, you're talking worldwide shipping and oil producing interest
that exists because of the demand of the industrial nations of the world for oil.
And an innovative program to clear the air in Los Angeles has companies buying your dirty
car to get it off the road.
The environment show is a national production made possible by Hemmings Motor News, the
national Bible of the old car hobby, monthly from Bennington, Vermont, and by the J.M.
Kaplan Fund of New York.
And this is Bruce Robertson.
The January 5th wreck of the Liberian Super Tanker Brayer in Hurricane Winds of the Coast
of the Shutton Islands dumped 85,000 tons of oil into the sea.
Twice the amount lost in the wreck of the Exxon Valdez.
The wreck of the Brayer is now considered one of the most severe in the history of oil
shipping in the area.
Following the wreck of the Exxon Valdez in 1989, a series of task forces from each region
studied one another in an effort to learn about not only how to prevent oil spills in the
shipping lanes, but how to react should one occur.
Now the wreck of the Brayer stands as something of a solemn blood oath between the people of
the Shutton Islands and the citizens of Prince William Sound in Alaska as they share this nightmare
experience.
It was under these terms that Scott Sterling, president of the Citizens Advisory Council
in Prince William Sound, went to view the wreck of the Brayer, half submerged, smashed
against the rocky cliffs.
We arrived on the afternoon of Thursday the 8th, which would have been about 48 hours
after she initially came to rest.
What we saw was we made contact with Shelen Island Council.
They briefed us on the situation and range for us to take a helicopter overview of the
wreck.
We did that.
What we saw was a tanker leaking oil, but not nearly in the quantity that we had expected.
And we also saw severe wind and wave energy at work.
It was a double-edged sword.
The wind and wave energy definitely helped disperse the oil very effectively, but it also
made salvage impossible.
When the ship finally broke in half several days later, it lost the remainder of its cargo,
twice that which was spilled from the Exxon Valdez, though the Exxon Valdez was carrying
more than the Brayer.
The ship's captain was making way in an authorized shipping lane outside of the Exclusion Zone.
The trouble started when the ship took on seawater that contaminated the fuel oil, the ship
lost power and was abandoned, eventually being crushed against the rocks in the Gale Force
winds that pounded for days on end.
Sterling says there was little the captain or the rescue teams could have done.
On the other hand,
if you read the pilot manual for the theory of the world, which is after all, you know,
been traversed for many hundreds of years by a maritime seafaring people, the warnings
in the pilot book about entering into what's called the Roost, R-O-O-S-T, the Sumbara Roost,
during a southwest Gale virtually predicts that what will happen is what happened to the
Brayer, which is if you have any difficulty at all, you're going to get caught in a combination
of wind, current and wave that's going to sweep you right into the rocky shores of
Shellend.
The investigation of the event is far from complete.
What is complete, though, is the loss of the oil to the sea.
Given the circumstances, the result has been incredible.
Shoreline and inner tidal zones are, of course, among the most sensitive zones for life,
history, and life and tidal life in the marine environment.
This oil, so far as we could see, provided a light coating or film on the shoreline environment,
which appeared to be bad enough in its way, but certainly nowhere near the kind of total
immersion and swapping that we saw in Prince William Sound and Codiac Island in Alaska.
That was a marked contrast.
I think that we have to do a lot of, and the authorities there intend to do, a lot of monitoring of all
basic life forms down to crustaceans, plankton life, and so forth, along the shoreline and
in the tidal zones to see how they're really going to fare.
Because those are the vital, most basic elements in the food chain.
When the nesting and breeding bird colonies return to Shatland in the spring, of course,
they depend on a lot of that for life and for feeding their young.
So it's going to be real important to find that out.
Now, the oil certainly didn't help matters, but whether it caused a wholesale devastation
of inner tidal and shoreline life, I think, remains to be determined.
It appears the oil in the water column of the sea water seems to have been dispersed
by the pounding sea storm.
However, 26 million gallons of oil, where oil hadn't ought to be, is a factor that cannot
be discounted.
The testing and the monitoring is only just beginning.
Even as the studies get underway though, sterling is joining with those calling for immediate
reactions to avert future spills.
First and foremost, he says, we need a worldwide system of monitoring the location and progress
of each and every tanker as it makes way.
Is something that can be done, the technology exists to do it, it is a question of working
out the economics and the international protocols to accomplish it.
But there is no doubt that if we can make our civil aviation network throughout the world,
there is no jet that flies in civil aviation in any virtually 90% of the world whose position
is not known by some authority at any time that plane is in the air.
We just need a similar system for oil tanker traffic.
The other component of this system would be to pre-position rescue ships and equipment
for quick strike, especially in and around particularly sensitive areas that would sustain
heavy damage should an accident occur.
There is no question these measures would cost money, costs that probably would be included
in the cost of a barrel of oil delivered.
The economics of just having a tug standing by at all times that may not ever be used causes
concern on the part of people who are in the business to make money.
But the argument on the other side is, look, the one time that we need it, if it is there,
makes up for all the days and months where we never used it because what it can save
is a cost both in human and environmental and dollar terms that it far exceeds the cost
of having it ready.
A properly trained crew, common languages and safety procedures are other recommendations
sterling would make to minimize the frequency and the extent of shipping accidents.
In the end though, it really comes down to this.
Everyone has to keep working at this, that you're talking a major, you're talking worldwide
shipping and oil producing interest that exists because of the demand of the industrial
nations of the world for oil.
So since we're the ones who are creating that demand, we have a concomitant responsibility
to try and make it as safe as possible.
Scott Sterling, president of the Alaskan Citizens Advisory Council, the council was formed
in cooperation with the Aliasca Pipeline Company, Exxon Oil and the towns and people along
Prince William Sound in the wake of the wreck of the Exxon Valdez.
He says, as long as we continue to put gasoline in our cars, we are all going to be at the
ship's wheel bringing the oil into port.
This is Bruce Robertson.
You probably passed one this morning, a 1970s something automobile coughing and growling
down the highway in front of you, noxious exhaust spitting from the tailpipe.
All of this is your car, it could be worth something.
In California that is.
The California South Coast Air Quality Management District is offering Los Angeles area businesses
a deal.
For $700, a company will purchase a pre-1982 car from its owner.
Destroy the car, then earn credit toward emissions reductions requirements.
Jim Lents, executive officer of the South Coast District, says this gives companies more
time to comply with air pollution requirements.
O'Cars in Los Angeles produce a large share of the emissions here.
Mobile source is produced about 60% of the total pollution that is caused in the basin.
And of that half of that comes from older vehicles.
So there is a real advantage in getting older vehicles off the road.
And we thought this would be the most helpful way of doing it.
Most of the older vehicles belong to poor or folks.
So it didn't seem reasonable to put big extra charges to force them off the road.
But to do it more on a voluntary basis, where businesses would get some advantage for buying
them off.
And people aren't forced to give up their cars.
They're only means of transportation.
But if they see an opportunity to make some money, maybe buy a newer vehicle, then they
have the opportunity to sell that vehicle.
So we thought it was a win-win situation.
The scrap program was tested by the oil company Unicel in 1990.
The company took more than 8,000 cars off the road.
The district program, which started at the first of this year, aims to remove at least 10,000
cars.
Lent says companies receive credit based on the car's age.
Older vehicles earn more credit because they generally have less effective emissions
controls.
So any car made before 1972 equals 108 pounds of smog-producing emissions released by
the company that is purchasing that car.
Once the cars are purchased, Lent says, the businesses must work with a licensed vehicle
scrapper.
And they would make arrangements with that licensed scrapper to take so many cars off the road.
And then they would receive actually a certificate of a mission reduction credit.
These mission reduction credits are good for three years.
And then after that they're no longer good.
So all the company avoids control for buying a certain amount of old cars off the road
is just three years.
But that can be very helpful to them at certain times.
According to the South Coast District, pre-1982 cars make up more than a quarter of the vehicles
on the road, while they create more than 50% of the pollution.
Environmentalists in the area agree it is time to scrap the cars most responsible for
emissions.
Joel Schwartz, staff scientist for the Coalition for Clean Air, says they are scrapping the
wrong vehicles.
The important thing is to target cars because they're dirty, not because they're old.
Although older cars are more likely to be grown submitters, most of the grown submitters
come from the late 70s through the mid 80s.
And that's because most of the cars on the road are from those model years.
So when we scrap cars because they're old, we are indiscriminate.
When we scrap some cars that are fairly clean and some of their fairly dirty.
In addition, the most important factor in whether a car is a grown submitter or a clean
car is how well the owner maintains it.
And so that means that a car that's five years old can be a grown submitter and a car
that's 15 years old can be relatively clean.
The important thing is for people to maintain and repair their cars.
Jim Yennell points to the district's figures as the root of the problem.
Yennell says the district calculated average emissions for each car model and year.
Yennell of citizens for a better environment argues every car should be tested for emissions
individually.
If what you wanted to do was have a program where the emissions that you credited to a company
were verifiable, then what you would have to be doing is having some kind of evidence
of what their actual emissions of this vehicle are and how many miles this vehicle
has been driven recently.
The vehicle buyback program or scrap program, if you will, doesn't give us the kind of
assurances that we need to feel that we are really trading one for one or 1.2 for one
and getting actual reductions compared to emissions that we know are being allowed to
continue.
Yennell says the district is trading uncertain calculations, auto emissions for concrete
emissions, those released by industry.
But Jim Lentz, the executive officer of the district, says the numbers air on the side
of the environment.
The credit we gave per car is actually a little bit less than what we think actually occurs.
So there is an environmental benefit to this program.
Lentz says the district discounts the credits 20%.
For example, if the average emission for a car is 100 pounds, the company purchasing
the car will get credit for only 80 pounds of those emissions.
Lentz says this discount provides a margin of error for those older cars that in fact have
cleaner emissions.
But Jim Yennell remains skeptical.
The reason they are doing this discount is because they are handing credits to companies
to offset real emissions.
And the question is whether or not this 20% really corresponds to anything in the real
world or whether it is simply a soft throw in the direction of environmentalists who are
uncomfortable with the notion that you trade somewhat fuzzy measured reductions for real
live increases in emissions on the other end.
Lentz argues the program does not provide an escape from pollution control.
He says it is only a matter of time before every corporation in the district will have
to conform with clean air regulations.
There is no definite deadline for the end of the scrap program.
Lentz expects it will just die away in 8 to 10 years with the advent of electric vehicles
and other alternate fuel cars.
Jim Lentz is executive officer of the South Coast Air Quality Management District, the
pollution control agency in the Los Angeles area.
Jim Yennell is director of the Clean Air Program at Citizens for a Better Environment
in Los Angeles and Joel Schwartz is the staff scientist at the Coalition for Clean Air in
Santa Monica.
And this is Bruce Robertson.
In his book, Earth in the Balance, Vice President Al Gore proposed a worldwide education program,
quote, to promote a new way of thinking about the current relationship between human civilization
and the earth.
End quote.
Professor David Oar has dedicated himself to both the theory and practice of environmental
education.
David Oar, professor of environmental studies at Oberlin College, has some clear ideas about
the current education system and how it must be adapted to teach contemporary environmental
issues more effectively.
The mainstream education, long ago divorced experience from learning.
And the best courses now being offered, I think, an environment are reintegrating experience
into the curriculum.
But it's a long process.
It evolves, I think, overcoming the idea that practical learning and liberal arts knowledge
should be separated.
And the best educational thinkers we've had in the 20th century, people like John Dewey,
Alfred North, Whitehead, and J. Glenn Gray, people who thought very seriously and deeply
about education and to some degree about environment science, talked about the all of them,
talked in different ways about the importance of weaving real world experience into the curriculum,
not because it was important to round out the personality.
Although it certainly is for that.
But it was important to stimulate the mind.
Problem-based learning, as it is referred to among educators, helps students retain more
information because they are actively engaged, rather than just passively absorbing it.
Or says this process of education does not start in college, though.
And neither should lessons in environmentalism.
American 13-year-olds ranked ninth of 12 countries in life science competitions last year.
The students lack a basic understanding of how nutrients move through the food chain.
They lack a fundamental understanding of natural selection and water cycles, as well as
the larger implications of deforestation, pollution, and organic evolution.
In 1987, the National Science Teachers Association created a task force to address this problem.
About a year ago, they recommended that biology be taught with a more holistic approach, combining
an examination of science as a process with a study of how that science relates to the
biosphere, society, and the individual.
In their report, the task force concentrated on grades 7-12, but says, or, environmental
education, could start earlier still.
It needs to start as early as possible.
And it needs to start with the child of at age 2 or 3 beginning to explore habitat.
It needs to be encouraged.
It proceeds in schools and all the way through the educational process.
But it needs to be woven into a curriculum.
And it needs to be woven into the livelihood and the pattern of the child.
That's why parks are so terribly important in greenways, places where people can play
and experience a natural world.
More and more of those kinds of habitats have been lost to urban development and shopping
malls and highways, and even the places that are left are often not very safe places.
Parks are more important now, as more children than ever are growing up in cities with no
other contact with the natural world.
There is also a need for wilderness, larger tracks of land left in its natural state, to
be the basic text in our study of the environment.
At one level, there are places that people simply go and experience.
And at another level, there are places that within the curriculum that's scientific study.
And they're terribly important for those kinds of studies to give us baseline data on how
ecosystems work and how pristine systems work.
They're recreational places.
They're educational in every way of the word and trying to understand how a place works.
I heard a story over lunch today about a professor who challenged his class to show him any
kind of wild area that had once been used for something else and take him out there and
show him the places.
And he would tell them how it had been used.
And the students took him out of an old dairy farm and had grown back up in trees.
He was given the task of trying to explore this and understand how that had once been used.
In this case, he was able to do some various natural signs that had once been a dairy farm.
But these natural areas are terribly important to give us some kind of alternative way to
see the world and also the way to experience the world differently.
Part of seeing the world differently involves re-examining how we think and how we discover
information.
Ever since philosopher Renee DeCarte, rational or objective thought processes have been preferred
over the subjective.
Some people now blame this for our separation from our instincts and from our place on
Earth.
There's this fact-value split.
There is the object-subject split.
There is a split we incur in the mind for left brain and right brain.
Now, the end of the short answer to that is we don't throw object to it.
It's a activity or what's called rationality out.
But what we need is a wider definition of what it means to be rational or objective.
There is no way a scientist can be entirely divorced from what he studies, what he or she
studies.
And there is the last element here, a good bit of science and probably the best science
operates very much through intuition.
Now intuition is not something you can cover in methodology courses and science or anything
else.
But the best science is Einstein could see in his mind light waves bending in a gravity
field at a very early age.
Long before the theory came along.
That was a vision that came to him.
And so we need a more rational, broader definition of rationality.
We need to think very long and hard about object and subject and where in what ways those
are brought together.
But it's not less science, it's a better science, it's a more inclusive kind of science.
Though or recognizes the importance of maintaining a dialogue within the scientific community,
he says the focus of this new science should be outside itself, educating the public as
to its findings.
Already the Pew Foundation is awarding grants to scholars whose work combines scholarship
with activism.
And some scientists are writing books for more general audiences instead of just academic
papers for their peers.
And this is education at its best.
I mean, communicating these kinds of things to the public that desperately needs to know
these things.
And I think what he wants to know these things.
But it changes, a lot of scientists look down on communicating with the public as popular
science.
But the kind of work that E.O. Wilson does or Barry Commer or Carl Sagan is very important
to the broad public understanding of why.
We need to build a constituency in Wilson's case and it's been very active in doing this,
a constituency for biodiversity.
And that needs to be a constituency that understands not only what the issues are, but why those
are important.
David Orr, professor of environmental studies at Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio.
He is author of many articles and books himself, including the Global Predicament, Ecological
Perspectives on World Order.
This is Bruce Robertson.
And that's our report on the Environment Show this week.
The Environment Show is a program about the environment, the air, water, soil, wildlife,
and people of our common habitat.
For a cassette copy of this program, call 1-800-767-1929.
Ask for the Environment Show Program Number 161.
That's 1-800-767-1929.
The Environment Show Program Number 161.
Our piece on dirty car removal in Los Angeles was written and produced by Karen Kelly.
The interview with Professor David Orr was conducted and written by Kristen Hutchinson.
The Environment Show is a presentation of national productions solely responsible for
its content.
Dr. Ellen Shartock, Executive Producer and this is Bruce Robertson.
The Environment Show is made possible by the JM Kaplan Fund of New York and by Heming's
Motor News, the national Bible of the Old Car Hobby, monthly from Bennington for a month.
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