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, a 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.
9% of the nation's children have unhealthy levels of lead in their blood, and the source
of the problem is the environment in our own homes.
We'll tell you what to do about it.
Then a portrait of a backyard in Ohio from author Brian Alexander.
We'll look at ways of making paper and clothing from plants other than trees and cotton.
In ear to the ground, we'll hear about an organization that is keeping our communities
healthy for wildlife, and our Earth calendar answers with a grouse in Montana.
These stories and more coming up this week on the Environment Show.
We all want our children to be strong and healthy, but sometimes we don't realize that
the biggest source of toxic spoising our kids is in our homes.
The toxic chemical is lead, and it's contained in paint that was sold before 1978.
Recently, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Urban Development
issued regulations scheduled to take effect in the fall of 1996.
These were require home sellers and landlords to give information to buyers and tenants
about lead contamination.
Dr. Janet Phoenix is the manager of public health programs for the National Safety Council's
Lead Information Center.
If you know that there's lead in the property, you need to let the tenant or the purchaser
know that at the time of the sale or the lease.
It does not require testing, but it does give home purchasers the option of doing their
own testing, and the contract with the subject determination, you know, if they found something
that they worked, they were not happy with.
In addition to notification and the 10-day opportunity for the buyer or renter to cancel
the contract, the regulation also requires the seller to furnish a pamphlet about how
to protect your family from the dangers of lead.
EPA estimates that more than 1.7 million children in the United States have unsafe blood-led
levels, making lead poisoning their number one environmental health hazard.
The lead comes from deteriorated paint and the contaminated soil and dust degenerates.
Lead poisoning can lead to behavioral problems, learning disabilities, permanent brain, nervous
system, and kidney damage.
Dr. Phoenix talks about what lead levels in the blood mean.
And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have set 10 micrograms per death a leader
as a threshold.
Anything above that is a matter of some concern, and you would want to follow up with your
health care provider, and potentially if the level rises significantly above 10, the
child may need medical treatment.
But most often, what you want to do is the child has a level above 10 is find out where
the lead is, and that means testing the home, maybe testing daycare, maybe testing grandma's
house.
Unfortunately, lead poisoning has been with us for a long time.
Peter Matigew, director of the Environmental Research Foundation in Annapolis, Maryland,
floors the slow response to the lead paint threat.
He says Australia banned lead paint in 1920, and the US EPA doesn't have much to show for
over 25 years of effort.
In preparation for talking to you, I read the EPA's Federal Register Notice.
It reads just like the Federal Register notices in 1971, 25 years ago.
The language is identical, the concern is identical, and unfortunately the problem is nearly
identical.
After 25 years of aggressive or supposedly aggressive government action on this problem,
the problem is still with us.
It's just shocking.
It's almost unbelievable that our society could do this to its children.
Don Ryan from the Alliance to In Childhood Lead Poising says we're making some progress.
The real key is that attention is now focused on making houses lead safe.
There's some lead paint in two thirds of the US housing stock.
So lead free housing is not a reasonable near-term goal.
Lead safe housing is.
Ryan says dust is the biggest problem, and home renovation which produces dust is the
biggest culprit.
Removing old paint, whether you do it yourself or have a contractor do it, requires special
attention.
Pro-paint torching off old paint is the worst thing that you can do.
The next worst is power sanding, taking a belt sander to old paint.
It just creates a storm of dust, and the lead dust is then left behind and can present
a hazard for months or years.
Many states now require contractors who remove lead paint to be trained and licensed.
The Illinois Department of Public Health says the training and dustless cleaning is a key
element of their program for workers in the field.
If you need help or have questions, Dr. Phoenix advises calling one of two hotlines set
up by the Federal National Lead Information Center.
There is a hotline, a toll free hotline, 1-800-led FYI, which people can call for information.
There is also a clearing house number, which is a live line that operates during the week
from 830 to 5, and that is 1-800-424-5323.
The hotline will give general information about testing, about sources of lead, and about
the health effects that result from lead exposure.
The clearing house number will give you a person you can talk to who can answer questions,
specific questions that you may have about doing something about the problem, and there
are more specific materials available through that second number.
Again, those numbers are 1-800-led FYI and 1-800-424-5323.
Also your state health department or Department of Environmental Protection should be able to
help as well.
I'm Peter Burley.
You're listening to the Environment Show.
Be seated.
We all have places which are special to us.
It could be places in the middle of a city or somewhere deep in the wilderness.
Brian Alexander, author of Green Cathedral's A Wayward Traveler in the Rainforest, presents
a portrait of a very special place deep in the wilds behind his house in Ohio.
I am thinking of my backyard.
Not the backyard I see now, the pebble topped patio of a condominium in the downtown section
of San Diego, California.
At the backyard of my kidhood, the backyard on the outskirts of a small central Ohio town.
Not that there was anything special about my backyard mind you.
It was rather prosaic for Ohio, no lawn ornaments, no manicured grass, just a yard half filled
with dandelions and bordered by dogwood, maple, and chestnut trees.
After the side of our house, our yard extended into what my father called his conservation
district, a moniker worthy of a professional spin doctor, seeing as how it amounted to
a quarter acre of unkempt jungle stuffed with scrawny trees, boggy, weedy earth, and lots
of rabbits, all bordered by a tiny creek supplied with septic tank runoff.
This on a street where everyone else's yard was fertilized, trimmed, and massaged into
bourgeois perfection.
But where our neighbors no doubt since disorder, my friends and I saw the world.
From our base in my backyard we could see countless battlefields where we ruthlessly
mowed down thousands of Nazis.
The creek was once the Panama Canal, a place where we spent an entire weekend diverting
the flow through an array of engineering works, and then tramped most of the resulting mud
through my mother's spotless house.
The backyard was the tundra, a barometer of Ohio's climate.
Somehow daffodils had wound up on the floor of the conservation district, and every year,
as February dragged on, I watched for the new green shafts of the flowers to emerge from
the soil, my signal for the spring thaw.
But mostly my backyard in the conservation district was what I knew of nature.
I learned the rabbits fed in the early morning.
Tadpoles became frogs.
Scunks smelled.
Crawdads turned the same shade of red as male cardinals when you held them over a pile
of burning leaves.
No pair of keds could survive more than one spring and summer cycle of mud.
Snakes made lousy pets, which was why all the ones I captured wound up in jars of alcohol.
I still have one all these years later.
That small place I played in so long ago was the Amazon, the Rainforest of Asia, the
Great North Woods.
In my adult life I have seen the Amazon, the Rainforest of Asia, and the Great North Woods.
I have even seen the real Panama Canal.
And every time I have seen one of these places, I find myself standing in their midst, listening
to exotic animals, seeing exotic plants, smelling exotic smells, all the sights and smells
I imagined as a kid in Ohio standing in the conservation district.
Those places throw knock out punches, not only because they are spectacular and dramatic,
but also for the amazing way they have of allowing me, if I squint just a little, to see my
backyard from there.
Brian Alexander is author of Green Cathedral's A Wayward Traveler in the Rainforest.
You're listening to the Environment Show.
I'm Peter Burley.
Still ahead.
It takes a lot of trees to make paper, but more environmentally friendly alternatives to
tree fiber are available.
We'll tell you what they are and how to get them.
Then our ear to the ground tells us about keeping tracks, an organization that monitors wildlife
habitat and tries to save it.
And we'll look at the dance of the wild grouse in our red calendar.
These stories still ahead on the Environment Show.
Paper products and textiles are one of the fundamental elements of our economy.
Today nearly all natural fibers are made from trees and cotton, but collecting and processing
these fibers takes a heavy toll on the environment.
Environment Show producer Thomas Lalley takes a look at alternatives to traditional fibers.
From the shirt on your back to your Sunday newspaper, fibers are everywhere in your life.
They're the reason we cut down whole forests, and the reason we use millions of gallons
of pesticides to grow cotton.
Brian West is with an effort at Earth Island Institute called Raising Paper.
He says there are many good reasons to look elsewhere for our fibers.
We have come to rely on very few fibers.
The negative ramifications are fairly clear.
In this country, 95% of our old growth forests are now gone.
They've been used and consumed by the timber products industry and the paper industry.
And this basically has led to serious decline in biodiversity and just overall forest ecological
health.
There are a broad range of materials that have historically been used for fibers other
than trees and cotton.
Straw, flaks and sugar stocks or begas are still used to make fibers for paper and textiles.
Some environmentalists believe the use of these materials and others should be expanded.
To some, the most promising fiber is hemp.
Its supporters say it can be used for over 50,000 different products, including paper, clothing,
food, building products, plastic and a range of medicinal uses.
Chris Conrad is author of hemp, Lifeline to the Future.
He says widespread cultivation of hemp could displace a good deal of our need for trees.
You're capable of getting about five tons or more of stock per acre by growing hemp.
And so that means it's plenty of raw materials and the federal government did a study in
2016 in which they stated that on a sustainable basis, the hemp produces about four times as
much pulp per acre as does forest land.
Well, our forestry practices have changed.
We've eliminated a lot of our forest and we're now using tree farming.
And so nowadays that ratio has probably changed to maybe twice as much or three times as much
per acre.
But it still outproduces trees in terms of the sustainable yield, not an annual yield,
but a sustainable yield.
Of course, hemp is marijuana and many people cringe at the prospects of seeing acres and
acres of it planted.
But Conrad says that industrial hemp bears little resemblance to the kind some people
smoke socially.
He says you'd literally have to smoke a whole field of it to get high.
The Colorado Senate recently approved a measure that would make Colorado the first state
to legalize the growing of industrial hemp, a similar bill, is pending in the Vermont
legislature.
Another plant making its way into the fiber scene is Knaf.
Like hemp, it's a slender plant growing up to 10 feet high.
Tom Rimshaw is president of Vision Paper in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
He explains that growing fiber for paper might seem like a new idea, but it's not.
It's about a hundred years ago our society as a whole took a turn away from carbohydrate
based economy where most of the raw materials were coming from the farm.
And we got into things like petrochemicals and mining and extractive processes like
cutting down our national forest systems for the sake of fiber.
Rimshaw says Knaf requires much less input from farmers than virtually any other crop
grown for paper.
He says there are 240 varieties available and it has been grown all over the world.
As a row crop, it requires less chemical and energy and inputs than almost anything
else a farmer might grow.
That's because we're growing the plant for the fiber, not for the fruit, but for the flower,
like most conventional agricultural crops.
The greatest impediment to widespread use of Knaf is money.
Investors, paper mills and consumers have been unwilling to spend the money needed to
bring Knaf into the mainstream.
Similar problems face other alternative fibers.
Meanwhile, hemp is outlawed and laws against it are aggressively enforced.
Although you're not likely to be reading your Sunday newspaper on Knaf anytime soon,
products made with alternative fibers are available.
Hemp products are found in some of the most fashionable boutiques and Knaf can be purchased
from several distributors.
If you'd like more information about alternative fibers, call the Earth Island Institute in
San Francisco at area code 415-788-3666.
You can get Knaf paper from real goods at 1-800-762-732-5.
For the Environment Show, I'm Thomas Lalley.
I'm Linda Anderson and this is Ear to the Ground with stories about people affecting
change in the environment.
This week, keeping track of wildlife.
100 years ago in New England, you would have been unlikely to see many wild creatures.
We tend to think that's because they had all been eliminated by greedy hunters.
But actually, it's because their habitat had been abolished.
80% of the region's forest cover had been destroyed, and creatures like the Cougar and
Bear simply could not make a living.
So says Susan Morse, Executive Director and Founder of Keeping Track.
We are a conservation organization with an emphasis on habitat protection through field research,
which we encourage citizens to do in their own communities.
Conservation and education, we have an educational component working with school children,
as well as adults, and planning, and we like to emphasize planning.
And so for that reason, we work closely with town conservation commissions in Vermont
and like-minded conservation groups all over New England and parts of the West.
Morse says the Harden Center of Keeping Track, based out of Jericho, Vermont,
are the volunteers who become involved.
The citizens, your neighbors, you.
She takes an inclusive approach that rallies diverse groups of individuals together
around a common concern, the love for wildlife.
Morse trains these interested groups, which may include hunters, foresters, hikers, and teachers,
how to observe, interpret, and record the evidence of wildlife in their region
by taking them out, tracking.
We get out and we just point out different things that you expect to see if you're in
a rare country, or Bobcat country, or Moose country, and you're not just looking at the ground,
you're looking at above you, at trees, you're looking for evidence of claw marks on trees,
you're looking for hair, snagged in bushes, you're looking for the contents of certain scat
that can be diagnostic for what it is that you might be looking at, that sort of thing.
And you just take a walk and see what you find.
And in New England, that may be evidence of Black Bear, Bobcat, Fisher, River Otter, Mink.
The information gathered is then collected and placed in a keeping track database.
The purpose of which Morse says is to be used with local and regional land use conservation initiatives.
If we are going to protect our wildlife, she says, we are going to have to plan where wildlife habitat is going to be.
That is, we have to think about whole regions of resources, how they are interconnected,
biologically, ecologically, and so on.
Today in her native Vermont, Morse says the wildlife picture has never looked better.
The landscape is a reverse of what it was 100 years ago, with 80 to 85% forest cover.
But drive four hours in any direction in New England, she says, and you will draw a line that includes 70 million people.
Without planning from us, she fears the creatures who share our home will cease to exist.
That's entirely within our capabilities to ruin it.
We've done it once here in New England. We could do it again in a heartbeat.
Join us again next week when ear to the ground goes tracking with Susan Morse.
This is Linda Anderson.
You're listening to the Environment Show. You can write us at 318 Central Avenue, Albany, New York, 12206.
That's 318 Central Avenue, Albany, New York, 12206.
And now it's time for the Earth calendar.
Being spring, it's time to go courting.
But if you go courting with Colombian sharp-tailed grouse in the grasslands of Western Montana, you better be prepared to dance.
Beginning each April, the male birds gather on what's known as a dancing ground or a lake.
They're the size of a small chicken with brownish buff colored feathers and a quite tail that fans out when they're doing their display.
Marilyn Wood, a fuel representative for the Montana Nature Conservancy, says the duration of their dance can last up to two hours at a time.
And sometimes you can hear them for almost a mile away.
The most of the females kind of stay outside of the dancing ground.
And when they're receptive, then they enter the dancing ground from the side and they'll come strutting in just quietly walking in.
The hens come on and they're like so nonchalant.
And they're kind of like looking over their shoulder like, okay, big boy, let's see what you can do.
And the males on the dancing ground go absolutely berserk.
All the calling, the hoot and the hoarring and the stomping defeat just go nuts.
And one of the ways to tell that a male is in the area or a female is in the areas when the male birds start to get super active.
And that's kind of what's happening right now out on the dancing ground.
According to Wood, the males return to the same site every year, resembling wind up toys as they beat their feet 18 times per second.
The object is to obtain the dominant center ring position, ideal for mating.
Typically, the grouse look for dancing grounds that are a little bit higher as well as free of vegetation so they have an open area to display in.
Consequently, this can make them an easy target for prey and that's an important reason to have good habitats as wood.
Tall bunch grass nearby makes it easier for them to hide at the first sign of danger.
But much of the habitat has been destroyed causing a major decline in their population. Wood offers some insight.
The Columbia in Sharpdale since it's only native to the Pacific Northwest.
And they used to be found all over Washington, Idaho, California, Utah, Colorado, up through Idaho and Montana.
And currently, we've estimated the populations occupy less than 10% of the range.
They've really gone down in numbers. And in fact, during Montana, we only have for quite a while there, we believe we only have one dancing ground here in western Montana.
And that's been the preserve that the Nature Conservancy bought back in 1987.
In an effort to keep the males and females active on this traditional dancing ground, the Nature Conservancy of Montana organized a rescue program.
Working in conjunction with British Columbia, they successfully transplanted 15 grouse to the native Prairie habitat of Montana.
Wood says that a client of the Columbia in Sharpdale Grouse is a good example of why protecting an animal's habitat needs to be a priority before they get to be endangered.
In an area or a prairie that's very diverse, you have that is what supplies all the components of what Columbia in Sharpdale Grouse needs to survive.
And once you change the diversity of this prairie, you lose some of those components and therefore you lose some of those species that occupy that.
Hopefully, the Colombian Sharpdale will dance every spring in Montana.
If you're there and hear the hooping and hollering, don't complain. It just means there's something to grouse about.
Thanks for being with us on this week's Environment Show. I'm Peter Burley.
For cassette copy of the program, call 1-800-747-7444 and ask for program number 328.
The Environment Show is a presentation of national productions which is solely responsible for its content.
Thomas Lally is the producer, Dr. Alan Shartag is the executive producer. The Environment Show is made possible by Hemings Motor News, the monthly Bible of the Old Car Habie, 1-800-C-A-R-H-E-R-E.
So long and join us next week for the Environment Show.
