Michael Reynolds is the mastermind behind Earthships, which makes him sound like some sort of space renegade. Reynolds is a rebel, profiled in the Walrus, but his transgressions are mundane: breaking state ordinances and county building codes to create sustainable homes dubbed Earthships. His work leaves little time for savvy branding to fight the prevailing belief that off-the-grid living means inhabiting a yurt. 

In the late 1980s, when his architect peers were busy “distinguishing architecture from mere building, liberating it from the plebian world of functionality,” Reynolds was building the first commissioned, decidedly functional Earthship in New Mexico. Reynolds’ designs aren’t sleek—the U-shaped buildings resemble a hybrid “between The Hobbit’s Bag End burrow and the Tatooine farmstead of Luke Skywalker’s youth”—but they are efficient.

“Reynolds’ houses verge on 100 percent self-sufficiency. They harvest their own water, treat their own sewage, generate their own electricity, self-heat, and self-cool,” the Walrus reports. The walls are made of mortar-encased recycled cans and tires, and they have been successfully sustainable in the deserts of New Mexico, the jungles of Bolivia, and the mountains of British Columbia. For Reynolds’ designs to enjoy greater popularity, he’ll need more accommodating building codes. Of course, the Walrus seems to hint, a less snigger-inducing name for his structures wouldn’t hurt either. 

Image by Matthew Yglesias, licensed under Creative Commons.

Since the death knell was sounded for the electric car, many assume that owing a plug-in electric vehicle is nearly impossible. Todd Kaho reports for Green Car Journal that the all-electric Revolution costs as little as $15,000. The price tag may seem high for a car that can’t go more than 35 miles per hour and looks like a Playskool toy car. But considering that oil is now nearing $150 per barrel, Green Car Journal insists, “this car is worth a look.”

The home aquarium trade is endangering coral reefs and hobbyists’ beloved marine pets. To stem the tide of destruction, consumers have to get involved.

As far as pets go, fish don’t have the most outgoing, cuddly personalities. But their brilliant colors and graceful movements have made aquariums vaunted fixtures in more than 800,000 U.S. households.

A home aquarium sounds harmless, but the trade that brings fish from coral reefs to our homes and dentist offices is deadly and unsustainable. Once lively reefs are being emptied of their inhabitants, leaving these crucial hubs of biodiversity in crisis. It’s a complex problem, with no easy solutions. Governing bodies haven’t stepped in to regulate the trade, and that means the power to make a difference lies in consumers’ hands.

The problem begins long before colorful butterfly fish and Banggai cardinalfish reach pet stores. Most fish come from coral reefs in the Philippines and Indonesia, where local fishermen make a living plundering fragile ecosystems that already have been damaged by warming waters (a phenomenon driven by climate change). Exporters pay fishermen per fish, says Drew Weiner, director of Reef Protection International, a Berkeley, California-based organization that seeks to educate the public about the aquarium trade and coral reefs. This pay-per-fish system has led to a deadly practice: Fishermen use cyanide to temporarily stun fish and make them easier to catch.  But less than 1 in 10 fish survive a cyanide stun, so the majority of stunned fish die hours later and arrive in the United States floating belly-up. On top of that, cyanide can damage surrounding coral and marine life not targeted for capture.

Even fish that are never exposed to cyanide frequently perish from trauma caused by the long trip from coral reefs to Los Angeles (where most major importers are located) to pet stores around the country. The result is millions of dead fish that don’t reach aquariums, further exacerbating demand for fish from over-harvested coral reefs.

Although the issue has gotten some coverage by the environmental press, the mainstream media have largely ignored the problem. The aquarium trade accounts for less than 1 percent of all the revenue generated from the ocean, so the problem hasn’t garnered attention on a large scale, Weiner says. The two largest sources of ocean revenue—recreation and commercial fishing—draw far more focus and have far stronger lobbying bases fighting for their interests.

A few legislative attempts to regulate the industry never made it off the ground, according to Barbara Best, a coastal resource and policy adviser for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a government agency that provides nonmilitary foreign aid. In the context of coral reef protection, USAID has been working with countries like the Philippines to promote economic development while sustaining biodiversity. USAID serves as a member of the U.S. Coral Reef Task Force, a partnership of government agencies formed to create a national action plan for protecting coral reefs. In the National Action Plan to Conserve Coral Reefs, created in 2000, the Task Force called for improved domestic laws regulating the import of marine animals into the United States, but Best says it didn’t go anywhere. She cites a variety of factors for the stalled effort, including the difficulty of enacting effective legislation, concern for fishermen whose livelihoods depend on the trade, and other issues being prioritized by Congress.

Another program, the Marine Aquarium Council (MAC), has tried to self-regulate the trade through an international certification program. Although MAC was created with good intentions, the program was never able to achieve its goal of certifying all the players in the trade, according to Weiner.

“It's not something that's been paid much attention to, but it's a huge story because [MAC] sucked $20 million out of the donor community for this misguided certification program that was flawed from the start,” Weiner says. (Best acknowledges that USAID was one such donor; the agency financially supported MAC for three years but dropped support after realizing the program wasn’t effective.)

With an unsuccessful certification program and no laws regulating import of marine animals, captive breeding programs and consumer education appear to be the most viable solutions to the problem.

Captive breeding aims to reduce demand for wild fish by raising would-be pets in tanks and then exporting them to pet stores. But consumer education about the environmental benefits of purchasing captive bred fish is crucial: Less than 10 percent of aquarium species are currently tank-raised, and consumer demand remains high for species that are not easily bred in captivity.

Weiner says that—given consumer demand and legislative blockades—an all-out ban on the import of marine animals might be the only option to ensure the protection of coral reefs.

“[A ban] might be the easiest thing to do politically: Since there are so few stakeholders, who will complain? It'd be different if you were to try to shut down the commercial fishing industry,” Weiner says.

But a ban could also push the trade further underground, Best says. And that could make the industry even more difficult to manage. 

This leaves all hope with consumers. Hobbyists can reduce demand for wild fish by buying captive bred species whenever possible. If captive bred fish aren’t available, consumers should try to choose species that are less susceptible to endangerment. To help hobbyists, Reef Protection International (RPI) has created a Reef Fish Guide that directs consumers on which species of fish are safe for purchase. For example, the combtooth blenny is on RPI’s “take it home” list because it easily adapts to a home aquarium and isn’t at high risk for disease. Even though the fish isn’t currently captive bred, the species breeds frequently enough in the wild that it isn’t threatened by endangerment. On the other hand, the moorish idol is on RPI’s “keep it wild” list (i.e., don’t buy it) because less than 5 percent survive the transport to home aquariums, and if they do make it that far, they are highly susceptible to disease.

Finding captive bred fish or fish on the “take it home” list can be tricky, especially when dealing with large pet store chains. At Petco.com, consumers can order 78 species of marine fish for home delivery, three of which (the cleaner wrasse, panther grouper, and large angelfish) aren’t recommended for purchase by RPI for various reasons. Petco sells captive bred fish, but the website doesn’t consistently specify which fish are captive bred. (A Petco representative, Ryan May, told Utne.com via email that though some of the website’s and stores’ stocks are wild, most of its fish are captive bred and that the company is “always on the lookout for new resources so we can eventually not have a need for non-captive bred species in our stores.”)   

Instead of going straight to the big chain pet stores, Weiner recommends consumers seek advice from their local aquarium hobbyist club. These groups usually have current information on where to buy sustainably captured fish and corals. The Marine Aquarium Societies of North America maintains a database of 157 hobbyist clubs in the United States and Canada. These clubs often link to smaller, local pet and aquarium stores, where staff is knowledgeable about sustainability issues.

Jake Hagberg is the owner of Discovery Aquatics, an aquarium service and installation store near Minneapolis that doesn’t sell fish, and is a lifelong, passionate aquarium hobbyist.

“A lot of stores don’t give hobbyists the education they need to be successful,” Hagberg says. “They bring in fish that are really colorful and beautiful, but they don’t last long in captivity.”

If consumers don’t stop demanding endangered wild fish, they may be in the market for a new hobby.

“Eventually there is going to be a day when [pet stores] don't have fish to sell,” Weiner says.

Image by jon hanson, licensed under Creative Commons.

DDT’s back. No, not in the form of a tortured debate about whether or not the toxic chemical really was good for malaria-plagued nations. Rather, the insecticide is seeping to a comeback via melting Antarctic glaciers. 

New Scientist reports that DDT is again showing up in penguins.

The trace levels found will not harm the birds, but the presence of the chemical could be an indication that other frozen pollutants will be released because of climate change, says Heidi Geisz, a marine biologist at Virginia Institute of Marine Science in Gloucester in the US. She led a team that sampled DDT levels in the penguins.

And here’s the more alarming bit: The DDT might have some frozen friends:

She worries that glaciers could release an alphabet soup of chemical pollutants into the ocean, including PCBs and PBDEs – industrial chemicals that have been linked to health problems in humans.

Image by elisfanclub, licensed under Creative Commons.

 If the future of nuclear power were as bright as its most enthusiastic supporters suggest it is, investors would be flocking to it like electrons to nuclei. But “the smart money is heading for the exits,” reports the Spring 2008 Solutions, the newsletter of the Rocky Mountain Institute energy think tank.

“The private capital market isn’t investing in new nuclear plants, and without financing, capitalist utilities aren’t buying,” write Amory Lovins, Imran Sheikh, and Alex Markevitch, in an article starkly titled “Forget Nuclear.” “In the United States, even government subsidies approaching or exceeding new nuclear power’s total cost have failed to entice Wall Street.”

The article goes on to crunch the numbers behind nuclear vs. renewable energy options, and lands, not surprisingly, yet authoritatively, on the side of renewables. In typical Rocky Mountain Institute style, the report is technical but not obtuse and even, in conclusion, quite impassioned:

“Isn’t it time we forgot about nuclear power?” the authors ask. “Informed capitalists have. Politicians and pundits should, too.”

Elsewhere in the issue, the institute thanks recent donors, and under the category of “Integrators”—those who gave $5,000 to $9,999—is R.E.M./Athens L.L.C., the business end of the little rock band from Georgia. I guess “Green” isn’t just the name of one of their albums.

Due to the dismal state of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Chris Mooney has created a backronym for the government office: the Enormously Pathetic Agency. Ouch.

Objectivity is boring. The determined even-handedness of “GMOs: The Seeds of Discord” at the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie in Paris is stultifiying after a few placards for anyone familiar with the issues surrounding genetically modified organisms. The interest of the exhibit, then, lies in unearthing the careful concession France is making on the topic.

The exhibit portrays the controversy over GMOs as a dispute between two camps led by the modification-happy United States, on one hand, pitted against “a line of resistance in France and a few other European countries, brandishing the precautionary principles.” So why would principle-brandishing France allow any GMOs within its borders?

France has hope in “second-generation” GMOs, which could increase the protein or omega-3 content of crops, allow crops to grow in arid regions or saline soil, and increase the storage time for grains. Unlike current GMOs, which are portrayed as profiting seed and pesticide companies like Monsanto, second-generation GMOs hold promise for the greater good. North America dominates current second-generation research, according to the exhibit, but France set aside 45 million Euros for research in 2009-2011.

It’s a contradictory move for France when it claims to be in the anti-GMO vanguard. After all, the nation recently outlawed the cultivation of Bt maize, a Monsanto seed that produces its own insecticide. Rather than categorically dismissing GMOs, then, the French seem to be cautiously awaiting GMOs that can combat serious food shortages rather than just individual pests and weeds.

 Read a review of a book critiquing scientific support for GMOs in the May/June issue of Utne Reader.

Image by Féron Benjamin, licensed under Creative Commons.

The great spring bird migration is under way, and here in Minnesota, right in the fast lane of the Mississippi flyway, we’re seeing all kinds of winged travelers. Loons and mergansers are clustering on lakes, awaiting a late ice-out on more northern waters. Hawks are circling and screeching out territorial threats. The juncos are already here and gone, having high-tailed it to their summer places in the boreal forest.

The modern birdwatcher can track this spectacular avian parade not just with binoculars and spotting scopes, but also with Nexrad radar. The Minnesota Birdnerd blog tipped me to this radar image from just after midnight last night, showing patterns of circles around Nexrad stations that indicate migrating birds aloft. To learn more about tracking migrating birds by radar, check out these tips from the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology.

Getting rid of old medications and pills can be an environmental disaster. The drugs are considered hazardous waste, but many people simply flush their old pills down the toilet. In the March-April issue of Utne Reader, Lisa Owens Viani wrote about some innovative strategies to get rid of expired medications. In the interview below, you can hear Owens Viani, senior editor of the northern California environmental magazine Terrain, talk about the problems with flushing pills down the toilet, and what you can do about it.

 Lisa Owens Viani on Expired Medication: Download