Hello friends, this is the Environment Show and welcome.
At first, the people talking about ecology were only defending the fishes, the animals,
the forest and the river.
They didn't realize that human beings were in the forest and that these humans were the
really ecologists because they couldn't live without the forest and the forest couldn't
be saved without them.
And the economy seems to be chugging along fairly well.
And Warren P. doesn't seem to be as big an issue as it is in other periods, international
hostilities are calm.
Then you get issues like the environment and drugs and other sort of second-tier issues
rising up in prominence and concern.
Author Andrew Revkin telling the story of Brazil's rubber tapers in his new book The
Burning Season, The Murder of Chico Mendes.
In Polster, Gary Langer observing why we seem to be committed to environmental and social
concerns these days.
Two of our stories and guests this time on the Environment Show, The Environment Show
is a production of WAMC and is made possible by the J.M. Kaplan Fund of New York and this
is Bruce Robertson.
The vast majority of Americans believe that pollution is a serious threat to life and according
to a recent poll, we also favor tougher laws on the federal, state and local level to
control that pollution.
Gary Langer of the Associated Press who conducted the survey in conjunction with media general
says he thinks he knows why we feel this way.
When we ask people if pollution threatens the quality of their own lives, four and five
said yes.
When we ask them if current laws to curb pollution are adequate, three quarters said no.
And when we ask people if they think pollution is likely to be reduced in the next decade,
only a third said it was.
So with that level of concern, you can expect support for tough measures against pollution
and indeed that's what we found.
The poll conducted in mid-May by telephone contacted 1100 people in a random survey on a
wide range of questions on how we have been doing and what we expect in the future about
pollution, the government and our personal lifestyles.
Interestingly, but perhaps not so surprisingly, Langer says though we support tough action
out there when it comes to making changes in our individual habits we are not so quick
to support change.
For example, we are still pulled by price rather than the environmental record of the manufacturer
when it comes to making purchases at the store.
And Langer says,
I think that's fairly understandable for a few reasons.
Not everyone has the kind of income that enables them to spend money on more expensive
the products even though they may want to.
Actually, I thought we found a fairly high level of support for that movement which I think
is known as ethical shopping.
I think 18% they do consider the manufacturer's record on environmental, for example, issues.
Now that's so 1 in 5, it's a fairly high proportion when you think of the strong pull of price
and quality.
However, 73% of us still make our purchases based on price considerations.
Even the best of polls will not easily distinguish between what we say and what we do.
Being in favor of a clean environment is sort of like being in favor of mom and apple pie.
So you can't expect much of a negative response to pro and environmental measures.
Also, it's easier to support a good concept than it is to support a painful reality.
So for example, more than three quarters of our respondents said they favor strict pollution
controls on oil and coal burning power plants, even if that would raise the price of electricity.
They support that now.
But when the higher bills come in, we may lose some of those people.
Over the last, Langer says he found a consistently high number of us in favor of specific bands
and curbs on sources of pollution.
Some of the questions on the survey, Langer says, were drawn from the so-called big green
environmental referendum initiative that will be going before the voters in California this fall.
Langer says he took some of those questions and put them before the rest of the nation
and found that the proposals had a fairly high level of support.
For example, that ban on pesticides that cause cancer is in big green.
That's in the California initiative and that was supported in our poll by 7 out of 10.
Another big green calls for restrictions on woodcutting in old growth forests.
We found 61% support for an actual ban on old forest woodcutting.
In another example, the big green calls for the election of a statewide environmental sheriff
in California.
Someone elected solely to enforce environmental laws.
In our survey, 70% supported the idea for their own state.
Langer, in comparing the results from this year's study with those of last year,
is not surprised that the level of concern for the environment normally of secondary importance
to other issues remains high for the second straight year.
Generally, people are most concerned reliably and over time with issues of warranties and the economy.
Job protection, unemployment, that kind of thing.
When the economy seems to be chugging along fairly well,
and a warrant piece doesn't seem to be as big an issue as it is in other periods,
international hostilities are calm.
Then you get issues like the environment and drugs and other sort of secondary issues
rising up in prominence and concern.
Gary Langer of the Associated Press.
The network conducted the study along with Media General,
a communications company based in Richmond, Virginia.
Langer adds that reaction to the questions seem to cross all demographic, economic, political, ideological,
and age barrier lines.
For the Environment Show, this is Bruce Robertson.
In the city of Santa Monica, a woman with an interesting name, a Tussas Sultani,
has developed an interesting way to dispose of some water guzzlers,
more on the story from Joy Newly in Los Angeles.
A Tussas Sultani calls herself Santa Monica's conservation coordinator,
but because her main project these days involves water closets,
I dubbed her the toilet queen.
Having told me she fell into the job,
she recovered her composure and we got on with the subject of this story.
A program in Santa Monica, which pays $100 to anyone who puts in a new technology toilet,
Sultani says there's a lot of interest in the new technology.
At this point, every manufacturer is making them because they realize
that the whole country is moving towards these new toilets.
The city of LA passed a law about a year after we did requiring these toilets in new construction.
The state of California has passed law a law that says that starting 1992,
all new construction will go to 1.6 gallon toilets.
And there's federal legislation pending that would require these in the whole country.
So on the state of Massachusetts, the city of New York,
Mexico City, I could just go on and on and name the number of cities and municipalities
and states that are adopting this new law.
So a manufacturer that doesn't have one out is right at this point at a very disadvantage.
The reason for the Santa Monica program is obvious,
new technology has meant that toilets no longer have to consume 5 to 8 gallons of water per flush.
Sultani says new toilets account for a 73% reduction in water use
from those on the market 10 years ago.
What's the goal here in Santa Monica of this rebate program in terms of water conservation?
We hope to retrofit a quarter of all toilets in Santa Monica with these 1.6 gallon toilets.
That is about 20,000 toilets in the next three to five years.
And with that, we're going to be saving at the end of that program almost a million gallons a day.
I know it may seem a bit weird to be listening to a story about toilets,
but the fact is this is really a story about water.
It's also true that what you may have in your home is going to become an historical item.
Out of five gallons of water, the first three gallons went switching around the bowl
to create a suction effect.
And the last thing that went out the bowl was the waste.
These toilets are completely different.
The first thing that goes out is the waste and the water comes in a direct jet behind the waste
and forces it to carry out.
What results is less water going into the sewer system?
I usually use a per day or DM figure.
In Santa Monica, it's all based on
guest visits of how many times you flush the toilet.
We would estimate that the average person would save about 17 to 20 gallons a day.
For a family of three, we're talking 18,000 gallons a year for a family of three
and that does not include, as I said, the leak factor.
And that comes out to be about 20 to 30 percent of your water bill.
No one could logically oppose a move to reduce water usage by literally millions of gallons of water a year, right?
And as far as I know, there has not been major opposition to the program.
In Santa Monica, the point is being made a bit more forcefully in that everyone who has not put in a new low-flesh toilet
will be charged an additional dollar on their monthly water bill starting this month.
So, Tony gives the program a B plus so far, which gives the city thousands of the older removed toilets,
which are now being stored in a city yard.
So what we're doing with the old toilets is we're proposing.
It's still proposed that we're going to be working with a Department of Fish and Game to create a habitation reef in Santa Monica Bay made out of porcelain.
I mean, when you think about it, what is porcelain is sand?
It's made out of natural material found at the bottom of the sea.
So we're returning it back to its natural environment.
Environmentally concerned people I've met, whose communities are not offering rebates,
tell me they save water by not flushing after every use.
It doesn't sound attractive, but somehow the thought of not having enough water sounds worse than unattractive.
For the Environment Show in Los Angeles, I'm Joy Newell.
Joy Newell reports from KCRW in Santa Monica.
It was dark, hot, and steamy around dinner time on the night of December 22, 1988.
Chico Mendes opened the back door of his house in the village of Chapurri, Acre, Brazil.
As he stepped out into the Amazonian jungle night, Mendes was hit with a blast from a 20-gauge shotgun.
In just a few moments, Chico Mendes died on his bedroom floor.
This is the story of Chico Mendes as told by Andrew Revkin in his new book, The Burning Season.
Chico Mendes was a rubber tapper, a setting ghetto.
And these are people who live deep in the forest.
They live a very isolated lives.
One family might be four or five hours walk through the forest from another one.
And they make a living by walking from tree to rubber tree each morning and putting a slash in the bark
and then coming back in the afternoon and harvesting the latex that trips out of the cut into a cup.
And they've lived the same way pretty much for 120 years or so.
They were drawn into the Amazon originally in the mid-1800s when rubber suddenly found all sorts of uses during the industrial revolution.
And Mendes came out of the forest just in the late 1980s to explain to the rest of the world that this was a place that was not empty of people.
That the rainforest was in peril, but there were people living there who were best suited to defend it,
better than any American or European environmentalist.
They were living in the forest.
Their entire livelihood and lifestyle was wrapped around the forest in a sustainable way.
They derived their living from the living forest and they were fundamentally opposed to the ranchers and small farmers who were coming in the Amazon
and whose only thought was to take down the forest and use the land for other purposes.
The Burning Season is that special time of year in the Amazonian rainforest when the rains let up
and the grounds dry out. The season during which trees are felled and the land is cleared in huge conflagrations.
Forest fires whose smoke obscures the land as seen from space fires that light up the night with glowing infernos.
These fires set by land speculators who are clearing the land to make way for their cattle ranches are burning up the trees from which the rubber tapers extract the latex sap.
In the steamy jungles of the Brazilian rainforest, a murderous war is going on as the rubber tapers fight to save the trees and the cattlemen burn, terrorize and kill the rubber tapers in an effort to drive them out of the forest.
The particular family that's alleged to have killed him had real virulent animosity for Chico.
He confronted them over particular purchase of land in the Amazon that they had made and it was an area that he had lived in as a kid.
That's where he first learned how to rubber tap so it was an area he felt, Chico felt very strongly about.
And then this ranching family came in and by hook or crook acquired the land and planned to take down the trees.
And Mendes ended up driving them out. He convinced the government to take that land away from them and make it into an extractive reserve which could only be used by the rubber tapers.
And they swore that this guy, Darly Alves and his son's and his father, several generations, a swore that Mendes wouldn't bother them again.
An extractive reserve is a tractive land protected by the government from any development or exploitation other than what the land itself can produce naturally.
It is generally believed that the Alves family was responsible for Chico's death but it is also generally believed that there was something of a conspiracy behind the assassination.
The Alves family is known for its violent intolerance for anyone who crosses them up.
Reportedly many bodies are found rotting in the jungle the work of the pistol eros, the hired gunman on the Alves ranch.
In researching history, Revkin learned that while it probably was one or two of the Alves boys in the dark courtyard that December night, the killing also probably had the blessing of other businessmen and perhaps even some government officials as far away as in Brazillia, the capital.
As Sebastio Alves, the grandfather patriarch said, Chico Mendes spent too much time alive.
What nobody knew though was that Chico Mendes' death would garner not only a Brazilian federal investigation but also the attention of the world media and environmental groups.
In fact, some say that were it not for his death, Chico Mendes and the rubber tapers might well have remained shrouded in the mist and steam of the jungle.
Instead, there are books, documentaries, songs and films and the environment show.
The struggle Chico Mendes died for is a struggle carried out in the dreams and ancient thoughts of a people, again Andrew Revkin.
If anyone has crystallized the essence of the rubber tapers or all about it, it was Osmarino Amancia Rodriguez, who is the secretary of the National Council of rubber tapers and one of the successors to Chico Mendes, someone who has taken up the banner.
Very powerful man. As he put it, and this is the essence, if I've ever heard it, of the tapers struggle, he said,
At first, the people talking about ecology were only defending the fishes, the animals, the forest and the river. They didn't realize that human beings were in the forest, and that these humans were the really ecologists, because they couldn't live without the forest, and the forest couldn't be saved without them.
To understand the story, it is helpful, maybe even necessary, to understand and even feel the Amazon jungle, something Revkin can tell having spent many months traveling and researching this story.
The Amazon River, Revkin points out, drains an area about the size of the United States east of the Rocky Mountains.
And imagine that area as a single river basin, the basin of a river that rises in the Rocky Mountains and runs east, gathering strength all across the Great Plains, all across the Midwest and then the east.
And it becomes this massive river that's 10 or 15 miles wide and bursts into the Atlantic Ocean, depositing 170 billion gallons of water and hour, fresh water into the ocean.
That's 11 times the flow of the Mississippi, and it makes the Amazon by far the largest river in the world.
And what is going on in that river basin is affecting the entire planet.
As we close our eyes, Andrew Revkin takes us up that river.
If let's just sort of close in a little bit, you're floating over this vast basin, and just come down to Earth's right in Okre in Chico State, and come down to a little tributary off of the Jurawai River, which is a tributary of the Amazon.
The Jurawai is only a thousand miles long itself, and it's a minor tributary of the Amazon river.
And then take this little stream off of the Jurawai, you're now canoeing up this little stream.
You pull aside a shore, and the forest closes over the river up above you.
It's like a canopy, like it's almost like being in a circus tent.
Tall poles and a seamless green canopy floating high above the ground.
And then this rubber taper greets you and takes you towards his home.
And you walk for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, two hours, and you're winding your way through this labyrinth of columns.
Some trees sort of look like cathedrals. They have these vaulted arches, and others look like pillars.
And you just keep walking, and it's getting dark, and you're a little concerned, because you can't see where you're walking too well.
And then the taper pulls out a little chunk of rubber from his belt pouch, and he sticks it on the end of a stick and lights it on fire.
And this is a marvelous torch. It's now it's dark, and you're walking for more hours.
You might walk for four or five hours to get to the home of this guy.
He lives way, way in there. And you come into a clearing, and usually after dusk the sound of the insects becomes a deafening symphony or sound.
It's just unbelievable. I didn't have a decibel meter with me, but it must equal what you hear on some city streets.
But it's this twangy kind of almost like a cittar kind of sound.
And it's almost hard to talk in some places. The cicadas and other loud insects just everything is buzzing and chipping and chirping.
And then you'll hear a howler monkey screaming as if someone's been murdered as a horrendous sound.
And finally you settle down to sleep, and you just hear the pigs, the tapers pigs, which live underneath the house, running around in the mud.
And then eventually toward dawn, the other sounds start to come up the morning sounds. And these are the sounds of parrots and the larger birds that are waking up.
And they start to group up in the trees. I woke up one morning in a tapers home and couldn't believe the racket.
And it was a tree full of dozens, if not hundreds of parrots, all screeching, greeting the rising sun.
An unholy sound, but a nice natural sound, not like the screech of the chain saws you hear further east and ocular.
The struggle going on in this wilderness began in 1964 when a military government took over and remained in power until 1985.
In those 20 years, the face of Brazil and maybe even the face of the whole planet was changed forever.
Reviken says the military government planners looked at their maps and saw vast, empty territories along the Amazon, an area that constitutes more than half of the nation's size but yet is home to only about 10% of the population.
Yes, it was empty. For 20 years, the official government policy was to get people and supplies up to the Amazon basin, no matter what, as quickly as possible.
With help and support from the United States, European governments and the World Bank, roads were built and airports constructed and the people came.
In this case, it was, if there is a way, there is a will.
There was another pressure on the area coming from landless poor people who were forced off their land in the south by rich speculators who bought up the land.
These poor people also followed the new roads into the jungle, wave upon wave of new settlers came and before them the trees came down and the struggle between the people of the forest and the people of the open spaces ensued.
The question rises, though we may be affected by the emotion of the story of Chico Mendez or the destruction of the jungle, in the end is this not a sovereign issue with Brazil.
In most cases, yes, it would be, says Revkin, but what is going on there is affecting the way you and I live.
Not only is the burning, creating heat and smoke and fire, which is polluting the world's atmosphere, but the destruction is also removing the trees that would also, through photosynthesis, replace oxygen.
That's on the actively negative side. On the more passively negative side, destroying the tropical forest is depriving Brazil and the rest of the world
of biological and medical benefits. Says Revkin, whereas a normal northern climate forest might have 20 species of trees in a given acre, in one football field sized area of a tropical forest, more than 200 different species of trees have been catalogued.
And says Revkin, you look at one of those trees as a biologist named Terry Irwin recently did and you can count as he did 1,500 different species of insect on one tree.
And that's not individual insects. That's different unique types of insect, most of which haven't even been catalogued, let alone studied.
And that doesn't count all the other things that are hanging onto that tree. Birds, reptiles, amphibians, cacti, other plants.
Sometimes a tree will harbor 20 or 30 or many more plant species in its branches.
And this area, this diversity leads to an unbelievable profusion of various types of natural compounds.
Everything there is in a state of defense or attack. Most of the plants produce natural insecticides, natural antibiotics, natural antifungal agents, just to keep alive in this stew of biological activity.
And there are valuable drugs that have been derived from these areas, considered a natural pharmacy.
You look in your medicine cabinet, something like one out of four of the products in your medicine cabinet has ingredients derived from tropical plants.
And in the Amazon, a fraction of 1% of the plants there have been studied for any kind of activity.
So it's lunacy for Brazil, for its own potential for its farm, budding pharmaceutical industry to destroy this natural reservoir of biological productivity.
And clearly it's lamentable for the world too, because there could very well be a cure for cancer that's lost when an acre of forest is lost.
The murder of Chico Mendes was one of 48 in the jungle in 1988. In fact, Amnesty International estimates that since 1980 over 1,000 people have lost their lives in the ongoing disputes over land and life.
This spring, a new administration took power in Brazil and many are hoping for some radical and positive changes.
President Fernando Colo Damello has pledged to make environmental concerns his priority, and in fact has already appointed as Secretary of the Environment José Lutzenberger, considered by many to be one of the world's leading environmentalists.
In fact, he has already taken drastic steps to ease tensions and act justly in the Amazon, ordering the bombing and destruction of small airports cut into the jungle, ones that allow quick and easy access to the area by those intent on destroying the forest.
But the struggle is likely to go on for a long while, as long as there are two types of people, the forest people and the open space people.
It is a struggle between two different ways of looking at the world, each in their own way as justifiable as two individuals are in their own private thoughts, who is right.
We conclude our story of Chico Mendes with an excerpt from the burning season, read for us by its author Andrew Revkin.
A scene where a group of rubber tappers is sitting around a fire at night, listening to stories told by one of their own.
Jhual has just told them all about what the ranchers really want to turn the jungle into open spaces.
Just before everyone wandered off to find a place to string a hammock, Jhual's friend Antonio tried to imagine the world that the ranchers wanted to create.
The world of open spaces that had already appeared in eastern Okre and was just starting to eat at the jungle among the Jhuraw.
He could not imagine it. His forested world was so complete that any alternative was unthinkable.
If they cut the trees, how can anyone live, Antonio asked, can you imagine a country that has only passed her in cattle without trees and man?
He did not even consider the possibility that there might be men who were able to live outside the forest.
That is no country, he said. Nothing will grow there. There is no game there. The ranchers will die in that kind of country.
For him, and he hoped for his children, the forest was home.
Here was the fundamental bond between a man and his environment that had been the basis for Chico Mendes' own passionate defense of the Amazon.
It was an intimate connection, transcending global considerations and political battles and personal conflicts.
As Antonio said, the life of the taper is very hard, but it is much better than the life in the towns.
It won't be easy, even with the cooperative. We have to start our lives from the beginning, but we need to try.
It's hard for me to be outside the forest. When I went down the river to the city once, I started to get a big pain in my head.
It only went away when I came back and was on my trail going home.
Andrew Revkin, author of The Burning Season, published by Houghton Mifflin Company.
For the Environment Show, this is Bruce Robertson.
And that's our show for this week. 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 production of WAMC, Dr. Alan Chartock, executive producer. This is Bruce Robertson. The Environment Show is made possible by the J.M. Kaplan Fund of New York.
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