• Counterterrorism Study Has Environmental Focus
  
• Polluter Pays Bill Addresses Superfund Costs
  
• Bette Midler Honored with Parks Award
  
• Fewer Toxics Used on U.S. Open Greens
  
• Public Transportation On the Decline
  
• Conservation Helped Californians Avoid Blackouts
  
• Hatchery Fish Learn Traits that Wild Salmon Adopt
  
• Oceana Nets Comments Favoring Ocean Protection
  

Counterterrorism Study Has Environmental Focus

The National Academies are offering their expertise to help the Bush administration use the nation's scientific and technical resources most effectively to counter terrorist threats of an environmental nature. The first phase of The National Academies' science and technology counterterrorism study is set for release later this month.

The study team is co-chaired by Lewis Branscomb, professor emeritus at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and Richard Klausner, executive director of global health at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The first phase addresses risks and research needs in what the team terms "key areas of vulnerability" human, animal, and agricultural health, toxics and explosives, radioactivity, information technology, transportation and distribution systems, energy systems; cities and fixed infrastructure, people, and interdependent systems.

The study also will examine the means for setting technical goals and identify how interagency coordination might be improved.

Scientific experts share information with federal government representatives in one day meetings on priority topics as the U.S. Postal Service did last fall on sanitizing the mail and the Justice Department did on how to analyze anthrax infected letters.

In similar meetings, the interagency Technical Support Working Group is focusing on biochemical decontamination and forensics, through-structure imaging, and explosives detection, the academies said.

Other research boards of the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine are examining how the government and the science and technology community can be better connected for counterterrorism efforts, and how the United States improve research standards and practices to prevent misuse of biotechnology research and "agricultural terrorism."

The National Academies include the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council. They are private, nonprofit institutions that provide science, technology, and health policy advice under a congressional charter.

Polluter Pays Bill Addresses Superfund Costs

The Bush administration announced earlier this year that it would not request a reauthorization of Superfund fees on oil and chemical companies. This fee, established in 1980, provides revenue to the Superfund Trust Fund, which ensured that polluters paid the bulk of Superfund cleanups.

As a result of the administration's decision to turn away from the concept of "polluter pays," the lawmakers warn, the trust fund will be depleted by 2004.

The Boxer-Chafee bill requires oil and chemical companies to once again pay the Superfund fee. The funds raised by the fee would go toward the Superfund trust fund, guaranteeing the fund's solvency.

"One in every four Americans lives within four miles of a Superfund site, putting these individuals at a higher risk of cancer and other diseases," said Senator Boxer. "Sadly, the Bush administration has turned its back on the people of this country and weakened the Superfund program by abandoning polluter pays."

"The Superfund program has a long track record of success - 800 sites have been cleaned up already - but there is far more work to be done. This bill will help ensure that cleanups continue, but not at the expense of our nation's communities or the American taxpayer," Boxer said.

The Boxer-Chafee bill is co-sponsored by Senators Jim Jeffords, a Vermont Independent, and Democrats Robert Torricelli and Jon Corzine of New Jersey, Joseph Biden of Deleware, Daniel Akaka of Hawaii, Richard Durbin of Illinois, Chris Dodd of Connecticut, Jack Reed of Rhode Island, Bill Nelson of Florida, Hillary Clinton of New York, and Maria Cantwell of Washington.

Bette Midler Honored with Parks Award

Bette Midler, founder of the New York Restoration Project (Photo credit unknown)

"Through her efforts, Bette has fostered investment and successful partnerships within the community to open up and beautify precious parklands and waterfronts. Under her stewardship, the New York Restoration Project has made tremendous strides in preserving valuable public spaces that improve the quality of life for all New Yorkers and she is much deserving of this award."

The governor announced two grants for the New York Restoration Project - a $400,000 Clean Water/Clean Air Bond Act award toward construction of a boathouse to be included in a new park along the Harlem River, and a $350,000 Environmental Protection Fund award to help acquire 49 community gardens throughout the city.

In addition, Fort Washington Park is receiving a $200,000 Bond Act Greenway grant for the revitalization of the Fort's waterfront with the rebuilding of a portion of the Hudson River Valley Greenway Trail.

The award was presented at a ceremony in Fort Washington Park, near the Little Red Lighthouse, along the Hudson River. A gala picnic dinner benefitted the New York Restoration Project and its various initiatives throughout the metropolitan area.

"As a New Yorker, I'm so proud to see our parks become ever cleaner, safer and more beautiful," Midler said. "Working together, in public/private partnership, we New Yorkers can make this State a model for the innovative and effective preservation of public parks and gardens."

Midler established the New York Restoration Project in 1995. The project works through a public/private partnership that helps protect public resources and open spaces.

Over the last seven years, the project has reclaimed 200 acres of parkland throughout the city, removed 75,000 tons of debris, created a new park and floating boathouse on the Harlem River, served thousands of students with environmental education programs, helped protect 114 community gardens, purchased and maintained nearly half the sites and assisted with beautification efforts along the Henry Hudson Parkway.

There are 1,700 parks, playgrounds and recreation facilities across New York's five boroughs. State Parks operates seven waterfront state parks in the city and New York City Parks manages more than 28,000 acres.

Fewer Toxics Used on U.S. Open Greens

Turf scientists at Cornell University and the Bethpage greenskeepers have been looking for ways to reduce pesticide use on one of the nation's busiest public golf course complexes.

Using techniques of integrated pest management, insecticide use was reduced by 50 percent on the Bethpage Green golf course in 2001. Herbicide use was reduced by 33, percent and fungicide use was cut by about 30 percent last year, according to a study conducted by Jennifer Grant, Cornell pest management specialist, and Frank Rossi, Cornell assistant professor of horticulture.

"Because of changes in the laws, we won't have many of the pesticides available to use in the future, so we're trying to invent new ways, new tools to manage the older golf course. We're taking a management systems approach," says Rossi. "Instead of looking for a silver bullet, we're changing the management system."

The Bethpage Green course hosts more than 55,000 rounds of golf annually and was an original component of the state park when it opened in the 1930s. The putting greens are constructed of a native loamy soil, which is typical of older courses in the Northeast.

Rossi says that conducting research on reducing pesticide use is a challenge on any course, particularly one so busy. "Everybody talks about thinking outside the box. With our project, there is no box. No one has ever tried to do anything like this before," he says. "We've become so reliant on pesticide chemistry that to completely remove it is a formidable challenge."

To reduce a fungus called dollar spot, which produces small, tan-colored, circular spots in the turf about the size of silver dollars greenskeepers remove the morning dew every day to reduce the fungal infection, Grant says. They are able to delay the use of fungicides by monitoring the turf and treating only when and where necessary.

Velvet bentgrass, organic compost, large landscapers' vacuums, traffic control - all are being used instead of toxic chemicals.

Extending the battle against the fungus Anthracnose and other pests, Rossi and Grant took a radical step - they raised the mowing height on half of the greens from .12 of an inch to .18 of an inch. The longer grass should reduce the stress on root systems, rendering healthier plants. "Letting the bentgrass grow that high is a huge change in the world of golf," says Grant.

Public Transportation On the Decline

The average trip to work is up more than three minutes since 1990 to 25.5 minutes, and a higher portion of commuters are driving alone to work.

"These figures confirm that travel choices are narrowing for many Americans when it comes to the work trip," said David Burwell, president of the Surface Transportation Policy Project, a group working to promote environmentally friendly, energy efficient transportation options.

"More people are living and working in places where they have little choice but to spend a significant part of their day driving in traffic," Burwell added.

Census population figures released earlier this year show that most population growth has occurred in metropolitan areas, but outside central cities. These suburban areas often have spread out development patterns where buses and trains are less available and carpooling is inconvenient.

The number of people living in these areas grew by 18 percent since the last census. The number of people living in the central cities, where transit, bicycling, and walking infrastructure tend to be more prevalent, grew by just eight percent.

The Census Bureau defines central cities as the most populous cities within a metropolitan area.

"Limited investments to create walkable, transit friendly communities have not been able to offset the prevalence of unplanned, sprawling development that requires a car for every trip," Burwell said.

New national figures show that commute times are longest for Americans who live in metropolitan areas, but outside the central city. Workers in these suburban areas spend an average of 26.9 minutes traveling to work, compared with 24.9 minutes by residents in central cities.

Transit use is more than twice the national average within central cities where 10.5 percent of commuters use transit.

Investment in transportation choices has grown over the past decade, but still lags far behind federal investment in the road network. During the 1990s, the federal government put $156 billion in federal funds into highways, while spending a total of $45 billion on transit, bicycling, and walking facilities combined.

Many Americans have limited access or no access to transit. A Bureau of Transportation Statistics survey taken in April 2002 found that 47 percent of drivers said transit could not take them where they needed to go.

More information is available at: http://www.transact.org

Conservation Helped Californians Avoid Blackouts

Consumers reduced peak power demands by 3,000 to 5,500 megawatts, shows a new analysis of the consumer response to the California electricity crisis by Charles Goldman, Joe Eto and Galen Barbose, researchers in LBNL's Environmental Energy Technologies Division.

"Many observers predicted that California would face widespread rolling blackouts in the summer of 2001," said Goldman. "In April 2001, the North American Electric Reliability Council predicted that the state would have about 250 hours of rolling blackouts. Others predicted that the cost of these blackouts would range from $2 billion to $20 billion."

"But the blackouts never happened last summer," Goldman added. "Our research addresses the question of what role customer load reductions played."

The report analyzes the effects of six factors:

1. the role of the media in increasing public awareness of the crisis
   
2. electricity and natural gas price increases
   
3. utility energy efficiency programs
   
4. the 20/20 rebate program
   
5. utility and California Independent Systems Operator (ISO) load management programs
   
6. other state programs, such as energy use reduction by federal, state and local government facilities and partnerships with the private sector.

"For example," he said, "many customers may have qualified for a rebate through the 20/20 program by simultaneously taking advantage of an incentive for high efficiency appliances. The synergies between these various factors were an important reason that customer load reductions were as great as they were."

Goldman said customers responded to the electricity crisis through a variety of means: installing energy efficient equipment, installing onsite generation, and modifying their electricity consumption habits or patterns.

"We estimate that energy efficiency measures and clean distributed generation will save the state about 1,100 MW when all the installations are completed from projects initiated during 2001," said Goldman.

Goldman said one lesson of the research is that setting up an energy efficient infrastructure can help the state respond to short term power shortage emergencies.

Scientists at LBNL have created a website at: http://savepower.lbl.gov website that identifies energy efficiency measures and their predicted percentage savings for consumers.

Hatchery Fish Learn Traits that Wild Salmon Adopt

Many salmon recovery plans include supplementing the wild population with hatchery raised fish. But new research confirms that hatchery salmon can adapt to captivity and transfer these traits to wild populations.

Compared to wild fish, hatchery coho salmon do not compete as well for mates, and hatchery steelhead are not as good at avoiding predators.

"As the population adapts to the hatchery, its survival rate in the wild goes down," said Michael Ford of the National Marine Fisheries Service's (NMFS) Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, Washington. Ford presents his research in the June issue of the journal "Conservation Biology."

To help determine how hatchery salmon affect wild populations, Ford used a genetic model that accounted for differences between captive and wild environments. He found that hatchery salmon can develop captive traits - that is, those that work best for captive fish - and introduce them to wild populations, which decreases the survival of salmon on the wild.

The greater the difference between the two environments, the greater the impact of hatchery fish on wild salmon.

"When the captive environment is very different from the wild, within 20 generations the population can lose much of its ability to survive in the wild," warned Ford. "In other words, the population adapts to the hatchery and becomes dependent on the hatchery for its survival."

Ford found that there are no easy fixes. The wild population shifts toward "captive traits" even if managers keep adding wild caught salmon to the hatchery population. To help counteract this shift, Ford suggests reducing the salmons' adaptation to hatchery conditions by using more natural methods of breeding and rearing, and researchers at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center are working on these techniques.

Even when few fish escape from farms, Ford found, the farm raised fish could decrease the survival of wild populations over time.

This could be a problem in areas with intensive aquaculture such as Norway, where salmon that escape from fish farms make up more than half of the wild populations in some areas.

More information about hatchery salmon is available at: http://www.nwfsc.noaa.gov/Q&A/index.html

Human Activities Linked to Sea Otter Diseases

"The diseases that cause the most mortality in otters," argues a report in the June issue of the journal "Conservation Biology," seem to be newly emerged."

"In some cases, humans may have influenced the spread and emergence of these new diseases," wrote Kevin Lafferty of the U.S. Geological Survey at the University Of California, Santa Barbara, and Leah Gerber, who did this work while at the National Center for Ecological Analysis in Santa Barbara and is now at Arizona State University.

Many of the factors that threaten wildlife species - from habitat degradation to introduced species to pollution - may also affect the transmission of infectious diseases.

Domestic animals can harbor diseases that can spread to wildlife, which can be devastating to rare species. For instance, domestic sheep diseases have wiped out populations of bighorn sheep.

An introduced infectious disease can make common species become rare because they are not adapted to the new pathogen. Introduced bird malaria has killed many Hawaiian songbirds that used to be common.

"Many of these wildlife diseases are viewed as emerging, particularly as we introduce species around the globe and as our domestic plants and animals encroach on natural habitat," said Lafferty.

In their analysis of the link between disease and conservation, Lafferty and Gerber focused on the California sea otter. While the Alaska population has been growing at about 18 percent per year, the California population has been declining by two to three percent per year since 1995.

"Because existing data indicate that non-otter diseases are responsible for a large proportion of otter deaths, we wanted to see if there was a link between disease and sea otter population trends," said Lafferty.

A parasitic worm caused 14 percent of the otter deaths. The worm is a shorebird parasite that uses sand crabs as an intermediate host.

Sea otters prefer clams and sea urchins to sand crabs. But people also like clams and sea urchins, and when these prey are scarce, an otter may eat several sand crabs in a row.

"Humans may have increased the prevalence of this disease by competing with otters for food, causing them to seek alternative prey," write Lafferty and Gerber.

Toxoplasmosis, a cat parasite, caused up to eight percent of the otter deaths. Otters may catch the disease from sea water contaminated by cat feces.

Valley fever caused four percent of the otter deaths. This disease is caused by inhaling spores of a soil fungus in dust raised by construction and agriculture.

"The emergence of valley fever as an otter disease corresponds with an increase in human cases in California," wrote Lafferty and Gerber. Dust control efforts that reduce human exposure to valley fever may also help protect sea otters from the disease.

"Perhaps the biggest benefit to be gained by understanding the role of disease in [California] sea otters is that it will help focus attention on the sources of mortality that will influence recovery efforts," say the researchers.