introduction: the plan—buy low, sell never
1.The full species name is Araucaria araucana. This is one of nineteen separate araucaria species, and one of the most imperiled. It is the national tree of Chile.
2.There is broad agreement within the scientific community that the planet is now experiencing its sixth great extinction event, also referred to as the Holocene extinction event. (The last such event, 65 million years ago, was the Cretaceous/Paleogene extinction, in which half of all living species, including most dinosaurs, went extinct.) The rate of observed extinctions has accelerated since the mid-twentieth century, with human causes (development, deforestation, pollution, hunting, fishing, and climate change) primarily responsible. By 2008, scientific estimates using different methodologies ranged from 27,000 extinctions a year to as many as 140,000 a year.
3.Estimate from “Eating Fossil Fuels,” by Dale Allen Pfeiffer, From the Wilderness Publications, 2004. According to data on oil use cited by Pfeiffer, a geologist, oil consumption in the agricultural sector breaks down into the following categories: 31 percent to manufacture inorganic fertilizer, 19 percent for field machinery, 16 percent for transportation, 13 percent for irrigation, 8 percent for raising livestock, and the remainder for pesticide production, crop drying, and other miscellaneous industrial farming practices. This figure of 400 gallons does not include energy costs for packaging, refrigeration, or cooking.
1. reaching the summit
1.Information here and throughout the book on Doug Tompkins is drawn from the author’s interview with him; his own writings; the Esprit Company’s official history and executive biographies; interviews with his wife, Kris McDivit Tompkins; interviews with his ex-wife, Susie Tompkins-Buell; interviews with his friend and colleague Peter Buckley; various speeches and published interviews he has given; Esprit: The Making of an Image, by Helie Robertson, Esprit de Corp., 1985; The Conservation Land Trust: The First Ten Years, 2002; The Foundation for Deep Ecology: The First Ten Years, 1999; Flying South: A Pilot’s Inner Journey, by Barbara Cushman Rowell, Ten Speed Press, 2002; and “Fitzroy 1968,” American Alpine Journal, by Douglas Tompkins, 1969.
2. the empire strikes out
1.Maureen Orth, “Esprit de Corp.: For Sportswear Mogul Doug Tompkins, Image and Attitude Are Everything,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 22, 1987; article reprinted from GQ magazine.
2.The argument that environmentally sound and sustainable practices cost too much is age-old and seemingly sensible, but it is at root dishonest, because it overlooks what amounts to a massive subsidy that rewards pollution and inefficiency. Pollution, climate change, and resource depletion carry enormous price tags—the costs related to cancer, heart disease, asthma, and other problems caused by emissions from cars and polluting industries alone are staggering. These emissions sicken and kill people—they are toxic to living things and to the environment—yet government and society bear almost all the costs. If the makers of the products that caused this harm were required to pay for the actual damages they cause, which are a true cost of doing business, then it would no longer be profitable to conduct business in an unsustainable way. As things stand, the incentives greatly favor environmental damage and unsustainable practices.
3.Doug Tompkins, “Looking Backward and Forward,” Foundation for Deep Ecology: The First Ten Years. In this essay, Tompkins also tried to explain why he—and other creative and well-intentioned businesspeople—could remain blind to the ecological consequences of their work:
As far back as 1985, my hopes and expectations in life began to shift. The excitement and involvement that came with building Esprit, improving the craft of image making, marketing, organizing, and growing a complex, multinational operation, began to lose its luster…. I still wonder how I could have been so focused elsewhere that I was not out there with the Earth First!ers, where my heart actually longed to be. I had become fascinated by marketing and image making, and as I look back on it now, I wonder what I was really thinking about, what captivated me so. I think in a way this ability to become narrowly focused is as fundamental a root cause of the eco-social crisis as one can find. One loses sight of the greater reality, living in that microcosmic world of marketing, advertising and global distribution.
3. lost and found
1.DINA—the Spanish acronym for National Intelligence Directorate—was Chile’s secret police, with virtual unlimited powers to detain anyone for any reason without charges or rights whenever the nation was in a state of emergency. Because the dictator Augusto Pinochet maintained Chile in a constant state of emergency, DINA operated above the law and above constitutional restraints. Human rights abuses were common and included torture, rape, and assassination. Despite this record, CIA documents made public in recent years reveal that the director of DINA was a paid “asset” of the CIA. DINA maintained a notorious facility, Colonia Dignidad, a concentration camp where political prisoners were tortured and used as guinea pigs for biological weapons experiments.
The media attacks on Tompkins and his Pumalin Park project would become so severe that one reporter asked in 1994, “What would you say to those who think Pumalin could become another Colonia Dignidad?” Tompkins said the question was absurd, but it was perhaps the most severe accusation that could be made in Chile, for no vestige of the Pinochet regime was more feared and despised.
4. image and reality
1.Region X, also called Los Lagos, is one of fifteen regions in Chile, each designated by a Roman numeral. Regions are the largest political subdivisions in the country, and they are in turn divided into provinces. Much of Patagonian Chile lies in Region X.
2.Argentina and Chile, whose border runs through Tompkins’s land, have bickered since the early 1800s over ownership of three islands in the Beagle Channel at the continent’s southern tip. With valuable oil and fishing rights at stake, an international court finally ruled in favor of Chile in 1977, but Argentina declared the decision void. Soon, opposing naval squadrons were facing off in the Beagle Channel, guns at the ready. War was averted only when Pope John Paul II intervened and insisted that he be allowed to mediate. After six years of acrimonious negotiations, the two countries signed a Treaty of Peace and Friendship at the Vatican. Two decades later, there are still old minefields in remote parkland near the border. When it became known that Tompkins was buying up land in Argentina as well as Chile for conservation, and that he might be enjoying a friendlier relationship with Buenos Aires than with Santiago, the allegation that he posed a national security risk with his extensive holdings on the border did not sound so outlandish to Chileans’ ears.
3.The coverage of Doug Tompkins was by no means universally positive: After granting extensive access to William Langewiesche of the Atlantic Monthly, who would later achieve greater prominence for his superb reporting from the World Trade Center after 9/11, Doug Tompkins was devastated by the dark, unflattering article that resulted in 1999: He was portrayed as a messianic character straight out of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness who loved nature but would just as soon have no people around to disturb it.
5. thinking like aldo
1.In a special message to Congress on February 8, 1972, President Richard Nixon explained his rationale for the Endangered Species Act and other major environmental legislation adopted during his administration:
This is the environmental awakening. It marks a new sensitivity of the American spirit and a new maturity of American public life. It is working a revolution in values, as commitment to responsible partnership with nature replaces cavalier assumptions that we can play God with our surroundings and survive. It is leading to broad reforms in action, as individuals, corporations, government, and civic groups mobilize to conserve resources, to control pollution, to anticipate and prevent emerging environmental problems, to manage the land more wisely, and to preserve wildness.
A summary of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) is contained in “Science and the Endangered Species Act,” National Research Council, 1995. Some excerpts:
The ESA defines three crucial categories: “endangered species,” “threatened” species, and “critical” habitats. Endangered species and their critical habitats receive extremely strong protection; it is illegal to take any endangered species of animal (or plant in some circumstances) in the United States, its territorial waters, or the high seas. In addition to this direct prohibition, Section 7 of the act prohibits any federal action that will jeopardize the future of any endangered species, including any threat to designated critical habitat….
The strength of the ESA lies with its stringent mandates constraining the actions of private parties and public agencies. Once a species is listed as threatened or endangered, it becomes entitled to shelter under the act’s protective umbrella, a far-reaching array of provisions. Critical habitat must be designated “to the maximum extent prudent and determinable” and recovery plans, designed to bring the species to the point where it no longer needs the act’s protections, are required if they will promote the conservation of the species.
The key to the act’s power is its absolute requirement that the decision to list and protect a species must be based solely on the best scientific data available. Economic factors may not be used to “balance” the science. Thus under the ESA a tiny fish can outweigh a massive proposed dam.
2.Scientists have concluded from the fossil record that under normal conditions, and prior to the rise of human civilization, the “background extinction rate” is about one species extinction a year for every million species on earth. No one knows how many separate species of plants, animals, and microbes there are on earth now; but if there were 10 million, this would mean that every year, ten different species would become extinct under normal conditions. However, normal conditions have not existed since the rise of civilization. The evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson of Harvard University has estimated that there are a total of 27,000 extinctions a year worldwide; Niles Eldridge, curator at the American Museum of Natural History, has put the number at 30,000 a year. Birds provide a practical example of these numbers. There are about 10,000 known bird species in the world. At the normal background rate, there should be one bird species extinction every century. But currently, there is one bird species extinction every year—100 times more than “normal,” according to Peter Raven, director of the Missouri Botanical Garden. In a paper he cowrote, “Human impacts on the rates of recent, present and future bird extinctions,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (July 2006), Raven estimates that the bird extinction rate will rise to 1,000 extinctions per century (or ten a year) by the end of the twenty-first century.
6. they never saw it coming
1.The Wise Use Movement is an antienvironmentalist, pro–property rights coalition of grassroots organizations and groups funded by mining, oil, and other resource-extraction industries. Militias, survivalists, and biblical literalists are significant parts of the coalition. Its purpose is to promote the use of nature and natural resources for human benefit and to oppose attempts by the environmental movement to protect nature from human exploitation—thus the term “wise use” of nature. An article of faith of the Wise Use Movement is that rural Americans suffer disproportionately from the consequences of environmental regulation.
The movement was founded by Ron Arnold, a former technical writer specializing in aerospace. He wrote several books criticizing environmentalism, as well as the authorized biography of Ronald Reagan’s first secretary of the interior, James Watt, a hero of the Wise Use Movement.
2.Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill, 437 U.S. 153 (1978). The snail darter, which had no economic or recreational value, was found to be endangered by the Fish and Wildlife Service. The Supreme Court decided that this finding, along with the prevailing scientific view that a hydroelectric dam planned for the Little Tennessee River would destroy the snail darter’s habitat and probably drive it into extinction, compelled the government to halt the dam project. The Supreme Court, in a vote of six to three, rejected arguments that Congress never intended to halt large public works projects already in progress because of concerns about endangered species. This precedent has held ever since, defining the broad and often absolute power of the Endangered Species Act.
Two ironies followed the ruling: Congress passed a law specifically exempting the dam project from the act, and the project was completed, destroying the snail darters’ habitat. However, the species was later found in other river habitats—the dam area turned out not to be the only place where it lived. It was removed from the endangered list in the 1980s.
3.A sampling of the Bush administration’s endangered-species policies that have been challenged or shown to be unlawful:
4.Other major legal victories by the Center for Biological Diversity include the following:
5.From “Report of Investigation: Julie MacDonald, Deputy Assistant Secretary, Fish, Wildlife and Parks,” an undated report made in 2007 by the U.S. Department of the Interior, Office of the Inspector General. According to the report:
MacDonald imposed a policy in which scientific information supporting species protection was kept secret while information that favored delisting species was made public, a tactic that allowed the delisting of the desert-nesting bald eagle, instead of categorizing it as a separate and endangered subspecies (a designation the center eventually got restored).
When MacDonald could not get scientists to alter their findings, she would personally rewrite the scientific reports, at times reaching conclusions exactly opposite of those her own experts had reached.
In other cases, she excised the arguably impartial analyses of government biologists with no stake in the outcome of an endangered-species petition and replaced it with scientifically suspect information supplied by industry sources who were simultaneously engaged in litigation against her own department.
After exchanging e-mails and internal information with an attorney representing business interests, MacDonald rewrote a memo on threats to populations of the bull trout in the Klamath River Basin, where government scientists had recommended carving out 300 river miles of critical habitat to stave off extinction, along with a reexamination of oil and gas leases in the area that could be contributing to the trout’s demise. The original memo refers to two scientific research documents that “clearly identify current and projected threats to the species, including mortality and habitat loss, fragmentation and degradation.” The rewrite by MacDonald removed references to energy leases and asserted: “The identified threats are speculative, and neither document provides substantial scientific information supporting the speculation.” MacDonald was then able to force a reduction in the critical habitat by 86 percent, leaving a protected area of only forty-two miles on the Klamath.
MacDonald also shared internal documents and e-mails with the Pacific Legal Foundation, which bills its program “Humanity First” as the national leader in fighting endangered-species protections.
Employees of the fish and wildlife service reported that they dreaded dealing with this angry, abusive, and sometimes foul-mouthed official; it got so bad that the manager of the California-Nevada Operations Office for Fish and Wildlife, a very senior official in the agency, started disconnecting MacDonald during conference calls when he felt she was too demeaning to his staff, and then would refuse to call her back. The manager made the extraordinary assertion during the inspector general’s investigation that he would not take anything MacDonald said or did at face value.
MacDonald intervened after field researchers with the fish and wildlife service had determined that an endangered bird, the southwest willow flycatcher, had a nesting range of 2.1 miles. MacDonald insisted that the report be rewritten using a reduced range of 1.8 miles, a seemingly arbitrary alteration—except that it was not arbitrary. MacDonald’s revision ensured that the bird’s reported range would not cross into her home state of California.
6.Science was often turned upside down by the Bush administration; that is how it could publicly portray logging operations as saving public forests, weakened air pollution standards as providing for cleaner air, and diminished protections for endangered species as a means of staving off extinctions. Bush’s Environmental Protection Agency overruled its own scientists to block states from imposing more stringent requirements for automobile exhaust and mileage than the federal government’s regulations. Bush’s Justice Department attempted to deny that greenhouse gases could be regulated or even defined as pollution. James Hansen, a climate scientist at NASA and one of the world’s leading experts on global warming, complained that he was censored, that his congressional testimony was doctored by political employees, and that he suffered reprisals for asserting that a tipping point will be reached by 2016 and will make destructive climate change inevitable unless greenhouse gas emissions are substantially reduced before then. Hansen has harshly criticized Bush for spending most of his presidency denying the existence of a global warming crisis, and all of his presidency resisting doing anything about it.
7.The eight decisions reviewed involved the white-tailed prairie dog, Prebel’s meadow jumping mouse (two decisions—delisting and critical habitat protections), arroyo toad, California red-legged frog, Canada lynx, southwestern willow flycatcher, and twelve species of the Hawaiian picture wing fly. Some of the most blatant cases of interference—such as the delisting of the Sacramento split-tail fish, which may have affected MacDonald’s own property—were not reviewed, but are the subjects of center litigation.
8.Julie MacDonald’s handling of scientific questions was not unique in the fish and wildlife service during the Bush administration—other political appointees in her office made the politicization of science pervasive in the agencies responsible for the Endangered Species Act. This was documented when the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and the Union of Concerned Scientists sent a forty-two-question survey about scientific integrity to more than 1,400 biologists, ecologists, botanists, and other working scientists in field offices of the fish and wildlife service nationwide. The agency took the extraordinary (and possibly unconstitutional) step of forbidding employees to answer the anonymous surveys, even on their own time, but nearly 30 percent responded anyway (this would be a high response rate even without such orders). The survey revealed:
Beyond the science of extinction, politicization, manipulation, and censorship of science were pervasive during the Bush administration. Pressure on scientists has also been documented in scientific reports and findings involving stem-cell research, the Plan B contraceptive, childhood lead poisoning, the health effects of the 9/11 attacks, prescription drug safety, the ineffectiveness of abstinence-only sex education, the dangers to whales posed by navy sonar tests, the dangers of certain pesticides, and, perhaps most of all, global warming. Even a bipartisan expert report on voter fraud—which disproved talking points of the White House and the Republican Party about the pervasiveness of voting fraud while supporting the Democratic Party’s claims about intimidation of minority voters in some areas of the country—was censored to suggest conclusions that favored the Bush administration’s political views.
An excellent compendium of cases of manipulation of science by the Bush administration, The A to Z Guide of Political Interference in Science, was compiled by the Union of Concerned Scientists and can be found on the Internet at www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/interference/a-to-z-guide-to-political.html.
7. the polar bear express
1.There are an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 polar bears in nineteen distinct populations; about 60 percent of the animals are in Canada. The population had dwindled to half that number because of overhunting, but an international treaty limiting the hunting of polar bears had then allowed the population to grow. Opponents to the Endangered Species Act have seized on this increase as evidence that more stringent protections are unnecessary. But by 2006, five of the nineteen populations were declining again, and loss of sea ice habitat is the primary culprit. (Sources: United States Geological Survey, Findings on Polar Bears, nine reports and executive summary released September 7, 2007; and testimony of Kassie Siegel, April 2, 2008, U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.)
2.Siegel’s testimony, particularly her unvarnished portrait of lawlessness at the White House, seemed to shock some of the senators. Until the shift from a Republican to a Democratic majority in Congress in January 2007, hearings on such topics tended to have a very different tone. More often than not, they had been convened to call global warming the “second largest hoax ever played on the American people,” as the former Republican chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, famously declared. (The largest hoax, according to Inhofe, was the idea that the Constitution establishes the separation of church and state; he also liked to compare environmentalists to Nazis and the Environmental Protection Agency to the Gestapo.)
Inhofe, now in the minority, joined other Republicans on the committee in attacking Siegel, claiming she was twisting endangered-species law and trying to paralyze the United States with an unprecedented regulatory burden, forcing the fish and wildlife service to consult on every power plant, road, and building project that might contribute, however remotely, to global warming. Siegel responded that there would be no paralysis or excessive regulation, because federal agencies already conduct environmental and endangered-species reviews for their projects all the time. All that listing the polar bear would do is force those agency reviews—and force the White House—to stop ignoring global warming as part of the decision-making process.
3.Kempthorne was referring to the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which in every way that matters for the polar bear is far weaker than the Endangered Species Act, particularly because only the latter allows for the protection of critical habitat.
4.“To make sure that the Endangered Species Act is not misused to regulate global climate change,”
Kempthorne said in his press conference on May 14, 2008, his department would “issue guidance to Fish and Wildlife Service staff that the best scientific data available today cannot make a causal connection between harm to listed species or their habitats and greenhouse gas emissions from a specific facility, or resource development project, or government action.” Kempthorne appears to be arguing here that because greenhouse gas comes from many sources rather than a single source, the Endangered Species Act has no power to protect anything. The argument is flawed; he could just as well assert that the act cannot be used to punish one hunter who illegally kills a polar bear, because there are many other hunters who won’t be caught.
Kempthorne’s position resembles the “many causes” rationale that cigarette companies rely on when they are sued by cancer patients: Smokers as a group may get lung cancer at horrific rates, but this doesn’t mean that an individual smoker who gets cancer can prove cigarettes, rather than some other factors, are at fault. This argument ignores the fact that reductions in the production of cigarette smoke—or greenhouse gases—over time and across many cases, will inarguably save the lives of humans and polar bears. There is no legal reason why the Endangered Species Act cannot be used to achieve such a result—this is why Kempthorne also announced that he would order a “commonsense” rewriting of regulations implementing the act “to provide greater certainty that this listing will not set backdoor climate policy outside our normal system of political accountability.”
This was a revealing admission that contradicted Kempthorne’s position on the impropriety of regulating climate change through the act: If the regulations have to be rewritten to prevent regulation of greenhouse gases, that means they have for the last thirty-five years allowed it.
As the Supreme Court ruled in 2007 in rebuffing the Bush administration’s refusal to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, “Agencies do not generally resolve massive problems in one fell swoop, but instead whittle away over time.”
5.Even conservative, antiregulatory analysts—including those who opposed using the Endangered Species Act to regulate climate change—saw Kempthorne’s position as internally inconsistent and, on its face, illegal. Kevin A.
Hassett, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote that Kempthorne’s position was “legally and ethically indefensible.” On May 23, 2008, in an article in the Financial Post headed “Bush’s polar bear legal disaster,” Hassett wrote: “The fact is, if they believed that inaction was the right policy, then they should have refused to list the bear as threatened. It’s ludicrous to try to have it both ways. Historians will doubtless use this cynical decision as a canonical example of what was wrong with this administration.” Hassett predicted that the Center for Biological Diversity and its colleagues would sue Kempthorne and win, and that the case would “almost surely go down in history as the turning point in the global-warming debate.”
6.The center was not completely alone in its negative view of the agreement between the Tejon Ranch Company and environmental groups. In addition to local Sierra Club members, who have decried the agreement, a group of eleven prominent condor researchers and past and present members of the condor recovery team harshly criticized the agreement’s likely effect on the endangered birds as well as the secretive process that led to the agreement.
Excerpts from the group’s open letter to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger:
As former and present participants in the condor conservation program we are firmly opposed to any development proposals for condor Critical Habitat, and we know of no evidence to support claims that the recent agreement is generally endorsed by condor experts. In fact, the agreement is almost uniformly opposed by condor experts who are independent of compensation from Tejon Ranch. Proponents have misrepresented the agreement by not revealing these negative aspects to the public, a problem we try to remedy here.
If built, this development would result in substantial harm to condors, posing a significant threat to the recovery of this well known and highly revered species. That any environmental organization might agree to such consequences is alarming and raises troubling questions about how the recent agreement was reached….
Condors are sensitive to many direct and indirect threats from human activities and they uniformly avoided urban and suburban areas in historical times. A major housing development in the heart of one of their most important use areas simply should not be permitted.
Incredibly, private environmental organizations with no special authority and with very limited experience with condor issues have now agreed to a deal that would allow substantial residential development of condor Critical Habitat. Sadly this deal was based on secret negotiations from which virtually all experienced condor experts were excluded. This is the worst sort of deal-making imaginable, particularly for a species that has become a public trust….
Allowing Tejon Mountain Village to be built in condor Critical Habitat would represent a victory only for unnecessary trophy-home development in the wrong place. This development would be a sad defeat for a species in which society has invested tremendous conservation resources, and an even worse defeat for the future of Critical Habitat protection for all endangered species.
These are no grounds for celebration.
The letter was signed by Dr. Noel F. R. Snyder, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) biologist in charge of condor field studies, 1980–1986, and a member of the Condor Recovery Team, 1980–1985; David A. Clendenen, condor researcher and USFWS lead biologist for condors 1982–1997, and member of Condor Recovery Team 1995–2000; Janet A. Hamber, condor biologist, Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, 1976–present; Dr. Eric V. Johnson, field condor researcher, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, 1978–1986; Dr. Allan Mee, postdoctoral condor researcher for Zoological Society of San Diego, 2001–2006; Dr. Vicky J. Meretsky, field biologist, Condor Research Center, 1984–1986; Bruce K. Palmer, USFWS California Condor Recovery Program Coordinator, 2000–2004; Anthony Prieto, condor field biologist, 1999–present; Dr. Arthur C. Risser, Jr., Condor Recovery Team member, 1980–1985; Fred C. Sibley, USFWS biologist in charge of condor field studies, 1966–1969; and William D. Toone, Condor Recovery Team member, 1984–1992.
8. a plum in the wood basket
1.Information on Roxanne Quimby throughout this section is drawn from the author’s interview with her, supplemented by biographical material from Burt’s Bees and her charitable foundations, and published interviews she has granted over the years.
2.The land that was to become Maine had a stormy, war-torn history. It was claimed at varying times by the British and French monarchies; ownership and boundaries were fought over during the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812. The land eventually became part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, then was set up as a separate territory. Maine became the twenty-third state, admitted to the union in 1820, though portions of its boundaries still remained in flux until 1839, when the governor of Maine declared war on Great Britain over a border clash with Newfoundland. This was the only time in American history that a state declared war on a foreign nation; the dispute was resolved by treaty without any combat.
3.The Seven Sisters were International Paper, Scott Paper, Great Northern, Diamond International, Champion International, Georgia-Pacific, and Mead Paper (later MeadWestvaco).
4.The winding down of the timber industry in the Maine Woods initially led to opportunities for conservation of natural areas, according to an analysis by Sara A. Clark and Peter Howell, “From Diamond International to Plum Creek: The Era of Large Landscape Conservation in the Northern Forest,” University of Maine, Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center (2007).
5.Congress succeeded, however, in enacting a law that forbade the president to designate any additional monuments in Wyoming without the approval of the state’s congressional delegation. That restriction, which applies only to Wyoming, is still in effect.
6.The account of Plum Creek’s lobbying and the meeting with Julie MacDonald is based on evidence and memos cited in a “Notice of Intent to Sue,” dated August 8, 2007, filed by the Natural Resources Council of Maine, the Center for Biological Diversity, and other environmental organizations; the testimony of Daryl DeJoy, executive director of the Wildlife Alliance of Maine, before the Maine Land Use Regulatory Commission; “Canada Lynx Protection: How not to make decisions,” Kennebec Journal (August 1, 2007); and statements by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service director, H. Dale Hall.
9. bees and trees
1.This early recycling program was canceled when it became clear that the benefits of recycling were outweighed by the environmental harm caused by packaging and mailing the tiny tubes.
2.Carbon offsets are an increasingly popular method of dealing with the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming—either as a voluntary purchase by companies and individuals, as in the case of Burt’s Bees, or as part of the “compliance market,” in which companies and governments purchase offsets to meet mandates for capping greenhouse gas emissions. “Cap and trade” proposals for dealing with greenhouse gas emissions, such as those California is planning to institute, rely on carbon offsets.
A carbon offset is a kind of financial instrument; one offset represents a reduction of one metric ton of carbon dioxide or its equivalent in other greenhouse gases, such as methane. The average car getting thirty miles to the gallon and being driven 12,000 miles a year produces about 3.5 tons of carbon dioxide, so it would require 3.5 offsets to balance it out and make the driver “carbon neutral”—$20 to $50, depending on the project the offset is used to finance. Burt’s Bees purchases about $25,000 worth of offsets annually.
10. your land is my land
1.All quoted testimony is from the public hearing transcript for Zoning Petition 707, Maine Land Use Regulation Commission.
11. andy frank and the power of the plug
1.Quotes and biographical information on Andy Frank are based on the author’s interviews, as well as Frank’s numerous published papers, articles, and speeches, and his public appearances.
2.According to the Internal Revenue Service, these tax credits were available for the following 2008 hybrid models:
Chevrolet Malibu hybrid: $1,300
Chevrolet Tahoe Hybrid SUV: $2,200
Ford Escape Hybrid: $3,000
GMC Yukon Hybrid: $2,200
Honda Civic Hybrid: $2,100
Lexus RX 400h: $1,100
Lexus LS 600h: $900
Nissan Altima Hybrid: $2,350
Saturn Aura Green Line: $1,300
Saturn Vue Hybrid: $1,550
Toyota Camry Hybrid: $1,300 if purchased before April 1, 2008; $650 if purchased before October 1; no rebate after October 1
Toyota Prius: $1,575 before April 1; $787 before October 1; no rebate after October 1
The rebate was designed to phase out for the most popular models of hybrids, which also happen to be the most fuel-efficient models—creating incentives to buy less fuel-efficient cars.
3.The Ford Model T, which at one point had 50 percent of the vehicle market in North America, had the added disadvantage of a gravity-fed fuel system that worked poorly on hills. Common practice for Model T owners was to stop, turn around, and drive backward up hills to avoid stalling. The Baker Electric had no issues with hills.
4.“Edison Batteries for New Ford Cars: Automobile Man Discusses Possibilities of New Storage Systems with Its Inventor,” The New York Times (January 11, 1914). According to the article, Henry Ford also said, “Mr. Edison and I have been working for some years on an electric automobile which would be cheap and practicable. Cars have been built for experimental purposes, and we are satisfied now that the way is clear to success.”
5.“Edison’s Latest Marvel—The Electric Country House: Any One May Now Have an Electric Plant in His Own Cellar at a Comparatively Small Cost Which Will Light and Heat It and Make Housework Easy,” The New York Times (September 15, 1912).
6.J. R. Anderson Jr., “Automobiles Complete Long Endurance Run: Trip of 1,000 Miles Including Mount Washington Climb Proves That Edison Battery Is No Longer a Myth,” The New York Times (October 16, 1910). The article reported dramatically on the car’s performance and its power source: “It seems incredible that the power of streams and coal can be changed to an invisible force capable of being stored in the little steel cans of this battery to be drawn on at will.”
7.Although it was never used extensively in cars, Edison and his heirs continued to manufacture his breakthrough nickel-iron battery quite profitably and practically unchanged for sixty years. Today it is largely forgotten, but it proved to be the most durable battery ever designed—a testament to the inventor’s ability to devise technology far ahead of his time. Except for poor performance in cold weather, the Edison batteries remain superior to those used in modern gasoline cars; they were favored by industries needing long-lasting power sources in inaccessible locations—remote railroad signals and switches, mining operations, construction equipment, forklifts. Edison batteries more than fifty years old have been found in such applications, still working at nearly their original efficiency.
The late-night television host Jay Leno, an avid car collector, has a 1909 Baker Electric vehicle that still runs with its original Edison batteries.
In the 1970s, the company was finally bought by Exide, which stopped manufacturing the Edison batteries a short time later—not because anything was wrong with them, but because they lasted so long that there were no repeat sales. They were deemed to be too good to be good for business. A Chinese manufacturer still makes the same battery, using the same original (1910) internal design, but the batteries have not been used in vehicles since Edison’s day, and they were largely forgotten by researchers who have sought to revive the electric car from time to time over the intervening decades.
8.A shady consortium, the Electric Vehicle Company, made matters worse, attempting to monopolize the electric taxi business in American cities through what was then called the Lead Cab Trust, named after the lead that was an essential ingredient in the car batteries. The company sold more than 2,000 cabs, but the business sank because of poor quality control at the factory and antitrust problems in court. The company then acquired and attempted to enforce the notorious Selden patent of 1895—a patented description of a liquid hydrocarbon–fueled vehicle. On the basis of this patent, the company sought to collect royalties from all car manufacturers. Some carmakers complied, but Henry Ford sued and won a hugely publicized judgment in 1911. This outcome made him a populist hero at the time and cast the electric car consortium—which by then was bankrupt—as an enemy of progress and of the common man.
9.Gladwin Hill, “Transit Line Plot Laid to Nine Firms: U.S. Indictment Says Rule of Network in 16 States Sought—GM, Firestone Named,” Los Angeles Times (April 11, 1947); “Transit Lines Found Guilty in Trust Case,” Los Angeles Times (March 13, 1949); “Transit Guilt in Bus Line Case Upheld,” Los Angeles Times (June 4, 1951).
10.In recent years, the idea of an automotive conspiracy to kill electric streetcars has been derided as paranoia, notwithstanding the conviction in 1949, later upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. Instead, it is argued that trolleys, many of which ran on surface streets where they were slowed by snarled traffic, had become money losers in the age of the automobile—slow, cumbersome, and unable to compete. Even if that were true—and in most locations, it was not—this was a situation created by the presence of automobiles, and by civic leaders’ failure to design traffic flows around existing trolley lines, rather than pitting cars against them. A company that wanted the trolley lines it purchased to stay in business would have insisted on such traffic engineering, and companies with the clout of GM, Standard Oil, and the others would have received such consideration if they demanded it. But they did not.
Another important factor was the suburban housing boom after World War II—and the failure of trolley lines controlled by auto companies to extend service to the new communities. Earlier in the century, the electric rail lines had always grown along with development, but after the war, new highways were built instead. (These highways could have incorporated light rail but usually did not, as the rail companies never sought it.) Suddenly, but not coincidentally, the nation’s new suburbanites found they needed to be two-car households in order to avoid having most of the family stranded in the hinterland during the workday.
11.From Who Killed the Electric Car? (2006), a documentary film written and directed by Chris Paine.
12.Ovonics Battery Company, founded by the inventor Stanford Ovshinsky, finally succeeded in building on and exceeding Edison’s old nickel battery, devising a new, better-performing large-format nickel metal hydride battery for a new generation of electric cars in the 1990s. The battery was announced with great fanfare. But the hoopla ended when rights to the battery were bought by General Motors and then by Chevron Oil. The batteries have been mostly unavailable for use in all-electric vehicles since then.
As GM and the other automakers fought the ZEV mandate, there was clear evidence that the battery technology was better than they were letting on. An upstart company in Massachusetts, Solectria, had used an old contract that predated the sale to GM to obtain the Ovonics batteries. It used those batteries to build a four-passenger car that resembled the streamlined EV1, and that had been crash-tested with impressive results: its light but very strong construction seemed to make it one of the safest cars on the road.
Most remarkably, the battery technology that GM claimed was inadequate for public consumption allowed the Solectria sedan to travel 375 miles on a single charge on a test track—a revolutionary accomplishment that should have validated electric vehicles once and for all.
The car had plenty of room, a full-size trunk, air-conditioning, and stereo—everything consumers demanded. In 1997, hoping to generate publicity and interest investors, Solectria followed up with a real-world drive between Boston and New York in stop-and-go traffic, a 217-mile journey that included a wrong turn, again completed on a single charge—something the big automakers adamantly claimed could not be done. As recently as April 2008, the head of research and development for GM publicly asserted that the “best battery known to mankind” could power a car only a small fraction of that distance—about forty miles—before running out of juice. That has been the public position of the major carmakers since Edison’s day, and no amount of proof to the contrary seems to change it.
The Solectria project died when California killed its electric car mandate, along with the emerging market the small company had been counting on to introduce its revolutionary car.
13.The story of the California Air Resources Board’s ZEV mandate is one of failed resolve. The board bowed to industry pressure and extended deadlines for increased electric car production in 1998 and again in 2001, as the car manufacturers pressed a lawsuit against the mandate. By the time the deadlines were relaxed, GM had produced 660 EV1s, Toyota had made a similar number of Toyota RAV4-EVs, and other manufacturers had contributed smaller numbers of vehicles to the ZEV fleet. Other states had expressed interest in adopting the same mandate, but the companies stopped making the cars and were letting the existing leases run out, even though California had only delayed, not abandoned, its mandate for tens of thousands of zero emissions cars.
Many of the consumers who had leased the existing electric cars came to the board to sing their praises—the speed, power, and zero emissions made them the perfect choice for California, they argued. “It’s the best car I’ve ever owned,” said one owner of a Toyota electric, a retired courtroom reporter, Linda Nicholes. She was so enthusiastic that she became president of a nonprofit electrical vehicle advocacy group, Plug-In America, which grew out of the advocacy and lobbying efforts to save the ZEV mandate; the group’s executive director, Chelsea Sexton, had been part of the EV1 sales force until GM fired them all.
A showdown came on April 24, 2003. Although the vast majority of witnesses, many of them drivers of electric cars, urged the board to keep its original zero emissions mandate, the air resources board voted to do as the carmakers requested, gutting the electric car program and shifting its emphasis to the carmakers’ preferred new alternative fuel, hydrogen. Instead of building hundreds of thousands of nonpolluting electric vehicles immediately, the carmakers would be allowed to fulfill their near-term obligations to cleaner air by building as few as 250 prototype hydrogen fuel cell cars, along with some modest hybrids that needed to travel only ten all-electric miles to pass muster—a ludicrous standard that Andy Frank had been beating since the 1970s. Then in eleven years, the companies each would have to put 25,000 ZEV hydrogen vehicles on the road. The carmakers happily promised to do this. The meeting was long and contentious, particularly as the board chairman gave unlimited time to the car companies’ representatives to testify, but mercilessly cut off advocates of the electric car after three minutes each. Frank advocated in vain for plug-in hybrids, as he had been doing throughout the long delays and complaints from automakers.
The board majority did not question why two industries that had steadfastly resisted introducing new technologies to improve cars, mileage, and emissions would suddenly embrace a radical alternative—hydrogen—skating over the fact that the few hydrogen prototypes then in existence were fabulously expensive and could not come close to matching batteries in performance, cost, or range.
Alan Lloyd, who was then the chairman of the air resources board, led the charge to scrap the electric car program and won the majority of votes he needed. It turned out he had also accepted another position four months earlier: He was named chair of the California Fuel Cell Partnership, a public-private initiative to promote hydrogen cars that was dominated by the major automakers.
12. can a malibu pool cleaner save the world?
1.From the author’s interview with Terry Tamminen.
2.Arnold Schwarzenegger’s gubernatorial campaign of 2003 included an “Action Plan for California’s Environment,” written by Tamminen. The plan began with this summary:
California’s economic future depends significantly on the quality of our environment. We face serious environmental challenges, which have a profound impact on public health and the economy. “Jobs vs. the environment” is a false choice. Overwhelming evidence demonstrates that clean air and water result in a more productive workforce, and a healthier economy, which will contribute to a balanced state budget. Moreover, it is children who suffer disproportionate impacts of environmental toxins. Studies show that children who live near freeways, for example, suffer significantly higher asthma rates and learning disabilities. This administration will protect and restore California’s air, water and landscapes so that all the people of California can enjoy the natural beauty that is California.
Specific campaign promises included an initiative to cut air pollution by 50 percent; to invest in hydrogen fuel cells and a “hydrogen highway” for a new generation of cars; to purchase clean vehicles for the state’s large fleet of government cars and trucks; to launch a green building initiative statewide; and to promote solar and renewable energy at the utility level and through an extensive rooftop solar initiative, with the goal of producing 20 percent of the state’s electricity through clean renewables by 2010, and 33 percent by 2020.
After the election, all the promised programs were set in motion. The goals regarding air pollution and greenhouse gases have become more ambitious, though the renewable energy targets for 2010 appear to have been unrealistic. The hydrogen highway has stalled, owing to the inability to develop practical, affordable hydrogen cars.
3.The CAFE standards regulate the fuel economy—miles per gallon—for the entire fleet of cars produced by each manufacturer. The regulation sets minimum standards, which, under President Carter, constituted an aggressive target for improving fuel efficiency. As a result, the fuel efficiency of American cars rose from an average of 18 miles per gallon in 1977 to 27 miles per gallon in 1984—a 50 percent increase. Standards were relaxed by Ronald Reagan, and fuel economy remained unchanged through 2007. A major flaw in the law was that it exempted sport utility vehicles (SUVs) from the standards; that is why American carmakers marketed them so aggressively.
In 2007, in a case brought by the Center for Biological Diversity, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the exemption as “arbitrary and capricious.” In 2002, a study by the National Academy of Sciences found that Americans would have consumed 14 percent more gasoline without the CAFE standards.
4.The Kyoto Protocol is part of the United Nations’ framework convention on Climate Change, established as a worldwide effort to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. The protocol has been ratified by 182 nations and all developed nations, as well as the European Union as combined entity—with the United States as a lone holdout. Each nation has varying targets for global warming reductions, but the international average for the world’s 36 top developed nations is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5 percent below 1990 levels (which would be about a 15 percent reduction from 2008 levels) by the year 2012. After 2012, Kyoto expires and is supposed to be superseded by a new international agreement. Preliminary plans call for a global cap and trade system in which all countries, developed and undeveloped, must participate, with the goal of cutting greenhouse gases in half by the year 2050.
5.The idea of local, regional, and state efforts to battle climate change has caught on as a result of federal inaction. As Tamminen worked on a state program, a parallel effort was getting under way involving hundreds of American cities that had been persuaded to combat climate change by means of green building codes, clean energy, recycling programs, and converting municipal vehicles to low-emission vehicles. This locally based program reached a critical mass in 2005, when the actor and environmentalist Robert Redford convened the first of several “Sundance summits” for leading American mayors at his eco-resort and conference center in Utah. Redford had argued persuasively to mayors across America that although policymakers in Washington might be paralyzed, the mayors had the power to identify and eliminate sources of greenhouse gases within their jurisdictions.
13. the turtle lady
1.The seven species of sea turtles are the flatback, green turtle, hawksbill, leatherback, loggerhead, olive ridley, and Kemp’s ridley. It was once thought that the black turtle was an eighth species, but DNA analysis shows that it is a variant of the green turtle. The largest of the sea turtles is the leatherback, the only sea turtle that has no shell; instead, its protection consists of bony plates covered with skin. The leatherback, hawksbill and Kemp’s ridley turtles are listed as critically endangered. All sea turtles can sense the earth’s magnetic poles and use them to navigate; this ability enables them to return to their original nesting place. They are among the most ancient living reptile species.
2.National Research Council, “Decline of the sea turtles: causes and prevention” (1990).
3.This practice, known as bottom trawling or benthic trawling, is so destructive that in 2006 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration banned it in more than 150,000 marine waters off the West Coast of the United States in order to protect important fisheries and habitats. The practice was curtailed in other U.S. waters as well, but the restrictions did not stop bottom trawling for shrimp in the Gulf of Mexico.
14. wild man
1.Source: IRS Form 990 for the years 2000 and 2007, Turner Foundation.
2.Source: United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, “Livestock’s Long Shadow—Environmental Issues and Options” (November 2006). According to the analysis, raising cattle—including land use practices—contributes more to global warming than transportation does. Livestock use 30 percent of the earth’s entire land surface, mostly in the form of pasture, but the figure also includes 33 percent of the world’s arable land, used to produce livestock feed. The creation of pastures is a major reason for deforestation; of the lost forestland in the Amazon, 70 percent has been turned over to grazing.
Livestock accounts for 9 percent of the word’s human-caused carbon dioxide (CO2), but other greenhouse gases are far worse: livestock produces 37 percent of human-induced methane (which pound for pound causes twenty-three times as much global warming as CO2) and 65 percent of human-related nitrous oxide (a manure-related gas that causes 296 times as much global warming as CO2).
3.According to the United States Department of Agriculture, on the basis of 2008 estimates, the United States consumed more beef than any other country, 12.8 million metric tons. China, with its much larger population, was second, with 7.7 million metric tons. While the United States as a whole is the undisputed beef consumption leader, it is second in the world in per capita beef consumption, behind Argentina, according to the USDA. Argentineans consume about 65 kilograms per person, while U.S. citizens consume 43.8 kilograms (these figures are based on 2006 statistics).
4.Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin, “Diet, Energy and Global Warming,” submitted to Earth Interactions (May 2005).
epilogue: schemers and dreamers
1.Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press (1969). Fuller, best-known for inventing the geodesic dome, was an early thinker and writer on the exhaustion of resources and the importance of building sustainability into human society and systems.
2.James Hansen, Makiko Sato, Pushker Kharecha, David Beerling, Valerie Masson-Delmotte, Mark Pagani, Maureen Raymo, Dana L. Royer, and James C. Zachos, “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?” (2008). Draft paper; the authors are climate scientists.
3.See World Meteorological Organization, “Climate Information for Adaptation and Development Needs” (2007); P. J. Webster, G. J. Holland, J. A. Curry, and H. R. Chang, Science, “Changes in Tropical Cyclone Number, Duration, and Intensity in a Warming Environment” (September 2005); Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Summary of Findings (February 2, 2007); Environmental Defense Fund, “Global Warming’s Increasingly Visible Impacts” (2006); and Steven W. Running, “Is Global Warming Causing More, Larger Wildfires?” Science (August 18, 2006).
4.Robèrt and his group of fifty scientists reached a consensus on how to pursue a national program of sustainability after twenty-one drafts of their research paper, which addressed the scientific and social issues in detail. This consensus was then distilled into four principles for building a sustainable society, “The Natural Step”:
The four principles may seem a matter of common sense, but modern civilization has—in the twenty-first century more than ever—consistently ignored them and, for the most part, built a human enterprise that is based on violating all four of them, extensively and habitually. Consider America’s preferred form of transportation, the car, as just one example of how far we live from these principles. Even in an age of increasingly scarce and expensive gasoline, America bases an entire economy on vehicles that waste most of the energy their engines create, and that annually spew into the atmosphere millions of tons of poison—including substances known to cause cancer in humans at the molecular level, and ruinous climate change on a planetary scale. An entire ancillary industry—armies of lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, industry trade groups, labor unions, advertising firms, film companies—exists solely to convince Americans that their cars’ constant waste, pollution, exhaustion of fossil fuels, and daily self-poisoning is a good, sensible, vital, sexy idea, and that we should even subsidize it with our taxes.
5.Climate Change Performance Index 2008, Germanwatch, http://www.germanwatch.org/klima/ccpi.htm.