[At Columbia], I studied environmental science and got fascinated by this microcosm of materials flow, the piles and piles of garbage along upper Broadway. My dorm was on 110th Street and the campus was on 116th Street and I would walk those six blocks every day and see shoulder-high piles of garbage. It was just amazing to see so many bags. I started digging through these bags because I was so curious about what was in them. I couldn’t believe how much stuff there was, but also how much paper there was. I don’t know what the statistics were then, but now forty percent of garbage
in this country is paper. I said, “That’s what these logs were being cut down for? That’s why those trees are being cleared and those forests felled?”

I signed up to take a tour of Fresh Kills landfill, this gigantic landfill in Staten Island. In every direction as far as I could see was just stuff. You know, appliances and clothes and shoes and pizza boxes and food. I was stunned at both the level of waste and that nobody was talking about this, as if I had stumbled on some secret mass grave. I kept thinking, “How is this happening? How did we build an economy based on such a massive level of destruction?” I vowed to figure it out. I became totally obsessed with garbage.

I was very lucky to be able to get a job at Greenpeace working on garbage. It was the late ‘80s to early ‘90s, and there was massive community opposition to landfills and incinerators in this country. There were about 400 incinerators proposed in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s in the US and three-quarters of them were stopped because of community opposition. There was a real pressure about “What are we going to do with our waste?” Greenpeace had the idea—which like many people in Berkeley I thought was a good idea—to make it increasingly difficult and expensive, increasingly strictly regulated, increasingly politically unpopular to build incinerators and dump your stuff in dumps, the idea being that the harder it gets to throw it away, the more motivation there is to reduce the waste upstream.

But we didn’t foresee that some real sleazy schmucks would just load their garbage onto ships and take it around the world and dump it on other countries. I was amazingly fortunate to be at Greenpeace right when they started this campaign, and I spent almost a decade traveling around the world tracking our garbage. I tracked US garbage ships to Haiti, [I went to] South Africa, all over Asia, just all over the place.

How did seeing where our trash ends up change your perspective?
It’s left me with this kind of social neurosis. I can’t help it, whenever I look at anything I just think of its lifecycle. I’ve been to literally hundreds of factories where stuff is made and dumps where stuff is dumped, all over the world except Antarctica. When I look at anything I think about where it came from.

A lot of people say that I’m anti-stuff, and some people that lack a critical thinking muscle email me to say, “If you’re so against stuff, where did you get that shirt you’re wearing?” I’m not against stuff. It’s actually the opposite—I’m pro-stuff. I’m into having knowledge and appreciation and reverence for our stuff. [She holds out her Blackberry.] These metals were mined somewhere. Some habitat was destroyed to get these metals. These chemicals that are inside it, the flame retardants, there’s probably a PVC coating on it—all these chemicals were produced at some factory that made some kid sick somewhere. There’s energy use, it was shipped around the world. So much is embodied in this that what I want to do is appreciate it and take care of it and to keep it as long as possible.

I’m not against consumption; I’m against consumerism, which is the particular kind of consumption where we try to meet our emotional needs and show our status through our stuff. If you’re cold, get a sweater, no problem, I’m not against that. But if you think you’re better than the person with an older sweater next to you, or if you have eight sweaters while someone is cold next to you, or if your sweater was made at the expense of workers using toxics, pesticides, and heavy metal dyes, those are a problem.

How did you branch out into public speaking?
I did a lot of talks being on staff at Greenpeace, working more and more with people around the world on environmental health and justice issues. But I finally realized I needed to come back to the US because the US was the driver of so much of this. I tracked the export of our hazardous
waste overseas. I tracked the export of our hazardous technologies overseas, things like incinerators that we don’t want here anymore but US companies are exporting overseas. I tracked the export of hazardous products like cigarettes or banned pesticides that we don’t want but we export. But I realized that the most dangerous thing that we were exporting is this toxic-based consumer-driven economic model. I realized I’ve got to come home and try to get us to slow down our consumption because we’re modeling this around the world. We’re telling people everywhere that they can live like this … when already we’re using one and a half planet’s worth of resources a year. If everybody lived like we do in the US we’d be using five!

You joined Berkeley’s Rockwood Institute leadership training program to learn about publicizing your message.
We had this exercise where you had to stand up in front of the group and you have five minutes to explain your purpose. I am such a materials geek and technical wonk that I stood up there and said, “My purpose is to bring about a paradigm shift in our relationship to materials.” I said, “We use too much materials, and we use too toxic materials.” I gave this whole talk—I’d been doing this for twenty years and I was very confident. At the end Eli [Pariser] from MoveOn, obviously a smart guy, raised his hand and said, “I have no idea what you just said!”

I was like, “What is not to understand—too much materials, too toxic materials?” And Eli said, “What is a material?” I asked, “What do you mean, ‘What is a material?’ It’s everything, it’s what you’re holding, it’s what you’re sitting on.”

And he looked and said, “I’m sitting on a chair.” That was the most important moment. I said, “Is that what you guys see when you look at that—your brain says ‘chair?’” And they were like, “Yeah, what does yours say?”

I said, “Mine says: ‘Wood, it looks like teak. I wonder if it came from Malaysia or Indonesia? I wonder which people got kicked out of the forest to make that? I wonder if it’s a clear-cut now or a palm oil plantation? It looks like PVC—I wonder if it’s got flame retardant?’”

They were just like, “Oh my God.” They said, “You are lost.” They wrote me off. They said, “You will never be able to talk about this to people who are not already talking about it.” They said that my talk was so full of jargon.

Van Jones [founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights] told me never to say the phrase “paradigm shift” in relation to materials in public ever again. He said that I was starting the conversation twenty years into it. He said, “You just spent twenty years looking at factories and dumps around the world—we didn’t. So you’re starting out there and we’re like, ‘chairs.’” That was so useful.

What happened next?
On the last session of this Rockwood training, almost as a joke, I got this big piece of paper and I drew this cartoon, “The Story of Stuff.” And they LOVED it. I was like, “You’re kidding, I just drew stick figures!”

Activists often take the wrong tack on communication. I did this in the first communication exercise I had in talking to this group—I realized in hindsight that my goal was to show them how much I knew, to share my most advanced thinking, to do as much of a brain dump as I could manage to establish myself as a credible source of information. I realized it was much more [about] showing off in a way, not so that they would think I was cool, but so they would think I was a valuable source of information on this so that they would want to come to me. … [But] as organizers it’s not our goals to tell every single thing we know to everybody. It’s to make a connection so that we can go on that journey together. They told me to take my center of gravity out of my head and put it into my heart and connect to people as humans.

How did you turn your cartoon into a film?
I was getting invited to do this talk all the time. I did it so many times I thought, “I’m going to barf if I have to give this talk again.” Every time after I would give the talk someone would raise their hand and say, “Do you have a film of this talk?” So I just collected all their names. I didn’t have any good film, and I’m busy and I just didn’t believe anybody would watch it. Films are expensive—it’s hard to make a film. Finally [a] funder gave me a seed grant and assigned her communications director to work with me. We took a film of me doing the talk live, and then we took it around to some different production houses and asked how they might make a film of it. I just loved Free Range Studios. I thought they were really creative. By then I had this pile of people who said they’d help so I wrote back to all of them and said, “Remember that talk that you saw a few years ago that you liked? We’re making a movie, you want to help?” Thank goodness so many people pitched in.

What did you think would happen when you released the movie online in 2007?
I just expected, phew, I don’t ever have to do that goddamn talk any more. I remember Free Range said, “Annie, you might need some help with this after you launch it.” And I was like, “Help with what? It’s a twenty-minute cartoon, you put it on the Web, what is there to do? I’ll just have to update the Web site once in a while.” I was so naïve. We had thought that success would be 50,0000 people watching it, and we got that in like four hours. We were getting emails from people literally all over the world. Now it’s been viewed online about 8 million times by people in 223 countries and territories.

Why do you think that happened?
I think a huge part of it was the moment. We’re trashing the planet, we’re trashing each other and we’re not even having fun—those three things are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

You got some flack from people who thought not buying stuff is unpatriotic.
Isn’t that so funny? I feel like the best way we can honor and pay tribute to our country is by pointing out where things are going wrong. It’s like, if you’re in a ship and it’s sinking and you point out that it’s sinking, is that anti-ship?

Was making the film free online part of its success?
When I was making it, I had another friend who works for an environmental group who was also making a film and he was making his available for $19.95 if you buy the DVD online. I told him, “Make it free, the new price point is free. The goal is getting the message out.” We had some arguments. He said, “No, people value stuff more if they pay for it.”

This movie, the viral success of it has just shocked everybody. Even before we made it, Free Range Studios, which knows so much about this, said twenty-minute things don’t go viral. They said, “Your primary distribution strategy will be DVDs.”

We do distribution by DVDs because a lot of places don’t have access to high-speed Internet. Some people have written to us and given us a hard time about the materials in the DVDs, but from my international travels I know that there’s such a digital divide. I didn’t want to limit this conversation to people who have high-speed Internet. We’ve sold a lot of DVDs to Native American communities, to public schools that don’t have Internet access, to Russia, China, India, places all over the world.

Why do a book too?
It’s one way to make it available beyond the high-speed Internet crowd. Also, I couldn’t fit all this in the movie. I had to leave a lot out. The number one complaint that The Story of Stuff movie gets is “You left something out.” I get that all the time. And I’m like, “Guys, cut me some slack, it’s a twenty-minute cartoon! I’m taking on the entire global materials economy!” I tried to talk really fast but there’s only so much you can say in twenty minutes.

There are four things that the book has beyond the movie. One is more detail. A lot of people wrote and wanted more detail: Is extraction always bad, could mining be reformed, are all chemicals bad, are all corporations bad?

Second thing is there are more explanations and alternatives and solutions. … People often ask, “What are the ten things I can do to save the planet?” and I’m like, “There aren’t ten things to do.” But I do recommend individual actions, and Appendix 1 is examples of the kinds of policies and reforms and laws that people could work for. So the third thing is more examples of ways to get involved.

The fourth is more personal stories. I was kind of hesitant to include this because it felt so narcissistic to talk about my own travels, but the publisher convinced me that it allows people to relate to me as a person. Not everybody is interested in the technical makeup of organochlorines and medical waste management techniques.

One of the book’s big recommendations is that we should value time over stuff.
Right now the people of the United States work longer hours than probably any other industrialized country. Juliet Schorr, who wrote The Overworked American, said that we’re working more hours now than in feudal society. In between feudal society and now, it got better for a while during the Industrial Revolution. In the Industrial Revolution there were gains in productivity and we chose a different path than Europe—we chose to trade those gains in productivity for more stuff. So we continued to work long hours but we have huge houses, huge cars, huge refrigerators, multiple televisions—I mean we have more and bigger stuff than anybody in any other country. Europe took a different path. They chose to trade those gains in productivity for more leisure. So if you spend time in Europe, their apartments are smaller, their fridges are smaller, their cars are smaller and fewer, they invested in public transportation instead of in a car ownership society. They have less stuff. It’s a less commodified society and there’s more leisure.

Are they happier?
All the data shows that they’re happier. The Happy Planet Index by the New Economics Foundation looks at happiness over resource use, which means: How efficient is that country at converting resources into well-being? They consider happiness [to be] life satisfaction times life expectancy. The United States [ranks] 114th out of 143. All of Asia, all of Latin America, all of Europe except Luxembourg, most of the former Soviet Union—almost everybody was above us [in 2009] except for one Middle Eastern country like the United Arab Emirates because they have such intensive resource use, and Africa. Costa Rica was number 1 in 2009, which is interesting because they’ve also abandoned their defensive military and diverted all those resources into social well-being. They have a higher life expectancy than us, a higher life satisfaction than us, and they are using a quarter of the resources.

You also recommend more sharing.
There is no reason not to do it: less resource use [and] you save money. If you save money you don’t have to work as much so you can have more leisure time. Another thing is you have to talk to people to share. When you look at the data of how we are working longer hours than at any time in recent history, where is all that time coming from? Where there’s less time spent is in community engagement and civil society.

There is this terrifying downward spiral where we are so exhausted and stressed and socially isolated, we’re spending less time investing into community, so community is less able to provide the resources it used to provide: entertainment, free childcare, someone to bring you food when you are at home sick, someone to bring in your mail when you are traveling, a ride to the airport, help moving. Those things get commodified, which means we have to work more to pay for them all.

Are you turning StoryofStuff.org into a channel for other films? In December you released The Story of Cap & Trade, and you’re also planning to do films on electronics and bottled water.
We were getting about 10,000 views a day and I thought, “If this many people are looking, we might as well give them some new information.” We decided we would work with partner groups that were working on issues directly related to systems of production and consumption. Our criteria is that [they be] more solutions-oriented. … Another criteria is that the organization we’re partnering with would do the follow-up work. We’re not going to start campaigns on cap and trade and bottled water and electronics and cosmetics. There are very good organizations on those issues. We wanted to encourage our viewers to contact them.

Another criteria is that the new films [be] emblematic of a key point of The Story of Stuff. The bottled water one is about manufactured demand. How was it that they got us all to spend $2 for a glass of water when you can get it for a cent at the faucet? The electronics one is about planned obsolescence.

How do you want people to use these films?
We use a Creative Commons license specifically because we want people to do whatever they want with these films. Anybody is allowed to download it for free. On the Web site for The Story of Stuff we have downloadable posters to announce a screening, downloadable invitations for house parties, and a little kit about how to have a house party. We want people to show these films and start a discussion with their classmates, their community.

The goal of making The Story of Stuff was to turn the volume up on public discourse around how we make, use and throw away stuff. I don’t have a particular thing I want [people] to do. If they’re turned on by gardening, they should start community gardens. If they’re turned on by transportation, they could fight for bike lanes. If they’re sick of working like dogs, they could fight for a mandatory vacation law.

Why did you do The Story of Cap & Trade? It’s about an abstract idea, not about a kind of stuff.
The cap and trade one was different because it was an emergency. Because of my work internationally I knew a lot of environmental activists in other countries and a lot of them are in the countries that are bearing the brunt of climate change. They felt excluded from the policy discussions and they were deeply concerned that this cap and trade approach was not going to work … [and] asked me if I would please work with members of Climate Justice Now! to make a film that would encourage critical discussions about cap and trade.

I called so many environmental groups around here and asked them, “What do you think about cap and trade?” Everybody I talked to said it doesn’t meet what the science says we need, it probably won’t work, but it’s the best we’re going to get. … I had this existential crisis because a lot of the groups that I knew said, “Don’t make that film, because it’s going to jeopardize our chance to get this bill, and even though it won’t work it’s the best we’re going to get.” And I said, “Well, it’s definitely the best we’re going to get if that’s all we ask for.”

What are your objections—you like the “cap,” but not the “trade” part?
“Cap” means you put a limit on how much carbon you’re producing. Duh, of course we need to do that. We’re producing too much carbon; we have to put a cap immediately. But then the devil’s in the details.

One of the devils is that the current bill in the US Congress is called “cap and give-away,” you cap how much carbon there is and then you make permits for companies to release that carbon. The companies get these permits for free. The other approach is that you charge the companies for the permits and you can use the money for all kinds of things to help transition to a clean energy economy, to help low-income residents deal with the higher cost of energy during this transition. We should charge them for [permits]—that should be a cost of doing business.

The second thing I’m concerned about is the offsets, which sort of ruins the whole point of cap and trade. With offsets if one reduces their emissions below how many permits they have, they can sell their permits to someone else. There are a number of problems with that. One is that it means there is more pollution still. If you’ve reduced [emissions], someone else has increased it, so it’s the same. Another thing is there tend to be pollution hotspots in those situations, which brings up a real environmental justice issue. In some communities people have the political clout to demand that their companies clean up, and in other communities they don’t. … [By] allowing companies to do these offsets I fear that you’ll see a migration of dirty industries to these communities that are perceived not to have the political clout to stop it.

The other thing is that there are just total scams with this. Under these offset programs a company can do something like say, “Oh, I was going to increase [emissions] 500 percent but because I care so much about the planet I’m going to only increase 100 percent.” So they can say that they are voluntarily reducing it 400 percent and then get paid to have offsets for that.

Another devil in the detail with this is that it’s a distraction. This creates a huge financial market for trading these offsets. It’s about creating a new bubble because the dot.com bubble burst, the housing bubble burst. The people whose jobs are creating and investing in bubbles are looking for a new bubble, and the carbon market is a really ripe one.

What’s a better solution?
What we really need is a complete overhaul of how we do business today. One is cutting fossil fuel subsidies. We said in the film that right now the US government subsidizes fossil fuels 2.5 times more than renewables. A lot of people told us that that is conservative … by some calculations the US subsidizes fossil fuels five times more than renewables.

We need to get subsidies [to move] away from an individual car ownership society, invest in public transportation, redesign cities so that people can live closer to their work and closer to stores and things so they don’t have to commute as much, build up our communities and increase sharing so that not everybody has to buy everything, because anything you buy adds more carbon to the planet. Invest in clean energies. Stop burning coal, no new coal plants. It’s hard to give a quick summary because it really means redesigning our entire economy.

For The Story of Stuff most of the criticism came from the right—for The Story of Cap & Trade some of it came from the left, people who say you’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
These were the “This is the best we’re going to get” people. There are some times in which you have to make compromises in politics. That is part of the game. But you can only make so many compromises before your solution is not a solution any more. I don’t trust commodities traders to save the planet. They’ve never made saving the planet their priority; I don’t believe they’re going to do it now.

Who should be at the helm?
I think it should be democratically elected government.

What are you going to do next?
We have a number of ideas for upcoming films. I want to do the story of credit cards. We want to focus on issues that are not getting a lot of attention and that we can take the risk, because we have nothing to lose.

America has tried, with increasing earnestness, to reduce its gasoline habit—first through greater fuel efficiency, more recently via “first generation” biofuels, such as corn-based ethanol, intended to replace petroleum with plant power. But critics spar over the carbon economics of using crops—particularly corn—as biofuel feedstocks. Growing corn requires irrigation and fertilizer, says Dan Kammen, director of UC Berkeley’s Renewable and Appropriate Energy Lab, who has analyzed the environmental merits of different fuels. “If you added up all these fossil-based inputs, corn ethanol was at best a very mild improvement over gasoline,” he says.

Corn ethanol also raises the “indirect land use” conundrum—when farms are switched from food to fuel production, virgin land elsewhere must be cultivated to meet the world’s unrelenting demand for food. Cutting down native forests, which recycle carbon dioxide into oxygen, boosts the need for yet more fertilizer and irrigation, exacerbating global warming. “If a farmer chooses to stop growing food and start growing a biofuel, or chooses to bring new land into production because the market for biofuels is growing, that comes with a carbon penalty, and sometimes that penalty alone can actually be worse than gasoline,”
says Kammen.

Some have advocated chucking liquid fuels altogether for electric batteries or hydrogen fuel cells. But even if you skip the debate over the eco-merits of plug-in cars—electricity is only as “green” as the power plant that makes it—or the technological challenge of developing long-lasting batteries that don’t cost a fortune or weigh a ton, these technologies still face infrastructure problems. We have trillions of dollars worth of vehicles, filling stations, and refineries built to accommodate liquid fuel. Creating a new fleet of vehicles and a system for recharging batteries or swapping fuel cells will take money and time, a luxury
we may no longer have.

That’s why the search is on for a second generation of biofuels derived from plants that don’t compete for cropland. Fuels made from farm waste itself—like bagasse, the material that remains after pressing sugarcane, or corn stover, its leftover stalks and
leaves—have won fans. But those still have ties to agriculture and are subject to its geographic and seasonal limitations.

Now, a cadre of California companies believe the solution to this complicated problem is really simple. Like, single-cell simple. Could the fuel of the future come from the most ancient green thing of all: algae?

Cell biologist Stephen Mayfield has spent the last 25 years working with algae, much of it at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, and most of that manipulating it into making medically useful proteins: one that neutralizes anthrax, one that
fights cancer, one that’s part of an anti-malaria vaccine. But a few years ago, a venture capital firm eyeing an even bigger health problem asked him to turn algae into biofuel.

This wasn’t as far-out as it sounds. “We knew that algae could make biofuels, that’s been known for a long time,” says Mayfield. Algae naturally make oil, or lipid—it’s how they store their energy. This oil can be converted into fuels that can be used by today’s vehicles: diesel, biodiesel, gasoline, even jet fuel. Yet until recently, not many companies had tried to do it.

Mayfield thinks that a few years ago, the algae idea finally reached the tipping point. “The driving force on this has been a combination of things: climate change, global warming. People began to say ‘Hey, we have got to start taking this biofuel stuff seriously, we cannot continue to burn fossil fuel and just spew the CO2 into the atmosphere,’” he says. Add to that the price of gas skyrocketing and “the realization that we are buying most of our oil from countries that really don’t particularly like us,” he says, and Americans warmed to energy independence—that is, growing our fuel at home.

Algae’s number one selling point is that among its untold thousands of species there’s bound to be one that can hack it just about anywhere, and nearly all of them are incredibly low-maintenance. Algae can grow in the ocean, in indoor tanks, in open ponds, or in translucent tubes called “photobioreactors.” These last two can be arrayed in the desert to catch the sunlight, built on barren land of little use to farmers. Better yet, algae doesn’t mind its water brackish or filthy, and can be grown using seawater, municipal wastewater, agricultural runoff, or the water from saline aquifers.

Compared to other biofuel feedstocks, algae are prolific oil makers. Depending on who you ask, photosynthetic
algae can produce anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 gallons per acre each year. Corn, by comparison, produces closer to 250 gallons and sugarcane produces 450. That’s largely because all that algae does is grow more algae. “They’re not making roots, they’re not making flowers, they’re not making trunks, they’re not doing all the other things that higher plants do. They’re just doing photosynthesis,” says Mayfield. Algae can also be grown year-round. Compared to corn’s four-month growing season, algae is a little green workhorse.

Perhaps best of all from a global warming standpoint, photosynthetic algae suck up the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. In fact, the massive algae population floating around the Earth’s waterways for the last 3 billion years is largely responsible for the fact that we have a temperate, oxygen-rich climate at all. “It’s unarguable that if we did not have oceans full of algae-sequestering CO2 we’d be in a completely different place than we are now,” says Mayfield of the role algae plays in climate regulation. “So already it does that. We just need to get it to do more of it.”

Mayfield now chairs the scientific advisory board at Sapphire Energy, an algae biofuels company he helped found in 2007. While the company is headquartered in San Diego, its algae resides in Las Cruces, New Mexico in a set of ring-shaped pools; a paddle wheel keeps the bright green sludge swirling through it. After four to fifteen days in the pool, the algae is harvested—or, “dewatered”—and the oil is transformed into what the company calls “Green Crude,” which can be refined into gasoline, diesel or jet fuel.

While burning algae oil does produce greenhouse gasses, Tim Zenk, Sapphire’s VP of corporate affairs, points out that because twelve to fourteen kilograms of CO2 are consumed to make every gallon of algae oil, the net emissions are low. “Sapphire‘s Green Crude fuel has a life cycle carbon impact that is roughly seventy percent less than petroleum-based fuels, and significantly lower than other conventional biofuels,” he says.

While Las Cruces is only a demonstration site, Zenk says the company expects to operate at commercial scale—producing 1 million gallons of fuel—by the year 2012, and be up to 1 billion by the year 2025. Ultimately,
Sapphire hopes to provide three percent of the 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels the Environmental Protection Agency says must be integrated with the nation’s motor-fuel supply by the year 2022.

Other California companies are hoping to dip a toe into this 36-billion-gallon market. Alameda-based Aurora Biofuels, founded by a trio of UC Berkeley grads in 2006, is using a similar model of open saltwater ponds. Although Aurora currently only runs a small pilot plant in Florida, CEO Bob Walsh says that by next summer they’ll have opened a demonstration site producing about 100 gallons a day, and that ultimately they’ll roll out facilities worldwide, each producing between 60 and 100 million gallons a year.

Solazyme, in South San Francisco, also hopes to eventually produce billions of gallons annually; it can already make batches of oil on demand and even boasts an algae-powered Mercedes. In 2008, the company signed a biodiesel development and
testing agreement with Richmond-based oil company Chevron.

Meanwhile, La Jolla-based Synthetic Genomics, headed by J. Craig Venter, the biologist most famous for his role in sequencing the human genome, recently announced a $600 million joint venture with ExxonMobil to develop algae fuel. The company will use both ponds and photobioreactor tubes.

While it may seem odd that alt-fuels companies are partnering with the petroleum producers whose business they are ostensibly trying to undercut, the oil giants have a couple of things that algae producers need: gas stations and waste CO2. Let’s take the carbon first: While algae can absorb it from the atmosphere, it’s more efficient to directly shunt it from the smokestack of a power plant, refinery, or steel mill into an algae pond. “You pipe it over and you pump it in, like they add CO2 to Coca-Cola,” says Aurora CEO Walsh.

Sapphire Energy, for example, is currently buying its carbon but would like to partner with a refinery or utility, a move that would make production greener for both companies. “We beneficially reuse the CO2 burned in a coal-fired power plant or emitted from an industrial source, resulting in green electricity and displacing the need for crude oil from the ground,” says Zenk. “The end result is a two-to-one reduction in CO2 emitted into the atmosphere.”

Zenk says Sapphire is also considering a “closed loop” system in which the solids left over after dewatering
the algae would be put into anaerobic digesters to produce methane, which in turn could generate electricity for the facility and produce CO2 to be pumped back into the ponds.

Additionally, the oil giants already have distribution systems for getting fuel to the pump, including their own filling stations, something the smaller fuel makers don’t want to have to replicate—or compete with. “To go further downstream you’ve got to push someone out, so we’d rather just fit in, let the existing infrastructure move it to the marketplace,” says Walsh.

Ultimately, some algae companies want to lean on the expertise of those who have been in the fuel business longer. “We will never refine oil into diesel fuel cheaper or more effectively than a major oil company; they have a hundred years of experience at doing that and they own factories that are the biggest industrial facilities in the world,” says Harrison Dillon, president and CTO of Solazyme. “You hear people at conferences saying ‘We’re going to put Big Oil out of business,’ and when you hear that that’s when you know that you’re listening to somebody who hasn’t really been in this very long. That kind of thing just isn’t going to happen.”

At six years old, Solazyme is one of the algae industry’s eldest, and perhaps most commercially advanced, players. “We founded the company in 2003—this was in the Stone Ages of biofuels,” recalls Dillon. “We couldn’t find a venture capital firm that had even heard of the concept of a biofuel in 2003, which sounds amazing.”

Solazyme started out planning to grow photosynthetic algae in ponds or photobioreactors, but soured on the idea, deciding that ponds are too costly and can’t produce enough algae. “It takes a couple of months to get an algae culture up to density, and you still then get, if you’re lucky, maybe a gram of algae per meter of culture,” says Dillon. “And that one gram of algae is like ten percent oil. You’re talking about an enormously expensive process to make a gallon of oil.”

Instead, Solazyme began experimenting with species that could grow inside fermentation tanks. Growing
indoors has its advantages: tanks are cheaper than ponds, and Solazyme found it could control the algae’s environment to get it to produce a very high quantity of lipid—as much as 75 percent of the cells’ dry weight. Says Dillon, “It’s about three decimal points cheaper per gallon” to grow in a tank than in a pond.

Instead of sunlight, these algae are fed a carbohydrate-rich diet of, essentially, trash. “Algae has been evolving for a long time in the presence of a lot of rotting plant material and it’s made certain species very adept at using any organic material that’s available to them,” says Dillon. A laboratory on the Solazyme campus is used to test-feed foods to algae strains, to see what will make each grow best. Among the candidates: corn stover, molasses (a byproduct of sugarcane processing), municipal green waste like grass clippings, even the waste glycerol produced when making biodiesel.

Having a variety of feedstocks is important, because Solazyme envisions manufacturing oil via a network of facilities, each using strains of algae that eat whatever happens to grow nearby. “If it’s in the Pacific Northwest, for example, it’s probably going to be lumber waste,” says Dillon. “If it’s, say, in the Midwest, agricultural residue, things like corn stover or other stalks and leaves from the plants. If it’s in a place like Florida or Hawaii, it could be sugarcane.”

Solazyme has already whipped up a few flavors of oil. Its office space, built into a former ice cream factory,
features an enormous glassed-in refrigeration bay now housing an assortment of plastic drums and buckets—
the oil in this one might be more suited for making jet fuel, Dillon says pointing, or that one for diesel.

Upstairs in a conference room, Dillon provides a glimpse of what’s inside those barrels, hefting three large glass jugs onto the table. The first contains diesel; it’s clear and gives off a faint, waxy smell. “Kind of like paraffin,” Dillon suggests, screwing the cap back on. There’s also biodiesel the shade of maple syrup, and crude algal oil, a deeper and more viscous orange, which emits a slightly soggier funk.

“We are the first and only company that has made algal fuel at a commercial scale,” says Dillon, indicating the jugs. “That’s probably more oil than any algae company you would go to talk to has ever made, and that’s a prop in our conference room.” To date Solazyme has made more than 10,000 gallons of algae oil; Dillon attributes this productivity to greater efficiency, and the fact that growing in tanks allows the company to produce batches on demand in less than a week.

There’s one more oil sample in the room, and it’s a hint that Solazyme is eyeing a market other than transportation.

Like the rest, the pale yellow fluid in this tiny vial started off as something inedible like sawdust or corn stover, before being fed to a tank of algae and turned into lipid. Now it’s cooking oil, surprisingly light on the tongue and almost flavorless. Branching out into food oil may be a smart move. Instead of having to beat the cost of gasoline, which is currently under $4 a gallon, “The wholesale price of olive oil is in, say, the $15 to 18 a gallon range,” says Dillon. “In fact, we are well below that manufacturing cost.”

Ultimately, Solazyme plans to take its oil-making technology far and wide, hoping that algae oil could be as integral to manufacturing as petroleum is today. “If you think about everything in your house that is made out of oil, it’s not just the gas in your car,” says Dillon. “It’s the cleaning supplies under the sink, and plastics and cosmetic ingredients, and the oil in your salad dressing bottle.” The FDA is currently reviewing Solazyme’s cooking oil; Dillon suggests that it may beat the company’s algae fuel to the marketplace.

Making algae oil affordable is probably the biggest challenge ahead for the fledgling industry. “Ultimately if you’re going to have a market for it, it needs to be cheaper than gasoline,” says Lawrence Berkeley National Lab Earth scientist Nigel Quinn, who is studying the state of algae fuel technology for Berkeley’s Energy Biosciences Institute. But currently, he says, the cost of producing algae in open ponds is five to ten times the cost of cost of producing a fossil fuel.

Most companies estimate they’ll need to get into the $60/barrel range before algae-based fuel finds your gas tank. A few are hoping that the military, which can afford to pay more for state-of-the-art technology, will be an early adopter, or that the trucking, cargo shipping, and aviation industries will take an interest. Sapphire, for example, has already tested its jet fuel for two airlines, JAL and Continental.

But building an algae industry from scratch won’t be cheap. Large tracts of land—even barren land—are expensive, and so are ponds and photobioreactors. A few farms already exist, but most grow the kind of algae used in health food supplements, not for oil, so there’s not a farming community hoping to adapt its crop for the biofuel market, as there is with corn, soy, and sugarcane. (Consequently, there’s also no algae lobby pressing the government for support.)

Co-locating with big carbon producers will help drive down manufacturing costs, says Quinn, and so will coming up with sellable byproducts. “We’ve only just scratched the surface in terms of what those products might be,” he says. A few companies plan to sell the dried-out meal that’s left after dewatering the algae for use as animal feed. Others hope the cosmetics and plastics industries will also buy their oil, or that they can collaborate with wastewater treatment plants.

Solazyme has a jump-start on the cooking oil market, and Dillon is quick to point out that its food oil won’t be made from genetically engineered algae strains. But all of the companies mentioned in this story expect to use some form of genetic modification to select for desirable qualities like hardiness and productivity when cultivating algae for fuel, and genetic modification is likely to be a serious point of debate as the public weighs the environmental desirability of algae oil.

The companies planning to grow in outdoor ponds know they’ll face some skepticism about the risk of the engineered species contaminating the surrounding gene pool. They contend that the odds of their genetically modified algae taking over the local waterways are eclipsed by the odds of hardier wild creatures getting in and overrunning the tanks, especially since the algae will be engineered to overproduce lipid—in other words, to be attractively plump to predators. “If you take an algae and convert it into something that makes thirty percent fat, that means it is ready to be eaten by everybody else out in the real world,” says Mayfield. “Escape—although it is something that we have to be very careful of and we want to be very conscious of—I think in the end is not a real problem.”

Some observers agree that the chance of genetic contamination is probably low. “Because those organisms would be in tanks, presumably on some piece of desert land or in a parking lot, if those are just spilled that doesn’t strike me as a high risk,” says UC Berkeley’s Dan Kammen, although he is more leery of farming algae in the ocean. “We can’t even keep our genetically modified salmon in pens, let alone algae that can float anywhere,” he says. As for Quinn, he says that even if genetically modified algae is unlikely to grow well enough to out-compete native species, it would be best kept in closed systems like photobioreactors, if only to avoid worrying the public.

Ultimately algae’s biggest question mark—but perhaps also its biggest promise—is that although it is 3 billion years old, there’s still so much left to learn about it. Of its thousands of species, only a few have been extensively studied, and even fewer genetically sequenced. Bioprospectors hoping to isolate species that might be good oil producers have their work cut out for them. Just as mankind couldn’t have tamed corn without the plow, or cotton without the gin, this new industry will need what Mayfield dubs an “algae combine,” new technologies that will make harvesting fast and cheap.

But even if the algae fuel industry is currently very small, innovators like Mayfield believe that they’re on the cusp of a new kind of green revolution. “Right now we have maybe 200 acres total in this country, maybe 300 acres of algae growing,” he says. “So we have got to learn as a society how to do this. We’ve done it in corn—we have 90 million acres of corn. Soybeans, 56 million acres. Okay, we can do it. But we’re not there yet.”

Since 2000, TOPP has involved some eighty scientists who have tagged more than 4,000 animals, collecting more than a trillion individual data points recording the movements of 23 predatory species like white sharks, bluefin tuna, and elephant seals. Why only predators? Imagine observing the Serengeti, says TOPP marine biologist Randy Kochevar: If you followed the lions and hyenas, you would also find their herbivore prey, who would in turn lead you to the landscape’s resources, like watering holes and plant life. “Our theory is that we can do the same thing in the ocean,” Kochevar says. “If you just focus on these apex predators you really start to get a sense of how the whole ecosystem is working.”

TOPP data shows that the Pacific Ocean contains the equivalent of “watering holes,” or multi-species hot spots where animals gather to eat and breed. These hot spots coalesce where upwellings of nutrients cause plankton to bloom, in turn attracting small fish, then bigger fish, and so on up the food chain. Between these hot spots are migratory corridors, the highways of the underwater world. Until recently, humans didn’t know much about the travels of highly migratory animals like sharks and tuna, most often spotting them where these highways run close to the coasts. But that, says Kochevar, is “like standing in your backyard and watching a jet fly over—you’re just getting a glimpse of a much larger journey.” With the tags, he says, “It really opens up a whole new world because you start being able to see where the animals are day to day.”

Scientists are now overlaying this tracking data with other oceanographic information like water temperature, sea surface height, and currents, to better understand why animals roam where they do, and which areas are particularly important to their survival. Up until now, regulators working with limited data have attempted to protect species via fairly blunt mechanisms like limiting catch—but as Kochevar points out, these policies are “oftentimes not necessarily based in a good understanding of the animal’s life history, or where they are when, or what’s critical habitat.” Instead, TOPP scientists hope that providing very specific data about how animals use the ocean will help us protect them, perhaps by influencing where we site shipping lanes, Marine Protected Areas, offshore drilling or wave energy plants, showing where we must control pollution and shoreline development, and helping us be smarter about how we fish.

Take, for example, the case of the rapidly disappearing leatherback turtles. “They are the ancient mariner of the sea turtle world—the widest ranging, largest existing sea turtle, the most prolific breeders that dive to the deepest depths, and swim in the coldest waters,” says Stanford researcher George Shillinger, who started tagging them for TOPP in 2003. “They’re just enigmatic and beautiful creatures.”

Indeed, the life of the leatherback is mysterious—although they live for forty years, most of that is spent at sea. Humans don’t see them except during their brief onshore nesting periods. “You see them as little hatchlings and then they disappear for ten to twelve years,” Shillinger explains. “Somehow or another, against all odds, they return [to breed], and then they go away again. For [another] four years they disappear out into the vast expansive blue, and then they come back. How do they do that? It’s incredible!”

Yet leatherbacks are in serious trouble. Shillinger says that over the last two decades the Pacific basin population has declined by over ninety percent. (The World Wildlife Fund estimates that only 2,300 adult females remain in the Pacific, and around 34,000 worldwide.) In the hope of figuring out how best to aid them, Shillinger has been tagging turtles on Costa Rica’s Playa Grande, their last remaining viable nesting colony in the eastern Pacific. Even there, the turtles are threatened by the harvest of eggs from their nesting
spots, habitat loss due to coastal development, light pollution that confuses them as they swim to sea, and deaths from eating plastic, which the turtles mistake for their favored prey, jellyfish.

But their biggest threat is fishermen. “The advent of cheaper fuel and new fisheries technologies has pushed a lot of fleets offshore, where the migrating turtles, when they head out to their foraging grounds, interact with fisheries in distant areas. They are hooked by long liners or they drown in gill nets,” says Shillinger. The loss of a single adult female is “a tragedy for the turtles,” he says, because of their low reproductive rate: A female may produce 2,400 eggs in her lifetime, of which only two will survive to adulthood. The irony, says Shillinger, is that nobody wants to kill leatherbacks; there isn’t a market for them, and when fishermen do hook them it causes a work slowdown and a PR embarrassment. Shillinger hopes to use the TOPP data to keep the turtles and the fishermen out of each other’s way.

This might not be so hard: tagging data shows that after their nesting period, the Playa Grande turtles follow a consistent path from beach to sea. “That in and of itself affords a fantastic opportunity for conservation,” says Shillinger; options include closing off that corridor to fishing fleets for the three months it takes the turtles to migrate across it, or just shutting down smaller sections while the turtles are passing through. Alternatively, tagging data showing the depths in which the turtles prefer to swim could be used to help fishermen to adjust the lengths of their lines to avoid hooking them. None of these solutions is as drastic as creating a permanent no-fishing zone; TOPP scientists hope highly targeted, short-term adjustments like these will be more palatable to the fishing industry, since it won’t eliminate anyone’s livelihood.

In April, Shillinger headed to Costa Rica to discuss his data with representatives from the ministry of environment, the parks service, and the fishing industry. He hopes to eventually see a regional conservation effort involving the nearby nations of Ecuador, Panama, Nicaragua, and Colombia, because as he puts it, “These animals obviously don’t abide by political boundaries.” He thinks international conservation efforts should also start looking ahead to future issues, like the effects global warming could have on leatherbacks. Sea level rise might be bad news for Playa Grande, and “If we don’t anticipate where the next great nesting beach might be, they might not have anywhere to go, especially with runaway development along the coastal areas,” he says.

But while the TOPP data hints at a way to help the leatherbacks, it’s also given us some gloomy news about other species. For example, TOPP pays a small fee to fishermen who return the tags from any tuna they’ve hooked; an unexpectedly high percentage of tags are being returned soon after deployment, suggesting that they are being harvested more intensively than previously thought. Even with animals that aren’t commercially fished, like white sharks, Kochevar says, the tagging team is “finding that we’re seeing the same animals again and again and again. … It suggests that, you know what, maybe there aren’t really that many white sharks.”

So as TOPP winds up its first phase, it faces two new challenges: communicating its findings to people who can push through conservation measures, especially for animals that are critically endangered, and broadening its efforts internationally. Its successor is a new project called GTOPP, or the Global Tagging of Pelagic Predators, which will invite scientists from around the world—not just California’s side of the Pacific—to pool their tracking data via Google Earth, the massive digital mapping project devoted to “annotating the globe.” Google Earth’s ocean maps (downloadable at www.earth.google.com/ocean) provide 3-D topographic images that allow viewers to “swim” around the underwater geography. TOPP is overlaying its animal tracking data onto these maps; click on the image of a shark or a leatherback and you can see where it’s been. Come back tomorrow, and see if it’s moved. Using Google is a way for scientists to easily exchange information—but it’s also a way to communicate with another ocean policy stakeholder: you.

“It seems like an interesting way to grab people’s attention and get them to be excited about exploring the planet,” says Google’s Steve Miller, who is working on the GTOPP project. Making data publicly accessible in real time will let people feel that they are “watching the experiment in progress,” says Kochevar, and has great potential for environmental education because so many of the tagged animals are sharks, tuna, and other “charismatic megafauna”—that’s scientist-speak for “really cool big animals” that capture the public’s imagination and arouse compassion. Since the data about those animal’s lives will always be updating, says Miller, “If a kid happens to fall in love with a particular whale shark, he ought to be able to come in every day and see where it’s going,” and maybe learn about its environment and challenges in the process.

For policymakers, dynamic mapping could make it easier to visualize and debate complicated conservation issues. This spring, Miller and other Google representatives met with congressional staffers on commerce, science, and natural resources subcommittees who were interested in using digital maps to help legislators evaluate the potential impacts of, for example, offshore wind, gas, or oil developments.

Google Earth’s maps have already been useful tools for environmental activists with more terrestrial concerns: In the Santa Cruz mountains, Neighbors Against Irresponsible Logging (NAIL), used Google Earth to illustrate how a proposed logging zone would encroach on residential areas; in North Carolina the group Appalachian Voices created a virtual tour within Google Earth showing the effects of mountaintop removal coal mining. Making TOPP’s tracking data public could be a boon for ocean conservation groups; Miller points out that UC Santa Barbara scientists have been using Google Earth’s ocean maps to discuss Marine Protected Areas.

TOPP’s tracking data is giving us our clearest picture yet of life in the Pacific—will better data ultimately mean better ocean health? Kochevar thinks so: “The only way that conservation can really work,” he says, “is if you’re working with the right information at your fingertips.”

Massive power shortages can do more than wreak havoc for ratepayers, they pose serious risks to a community’s safety and economic wellbeing. Blackouts and brownouts disrupt office life and factory schedules, suddenly stop elevators and darken traffic signals, and create health hazards for the very young, the very old, the very sick, and anyone else who relies on stable heating, cooling, or plug-in medical devices. But the emergency also posed a rare and valuable challenge. Juneau had a chance to find out how much a community’s power demand can be quickly and steeply reduced—and to discover what changes can carry over after the crisis is past.

Juneau’s utility, the Alaska Electric Light and Power Company, did its best to quickly alert customers to the rate change, offering the option of spreading the increase out over a year’s worth of bills. But thrifty and conscientious residents were clearly eager to save energy. “The day following the avalanche, the office became a beehive of conversation with walk-in customers looking for ideas,” recalls Gayle Wood, the company’s director of consumer affairs. “Suddenly, folks were curious about such things as the amount of energy that dusty thirty-year-old freezer was using.” The company’s small office was so besieged with inquiries that it had to hire two temps and even recall retirees to handle the demand for information.

Juneau needed all the help it could get guiding the city’s conservation efforts. By chance, a student who had recently returned from taking classes in California suggested just the guy: Dr. Alan Meier, a senior scientist in the Energy Analysis Department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Meier, who also teaches courses in energy conservation at UC Davis, specializes in saving electricity in a hurry; in fact, Saving Electricity in a Hurry is the name of the book he published in 2005 while working for the International Energy Agency. Meier has studied dozens of similar power outages, from the rolling blackouts during California’s 2001 energy crisis, to a situation that same year in Brazil when a drought left the nation’s almost entirely hydroelectric system parched, to the 2003 squeeze on Tokyo’s electric supply after seventeen nuclear reactors—about half of the city’s generating power—were temporarily taken offline because utility officials were discovered to have been falsifying safety reports.

These kinds of power shortfalls have a common thread, says Meier: in each case the problem is temporary and solvable, because the power-generating infrastructure remains intact. However, electricity use must be sharply curtailed virtually overnight.That leaves local authorities with an unattractive set of options. “You really have to rely on either just having blackouts—which are economically destructive and also dangerous to life and health— or instead you have to rely on getting people to change their habits,” Meier says. “The question is, ‘How do you do that?’”

It’s a trickier question than it seems at first glance. Many of the kinds of power-saving solutions that the government is used to pushing—providing rebates for people who switch to more energy-efficient appliances, encouraging the weatherization of homes, creating standards for more eco-friendly buildings—make slow, permanent changes. An avalanche bowling over a city’s transmission towers instead demands a rapid response to a temporary problem. Additionally, as Meier points out, you can’t rely on pricing and market forces to control energy consumption because most people only get a utility bill once a month—by the time they find out how sharply the price of power has skyrocketed, they’ve already used far too much of it.

And of course, most people already know the basics of conservation: turn down the thermostat, keep the lights dim and the drapes open, wear a sweater. Within a few days of the avalanche, Juneau’s stores had been cleaned out of compact fluorescent lightbulbs, and customers had to wait for more to arrive via the weekly barge shipment from Seattle. “Juneau is situated in a rainforest, and it was common to hear stories about [people] using clotheslines for the first time, or hanging clothes to dry in garages,” recalls Wood. “There was a run on clothespins and drying racks.” But those household measures alone, even when undertaken collectively, aren’t enough to relieve the strain on overwhelmed utilities during a crisis. A community often needs to look for bigger, broader solutions.

At the invitation of city officials, Meier decamped to Juneau to help it find those big ways to save energy. “One thing I had to work on very quickly is to figure out, overall, in the city where electricity goes,” he recalls. Partly, he determined, it was going to the airport, which was leaving runway lights on even when planes weren’t landing. But more surprisingly, much of it was going down the drain. “Even though it was raining out, and Juneau is a terribly wet place, because of the delicate environment they had to invest a lot of electricity in delivering the water and even more in treating the sewage,” says Meier.

According to a newspaper editorial published by Juneau mayor Bruce Botelho, managing Juneau’s water supply is the city’s biggest single electrical demand. The city pumps more than three million gallons of water every day from surface level up to storage reservoirs used to maintain water pressure. Because of the quintupled power rates, doing so cost the city an extra $15,000 per day. Even using cold water—much less water that had been electrically heated—was becoming a double drain on resources. As a result, an energy conservation campaign that began by asking people to mind their light switches ended with asking them to monitor the tap.

Since about a third of energy is consumed at home, part of Meier’s task on his Juneau visit was to dispel myths about which household conservation measures truly save electricity and which don’t. (See sidebar for Meier’s do’s and don’ts.) But how do you stage a media campaign to reach out to residents when you’re also telling everyone to unplug their entertainment center? “That’s a challenge,” Meier admits. “That’s why I spent time on every medium possible,” including radio, newspapers, blogs, and live visits throughout the city. Among Meier’s many stops: a fish processing plant, where he examined the company’s refrigeration unit; several low-income housing units, where he spoke with managers about how to reduce electricity usage; and a brewery, where, he says, “I had absolutely no idea what to suggest partly because they were completely on top of things.” He also made the rounds of schools and office buildings, where he urged occupants to be responsible for turning off their own computers and lights at the end of the day instead of leaving it up to custodians.

Meier had plenty of company in his attempts to help the city power down. Alaska Electric Light and Power had already produced handouts and informational displays for Earth Day asking customers to reduce their power usage by ten percent, but these were quickly repurposed for the energy crisis. The city sent mailers listing energy conservation steps and urging residents to use less water. “The mayor and others from the business community walked the downtown area to encourage businesses to reduce their usage,” recalls Wood. A local nonprofit organized volunteers to help people make energy-efficient upgrades, like swapping incandescent bulbs for CFLs. Meier’s visit inspired the creation of a community campaign and a matching Web site called “Juneau Unplugged” that provided information about how to save energy and where those struggling with their power bills could turn for financial help.

City officials also had to get the word out to the approximately half a million tourists expected to arrive in Juneau via cruise liner before the towers could be repaired, so they wouldn’t be alarmed by its darkened shops and take their spending money elsewhere. Cruise lines were asked to explain the situation to their passengers, and shopkeepers placed placards in their windows explaining that they were conserving electricity.

The best information campaigns, says Meier, mix facts with humor, which is why he encouraged Juneau’s officials to study California’s tongue-in-cheek “Flex Your Power” TV ads. (Remember the one with a flirty octogenarian couple suggesting that they go skinnydipping instead of using the air conditioning, or one advising parents to let their energy-hog teenagers sleep in all day?) The trick was to make conservation the norm, says Meier, so that people would good-naturedly hassle anyone who wasn’t doing their part. It worked, says Wood. “I’m sure there wasn’t a work site coffee room where the conversation didn’t center on the energy situation and on what individuals were doing to cut their energy use. Energy conservation was ‘the thing to do.’ There was also a sense of peer pressure—‘My neighbors don’t have their lights on, so I can’t turn mine on yet.’”

But residents also needed to be reassured that the crisis wouldn’t last forever. In advising the utility, Meier recalls, “I said that one thing you have to do is make sure that the customers, the citizens of Juneau, know how hard you are striving to fix the problem—you need to create on your Web site a day-by-day description of what tasks are you working on, what is the status of the repairs, so that people can see that they’re saving for some reason, there’s an end in sight.”

The utility took this task very seriously. “Some customers took extraordinary measures to reduce their energy use, and knowing that progress was being made was like getting a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel,” recalls Wood. “Our generation engineer recorded consistent daily updates. These were provided to all the media outlets, and were aired on all local radio stations.” Updates were also posted on the company’s Web site.

And it worked. Within weeks, energy usage in Juneau dropped a dramatic thirty percent. Even better, none of that savings rate is due to seasonal fluctuations in power use—that thirty percent represents pure conservation, says Wood. Remember, only a few days before the avalanche the power company had hoping residents could be persuaded to save a mere ten percent. That thirty percent reduction sounds even more impressive when you compare it to the savings realized during other recent—albeit longer-term—power shortages. As Meier points out in his book, California’s 2001 energy crisis produced about a fourteen percent electricity savings rate over the course of nine months. During Brazil’s 2001 power shortage, during which the government rationed electricity and levied penalties for people who failed to reduce their usage, the energy savings was around twenty percent over ten months.

Many Juneau customers had dreaded receiving the “big bill”—the first power bill after the avalanche reflecting the new electricity rates. But the conservation effort, and the fact that repairs to the transmission towers finished ahead of schedule in early June, eased some of their pain. “As customers received the ‘big bill’ following their conservation efforts, most were relieved by the dollar amount compared with what they feared their bill could be when the news first broke,” says Wood. “Customers claimed bragging rights given the amount of conservation they attained. One young woman told me she was so proud of her $300 bill, she put it on the refrigerator!”

After the transmission towers were fixed, Juneau’s electricity use began to gradually creep back upwards but has not yet returned to former levels. “As of the end of September, overall usage was still down by about ten percent,” says Wood. “This reduction is basically the same for residential, small and large commercial and government customer classes. We expect that some reduction will be permanent, given removal of old refrigerators and freezers, replacement of incandescent lights with CFLs and a change in the way customers think about energy and resulting changes in habits.”

Indeed, agrees Meier, the city will probably benefit from some conservation inertia. “Once you turn down the thermostat on your water heater you probably don’t go and turn it up again unless there is a problem,” he says. ”You don’t unscrew a compact fluorescent light unless it’s really a nuisance.” As he points out, a ten percent reduction in a city’s power usage is a tremendous feat, one that would be very difficult to accomplish by a campaign alone, without an impending crisis to motivate the population.

The Juneau avalanche illustrates a fate that could easily befall Northern California—for instance, an earthquake that knocks the Diablo Canyon power plant or another nearby generator offline. But the bigger lesson is very simple: we could all live with less. Why wait for the next disaster to save electricity in a hurry when we could start now?

SB 1121, Migden’s labeling bill, is currently making its way through the state’s Senate. California is one of thirteen states considering such a bill; Maryland senator Barbara Mikulski is also pushing for a federal law. So far, none have passed; Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a virtually identical Migden bill last year, saying such labeling is pre-empted by federal law. Migden and her allies, mostly food safety and consumer interest groups, disagree, pointing out that states have often set precedents for labeling regulations, such as for irradiated foods. “People have a right to know that cloned foods are on the market,” says Migden spokesperson Tracy Fairchild. “We see it as an issue of consumer choice.”

Admittedly, there isn’t much to label yet. According to the US Department of Agriculture, there are fewer than 600 clones in the United States, mostly cattle. The USDA, as well as the federal Food and Drug Administration, portray cloning as the most recent development in animal husbandry’s long history of assisted reproductive technologies, which already includes artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, and selective breeding. Cloning companies usually market their services as a way for ranchers to replace valuable animals that die or are injured, or to engineer herds of highly productive livestock. “Instead of having one top female in your & breeding program, imagine what you could accomplish with two, four, or eight of her,” cloning company Cyagra urges on its Web site. Indeed, because clones are so expensive to produce, most observers expect that they’ll primarily be used for breeding, not eating.

In January, the FDA concluded that it is safe to eat milk and meat from cloned animals as well as from their conventionally bred offspring. The FDA spent years examining this hot-button issue; in 2001, the agency asked agricultural producers to observe a “voluntary moratorium” on introducing products from cloned animals into the food supply while it deliberated. In 2006, the agency gave a preliminary all-clear, releasing a draft risk assessment claiming that milk and meat produced by clones and their progeny are no different than those from other animals.

The agency’s findings were hotly contested by the Center for Food Safety, which accused the FDA of fuzzy math and of basing its research too heavily on data supplied by cloning companies. The center released its own report deconstructing the FDA’s figures, emphasizing clones’ low survival rate (between five and eighteen percent between implantation and delivery for cows) and the high prevalence of birth defects.

For example, the Center for Food Safety reports that hydrops, an abnormal build-up of fluid in the fetus that can cause stillbirths and often leads to the euthanization of the surrogate mother, is very rare in natural breeding but may have an incidence rate of up to 42 percent in cattle cloning. The center claims that as many as half of cow clones are afflicted by “Large Offspring Syndrome,” which can cause not only unusually high birth weight, endangering the host mother, but a laundry list of organ dysfunctions and systemic abnormalities, including heart problems and immature lung development. Furthermore, the report cited some evidence that clones are not always exact duplicates of their gene donors, suggesting that cloning remains an unpredictable science.

Rebecca Spector, the group’s West Coast director, says they’re worried that the cloning process might create problems up the food chain. For example, she asks, could people get sick, or develop allergic reactions or antibiotic resistances, due to the high doses of hormones administered to host mothers to assist difficult pregnancies, or the antibiotics given to sickly offspring? Could undetected birth defects or genetic changes in animals that make it to slaughter age have food safety implications? “The FDA’s risk assessment didn’t adequately look at that, especially for long-term effects or effects on children,” Spector says. The group has also encouraged the FDA to consider issues outside of food safety: the animal welfare concerns raised by the poor health of clones and dangers to their host mothers, as well as the threat to biodiversity caused by genetic homogenization. (For the dangers of a monocrop, one only need think of the Irish potato famine.)

Yet the FDA’s final report, issued this January, brushed aside most of these concerns, stating that it was not the agency’s goal to parse the ethics of cloning or determine if clones are “normal.” The agency stood by its original findings: that it’s safe to eat cloned cows, pigs, and goats, although it admitted that the efficiency of producing clones is “very low,” and that animals involved in the process “are at increased risk of adverse health outcomes.” While admitting that the technology is still too new for anyone to draw conclusions about overall clone longevity, the agency ruled that premature deaths “do not pose a food consumption risk” because those animals theoretically don’t survive long enough to enter the food supply, and that the offspring of clones are safe to eat because the sexual reproduction process resets possible genetic defects in their parents.

The FDA stresses that meat and milk go through multiple quality checks before hitting the grocery stores (including ensuring that animals slaughtered for meat do not contain unapproved levels of antibiotics in their edible tissues), and products that fail federal or state standards are withheld from the food supply. (The Center for Food Safety challenges these claims, pointing out that agricultural inspectors are unlikely to catch subtle defects.) The FDA emphasizes that clones are mostly “elite breeding animals” unlikely to go to slaughter. As a statement from the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine puts it: “The value of these animals is in their genetics, not their meat. & Clones are just too expensive to produce, so you wouldn’t want to eat your investment.” In any case, the statement continues, “Clones are as identical as twins are—there is always a slim chance of genetic mutation in the production of any animal, no matter how it is created. We do not expect any food safety effects.”

Even after the report’s release, both the FDA and the USDA have asked producers to continue observing the voluntary moratorium. The FDA says that it is not aware of any clone-derived products entering the market since the report was released. The FDA (which regulates milk products) says it will not require labeling for food derived from clones, because it is not nutritionally different than food from other animals. However, the agency may consider, on a case-by-case basis, the truthfulness of the claims of producers who want to label their dairy products “clone-free.” The USDA (which regulates meat) has not taken a stance on labeling, although it has stated that meat from clones cannot be considered “organic.” (The agency has not decided if this will also apply to meat from clones’ offspring.) A spokesman from the California Department of Food & Agriculture declined to give the state’s take on the labeling issue, saying the agency cannot comment on pending legislation.

According to a 2007 Consumers Unions survey, 89 percent of Americans would support labeling. Oddly, most of the forward motion on this issue seems to be coming from cloning companies themselves. Last year two of them—ViaGen and TransOva Genetics—announced they had developed a supply chain tracking program for cloned animals utilizing a third party registry, similar to the systems used to reassure consumers that they are buying Fair Trade coffee or Halal meats. Both companies referred questions to Barbara Glenn, animal biotechnology spokesperson for lobbying group BIO (Biotechnology Industry Organization). She compares the labels involved in this system to ones already used to denote organic or kosher foods. “Such labels provide information not about the ingredients, or nutritional value, or safety of the foods, but rather about the process by which the foods were produced.By facilitating consumer choice, such labels serve a valuable function,” she says.

Glenn says that while BIO opposes mandatory labeling, “We do support voluntary labeling as long as the label is truthful and not misleading. Therefore, food marketers could use ‘no clone’ labels to appeal to consumers who want to avoid buying food products from cloned animals.” Others have suggested that consumers concerned about cloning skirt the issue by buying organic. However, says Migden spokesperson Fairchild, “That is unfair to consumers. It puts more pressure on their pocketbooks, because organic foods are more expensive.”

Cloning’s critics suspect that even if labeling eventually prevails, consumers will ultimately reject a technology that seems to benefit breeders, rather than buyers—especially one that involves dairy production, a touchy subject because milk is so frequently consumed by children. Plus, Spector points out, as a political issue, cloning likely has a “yick factor” that even genetically engineered crops can’t match. As the labeling debate makes its way through thirteen state legislatures, brace yourself—we’ll be hearing about clone-derived foods again.

And again.

This is Fernwood cemetery, where so far about 120 people are helping, even in repose, to pioneer a concept that’s been dubbed “green,” “natural,” or “conservation” burial. The goal is to make interment a less resource-intensive process than traditional burial by returning one’s body gently to the Earth. As the Fernwood staff like to say, it’s using “what remains of a life to generate new life.”

It’s a striking contrast to the prevailing emphasis of the $20-billion-a-year American funeral industry, which over the last century has profited greatly from the illusion that its particular form of artistry can stand indefinitely between the human body and decay. Staples of the modern American funeral now include metal caskets billed as airtight and waterproof, which are further sealed inside concrete sarcophagi called “grave liners” or “vaults.” To restore the deceased to a semblance of lifelikeness and good health, chemical embalming is typically used, as well as a heavy application of cosmetics. While the American use of embalming has its roots in Civil War, when it helped preserve the bodies of soldiers shipped home from the battlefield, today the funeral industry’s emphasis on lifelike tableaux and decay-resistant entombment serves a different purpose: it enables bodies to withstand lengthy periods of public viewing, and gives grieving family members a certain—false—hope that their loved one will not be doing much mouldering in the grave.

Green burial’s modus operandi, on the other hand, is to help dust become dust again as seamlessly as possible. Instead of copper, bronze, or stainless steel caskets, green burial favors anything designed to fade away: That can run the gamut from ancient wrappings like fabric shrouds to very modern innovations like the Ecopod, a shell made of recycled paper that biodegrades in about six months. Fernwood offers options including a $1,200 plain pine wood box with rope handles, made without nails or toxic adhesives, an $800 wicker basket, or just bringing an old sheet from home. Embalming, which is not required by state law, is optional, and green burial grounds use dry ice or refrigeration for preservation. (Fernwood customers who request embalming are referred off-site; its funeral home does not perform the procedure.)

What is preserved instead is the land itself. Fernwood has been a green burial ground for three years; for the previous 114, it was a conventional, if somewhat run-down, cemetery and crematory. Fernwood’s current owners poured $3 million into restoring the property, including using hand tools to clear the grounds of non-native plants, and building a strikingly beautiful memorial hall that seems composed of equal parts concrete, air, and waterfall.

Because of its hybrid history, Fernwood still allows conventional burials in the older part of the graveyard, but interments on the other twenty acres play by new, eco-friendly rules. Graves are dug by hand, to minimize the chance that healthy topsoil and the nutrient-poor clay six feet under will switch places. (Conventional cemeteries, which have accidentally buried their best soil, often chemically treat their lawns.) There are no grave liners or upright headstones made of granite or other imported stone. Fernwood favors a mixture of high– and low-tech to mark graves, with an emphasis on extreme subtlety. Families may indicate gravesites by planting a tree or laser-etching a small locally sourced rock; a signaling device is buried at each site so that it can be located with a GPS receiver. Next year, Fernwood’s staff hopes to replace its current GPS locator—a monstrosity as tall as a fishing pole—with handheld devices that can play a memorial montage of music and photos as visitors approach a grave site.

It’s hard, though, to discourage the human urge to proclaim that we were here. A walk through Fernwood reveals that several families have ringed recent burial sites with purplish stones; others have scattered brightly colored pebbles over the top of graves. One family used dry flower stalks to spell out “Mom.” But despite these temporary tributes, Fernwood family services counselor Eliot Vander Lugt says he’s noticing an interesting psychological shift among the families who visit the cemetery. “A lot of them have started to express this identification of the entire habitat, this preserved park area, being the memorial,” he says. “There’s not the same focus on this spot for my loved one, it’s more about participating in this with other like-minded people.”

And there are plenty of those people. In addition to the 120 occupied green gravesites, Fernwood has booked another 240 spots for natural burials. Fernwood is one of nine green cemeteries in the United States, with another half dozen on the way. The modern eco-funeral is actually a British concept, brought to the states in 1998 when physician Billy Campbell opened the Ramsey Creek Preserve in Westminster, South Carolina. The phenomenon has received a good deal of media attention, much delivered under punny headlines about “greener pastures” and “thinking outside of the box.” But the effort is serious: Natural burial is a legal and financial tool to conserve open space, and a stopper against the huge drain on natural resources associated with conventional funerals.

There are about 2.5 million deaths a year in the United States, creating an enormous demand for the flowers, hardwoods, metals, and chemicals that make open-casket wakes possible, even though most of these materials will be permanently sequestered underground within a few days. Fernwood funeral director Tom Cromie puts it this way: “First you mine the Earth to get the gravel to make the cement to make the grave liner that you put back in the ground. Then you cut down the forest to make the coffin.”

“We bury more metal each year in caskets than what was used to build the Golden Gate Bridge, and bury enough reinforced concrete each year that we could build a two-lane highway from New York to Detroit,” says Joe Sehee, executive director of the Green Burial Council, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Britain’s Centre for Natural Burial estimates that nearly a million gallons of embalming fluid, which contains the carcinogen formaldehyde, is buried in North America every year.

Why not just cremate? It’s a fast, simple process that’s easier on the environment and the pocketbook than conventional burial, and it has become increasingly popular over the last century. California performs the most cremations in the nation; more than half of Californians choose it over burial. But cremation, too, has an environmental impact, albeit much smaller: burning vaporizes the mercury in tooth fillings, produces dioxins, and consumes fuel. The Centre for Natural Burial claims on its Web site that “the amount of non-renewable fossil fuel needed to cremate bodies in North America is equivalent to a car making 84 trips to the Moon and back&each year.” Even though no laws require a casket or embalming for cremation, service providers may urge families to choose them, racking up additional tolls, financial and environmental.

But cremation’s real drawback, some critics say, is that while many people choose it with the romantic notion that their ashes will be scattered outdoors to nourish a beloved landscape, in fact, cremated ashes are sterile. They won’t do any harm, but they’re not fertilizer.

Speaking of fertilizer, here are some things about green burial you no doubt are dying to know: Do wild animals ever dig up bodies, or do teeth and bones make their way to the surface? (So far, no.) Do the cemeteries smell? (Nope.) Without embalming, will decomposing bodies cause disease? (No; green burial’s proponents say there are no public health consequences to skipping embalming.) Will buried people be literally pushing up daisies? (Probably not—Fernwood’s graves are five and a half feet deep, too far for most roots to reach.)

If the idea of commingling bodies with the Earth makes you feel a little squeamish, some of the methods used by conventional cemeteries to keep bodies boxed forever aren’t much nicer. One of the reasons most cemeteries insist on concrete grave liners is because industrial-sized mowers and backhoes can otherwise crush the caskets beneath; easier lawn mowing is also behind modern cemeteries’ switch from upright headstones to flat-lying memorial plaques. Conventional cemeteries usually squeeze about 1,000 bodies into an acre, so chockablock that the grave liners touch. (Fernwood won’t put more than two in the same twelve-foot by twelve-foot space.) Some funeral homes require grieving relatives who resist buying a waterproof vault to sign waivers indicating it’s okay for the deceased to be submerged in water and subjected to decay.

And if spending money is the sort of thing that gives you the heebie-jeebies, traditional funerals are terrifying. They’re expensive, something well-known since 1963, when muckraking Oakland journalist Jessica Mitford blew the crypt doors off the funeral industry with The American Way of Death, her exposé of how unscrupulous operators can take advantage of people faced with the perfect storm of circumstances: bereavement, a time crunch, a pocketful of insurance money, their own inexperience organizing a funeral, and a fear of looking cheap. Back then, the average cost of a funeral was $1,450; today, it’s $6,500, according to the National Funeral Directors Association, and that doesn’t include cemetery fees. Neither does it include flowers, transportation, obituary notices, nor vaults, all of which, as the AARP warns its members, can bring the bill closer to $10,000.

Sehee estimates that even though buying a plot in a natural burial ground may be more expensive than buying one elsewhere—places like Fernwood exist on some pricey real estate—a green burial typically costs one-half to two-thirds as much as a conventional one because it excludes some of the costlier accessories: a grave liner, embalming, a fancy headstone or casket. “There is no economic motivation for a cemetery to do it this way. It would strip away all their profit, all their add-ons,” muses Vander Lugt. “It’s like a dealership not having a service department where they sell you the car, and then they make money on service.”

He considers green burial a middle ground between too much memorializing and not enough. “The natural burial approach gets rid of the excesses of conventional funeral practices and the excessive expense, without going way to the other extreme either philosophically or financially,” says Vander Lugt. “It seems a little more holistic.”

But how holistic, exactly, is holistic enough? Even in its short lifetime Fernwood has already been the source of a rift in the eco-burial community. Sehee, a former Jesuit lay minister, was one of Fernwood’s first advocates; now, through the Green Burial Council, he runs a certification program that has granted approval to several green burial sites in the US, but not Fernwood.

First a word about Fernwood’s owner, Tyler Cassity: Cassity is a funeral industry icon and provocateur; he pioneered the idea of a hip, rock n’ roll cemetery that could be a hangout for the living as well as the dead. The son of a Missouri-based family that operates six cemeteries under the name Forever Enterprises, Cassity made his own mark on the trade by reviving the once moribund Los Angeles cemetery Hollywood Forever, screening classic films against the mausoleum walls and setting up touch-screen kiosks that would play back professionally produced “Life Stories” videos of the deceased. Cassity conferred a certain glamour on the undertaking business, consulting for the TV show Six Feet Under, and becoming the subject of the HBO documentary The Young and the Dead as well as a stream of articles in publications like the New Yorker.

Sehee claims to have brought the idea for green burial to Cassity while doing communications work for Hollywood Forever and running an eco-retreat in Joshua Tree, and says he was part of the initial team that designed and developed the Fernwood site. Billy Campbell, the founder of the Ramsey Creek Preserve, also served as a consultant. But the relationship between Sehee and Cassity soured quickly, and in 2005 Sehee split off to form his own organization. Among Sehee’s bones of contention: he alleges that Fernwood was making misrepresentations about banning embalming on the premises and having a conservation easement when it did not.

Fernwood’s general manager, Nickolas Careone, says Fernwood never claimed to have such a ban. Although it no longer performs embalming, because of its hybrid status Fernwood does allow embalmed bodies in the older part of the graveyard, where some people have pre-purchased plots with conventional burials in mind. “If Mom’s there, we can’t say, ‘Sorry, Dad, you can’t be,’” says Careone, noting that they only do two or three such burials a year.

A conservation easement, which Fernwood currently does not have, would turn the land’s long-term care over to a nonprofit organization or government agency like the National Parks Service, ensuring that it could not be used for another purpose in the future. Sehee hopes to use this mechanisim to fundamentally change the industry by making cemetery owners concessionaires, rather than the actual guardians of land. “What you want is the cemetery operator to focus on what they’re good at—opening and closing graves—and the parks service to focus on what they’re good at. A cemetery shouldn’t do stewardship of a natural area,” says Sehee.

Without an easement, Sehee asks, “How do you make promises to families today that in ten years it won’t be a field of weeds, or it won’t be sold to another concern that says ‘There isn’t money in this?’” His worries about Fernwood were exacerbated this May when the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that three of the Cassity family’s holdings have been taken over by government regulators who are trying to determine if one of the businesses, National Prearranged Services, which sells prepaid funeral packages, has enough money in its coffers to make good on as many as 100,000 prepaid funerals. For Sehee, Fernwood’s lack of an easement, combined with the Cassity empire’s ongoing problems, raises concerns that if there is a sale of the property, nothing would prevent a future owner from turning it into a more conventional cemetery.

But Careone says that can’t happen. He points out that Fernwood plans to apply for an easement once the property is fully restored, most likely turning over control to the federal government, since the cemetery abuts the Golden Gate National Recreational Area. In the meantime, it has a dedication on record with Marin County stating that the land can only be used as a green cemetery. “Either way,” says Careone, “it can never be anything other than what it is now.” In addition, Fernwood, like most cemeteries, has an endowment fund—people who purchase plots pay an extra ten percent, which goes into a state-controlled trust. The interest from this account must be used to care for the cemetery in perpetuity.

Furthermore, says Careone, he believes Fernwood is insulated from National Prearranged Services’ money problems because Tyler Cassity runs the two California cemeteries separately from his family’s businesses. (Indeed, the media relations team at Forever Enterprises’ St. Louis office referred interview requests back to California; Hollywood Forever staffers did not return phone calls.)

While there may be some bad blood in this fledgling industry, it’s clear that everyone involved wants the same thing: a burial process that respects the dead and the planet. “I feel like this is the kind of place where somebody might go if maybe Dad was an outdoorsman or something, and they would never think of putting him in a confined box-in-a-box and then have a mowed lawn on it,” says Cromie, as he picks his way down Fernwood’s slope. “They can come here and have a good feeling, like this is where Dad would belong. A lot of people would never visit a regular cemetery, the more recent generations. I don’t think it resonates for them.”

Sehee puts it this way: “Americans are starting to understand their end of life ritual options, and I think they are very much drawn to this idea that provides a great deal of solace, and allows them to get into sync with this cycle we see all around us of birth, life, death, and rebirth.”

Maybe Mitford had it right 45 years ago, when she observed that just as ostentatiously large cars were going out of style, so might the voluptuous funeral. “Could it be,” she wrote back then, “that the same cycle is working itself out in the attitude towards the final return of dust to dust, that the American public is becoming sickened by ever more ornate and costly funerals, and that a status symbol of the future may indeed be the simplest kind of ‘funeral without fins?’”

If so, then the funeral industry may have just met its Prius.

Since 2001, the program has been setting up weekly farm stands at three Berkeley sites selling—at cost—organic or pesticide-free produce grown by local independent farmers. This January, Oakland caterer HuNia Bradley joined the team as co-manager. She wryly describes her qualifications this way: “I raised my two children vegetarian, so I had to learn how to compete with McDonald’s and Taco Bell.”

In fact, she says, she not only convinced her own kids—now in high school and college—to skip the fast food, but soon their friends followed suit. “Everything I made was more flavorful and more bountiful that they didn’t want to go there, and they influenced their friends to change their diets,” she says. Her home cooking’s popularity soon grew into a catering and personal chef service she dubbed HuNia’s Divine Soul Kitchen. “The cornerstone of my business was to introduce to the primarily African-American community a healthier way of eating,” she says.

Bradley calls her cooking style “vegetarian soul,” specializing in reinvented classics like greens cooked without meat and barbequed tofu instead of chicken. Currently, she whips up 200 school lunches a day for the ASA Academy in Oakland, and is also frequently asked to provide meals for church health ministries, as well as events sponsored by groups like the American Heart Association.

Bradley says her own conversion to healthy eating happened as a college student. She felt low on energy, and when she complained to a friend, the friend suggested that maybe it had to do with all the meat in her diet—she was used to eating heavy breakfasts with plenty of bacon. “I laid off the bacon, and I was like, ‘There is a difference,’” she recalls. “I totally became a vegetarian once I was pregnant. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I really have to do better because I don’t want my kids to have what runs in my family—high blood pressure and diabetes. I realized there was a direct correlation between what I was eating and how I was living.”

She firmly believes that healthy eating has a broad impact on the community well-being, not only in terms of preventing chronic illnesses but in enhancing its collective “behavior and attitude.” Not only do well-fed kids perform better in school, she says, but “If you eat bad food you tend to have more headaches, you don’t feel as well, you’re grouchy and grumpy. If someone steps on your toe you have a different reaction if you have a whole community of folks not feeling well.”

The trick to getting students to try healthy foods, says Bradley, is catching their attention. If you can get them to at least try the fresh produce, she says, “It’s a done deal.” That’s something she’s witnessed many times in her experience preparing school lunches for the ASA Academy. “It started off with students saying stuff like ‘Ugh, where’s the meat?’ and then ‘Oh, my gosh, these pears are delicious!’” she recalls.

Bradley says that one of her goals for Farm Fresh Choice is to supply students with many samples of fruits and vegetables in season—right now that would be things such as squashes and celeries—and also to show how they can prepare these foods at home. Although it might sound hard to cook on a street corner, Bradley says that portable kitchen devices actually make it pretty easy to demonstrate the basics. “We can do vegetable stir fries, we can lay the foundation for soups, we can do some pretty awesome salads right on the spot. Given the right situation, we can do a version of a smoothie,” she says.

In addition, she says, Farm Fresh Choice supplies students with practical information about where their food comes from, how to shop for produce and how to read labels. For example, she says, since not all peanut butter is created equally, how can you find the one that’s best to eat? “We are training young people around food justice and getting them to look at food systems and how they operate, and really understanding why bad food is cheap and good food costs more, but it’s better for you in the long run,” she says.

Getting young people to taste new foods is only half the battle—the other half is winning over their parents. “We pass on our eating habits to our children” says Bradley, and often, those habits are based on convenience and fatigue. “A lot of it’s habitual—like they come home from work and they don’t have time to make all that stuff, so they stop by McDonald’s or somewhere real quick.”

She’s had to battle with parents of the students at the ASA Academy who swear that their children will never eat certain foods that she’s already seen them happily devour that day at lunch. She chuckles at the mention of the furor raised by Jessica Seinfeld’s book Deceptively Delicious, which advises parents to hide pureed vegetables in the kinds of junk foods kids like to eat, like sneaking spinach into brownies. Bradley says she’s never gone to such lengths, but it’s pretty easy to subtly add vegetables to a meal, for example, by mixing shredded carrots into taco filling. “And then after they’re done, you say, ‘That was such and such,’” she explains.

The important thing, she says, is to start getting kids used to a variety of tastes early, before peer pressure about food kicks in. “Once they start filtering other people’s opinions it becomes a challenge,” she says. “But if their taste buds have already been hit, they’re like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about—I like broccoli. My mama makes it like this, and it’s delicious.’”

For families with hungry kids, she says the best snacking policy is to provide a no-limit supply of fresh fruit and veggies. As she told her own kids, “You don’t have to ask for fruit or a vegetable—just go and have at it and I’ll keep it coming.”

Farm Fresh Choice keeps the produce coming Tuesday afternoons outside of the BAHIA School, Berkeley Youth Alternatives, and the Frances Albrier Community Center at San Pablo Park. Bradley points out that they could use new volunteers between the ages of 15 and 21 to help out at the booth and participate in cooking demonstrations. While learning about healthy eating and food politics, youth can gain experience in public speaking and building community. “We’re always looking for a few good folks,” she says.

You can find out more about the Farm Fresh Choice program, including a list of its farms, suggested recipes, and schedule at www.ecologycenter.org/FFC.