Peter Lehner's Blog: Health and the Environment

Saving Forests One Tree at a Time

2010-04-14T19:24:42Z

News about forest conservation is often filled with sobering facts about the damage caused by deforestation.

Just recently a United Nations study found that globally we are losing the equivalent of an area the size of Costa Rica each year to deforestation. This is scary news; as we lose our forests so go countless species, some still yet to be discovered, and even more greenhouse gas emissions are released into the atmosphere.

Encouragingly though, the UN study also found that targeted efforts have helped slow the global rate of deforestation. While much remains to be done to save our forests, we are seeing that we can make a difference.

Last year, with the support of our members, NRDC's Revive a Rainforest initiative planted 30,000 trees in Costa Rica's Central Valley. Our local partner CATIE, a regional leader in tropical resource management, will use this project as a model for farmers, rural communities and organizations interested in reforestation initiatives.

Photo Credit: CATIE

I helped plant one of the first trees and I'm heartened to see how big the trees in our Member Rainforest have already grown -- from just a few inches less than a year ago to nearly three feet tall.

Our reforestation initiative is also now seeking to restore the biodiversity of 50 acres of former cattle pasture and plantation land on Costa Rica's Osa Peninsula. Working with the Friends of the Osa (or FOO), NRDC’s Revive a Rainforest initiative will now plant up to 50 different species of trees and plants.

Photo Credit: Tina Lee & Kristine Bucchianeri

I've been travelling and working in Costa Rica for many years but had never had the chance to visit the Osa Peninsula until last year. I was amazed by the abundance of wildlife -- in one afternoon I saw toucans, four different species of monkeys, hundreds of dolphins in the Golfo Dulce and trees full of scarlet macaws -- including one that was very friendly! The Osa is one of the wildest places on Earth and we must do all we can to protect it from the persisting threat of unsustainable agricultural and expanding real estate development.

We can restore areas that have lost their biodiversity and recreate the type of habitat where animals such as the jaguar and spider monkey can thrive again. The goal of our project with FOO is to do precisely that.

The project site will be a living laboratory, especially for young people in the Osa to learn first-hand the importance of protecting forest biodiversity. We're excited about these projects and very grateful to the NRDC members who have supported our efforts to revive Costa Rica's rainforests.

And I'm happy to say that The Walt Disney Company is also excited about our project and has selected the Cerro Osa Restoration project as one of five habitat restoration efforts that will receive support through Disney's Friends for Change: Project Green.

Through the Friends for Change website kids can learn how to help the planet through simple every day actions - involving their friends and tracking their collective impact. Kids can also vote to help Disney decide how much support each habitat project will receive.

Disney’s initiative means that starting at an early age kids will have a real opportunity to see and learn just how important small steps like planting a new tree can be.

In fact, as we are discovering, these small steps can collectively revive a rainforest.

Driving Toward Clean Air at Our Nation’s Ports

2009-10-27T21:41:31Z

This post was co-written with Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club. NRDC and Sierra Club are members of the Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports, supporters of the clean truck program.

"Cancer alley." That's what many Southern Californians call the 23-mile rail and truck corridor connecting our nation's largest seaport to massive distribution centers east of Downtown Los Angeles. In California alone, diesel air pollution from ships, trucks and trains kills more than 3,700 people every year -- more than died in the 9-11 attacks.

Despite this stunning death-toll, the American Trucking Association is aggressively trying to dismantle a successful program adopted a year ago this month by the Port of Los Angeles that is well on its way to reducing diesel emissions from port trucks by 80 percent, and establishing a model that diesel-afflicted communities around the nation are beginning to follow.

California's diesel body count may be highest, but concentrations of cancer, asthma and other diseases caused by air pollution occur wherever large amounts of cargo move by ship, truck and train. The victims tend to be poor people of color who live or work alongside our ports, freeways and cargo hubs. But toxic diesel smoke knows no boundaries. It follows the wind, depositing carcinogenic particulate matter in the lungs of rich and poor alike.

By banning the oldest trucks outright, putting cleaner trucks on the road, and creating powerful rules to move cargo greenly, Los Angeles officials have removed 2,000 of the dirtiest rigs from service and helped business put nearly 6,000 clean-burning and alternative fuel trucks on the road.

The landmark clean truck program at the Port of Los Angeles sets the standard because it ensures that trucking companies that can afford to meet increasingly stringent environmental standards are responsible for clean-up, instead of independent truck drivers, who have been historically underpaid. Under the program, trucking companies agree to meet environmental, safety, and security standards in exchange for access to port terminals.

However, the trucking industry is spending millions of dollars to undermine this progress and the progress of like-minded ports nationwide that want to adopt clean-up plans. In an ongoing lawsuit against the Port of Los Angeles, the trucking industry is trying to weaken the progressive clean truck program, arguing that the port has no authority to reform port trucking operations that occur on its own property or even cure inefficiencies that affect the bottom line. Industry representatives go so far as to argue that the port should be barred from verifying whether trucks comply with clean air standards when entering port facilities.

Municipal airports and privately-owned stadiums place conditions on those who want to do business there, increasing the odds that vendors operate safely and consistently provide a high level of service. Ports should feel empowered to do the same.

The litigation by the trucking industry relies on obscure federal law that wasn't designed to restrict the right of local governments to protect their residents' health. That's why Congress should act now to clarify the right of states and municipalities to protect their citizens from the lethal byproduct of cargo transport.

Los Angeles has survived these challenges so far, but the specter of intense litigation with the trucking industry may dissuade other ports and municipalities from pursuing similar programs to reduce diesel pollution and save lives. Mayors Bloomberg and Booker of the Ports of New York and Newark respectively, Mayor Ritter of the Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale, Port of Oakland Mayor Dellums, and officials in Virginia, Charleston, Houston, and Tacoma know that unchecked diesel pollution degrades and shortens lives and causes tens of billions of dollars in health-related costs every year. They are all calling to regulate and reduce truck-produced pollution at their ports.

Our collective failure to protect the public from diesel pollution is a moral outrage and a shame on our nation. Fortunately, the Obama Administration appreciates that Americans want and deserve clean air and the sustainable jobs that accompany it. In the case of Los Angeles, there's a proven track record of success. As we celebrate the program's first year, Congress should embrace this local green-growth model and take action to protect it.

A Goal for Copenhagen: Keep the Focus on Enforcement

2009-09-23T20:50:20Z

Few seem willing to address the issue openly, but one of the toughest issues to address when delegates gather in Copenhagen in December for the global conference on climate change will be governance. Many developing nations attending have stressed and under-funded civil systems. Others are torn by armed conflict and human suffering that push enforcement of environmental laws to the fringes of the political priority list. As an experienced environmental prosecutor, I know how hard it is to achieve compliance particularly with environmental laws which are often perceived as not posing the type of immediate threat to public safety that ordinary crimes are -- even in a stable democracy such as the United States. I also know what happens without enforcement: Very little.

Beyond my experience as a prosecutor, I also have a personal connection with a story that proves this point. That experience is with the tale of two modest Central American nations, Costa Rica and Nicaragua -- neighbors who share a long common border, similar environmental laws -- and vastly different records of enforcement. I've watched this tale unfold first-hand for nearly 30 years during frequent visits to the region to help with family businesses in Nicaragua and Costa Rica. (The family coffee farm there is Rainforest Alliance-certified.)

When economic expansion, cheap credit for cattle and laws favoring deforestation all contributed to a dramatic loss of Costa Rica's lush tropical rain forest between 1950 and the mid-1980s, alarm bells went off in the corridors of power. Vast stretches of remaining public forest land were placed under protection, national parks were expanded and reforestation projects launched. With a well-established rule of law and functioning government institutions, the protection worked. A quarter of the nation's territory is national forest land. Forests on privately-owned land are protected with the help of FUNDECOR (Foundation for the Development of the Central Volcanic Mountain Range), a non-profit foundation established to protect Costa Rica's tropical forests. Under a FUNDECOR program, revenue from taxes on gasoline and tourism are used to pay farmers not to cut forested areas of their land. Those monitoring the program say the compliance rate of private landowners is high -- 99 percent, according to one estimate. Moreover, although the situation is far from perfect, in many areas of the country, people really do comply with laws restricting logging.

As a result, Costa Rica's rainforest, which had shrunk from about 60 percent to around a quarter of the country's land area between 1950 and the mid-1980s, began growing again and today once again covers over half the country. Shrewd political leadership coupled with some slick marketing has leveraged the richness of those forests into one of the country's biggest commercial assets. Eco-tourism today is a huge money-spinner and President Oscar Arias talks about a new goal to make Costa Rica the first nation in the world to become carbon neutral by 2021, in time for the country's 200th birthday.

The ingredients to this success: political stability, functioning institutions, a respect for the rule of law, a strong economy and a stable middle class that values quality of life issues, such as a clean environmental quality. Now, with huge economic benefit from eco-tourism, strong environmental practices play an additional role. They protect an important commercial asset. The consistency of Costa Rica's enforcement of environmental laws -- and other legislation -- also creates a level of predictability that encourages new investment across a broad cross-section of the economy.

In neighboring Nicaragua, the story is very different. With income levels about one-fifth of those in Costa Rica, Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the hemisphere (behind Haiti). Poverty, together with a history of political turmoil through much of the past century, have left Nicaragua's government institutions woefully under-funded, inefficient and open to corruption. There is no well-developed culture of compliance with environmental laws or consistent enforcement to assure such compliance. The judicial system is weak and there is no clearly defined political vision of what to do with the forested land.

Because of this, illegal logging operations all too often out-muscle municipal authorities who are responsible for forest management but have few of the resources needed to fulfill the task. Today, Nicaragua's forests occupy roughly half the territory they covered in 1950 and continue to shrink in size, albeit at a slower pace than a decade ago. A dramatic turn-around any time soon seems too much to hope for.

My point here is that it will be critical to focus in Copenhagen on steps that take the realities on the ground into consideration. Only such steps can make a difference. Environment specialist Michael Levi at the Council on Foreign Relations is correct when he calls it "a waste of time" to focus too heavily on near-term, legally binding carbon emissions caps for developing countries. They may sound serious, but, as Levi points out, they are largely toothless. Verification is difficult and punitive measures highly unlikely.

There's no silver bullet that can resolve the carbon emissions problem in Copenhagen, but there are steps that can be taken to help developing nations strengthen their institutions and, with that, enforcement.

Under provisions of the Central America Free Trade Agreement's (CAFTA) environmental chapter, for example, the United States is working with governments in the region, including Nicaragua, on a program to strengthen environmental legislation. This work includes a public awareness campaign about a provision in the agreement that enables individuals to sue for compliance.

Shortly after coming to office, the Obama administration declared it planned tough enforcement of environmental provisions in America's trade agreements. Such steps are crucial because the sooner developing countries learn there is a visible upside to responsible environmental practices then pressing for enforcement will be seen more as an asset than a liability. Then we will be on the way to real change.

Protecting the Rainforests: Sending out an SOS on behalf of the world's tropical forests

2009-09-21T20:24:57Z

As all eyes turn toward the UN's Climate Week and G20 summit, now is a good time to focus on the international impacts of climate change and the actions we all can take to stop the further deterioration of our planet.

One such action is to lend your voice to an international effort to protect the rainforests.

NRDC has partnered with the Prince's Rainforests Project - an initiative created by Britain's Prince Charles to support the development of an emergency package to curb deforestation and help spread the word on the connection between tropical deforestation and climate change.

Prince Charles, a dedicated environmentalist, has recruited famous faces and influential leaders including the Dalai Lama, Michael Dell, Daniel Craig, Eric Schmidt of Google, Harrison Ford, Russ Mittermeier, Pele, and Princes William and Harry to educate the public on the connection between rainforests and Climate Change. And just recently, I participated in the effort alongside NRDC president Frances Beinecke.

You too can lend your voice to the cause by making your own frog video right on the site; post it to social networking sites, and send to friends and family. We urge you to take minute to sign up and here's why:

Curbing tropical deforestation is vital in order to mitigate climate change. Tropical forests act as carbon sinks, sequestering approximately 20% of greenhouse gas emissions internationally. In addition, tropical deforestation occurs on such a grand scale that it accounts for about 17% of global greenhouse gas emissions worldwide - that's more than the entire international transportation sector (all of the planes, trucks, cars, and ships combined).

The 2007 UNFCCC Bali Action plan included language addressing policy approaches and positive incentives to protect forests; and this year's climate negotiations will consider plans for a scheme known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation). REDD aims to reduce deforestation and forest degradation through financial incentives. Unfortunately, developing and implementing REDD will not be simple and might take years to come into fruition as stakeholders iron out REDD's key questions and concerns.

In the interim, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN estimates that the world could lose over 100 million hectares of tropical forests over the next 10 years. Several observers including Norway's International Climate and Forests Initiative, Project Catalyst and the Prince's Rainforests Project, all developed proposals for emergency funding to curb deforestation as REDD comes into fruition.

In London in April of 2009, HRH The Prince of Wales (Prince Charles) hosted a meeting of world leaders in order to discuss the need for immediate interim action. The result of this meeting was the formation of the Informal Working Group on Interim Financing for REDD (IWG-IFR), with Norway acting as the secretariat. The IWG-IFR has met several times this year and will likely reach an agreement early 2010.

As negotiations continue, we at NRDC strongly encourage everyone to call upon world leaders to reach an agreement and sign up today to show support for emergency action to save the rainforests.

Meeting the Enemy

2009-09-15T20:53:28Z

During eight years as chief of the Environmental Protection Bureau in the New York State Attorney General's Office, I had the political backing necessary to take on large corporate polluters.

Such support is crucial to enforce the hard-won standards contained in our environmental legislation. If there was any doubt, The New York Times ("Clean Water Laws Neglected, at a Cost") has laid bare just want happens when political will fails: polluters with deep pockets and millions-sometimes billions-of dollars at stake run roughshod over our country's cornerstone environmental laws.

Public records, government documents and even reports submitted by polluters themselves analyzed by the Times set out a stunning portrait of non-compliance across the country that includes over half a million violations of the 1972 Clean Water Act since 2004. Well over half of these were described as "significant non-compliance". Still, the Times' research found fewer than 3% of these Clean Water Act violations resulted in fines or other significant punishment.

For anyone in the business of enforcing environmental law, these figures merely provide unsettling detail for a broader picture they already know all too well. The numbers underscore a stark reality: our environmental laws have not failed us; we have failed our environmental laws. To quote the comic strip character Pogo, "We have met the enemy and he is us." Without enforcement, even the finest laws protect little.

Environmental regulation was rarely a Bush administration priority and the New York Times report has given a whiff of what that low priority has produced. Today, there is a new administration in Washington and the appointment of Lisa Jackson as head of the Environmental Protection Agency is encouraging. She told The Times that "strengthening water protections is "among her top priorities."

It will be important that she repeatedly shows her attention to water quality because political direction-and political will-flow from the top. If the EPA shows determination on enforcement, then state regulators will get tough, too. Success in just one high profile case can cause a ripple effect with a far broader impact.

While political will is crucial, it's not enough. Government regulators at both federal and state levels often lack the resources needed to enforce key provisions of the Clean Water Act and other environmental legislation. In New York state, for example, the number of regulated polluters has doubled over the past decade, yet the number of government inspectors has remained roughly the same, according to the Times. When the economic slowdowns force governments at all levels to tighten their belts, enforcement budgets are often among the first cut.

But beyond these staffing numbers there's also a more subtle-equally damaging-barrier to enforcement that has grown steadily over the past two decades: the ability of defendants to drag out enforcement cases to the point that the process itself becomes a deterrent to regulators. If they launch an enforcement case today, they know they are taking on a long and exhausting battle, one that could last years-while still dealing with everything else on their plate.

For example, it took the New York State Attorney General's office, working with EPA, the Department of Justice and other states and environmental organizations (including NRDC) ten years to win cases against major polluters who had violated the Clean Air Act's New Source Review Provisions.

It was an important case because the pollution was costing thousands of lives each year and although we won it, the very length of such a fight raises questions about the balance of public interests versus the interests of private polluters; between public health and private gain. To protect the public, the pace of these cases must go faster at both the administrative and judicial level. There needs to be greater presumptions favoring the public interest.

To achieve that, we have to ask ourselves how we feel as a people about environmental law, the value we place on it and the value we place on those who regulate it. All too often, the regulator's public image is a negative cliché: a bureaucrat interested mainly in disrupting business and endangering jobs. The truth is far different. The New York Times story provides a glimpse of what happens when regulators are unable to enforce environmental laws. Law enforcement is critical to leveling the playing field and ending the competitive advantage given to polluters. Consistent enforcement is also crucial to create the kind of predictability needed to justify for new investment. But the real evidence of under-enforcement is that, years after the deadlines imposed in key environmental legislation, we haven't yet met the goals set out in those laws and people still get sick from drinking water.

We’re Drowning In Our Own Trash

2008-07-11T19:05:37Z

Thomas Malthus has suddenly become popular again. While Americans are concerned about fuel prices, much of the rest of the world is concerned about food prices. In countries like Egypt and Bangladesh, and in regions of Africa, riots have erupted over a shortage of food. In other countries, like China and India, when rice is shipped, it’s shipped under the protection of armed guards.

Global production simply can’t keep up with global consumption. And so people are asking: Was Malthus right?

Malthus, an economist and demographer from the 19th century, is known for predicting that population growth moves more quickly than the expansion of food production. As he former moves geometrically, and the latter arithmetically, its inevitable that population overcomes production. As a result, Malthus predicted, people will starve.

Many experts now believe that the 19th century proved Malthus incorrect. The Green Revolution increased global food production, helping it keep pace with global population growth. It allowed us to keep consuming.

But with anything you produce, you also have waste. And, given the growing consumption, unless one is very careful about production technologies, you have waste on a massive scale. As photographs by Chris Jordan and our daily experience of taking out the trash and seeing litter everywhere can testify, our consumption of goods leads to an overwhelming volume of trash. So much so that the scale of the numbers can be difficult to comprehend. Consider some numbers Jordan uses:

Two million plastic beverage bottles are used in the US every five minutes.
1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags are used in the US every hour.
426,000 cell phones are retired in the US every day.
While 106,000 aluminum cans are used in the US every thirty seconds.

And that’s just the waste we can see. Waste gases from power plants are filling the air that we breathe, leading to the early deaths of tens of thousands of American and hundreds of thousands or millions around the world. Invisible carbon dioxide is turning the oceans so acidic that shell fish are having a harder time growing their shells while it changes our entire planet’s climate.

The point here is pretty clear. We’re drowning in a sea of our own waste.

This point changes the way we have to understand Malthus. For him, it was a two-way balance between consumption and production. Now, it’s a three-way balance between production, consumption, and waste.

And it’s no longer simply a question of whether we can have another Green Revolution to increase production, because even if we did that we would only increase our waste problem.

We have to begin addressing this question of waste. If we are to feed more people – and we will have to, given predictions of global population growths – than we should also free more people of the sea of garbage and poison and waste our production has created.

Part of this will be to examine of our own, personal consumption habits. Each of us should find ways to reduce our waste, whether it’s by bringing lunch to work, or by using cloth bags at the grocery store, or by driving smaller cars. Whatever it is that works for you, I’d urge you to try it.

Will that be enough? Certainly not. But it is a start. A start to be expanded on every day.

(Photo credit: Chris Jordan, www.chrisjordan.com)

Let's Respect the Public With More Information

2008-06-30T14:00:00Z

We need a lot more environmental information to begin to address the lack of public understanding of environmental harms.

This may seem obvious, but it isn’t. At a meeting a few years ago, I was shocked to find the head of a state water agency opposed to an effort to provide the public with more information on sewage overflows. His argument was that he didn’t want to scare the public, and that the public wasn’t sophisticated enough to understand the information.

About our families swimming in sewage, I thought?

Sewage overflows happen much more frequently than they should. In the Clean Water Act of 1972, Congress set a goal for our waters to be fishable and swimmable by 1983. Yet today, fewer than one half of our waters have even been assessed. Of those, only about half meet their designated uses. And for most of those, the designated use is something less than fishable and swimmable.

Take our beaches, for example. In 2007, the NRDC released the results of our annual water quality survey. The results were startling. In 2006, pollution caused a record number of beach closings nationwide. Closing and advisory days topped 25,000 – more than had ever been recorded in the survey’s 17-year history. The public needs to know about this. And yet, agencies are wary of releasing information that would hold them responsible.

In one EPA negotiated undertaking I was involved with, we were discussing the possibility of electronic filing of permit applications, permits, and monitoring data. Many dischargers were first supportive – after all, it would save them time and money. But once they realized that if electronically filed it would be easily accessible, they changed their minds. They knew that publicly available information leads to more awareness, more attention, and more enforcement. They were not sure that was good.

In my opinion, this is backwards. If there is a concern about the reaction, the answer is to provide the public with more, or better, information, not less. We should have more respect for the public.

To solve this problem, we need to begin by providing the public with more information – much more information than they currently have. But we also need to provide them with better information. It’s not just about quantity, but quality. The information should be about the full range of effects – health, environmental, cultural – and not just about the associated costs.

And we need to make the information available. The internet is a truly terrific opportunity for this (if you’re reading this blog, I hope you’ll agree). Environmental information should all be up on the web so anyone can find out about the permit (or lack of a permit) for the factory or whatever is down the street from one of their kids’ schools.

This is one of NRDC’s goals. We believe that an informed citizenry is an active citizenry – one more likely to hold the federal government to its promise of providing clean water for our families, and for our kids.