Hello friends, it's the Environment Show and welcome.
The tale of the 2000 year old tree, a stand of ancient pine trees in Tasmania, reveals
a deep dark secret.
In 30 years, global temperatures have been warmest in Tumalenia.
Also, the growing link between industrial toxics and breast cancer, a commentary.
And Chattanooga tries to do the right thing for something of the wrong reasons.
Having said, I will hug a tree if I have to.
And I believe in that, but this is really a development strategy in my view that drives
this economy into the 21st century.
These stories, this time on the Environment Show, a national production made possible by
Heming's Motor News, the monthly Bible of the Old Car Hobby, 1-800-CAR.
And this is Bruce Robertson.
How often have we wondered what it may have been like to be alive in an earlier age to smell
the smells and see the sights?
What did the world look like in times before the era of photography or landscape painting?
Tree Ring Specialist Dr. Edward Cook believes he has a pretty good idea of life as it was
nearly 2000 years ago.
Dr. Cook is a tree ring specialist with Lamont Dorety Laboratories affiliated with Columbia
University.
Tree Rings on Tasmania, he says, tell a clear and disturbing tale.
In Western Tasmania, there is an unusual tree species called Hewon Pine.
It's a very long-lived tree species.
Can you live to be over 2000 years of age?
And the trees growing in a very high elevation site there of this species are particularly sensitive
to long-term variations in summertime temperatures.
And you were there to study these trees and found that they were quite old trees.
What was their age?
What is their age now?
The oldest living trees at the site are approximately 1,200 years of age with many other trees
approaching 1,000 years.
And how does one gauge the age of a tree while it's still standing?
How we use an instrument developed by forestry many years ago, it's called an increment
borer.
And it extracts a 5-millimeter diameter core of wood from the tree.
It looks something like a thin arrow shaft that contains the full record of the tree's
life in its annual rings.
Cutting across its rings.
Yes, correct.
And this boring has no effect on the tree?
Not appreciably, it leaves a very small hole.
And for coniferous in particular, which you and Pine is one, the residents in the wood tend
to seal up the hole rather quickly.
So you were able to draw out a bore, a sample bore from these trees to determine their age
in looking at the cross-section of the sample you brought out.
What did you find?
Well, we found that among other things that the variations in ring width from year to
year are quite highly correlated with summertime temperatures down in Tasmania.
This is through a comparison of the ring width variations with instrumental temperature
records from nearby stations.
In addition, we found that the previous, say, 30 years have been unusual in the sense
that the trees are growing quite rapidly relative to past variations in growth.
And this increase in growth corresponds quite well with an increase in temperature from
the instrumental records.
And I pertinent to the story here, then, is in the past 30 years, is this how unique,
how rapidly by comparison to the sample that you were able to get from the early growth
of that tree that you say is at least a thousand if not more years old?
Well, we now have a continuous record of tree growth variations from that site back
almost three thousand years.
We're able to do this by sampling both living trees and sampling old logs and stumps
from the site that can extend the tree and record back in time.
When we do this, we find that we have to go back over two thousand years to find a
thirty-year period of indicated warmth that marginally exceeds the most recent 30 years.
So the most recent 30 years would have to be regarded as highly unusual.
Cook drilled out thirty trees, taking two boars per tree.
The story was the same.
While the samples show the most recent three decades of earth history have been the warmest
in two thousand years, the samples do not answer the question of what is causing this
change.
Cook says, while there is some evidence to show that natural fluctuations are a part of
the background and must be factored in, he says there is a great deal of unexplained
information that cannot be accounted for, except by introducing human activity as a cause.
Cook says, based on previous Earth's climate cycle records, we should be entering a period
of cooling now.
We will continue to sample these trees and others to see whether the rapid growth,
indicating a steady or an even increasing warming trend, continues even as we enter this cooling
cycle.
These tree rings could be another chapter in the story of carbon build-up in the atmosphere,
carbon from fossil fuel combustion, a distinctly human activity.
Dr. Ed Cook is a tree ring specialist at the tree ring laboratory of Lamont-Dorothy Observatory
and Research Labs, affiliated with Columbia University in New York City.
This is Bruce Robertson.
The
Environmental Toxic and Breast Cancer
Increasingly, evidence is linking industrial toxics to the reported rise in breast cancer
rates.
Commentator Judith Enk says it will probably take a death in the family before a member
of Congress will propose regulatory legislation.
Breast Cancer kills more women between ages 40 and 55 than any other cancer.
Further, breast cancer rates are on the rise.
In 1960, your chances of getting breast cancer were 1 in 30.
Today, it is 1 in 8.
Those numbers may not mean much to you until someone you know and love appears in those
statistics.
Suddenly, the statistics have a face, and the need to take action on cancer prevention
becomes even more urgent.
Roughly 70% of breast cancer cases cannot be attributed to known risk factors.
However, mounting scientific evidence suggests that exposure to industrial pollutants may
be a major cause of breast cancer.
Of particular concern is the highly toxic class of chemicals known as organoclorines.
These chemicals are produced by a variety of industrial processes, including pulp and
paper bleaching, waste incineration, and by the manufacture of pesticides, plastics,
and solvents.
These chemicals are long lasting in the environment and tend to accumulate in fatty tissues of
the body.
Israel began facing out organoclorine pesticides in 1978.
The breast cancer rate in Israel then dropped by 8% during the 1980s.
Many women across the country are taking political action to help fight the high rates of breast
cancer in their communities.
No longer willing to go through the painful ordeal of chemotherapy and crossing their fingers
that their daughters won't be afflicted, they are demanding that government and industry
determine why the incidence of breast cancer is on the rise and what role pollution plays.
Taking a page from AIDS activists, grassroots groups are putting breast cancer prevention
on the political map.
On Long Island, which has some of the highest breast cancer rates in the nation, groups
such as one in nine, the Long Island breast cancer action coalition are making a difference.
Based with strong opposition from chemical companies in the Farm Bureau, the breast cancer
activists have teamed up with environmental groups to work on new laws that provide information
on the use of pesticides and other toxic chemicals.
A sad political phenomena is paving the way for important new policies on breast cancer
prevention.
Every year more law makers lose their mothers, their sisters, their daughters, or their
wives to the disease.
Suddenly, those hollow arguments from pesticide manufacturers in the nuclear industry just
do not ring true anymore.
These lawmakers then seek out alternative information and are willing to work for new laws in
this area.
What a tragic way to build political support for breast cancer prevention.
This is Judith Enk.
As you thank Senior Environmental Research Associate with the New York State Public Interest
Research Group, her comments are a regular feature on the Environment Show.
So if you thought this is about a stadium, I don't want you to leave here today.
Thinking that we're talking about a trade center, thinking we're talking about a stadium,
thinking we're talking about an industrial park, our research park, or another downtown
development project.
We are talking about all those things, but we are talking about perhaps the best opportunity
since I have been in Chattanooga for 25 years to address the principal challenges of the
city of Chattanooga and claim a new future.
Chattanooga City Councilman David Crockett, the keynote speaker before a recent lunch meeting
of the Chattanooga area Chamber of Commerce.
Councilman Crockett, and yes he is a descendant of Explorer Dave Crockett of Colonial Times.
Councilman Crockett is a pioneer in his own way, pushing hard for approval and funding
of what is called the South Central Business District Redevelopment Project.
The Southside Project, as it is more easily referred to, would turn a section of downtown
Chattanooga into a modern, even futuristic, eco-industrial park.
It is a plan most in the city favor.
It is a plan most in the city disagree over out of fund.
Crockett says the money could come from an increase in property taxes, sales tax, or
a meal tax.
He favors the meal tax.
If you were to spend as much as $2,000 a year on restaurant meals, he says the tax would
cost you in additional $20.
And this spread over 12 months.
That's the big deal, ask Crockett.
Mayor Gene Roberts also favors the meal tax.
It's going to take about a $50 million jump start to relegate it moving.
Almost everyone wants to do it, but a lot of people are reluctant to address any new
tax.
I think we ought to have a 1% meal tax, restaurant tax only.
Frankly, which would provide the world with all to get the project started.
It's project specific, the restaurants, hotel, motels, etc.
Will benefit substantially along with other segments of community if we do this.
And I think that's the way to finance it.
Unfortunately, our legislative delegation does not quite agree at this point.
The area south of the central district of Chattanooga today looks a bit like a bombed
city.
The tall brick buildings, once thundering with the machinery of industry, today are skeletons.
Their windows staring like ice sockets out over a torn landscape full of weeds, rusting
steel and broken glass.
Block after block of city lies and ruins.
Rob Taylor is one of the River Valley partners, a nonprofit organization responsible for urban
development in the city.
Taylor says the south side today is indeed a shell of its former design.
It is Taylor's charge to restore that shell.
It was probably the second wave of industrial development in the community.
Chattanooga was founded at the riverfront.
Its first businesses and industries were started there.
And as the city grew away from the river in England, so to speak, into downtown, this area
was probably the second major growth area for the smoke stack industries.
And many of the pieces that we're dealing with are some of the foundry sites, in one case
in abandoned one, and one case a very active one that's an important job.
What kind of smoke stack industries?
Foundry.
Foundry.
And it's also an area that probably a little bit later in its growth phasing became more
distribution warehouse oriented, but it had had heavy industry in it.
So then what happened to it?
The typical of any manufacturing-based community as technologies and the housing for the manufacturing
facilities sought new locations, larger parcels, and easier access to what would have become
interstate systems and the like.
They moved out of the downtown and then in the 70s and early 80s, a lot of those jobs
went overseas and or were eliminated by advancements in technology.
Not an uncommon story in any manufacturing community.
So I would dare say the initial departure was part of a local migration to outlying areas,
but community-wide the loss of the manufacturing base was certainly part of the national trend
of losing it to technology and overseas.
What's this site going to, these acres going to look like?
If I were to walk down the street there in 10 years or so from now.
I think the most compelling and challenging part of the vision and the plan for this area
is to take one of those abandoned foundry sites that is exactly what you described.
Broken windows, structurally decaying probably, and to try to turn that into what has been described
as an ecology center, a crystal palace.
And the vision would be that that whole structure is re-glazed.
We come back in and rework all of the window systems and put glass in and open up what is really a cavernous space
within which most anything could be done.
And of the things mentioned as possibilities would be interior plannings and arborateum, for instance.
Research and development opportunities for testing and demonstration of some of the biotechnology treatments
that have already been tested here in South Chattanooga Creek, Dr. John Tajwork,
has already gotten a lot of attention here.
There's ample opportunity for continuing experimentation with that and more importantly, education surrounding that.
So a site like this particular abandoned foundry, Ross Mehan, provides a wonderful space,
both enclosed as well as available property on the exterior to work in, again, wastewater treatment,
sorts of things using natural systems, inside an opportunity for incubator, R&D, and office-related functions.
So that, as I mentioned earlier, is the most challenging and yet compelling vision out of this plan to take the fabric that's there,
not raise it, not abandon it because it is part of a legacy that this community is proud of, its manufacturing history,
but put the twist on it that it becomes a harbinger of the new technologies and the new industrial opportunities for the community.
And the country for that matter.
Again and again, the environmental theme is sounded.
Mayor Roberts is squarely behind it.
Councilman Crockett gets nearly evangelical when he describes his vision of the eco-industrial park.
Why choose this route when it's not a proven redevelopment strategy when other cities are competing in different ways?
Jim Vaughn, president of the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce, says the reasoning is simple.
He likes to draw the analogy of standing in a ticket line.
You are one hundred in line and they are only letting in ten people in the gate.
If you scramble, kick, and bribe your way up to eightieth in line, you are still not at the gate.
Basically what we are trying to do is to try to compete for jobs in the old way that we won't be successful in doing that.
In the old way of making little incremental steps of improvement in terms of education,
I mean to make significant improvement in education could take a generation before we would be known for that kind of improvement.
The gradual steps to move from 100 to 99 or 98 or 97, if they are only going to let five or six people be on the short list,
that improvement from number 100 to number 90 might make you feel like you are accomplishing something but you will not make the short list.
You will not be at the negotiating table.
What we are trying to do is make a quantum leap forward by striking out in a new direction.
It creates jobs, it creates opportunity for the people who are here, and it makes us attractive for the jobs of the future and for new development.
This is an environmental strategy, but as President of the Chamber would tell you it is a business strategy.
It is an economic development strategy to improve our economy, to strengthen this market for the businesses who are here,
and those who will come here because this is the kind of place that they want to make an investment with their lives as well as their financial resources.
While Huntsville, Alabama and Atlanta, Georgia to the south and Knoxville and Oak Ridge to the north start to reconfigure their business policies in hopes of attracting new money,
Chattanooga plans to stand alone as the environmental city, certainly in the southeast.
Speaking to the Chamber lunch crowd, Councilman Crockett says if they do it right, Chattanooga will also be a global force.
Across the world right now, people are trying to define how we do things differently.
It's a universal opinion in business.
It's a universal opinion in cities that the way we've designed products and manufactured products in the past will not work in the future.
Just by simple mathematics, the amount of raw materials, the amount of energy, and then the downsides of waste and pollution that come from those processes just won't work on a global scale that will be consuming more by more people.
The way we've designed cities just won't work.
The Bank of America report delays two months ago, between Bank of America and the state of California says that the way that they have designed cities which have grown like a pebble and a pond like this have sprawled out are unrecoverable in two decades.
We've got a design cities differently.
Well, and we're going to have to design products like that are not one time use products.
Now, give one quick example.
Every year, five million personal computers come to the end of their life and go in a hole.
They were designed by IBM and whoever else to be used one time.
And all the raw materials and all the energy taken to make them go in a hole.
Most everything we make, whether it's carpet or televisions or personal computers or something else, are made with the design point of a styrofoam cup.
Use it one time, throw it away.
Where we're running out of places, throw it away, we're running out of materials to do it.
And we can't cause the pollution and the waste and national corporations realize that.
And that is our strategy to be the regional hub for training, for conferencing, to be that living laboratory.
With our businesses, with our city design, it takes technologies and puts them into solutions that can be replicated around the world.
And in that context, Chattanooga is becoming, can become one of the most important cities in the world.
While this is Crockett's campaign and one supported by many in the community, not everyone can or should go to Chattanooga.
The real challenge is to replicate this vision and the visioning process in cities and communities not only nationwide but worldwide.
And this is the real question, how did Chattanooga rally?
Chamber President Jim Vaughn says it worked because it was not just an environmental plan, it was more encompassing.
When we first started talking about this, people would say, we're not talking about tree huggers here.
And I remember jumping at somebody verbally one day.
When I said, what's wrong with hugging a few trees once in a while?
Our chamber has made a party of improving the visual appearance of the community as well.
And with the city of Chattanooga as our partner and with some outstanding volunteers, planted trees and beautified their appearance of the community.
So I think that's important too.
But having said that, having said, I will hug a tree if I have to.
And I believe in that, but this is really a development strategy in my view that drives this economy into the 21st century.
That makes us competitive with communities that we would otherwise not be competitive with.
That breaks us out of that long line where we never make the short list and puts us in a much shorter line where people are coming to us and asking us to partner with them.
These things I believe, this is what this strategy is about.
And this is the legacy that we will leave.
In order to lay the cornerstone, Councilman Crockett is stumping for some type of tax.
Before the chamber lunch guests, Crockett laid it on the line.
Without a tax to make it happen, he says the whole plan moves to another city.
This is a big one for us. And one more time, Mr. Walker, we're calling on the chamber. Thank you.
This is Bruce Robertson.
And that's our report on the Environment Show. For this week, we're glad you joined us.
Make a note tuning again next week for more news on the environment.
The Environment Show is a program about the environment, the air, water, soil, wildlife, and people of our common habitat.
The Environment Show is a presentation of national productions solely responsible for its content. Dr. Ellen Shartock, executive producer.
This is Bruce Robertson. The Environment Show.
