When it comes to conservation, all gun rights advocates are not created equal. And according to Pat Wray at High Country News, the National Rifle Association (NRA) is the worst of the worst.

Wray, a life member of the NRA, is running for the organization’s board of directors to try to change that. Wray is a hunter who wants his right to bear arms protected, but he also wants wildlife habitat protected, and at this the NRA is failing miserably, he says.

“The NRA’s ability to take money from hunters and use it in ways that will ultimately ruin hunting constitutes one of the most dishonest public relations campaigns ever perpetrated on the American people,” Wray writes.

Wray goes on to describe politicians the organization has supported, like former Rep. Richard Pombo, Sen. Larry Craig, and President Bush, who have sold off public lands to private companies or removed protections for roadless areas. As a member of the board, Wray says he would “Require the organization to work with politicians who care about the environment, wildlife and wild lands in addition to their support of our Second Amendment rights. The two are not mutually exclusive.”

While Wray tries to change the system from within, the American Hunters and Shooters Association (AHSA) is competing with the NRA from the outside, but with some of the same complaints.

At New West, Bill Schneider calls the AHSA “the bane of the NRA because it’s not just pro-gun but unlike the NRA, also pro-hunter.”

The NRA will spend up to $40 million to defeat Barack Obama this election season. Meanwhile, the AHSA will be throwing its weight—however much that is—behind Obama and emphasizing conservation in its message. As AHSA president Ray Schoenke stated, “Senator Obama’s commitment to conservation and protection of our natural resources and access to public lands demonstrates to us his commitment to America’s hunting and shooting heritage.”

For his part, Obama told Montana voters, “There is not a sportsman or hunter in Montana who is a legal possessor of firearms that has anything to worry about from me.”

Image by Richard Bartz, licensed under Creative Commons.

One of the most influential actors in the mainstream environmental movement has taken a radical turn in his views on the subject. James Gustave “Gus” Speth—whose contributions to environmental causes include cofounding the Natural Resources Defense Council, serving as a policy advisor to the Carter administration, and founding the environmental think tank World Resources Institute—is now pushing for a take-to-the-streets approach to the environmental crisis.

A dean at Yale University is not the most likely of candidates to call for civic upheaval, but Speth’s passion for the environment and his unyielding desire to save our planet from destruction leads him to a conclusion that is slowly becoming more prevalent in the mainstream movement. In an interview with Jeff Goodell in the Sept.-Oct. Orion (not yet available online), Speth shared his vision for a citizen-led movement that reimagines our current economy and state of mind in favor of environmental sustainability. This vision is spelled out in his new book, The Bridge at the Edge of the World (Yale University Press, 2008).

“The fundamental thing that’s happened is that our efforts to clean up the environment are being overwhelmed by the sheer increase in the size of the economy,” Speth tells Goodell. “And there’s no reason to think that won’t continue. So we have to ask, what is it about our society that puts such an extraordinary premium on growth? Is it justified? Why is that growth so destructive? And what do we do about it?

“Capitalism is a growth machine. What it really cares about is earning a profit and reinvesting a large share of that and growing continually … . And so all of these things combine to produce a type of capitalism that really doesn’t care about the environment, and doesn’t really care about people much either. What it really cares about is profits and growth, and the rest is more or less incidental. And until we change that system, my conclusion is that it will continue to be fundamentally destructive.”

Speth proposes we look for a “nonsocialist alternative” to capitalism. This revised capitalist system would require a series of transformations:

“The first would be a transformation in the market. There would be a real revolution in pricing. Things that are environmentally destructive would be—if they were really destructive—almost out of reach, prohibitively expensive.

“A second would be a transformation to a postgrowth society where what you really want is to grow very specific things that are desperately needed in a very targeted way—you know, care for the mentally ill, health-care accessibility, high-tech green-collar industries.

“A third would be a move to a wider variety of ownership patterns in the private sector. More co-ops, more employee ownership plans, and less rigid lines between the profit and the not-for-profit sectors.”

To get there, though, requires more than just policy orchestrated by the people on the top. Beyond his call for a serious bottom-up grassroots effort that “shakes up people’s consciousness and forces us to rethink what’s really important,” Speth also believes that a fundamental shift both in environmental groups’ focus and in our society’s values are crucial to saving the planet.

“I think that the environmental community needs to see political reform as central to its agenda, and it doesn’t now…the other thing that needs to happen is that there needs to be some fundamental challenge to our dominant values. It’s been addressed by religious organizations and psychologists and philosophers and countless others for a long time. But until we reconnect in a more profound way with ourselves and our communities and the natural world, it seems unlikely that we will deal successfully with our problems.”

Image by scottfeldstein, licensed under Creative Commons.

No, I don’t mean on an energy-efficient treadmill. Get a wild workout the good old-fashioned way—doing chores. According to Nicolette Loizou of the Ecologist (article not available online), Green Gyms, which are gaining popularity in the UK, revolve around the idea of conservation and gardening volunteerism as a workout. The UK now has 95 Green Gyms, where you can expend your calories while nurturing the great outdoors.

BTCV, a charitable environmental organization in Doncaster, UK, began its Green Gym 10 years ago. More than 10,000 people have since volunteered to improve local green spaces, as well as their own fitness. Typical tasks can be anything from digging soil and planting trees to sawing logs for building a sheep enclosure. And just like a workout routine with a personal trainer, BTCV leads groups in pre-workout warm-up exercises.

Aside from the obvious benefits of improving physical health and our natural surroundings, participants felt that the skills they learned helped to improve their mental health, self-esteem and confidence, reports Loizou.

A single Green Gym session usually lasts around three hours—for free. So instead of hiking it across spinning rubber, grab a shovel and dig—a tree is waiting to be planted. Exercise never felt so worthwhile.

(Thanks, Ecologist.)

Image by  alexindigo , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Who but climate-change denialists and animal haters could oppose the United States’ decision to list polar bears as threatened? The Inupiat people of northern Alaska who live closest to the bears, Cameron Smith reports in Cultural Survival Quarterly.

“The Inupiat argue that listing the polar bear as threatened won’t save it,” Smith writes, noting that the bear is a cornerstone of the Inupiat’s traditional hunting culture and they have centuries of collective knowledge about the animal. Their opposition is based on three key points: they don’t think bear numbers are actually declining; they kill only about 20 bears a year, not enough to threaten the species; and “Listing the polar bear does not address the problem!” as North Slope Borough Mayor Edward S. Itta told U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials at a public meeting in Barrow. Shrinking sea ice caused by carbon dioxide emissions is the culprit, not Inupiat hunters.

“The Inupiat solution,” Smith writes, “was for Washington to address climate change head-on by legislating global warming preventatives, and leave the polar bears to the native peoples of the Arctic.”

Image by  Dave Olsen , licensed under  Wikimedia Commons . 

Farm animals are beginning to breathe (and move) a little easier. After much pushing by U.S. voters and European Union policy reforms, farming companies the world over are finally changing their animal confinement policies, Ben Block reports on Worldwatch.org. Besides the impact on animal welfare, close confinement also spreads disease and  increases pollution and bacteria resistance, things that can and do affect human health. Farmers, as well as food industry giants like Burger King and Safeway, are responding to customer concern and have begun to phase out inhumane confinement practices such as breeding pig crates and chicken battery cages.

Image by  Rephotography , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Why are some leaders still dragging their feet on climate change? There’s a host of reasons both political and scientific, but one provocative explanation I’ve never heard before was recently floated by Gar Lipow at Gristmill: “Somebody has to be Hitler.”

What Lipow means is that some thinkers—especially politically moderate and conservative ones—never address the threat of climate change because they’re too busy fomenting war against whichever node on the axis of evil is posing the greatest threat. “The year is eternally 1938, and the place eternally Munich. Peace is for dirty hippies. Problems like climate change are always going to have to wait for the current emergency to end, and for one last enemy to be defeated.”

Uttering the H-word is ordinarily the surest way to derail an otherwise legitimate debate—but it’s hard not to see support for Lipow’s theory in our current leadership. The Bush administration’s strategy of fear-based governance has been obsessed with hunting down real or imagined terrorists while conveniently ignoring—or flat-out denying the existence of—climate change and other environmental crises. And as long as this mindset grips those in power, as it has for most of the decade, real change in environmental policy cannot occur.

“It’s a 9/11 thing.” 

We’re all well-accustomed to hearing this rote justification as we stuff toiletries into a tiny Ziploc bag at airport security or question the aesthetic judgment behind the makeshift, gigantic cement pylons encircling downtown buildings. But here’s an unexpected use of this most 21st-century of mantras: The response above came from an escalator company representative explaining why the firm couldn’t give a reporter from Next American City information about their products’ energy use and pricing.

The industry has good cause to be cagey. These icons of modern ease are dinosaurs when it comes to energy efficiency. As Next American City reports, “[t]he national energy use of escalators is estimated at 2.6 billion kilowatt hours per year, equivalent to powering 375,000 houses.” That’s a lot of wattage for devices that keep draining electricity even when they’re not being used (which is much of the time).

There are some attempts to green escalators. Next American City notes the efforts of J. Dunlop Inc., which has applied for a patent on a design for a plastic elevator step whose lighter weight would require less energy than the current heavy aluminum versions.

The article does not make mention of “variable-speed escalators”—those that stay still or move very slowly until someone in need of a lift climbs aboard. New York City is in the midst of transitioning a handful of subway stations to this more energy-efficient version. But, as the New York Times reports, the escalators hit a few bumps on their inaugural voyages: only 22 of the 35 escalators slated to shift to variable speed at four stations were functioning properly by showtime on Monday.

An earlier piece announcing the initiative notes that such technology hasn’t yet been approved by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. (New York City Transit had to get a work-around OK from state code enforcers for the experimental program.) The “sleep mode” or “intermittent operation” technology is used, however, in Europe, Asia, Canada, and Israel.

So perhaps that’s one greener option for stateside escalators in the future. Or, there’s always the other route: Take the stairs. As one mechanical engineer puts it to Next American City: "If you have a place like a mall, you could install an elevator for the elderly and the disabled and tell everyone else to take a walk. It’s not the kind of machine that you can make practical. Because it’s not."

Image by Jan the manson, licensed under Creative Commons.

Let’s not repeat our energy failures when addressing the global population crisis

Americans have a long history of inciting political action by shaking one problem under our politicians’ noses to draw attention to another. It’s like killing two birds with one stone. Liberals are notoriously less-than-fond of Big Oil’s rabid profit margins, so we point out the obvious need for alternative energy. Then, because we don’t want to come off as anti-business, we frame it as an environmental problem. But it is also an economic problem, a social problem, and a foreign policy problem. Our hope, however tenuous, is that the environmental issue is one that can bring everybody, liberal and conservative, together to address the oil conundrum. This has proven to be a reasonably effective approach. While our energy crisis is far from solved, at least it is being talked about by both presidential candidates. Which is a lot more mic-time than they’re giving our other global environmental catastrophe: the population crisis.

A recent report (pdf) by the Population Institute notes that global population could increase from 6.7 billion to as much as 12 billion by 2050. Most of this increase is expected to occur in developing countries. In spite of these bleak findings, the closest thing to population reform coming from the right amounts to, “If the world’s brown people would stop having so many babies, there’d be no crisis.” In other words: Population is not our problem. On the left, sentiment has been that if we ease poverty and increase education in developing countries, the trajectory of global population will even itself out. Basically, solve two pressing problems and the third is a freebee.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that as global citizens, the growing number of people inhabiting the Earth is everybody’s problem. It’s also safe to say that, based on solid statistical evidence, there is a direct relationship between lower standards of living and larger family size. Yet there is no guarantee that addressing these quality-of-living issues will solve the population problem, in part because our definition of what constitutes a problem in population is fuzzy.

We are faced with a crisis not because there are too many of us for the planet to sustain, but because we are collectively using up more resources than the planet can produce. This isn’t just true with valuable commodities, like oil and ore. The most basic of resources are growing scarce as well—food, potable water, wood. While reducing consumption in first-world countries will go a long way in addressing this problem, a population that just keeps growing will eventually overwhelm the planet, regardless of consumption. And as formerly impoverished nations achieve moderate prosperity, their consumption grows, likely negating any environmental benefits from reduced population growth via poverty aid. Therefore, a two-pronged solution is needed: reduced consumption and staved population growth.

It is widely believed that the U.S. population is in decline and has been for decades. Hence, the assumption is that limiting our own population won’t address the global problem. This is untrue on two counts. First, as Utne.com noted in January, the birth-to-death ratio in this country recently reached replacement level again. Second, a child born in a first-world country uses far more resources and therefore emits vastly more carbon than a child born in a developing country. Limiting births and limiting carbon emissions would be far more effective than addressing only one of these issues. This not only makes an impact within our own country, it sets an example for other nations as well.   

One of the primary obstacles to enacting effective international policies to curtail the population explosion is that, like climate change up until recently, there is no real consensus that the present global population is a problem. Many countries, including the United States, still actively encourage family growth through tax incentives and other pronatalist policies. Population control—even of the most moderate variety, like simply advocating smaller families—is met with vehement opposition. These objections are not based on science or even logic; they are informed by the human desire to live the way we wish, consequences be damned. Or, put more generously, the biological, mammalian urge to procreate without restriction. The only way to counteract this desire is to make it less profitable to have children.

Rather than giving tax credits to parents, we need policies that attend to educational inadequacies, create affordable food cooperatives, and ensure that all children have medical coverage. Tax credits are meant to provide funds for these necessary services to families. If food, healthcare, and education are provided, actively subsidizing procreation won’t be necessary. This will increase the quality of life for families without punishing parents or promoting family growth.

Next, make birth control and voluntary procedures such as vasectomies and tubal ligations more widely available worldwide. For every unplanned pregnancy averted, one less little bundle of CO2 emissions is born. These changes are not anti-family. They are not a replication of China’s one-child policy. They simply help with family planning and give equal standing to small families, large families, and single people by de-subsidizing procreation. Pair this type of response in Europe, North America, and wealthy nations around the world with poverty relief and education in developing countries, and we may begin to make a real environmental impact that our children, if we choose to have them, can enjoy.

Another barrier facing advocates of population control is that, historically, attempts to limit population growth have often been motivated by the wishes of dynastic Eurasian puppet masters to maintain their grip on the indigenous populations of desirable regions under their control. Put simply, this form of population manipulation is preemptive genocide. Nicholas Kristof offers an astute summation of the grimy history of population control in a review of a book on the subject in the New York Times. This damaging association between the tyrannical and the humanitarian motivations of limiting population bolsters the need for transparent and public worldwide policies. If these policies appear to limit African and Asian populations while France and the United States continue to reward large families, the campaign will be seen as ethnic manipulation rather than an attempt to solve a global emergency. And rightly so.

There is another telling lesson to be gleaned from the crusade to replace fossil fuels with alternative energy: the necessity of acting while we still can. It is beginning to seem that, if velocity continues to build, we may yet solve our energy conundrum. Of course, solving a problem and actually fixing it are two very different things. The one relies on scientific invention (something humanity is notoriously good at), while the other necessitates pragmatic action (something we find much more difficult). Things are still looking pretty bleak. But as the Bush stranglehold begins to weaken, it seems almost certain that we will continue the push toward alternative forms of energy.

We may still dodge the bullet. Because of some long-overdue, forward-thinking policy adjustments—and more to come, one can hope—we may still be allowed a weaning period. In this scenario, energy costs will steadily rise. The poor will bear the brunt of the burden, as they always do in times of economic and industrial transition. But innovation will balloon, and the dividends of increased innovation will grow. If this is the case—and it is far from a forgone conclusion—it will be only because we made the right calls in the nick of time, in spite of heavy opposition from those unwilling to give up the luxuries they’d grown fat on. Any longer and we surely will be forced to forgo a transitional period in favor of more drastic measures.

And what of population? It is no stretch to assume that complacency and an unwillingness to make sacrifices, to self-regulate, will ultimately result in imposed regulation by government or nature. If we do not begin the process now—cautiously and with plenty of forethought, to be sure—our descendants, perhaps only a hundred years from now, will be faced with a crisis so dire that governments will be forced to drastic action.

It is baffling that, given the intense growing pains felt during the transition between fossil and alternative fuels, such concerns are scoffed at. A lack of fortitude and forethought in energy policy almost destroyed the planet, and still might. How much more difficult will it be, sometime in the near future, to make the argument that the choice to have a child is no longer a decision that can be made freely? Better to address the problem now, while we can still stomach the sacrifices a solution requires.

For some clotheshorses, the ethical quandry of leather fashions is implicit: It’s a dead animal’s skin. But that’s only part of the story. While leather goods don’t carry quite the stigma that furs do, perhaps they should, especially when one learns the cost of leather production in terms of human health and environmental damage.

A recent article in the Ecologist (not available online) profiles the leather industry in Hazaribagh, a city in the Dhaka region of Bangladesh. Thanks to lax environmental regulations, the city is able to provide leather at lower costs than its Western counterparts, making its tanneries an economic boon to the city. But the cost of production is lower precisely because environmental regulations are lower.

Describing the leather manufacturing process at length, the Ecologist implicates the city’s tanneries with vivid descriptions of their environmental impact:

Electric-blue rivers of effluent gushing out of every tannery wall; a frothy, noxious cocktail of lead, chrome syntans, mercury, cadmium, and corrosive acids that creeps along the open drains under the stilted homes of neighbouring slums, and then straight into the Dhaka’s primary river, the Buriganga. 

Communities that once depended on the river for fishing have been decimated, while toxic tanning chemicals are slowly killing the city’s inhabitants:

Large numbers of the 8,000 to 12,000 workers at the tanneries suffer from gastrointestinal and dermatological diseases... SEDH (Bangladesh’s Society for Environment and Human Development) claims that 90 percent of tannery workers will be dead by the age of 50.

As with other consumer goods, there is an alternative for the conscientious: Organic Leather, in California, for example, promises leather derived from humanely slaughtered animals and tanned without toxic chemicals. Of course, these methods raise the product’s price significantly and cannot be conducted on Hazaribagh’s massive scale. It’s unlikely that real change can happen in Bangladesh’s tanneries until leather buyers worldwide, and especially in Europe, stop feeding the market for cheaper leather manufactured under such conditions.

(Thanks to Kari Volkmann-Carlsen for additional research.)

Image by Frances Voon, licensed by Creative Commons.

David Suzuki truly has a passion. His lifelong dedication to the environment spans across his many endeavors; most notably, he is a broadcaster, a scientist, an activist, and an author of 43 books. A Passion for This Earth (David Suzuki Foundation and Greystone Books, 2008), however, is not Suzuki’s book at all, but the product of his remarkable ability to inspire people to think critically, personally, and practically about our environment. A collection of essays from writers, scientists, and activists, the book presents an extensive selection of voices about a common passion: the earth and our role in its capacity to flourish.

Edited by Michelle Benjamin, A Passion for This Earth boasts a foreword by Bill McKibben, environmentalist and acclaimed author of several books including The End of Nature and Deep Economy. The essays range from the urgent call for action of Doug Moss’ “Save the Environment—Take Back the Media” to the anecdotal nature of David Helvarg’s “Saved by the Sea”:

As a young kid, I’d looked up at the stars and gotten pissed off, thinking I’d been born a generation too soon to explore other worlds. But that week in Key West I got hold of a mask and snorkel and got into the water and saw live rocks, and vibrant colors, sea cucumbers and a queen conch, a sea turtle and a small hammerhead gliding through a coral canyon amid shoaling fish and realized there was this whole other alien world right beyond the seawall. Sadly, in the blink of an eye that’s been my life, the Keys reef has gone from 90 percent live coral cover to less than 10 percent, devastated by pollution, physical impacts from boats, anchors and people and global warming.

A Passion for This Earth is a satisfying fusion of appreciation for nature and political activism that stems from the natural diversity of our earth, of the problems that face it and the people who choose to tackle the issues.

Advertisements are the invasive species of the urban world, seeking out every available space to spawn a message. The latest marketing slot is wrapped around free water bottles at just about any business you can imagine. Whether you are browsing around at a car dealership, shopping at a department store, or getting your teeth cleaned, there’s a good chance that a free bottle of water sporting the company slogan is waiting for you to grab it up.

And it’s not an unsuccessful ad campaign, because it banks on a widespread weakness for free product and stats that show Americans guzzle twice as much bottled water as they did just 10 years ago. Amy Roe, a senior editor for the Bear Deluxe, a quarterly magazine of environmental issues and creative arts, writes in “Message in a Bottle” (article not available online), “Taking free things is easy to rationalize, hard to resist. (Free food, as we all know, doesn’t really have calories.)”

Likewise, the environmental impacts of free items are often easier to disregard than items you pay for. It’s not hard to see, however, that free plastic water bottles are not an eco-friendly way to publicize a brand. Recyclable, yes—but 90 percent of plastic water bottles still end up in the trash or littered on the ground, according to the Sierra Club.

The good news is that some people are starting to avoid plastic bottles, opting for municipal water instead. Bear Deluxe reports that the West Coast cities of Seattle, San Francisco, and Vancouver have all made similar efforts to phase out the use of plastic water bottles at city functions, an earth-conscious change that has additionally benefited San Francisco with a savings of $500,000 a year.

We’re accustomed to being bombarded with unnecessary free products in our culture, and Amy Roe is great at bringing the uselessness of those trends to surface. The Utne Reader recently reprinted another Roe article from the Bear Deluxe, “Tee-d Off,” that fleshes out the ills of race-day T-shirts, which are often used just once and subsequently shipped off to countries where they were most likely originally made.

(Thanks, Bear Deluxe.)

Image by  shrff14 , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

With the Senate’s passage last week of a ban on lead in children’s toys, it’s tempting to think that we’ve taken care of that nasty old lead problem. But we’ve taken care of just a small part of it. The fact remains that many children are still exposed to lead in the environment, even if they don’t regularly suck on toxic Thomas the Tank Engines.

Children are indeed at higher risk from lead exposure than adults, the Alliance for Healthy Homes reminds us, though the greatest source of exposure isn’t toys but the paint in old homes (PDF), specifically the dust created when paint is damaged during home renovations.

Unfortunately, cleaning up this source has less public oomph—and thus political power—behind it than the toy scare. That’s why the Environmental Protection Agency, ordered by Congress in 1992 to address the danger of lead in home renovations, took until March this year to actually do something. And even then it was a baby step, requiring contractors who fix up older homes and other buildings occupied by children to take simple precautions against creating and spreading lead dust. The cleaning must then be verified—by the same workers who do the lead removal. The rule doesn’t take effect until 2010.

“In the 16 years since we’ve been waiting for this rule, at least 17 million children have been exposed to harmful levels of lead unnecessarily, permanently losing IQ points as a result,” the Alliance for Healthy Homes said in a statement (PDF). “The new regulation is an important first step toward preventing another generation from being poisoned by debris left behind after a remodeling job.”

The Alliance went on to criticize the lack of teeth in the new rule and encouraged the EPA to take additional steps, including banning “dry scraping,” which generates lots of hard-to-clean lead dust and increases exposure; requiring formal lead-safe training of all workers, not just their supervisors; and strengthening its enforcement. I suggest going even further and enhancing the educational effort aimed at do-it-yourself remodelers, who every weekend haul out their scrapers, sanders, and demolition bars and release tons of lead dust into the air, often unknowingly.

Lead is a potent neurotoxin that can retard children's mental and physical development, reduce attention span and delay fetal development, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. Alarming new studies have even linked childhood lead exposure to adult crime and brain damage. Let’s use the awareness generated by the toy scare to tackle this lurking environmental threat.

Image by skidrd, licensed under Creative Commons.

Soon, Galactic Pizza-delivering superheroes might have to share Minnesota streets with another group jockeying to put more fuel-efficient vehicles on the road.

With a $10,000 grant from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a group of Minnesota high school students on the Experimental Vehicle Team created an electric motorcycle that could hit a top speed of 60 mph and goes 40 miles before recharging. It looks like the result of “mating a mutant soybean with a Vespa scooter,” writes Minnesota Public Radio. The bike’s unorthodox design stems from concerns over rider safety. Along with a seat belt, the bike has a body that encloses the rider, “designed for crumple zones so that it will take the energy from an accident and dissipate it,” team member Tom Lenertz told KSAX-TV. 

You won’t see a fleet of these bikes on the road anytime soon, however. Talks to register and license the original bike with the Minnesota Department of Motor Vehicles have been ongoing since March, says team advisor Mark Westlake. “They keep asking for the model and who made it,” says Westlake. “And we’re like, well, we made it ourselves. We don't really have a model name for it.” Sounds like the Experimental Vehicle Team could use some marketing help. Any suggestions? 

(Thanks, City Pages.)