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 Motornews, the
monthly Bible of the Old Car Hobby from Bennington, Vermont, 1-800-C-A-R-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, we'll get an update on the oil spill off the
coast of Rhode Island, and then examine ways to clean up such disasters.
Scientists are now studying microorganisms which help to clean up spills and other contaminated
sites.
And then we'll look at so-called green investing.
Nowadays there are host of funds which promise to invest your money in environmentally friendly
companies.
But how risky are they?
Will they make you any money?
Curly Bear Wagner, a Native American environmentalist from Montana, delivers a portrait of a sweet
gas peri.
And if you've ever slept through your alarm, try sleeping through a whole season.
Our Earth calendar will look at grizzly bears now in the middle of their sleep marathon.
These stories and more coming up this week on the Environment Show.
Such of the world depends on oil.
So it's not surprising when some of its spills.
Unfortunately, spills create an environmental nightmare, killing wildlife and poisoning
water.
Earlier this month, the barge carrying heating oil ran aground off the coast of Rhode
Island, and over 800,000 gallons spilled into the ocean.
Although it's impossible to retrieve all of the spill, there are new ways to help ecosystems
recover.
Thomas Lally reports on one method used to clean up oil and other harmful substances.
The Trustum Pond National Wildlife Refuge sits on the southern shore of Rhode Island.
It's a rare area of wilderness along the crowded northeast coast.
Today the refuge is in peril, suffering from the effects of hundreds of thousands of gallons
of spilled heating oil.
Nearly 100 birds have died along with 43,000 pounds of lobsters and countless other creatures.
Donald Bryant is a spokesman for the Coast Guard, which is overseeing the recovery efforts.
We reached him four days after the spill when clean up efforts were well underway.
He says they're lucky that the oil is light.
The biggest thing we've concentrated on has been the barge.
Most of the oil that's went into the water has really dissipated.
We had like 828,000 gallons, and I would say more than 80 percent of it has either dissipated
or evaporated.
So what we're looking at now is very small machines, which is almost impossible to actually
pick up with any type of mechanical means.
When it gets into the marsh areas, we'll put down a pump to try to pump out the areas.
We'll put down an absorbent cloth to try to absorb up as much as possible.
That's pretty much what we're limited to.
What you see is as it comes on shore, it's evaporating very, very quickly.
We don't want to bring tractors in there to dig it up.
Right now it's not necessary to do that.
Experience with other spills has taught us that working with nature will speed recovery.
There are organisms which to put it crudely, eat oil and other toxins.
These creatures occur naturally in the environment and have been used recently after such calamities
as the Valdez oil spill.
Professors Robin Aughtneryth and Jim Bonner are a husband and wife team at Texas A&M University
studying bioremediation, the process that uses nature to clean the environment after spills.
Professor Aughtneryth says nature has a way of cleaning itself, even when humans aren't
involved.
Whether or not we do anything, it's going on.
When I need a population of microorganisms to degrade a certain compound, I go to a site
that's been exposed because the organisms are there.
But it's not that easy to just let nature take its course.
Oil and other spills require intense cleanup efforts.
Bioremediation is one tool, but it's a complicated process and often takes time to work.
Efforts are underway to extend the reach of bioremediation.
While Professor Bonner concentrates his research on bioremediation of oil spills, Aughtneryth
is working on ways to biodegrade substances for the U.S. Army, like explosives and nerve
gas.
For hundreds of thousands of years, organisms have acclimated to the presence of oil.
And so yes, they do degrade it as indigenous species, as you mentioned before.
But there are ways we hold to enhance this and increase the efficiency.
And maybe Robin could address the issues of diminishing.
That's a little bit more of a special case.
And munitions compounds are often called anthropogenic pollutants or zinobiotic compounds.
Those are two catch words frequently used.
And what that indicates is that they are non-natural, that they are produced by human activities.
So in the case of the nitro-eromatic compounds, what we do is acclimate organisms, but they
become naturally acclimated in the environment when exposed at levels that are not too toxic
for them.
So as Jim was saying, what we are attempting to do is determine what makes their life easier
so that they are more effective in degrading the target compounds.
Bioremediation works by figuring out what organisms degrade what substances.
Even poisons like PCBs are degraded by something.
So once you have an organism, the job becomes how to encourage them to do their job.
For Professor Bonner, this means releasing fertilizer into the San Jacinto River in Texas,
where spilled oil is a constant problem from the refineries along the Houston shipping
channel.
Some have voiced concerns that encouraging the growth of these organisms may harm the
environment if they begin to attack beneficial plants and animals.
But Professor Bonner and Aughton Reath say the chances of that happening are slim.
These organisms, what we want them to do is be very efficient in degrading these target
compounds.
Once a target compound is gone, their source of food is gone.
So unless they can very quickly adapt to something else, they are also going to be their populations
will decrease.
So you would also stop your environmental manipulation at that point.
Once the job is done, it is no longer economically viable to continue putting chemical additions
to the environment so you would stop.
And second, just like Robin said, after you remove the manipulation that allowed it to
go to a greater extent, i.e. a non-limited condition, when you stop providing that for
the organism, it will disappear.
It is going to be consumed by zooplankton or just dive starvation and then become part
of the carbon cycle.
We are just trying to make it a little bit easier for nature to take care of what has been
dumped on it.
Bonner and Aughton Reath's work centers around making the environment better for organisms
that are already there.
Other researchers are working on creating organisms in the laboratory, targeted for specific
jobs, though most of these creatures cannot withstand conditions in the field.
But that may change.
Bio-remediation is getting more attention these days, partially because in some cases is
cheaper than other cleanup methods.
For example, it is about a third less expensive than incineration for some compounds.
One advantage is that you don't have to disturb the site very much to get the job done.
You can't burn material in an incinerator in place.
You must first dig it up if it is in the ground or pump it, whatever, but put it into the
incinerator.
And oftentimes there is a tremendous amount of environmental exposure by actually picking
the material up and putting it in a incinerator.
For example, with New Bedford Harbor or Hudson River, there is contaminated sediment.
If you could work a method where you could bio-remediate that material in situ, you wouldn't
necessarily have the same exposure as coming along with a huge 500 horsepower hydraulic
dredge which would dig this material up and potentially stir it up.
Therefore exposing the environment to get it in a hopper which would then be pumped to
the incinerator.
Bio-remediation still has a long way to go before it can be relied upon as the primary
means of cleanup of toxic substances.
But it's hope that it can be used to get to places humans cannot and to restore places
like the Trust and Pond National Wildlife Refuge which will likely feel the effects of
the oil spill for many years to come.
For the Environment Show, I'm Thomas Lalley.
One of the ways some people have chosen to favorably impact the environment is through
so-called green investing.
This is where people invest in environmentally friendly companies or mutual funds.
But do these green investments work?
Mark Cohen, professor at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University,
says that a green investment means different things to different people.
Well, green investing, I think, is in the eyes of the beholder quite frankly.
To some people it means screening firms that follow certain environmental practices that
don't have certain environmental violations.
Screening firms out on the basis of their environmental performance.
To others it seems to mean taking on some sort of proactive, I guess, attempt to profit
from trends in the environment such that you invest in, let's say, environmental services
industry, clean up companies.
Whether they necessarily have a great environmental record themselves.
And I think the third approach is to green investing to some is to use environmental performance
in general as a tool to get better market performance.
There are a host of mutual funds which bill themselves as green.
What there is sharp disagreement is to whether these are sound investments.
Mark White is an assistant professor of commerce at the Macintyre School of Commerce at the
University of Virginia.
He concluded,
I conducted a study on green mutual funds available in the United States and also a set of
funds that were available in Germany.
And I found it over the period from December 1990 to 1993, a three-year period, that the
green funds in both countries performed or significantly underperformed the overall
market on a risk-adjusted basis.
However, there are managers of socially responsible funds who are achieving impressive results.
Sophia Kohler is the president of Citizens Trust.
I asked her whether an investment in an environmentally sound mutual fund could match that of an ordinary
mutual fund.
My answer would be an unqualified yes.
Obviously our Citizens Emerging Growth Fund is an aggressive growth fund.
That's how we're achieving the kind of hot results that we have by being invested in smaller,
more aggressive companies.
That's a type of fund for a long-term investor wants to invest in, say someone who's starting
an IRA or who is contributing to it, should look at a fund like Citizens Emerging Growth
Fund.
And where it had a return of almost 41 percent last year and an average an hour return of
about 24 percent.
Citizens Emerging Growth Fund was rated the top performing socially responsible fund of
1995 by Business Ethics Magazine.
The fact is, there are a lot of mutual funds of various shades of green whose performance
varies greatly.
Alicia Gravitz is Executive Director of Co-op America, a non-profit organization whose
mission is to use marketplace strategies to bring a social and environmental value
into the economy.
Co-op America publishes a list of 35 green mutual funds and rates their performance.
What you'll find when you look at that is that like any other group of 35 mutual funds,
sometimes they did better than the market, sometimes they did worse than the market.
In any given market there were some that were in the top 10 percent and some that were
in the bottom 10 percent.
But conclusions about green mutual funds are mixed, there seems to be general agreement
that companies as opposed to mutual funds that have good environmental records have significant
positive performance.
Having heard all of this, you're probably asking yourself how can I make decisions about
my own finances.
Alicia Gravitz provides a guide.
The basic general strategies of social investors is to screen out companies who are disregarding
social and environmental concerns and to look for companies that have exemplary social
and environmental records.
There's basically three strategies that you can use to do that.
The first is to consider your bank.
Banks obviously represent a lot of capital in this country and unfortunately there are
a lot of banks who are not taking care of their communities and who may, for example,
be investing in luxury condominiums in Florida that are displaced in the Everglades instead
of the inner cities in their own communities.
We particularly encourage people to look at something called community banking or socially
responsible banking.
There are about 5 or 10 of these banks around the company who are doing extraordinary things.
No matter where you are, you can put your money in these banks and through the ATM system.
You can use them for your regular checking and saving.
The next strategy you can take is to invest in mutual funds.
There are about 35 or 40 mutual funds who specialize in socially responsible investing.
This group of mutual funds is getting to the size where you can have a really good mutual
fund strategy and you can do as well as someone who does not take social concerns into
account.
My recommendation is that people who want to do a mutual fund strategy is to get one of
the resources that lists all the social responsible investing funds, look at their performance,
look at their social and environmental screens and match the ones that you're most interested
in.
We have a free guide to socially responsible investing and we list the socially responsible
banks.
We list the socially responsible mutual funds.
We provide worksheets so that you can plan your own goals, both your financial goals
and your environmental and social goals.
It's all for free and it puts it all together for you and you can make the decision about
what works best for you.
And so how do we reach you?
You can get this for free by calling 800-713-8086 after the handbook for responsible investors
and we'll get that to you right away.
The number again is 800-713-8086.
Lisa Gravitz is Executive Director of the Nonprofit Organization, Co-op America.
She represents a growing number of activists who are developing ways to improve the environment
through the marketplace.
I'm Peter Burley.
We're always interested in what you have to say.
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Still ahead.
Curly Bear Wagner, environmentalist and native American, gives us a portrait of the
sweet grass prairie in Montana.
And our earth calendar sleeps through the winter with the grizzly bears.
These stories still ahead on the environment show.
We all have places which are special to us.
There's some at the city street.
For others it's a place deep in the wilderness.
Curly Bear Wagner is a blackfoot Indian from Browning, Montana.
He lives in the sweet grass prairie, an area of wide open beauty now sought after for
gold lining.
Wagner has been involved in the fight against development in this area for 15 years.
Our portrait of place is the sweet grass prairie, as seen by Curly Bear Wagner.
I was about a, the name of the story is who are you?
We were out on Lower St. Mary's Lake.
A fishing with a net, a white fish on St. Mary's Lake.
He asked me, who are you, son?
I looked at him and I said, well, he said, I know you're Curly Bear, I know you're
not my nephew, but who are you?
I felt very silly because I really didn't know who I was.
He said, we all know that you who you are, but we, but do you know who you are?
And I said, no, I really don't.
I was embarrassed.
And so he said, I'm going to tell you who you are.
And he said, you look up and you see the sun.
You said, you see the sky, the mountains.
He said, you see those hills, those trees.
He said, you see the ground, the dirt, the rocks, and the water, and the four-legged,
and the ones that fly up above.
And he said, that's who you are.
He said, you're all those things.
He said, you come from the earth and you'll go back.
He said, always respect those things and those things will respect you.
They'll be good to you.
And so always remember that and the things that I work with today and my fight and efforts
for the street grass hills with Havien.
Because like they say, the earth is the temple of God and the tabernacle of the people.
And so we've got to respect the earth and all the things within the earth because everything
out there, the trees, the four-legged, the ones that fly up above the fish, all those
things, that's kind of our library.
And this is what we learned.
This is what we learned how to survive from the animals because they were here first.
And so our ancestors learned from them to survive on this planet.
And so it all comes back.
And so we've got to keep, always keep that in mind how important those things are.
And we must always respect and honor those things as we travel in our everyday life, always
give thanks to the sun.
And it's like all Indians do.
We always, the sun is very important to our people, not many people understand that, but
we always give thanks to the sun.
Stop and think to what the sun gives to us.
It gives us light.
It makes things grow.
It makes things fresh.
And all the time, the sun is very important.
So we're always giving thanks to the sun that way.
And so all these things on this earth and the things around us with the cold, the sacred
hoop are all important everyday lifestyle.
So we're always going to remember to say a little prayer or give a little thanks to what
God has given to our people.
Thank you.
Charlie Bear Wagner is a blackfoot Indian from Browning, Montana.
And now it's time for the earth calendar.
If you've ever wished on a cold winter evening that you'd crawl up in a ball and sleep till
springtime, you're not alone.
Many animals like grizzly bears take the winter off, not by going to Florida or Arizona,
but by hibernating.
This ravine is the grizzly bear recovery coordinator for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service
in Missoula, Montana.
Well, as we speak, most of bears in the Rocky Mountains are sound asleep in the middle of
the thening season.
Bears have been asleep, most of them for one to two months.
And they won't be up again for probably another one to two months.
Their physiology changes to the point that they don't need to eat or drink.
They don't need to get rid of any waste products either, so they don't urinate or defecate.
And during that time period, they're using stored fat reserves and they're surviving on
that.
And they've changed their physiology to the point that they're recycling water internally
so that they don't need to drink.
And it's quite remarkable when you think about that that you can get a six or 700 pound
animal that can go four to five months without eating, drinking, urinating or defecating.
Around autumn, grizzly bears begin to gorge themselves with food to build up their fat supplies.
Surveys says that when they've had their fill, they stop eating and build a den, which can
be a hole in the ground or cave or even a hollowed out tree.
Grizzlies then get a lothargic and will wait in front of their den in preparation for
winter.
Usually all the dens are above 6,000 feet.
Scientists suspect this is to ensure the den will be covered in a deep layer of snow to
keep them warm.
But exactly how the grizzlies know where and when to den is still a mystery.
I suspect that there are some cues, probably just an internal timing cue.
Interestingly enough, in good weather, in January or February, in the middle of winter, on sunny
days, bears will sometimes dig out of the den and sit out in the sunlight.
We call that area in front of the den the porch.
Sometimes you can see these bears sitting out on their porch on these warm, clear days
may sometimes get in mid-winter and probably sitting out there observing the sun.
And as soon as the weather turns bad again, they go back inside and the snow once again
seals off their den.
And as with humans, the males sleep while females get up to do a little work.
I would expect that the females right about now are giving birth throughout the rank.
And so the cups are actually born in mid-January when the mother is in the den.
And of course the cups are in need of food and they start feeding on their mother's
milk.
So the mother is lactating and producing cups and yet she still doesn't need any water
or food during that time period.
And she can feed three and sometimes exceptionally four cups for two to three months, strictly
from her fat reserves without ever drinking anything or eating anything until she leaves
the den.
And that's pretty remarkable.
So maybe next autumn you should follow the lead of the grizzly.
As Gord yourself, build a den, wait for the first snow on hybronate.
And who knows, perhaps a baby will arrive at the process.
Thanks for being with us on this week's Environment Show.
I'm Peter Burley.
For a cassette copy of the program, call 1-800-747-7444 and ask for program number 317.
The Environment Show is a presentation of national productions which is solely responsible
for its content.
Thomas Lally is the producer, Dr. Ellen Shartug is the executive producer.
The Environment Show is made possible by Heming's Motor News, the monthly Bible of the Old
Car Habit, 1-800-C-A-R-H-E-R-E.
So long and join us next week for the Environment Show.
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