In March, the city passed an ordinance proposed by Mirkarimi requiring its Recreation and Park Department to develop a plan for restoring habitat in Sharp Park for at-risk species. The 410-acre park, which is in Pacifica but is owned and operated by the City of San Francisco, includes an 18-hole golf course on about 133 of its acres. Critics say the course is maintained at the expense of the threatened California Red-legged frog and the endangered San Francisco garter snake.

The park starts at the edge of the beach behind a sea wall, and stretches across a diverse topography: grasslands, scrublands, forest, a lagoon called Laguna Salada, Horse Stable Pond, and Sanchez Creek. The frogs and snakes live primarily in the park’s wetlands and on nearby Mori Point, which is owned by the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The animals breed and feed in Laguna Salada, Horse Stable Pond, the canal connecting these two water bodies, and in lower Sanchez Creek—all of which are on the golf course itself. The amphibians disperse to adjacent uplands habitat during the dry season, where they survive the hot weather by hibernating in rodent burrows.

Mark Twain, in his short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” immortalized the red-legged frog. During California’s Gold Rush, the amphibian was considered a delicacy and widely eaten by miners out to make their fortune. Today the frog has been driven from seventy percent of its historic range.

Environmental lawyer Brent Plater is a key player in the campaign to restore the natural ecology of Sharp Park. He stresses that the fate of the San Francisco garter snake, which he calls “the most beautiful serpent in Northern California, and the most rare,” is even more worrisome. In the 1940s the snake was considered abundant, but now it is approaching extinction. Fewer than 2,000 San Francisco garter snakes are left globally; Sharp Park/Mori Point is one of only five viable populations left. These populations are small: six snakes were found at Mori Point in 2004, 13 snakes in 2006, and five in 2008. At Sharp Park, five snakes were found in 2004, then only two in 2008.

Proximity to humans and their golf game isn’t helping. In 2005, a lawnmower on the golf course killed one of the few remaining snakes. The same year the Fish and Wildlife Service of the US Department of the Interior noted in a letter to the parks departments’ golf program manager that a water pump “lowered the water level at Horse Stable Pond and resulted
in the stranding and exposure of a number of egg masses of the California Red-legged frog. This action
apparently caused the death of an unknown quantity of embryonic tadpoles of the completely aquatic early stage of this animal’s lifecycle.”

Plater points out that a single “take” of any federally listed species can result in a fine of $25,000. The frog egg masses at the golf course could contain thousands of eggs, so fines for those “takings” could be enormous.

The Center for Biological Diversity joined the Sharp Park debate after San Francisco’s parks department proposed
what Jeff Miller, a conservation advocate with the nonprofit, calls “a flawed plan calling for privatizing the mismanaged and financially failing golf course and illegally reconstructing flooded portions of the course at the expense of endangered species.” After evidence surfaced of the deaths of red-legged frogs and the snake, the group threatened to sue the city if it did not cease harming endangered species, restore Sharp Park to its natural state as a coastal wetland, and provide more diverse recreational opportunities for the public at the site. The center supported Mirkarimi’s legislation and urged their membership to back the initiative.

Once the ordinance passed, the city funded a study of the park by the firm Tetra Tech, which is assessing options for the golf course’s future; at press time its conclusions had not yet been made public. However, the three main ideas on the table are to keep the golf course as it is, shrink the course while making some environmental changes, or shut it down in favor of restoring habitat for the endangered animals, as well as for migratory birds.

The Center for Biological Diversity would like to preserve as large a swath of wetlands as possible, but Plater says that if the study concludes it is a viable option, he “could live with” a Sharp Park golf course reduced to nine holes that did not compete with the snake and frog habitat. If the course is shut down, Plater believes that the city’s other existing golf courses could handle the business at Sharp Park. A 2008 study concluded that of San Francisco city golf courses, only Harding Park is operating above fifty percent capacity; Sharp Park was operating in the mid-to-upper forty percent capacity.

But golfers want to keep the course open. Richard Harris, a lawyer who cofounded the San Francisco Public Golf Alliance, argues that Sharp Park is especially important to golfers because the game started as a seaside sport in Scotland, on bluffs and dunes, and Sharp Park is the only seaside course in San Francisco. He is passionate about Sharp Park being a legacy of Dr. Alister MacKenzie, one of the most famous landscape architects to design a golf course. While Harris concedes that the ocean washed away several of the original holes MacKenzie put in place, he says that remaining links designed by MacKenzie are important highlights of the grounds. The course is “a treasure of the golf world,” says Harris. “It is one of only three public seaside links courses in California. The other two are on the Monterey Peninsula, and one of them has green fees over $200. It is one of MacKenzie’s very few public courses, and it is the only seaside links course built by MacKenzie remaining in the world.” (Green fees at Sharp Park run around $30.)

Harris insists that at other golf courses, endangered species have coexisted with golfers, and adjustments can be made to the course to make the frog and snake safer than they are now. In a letter to the San Francisco Planning Department this June, Harris suggested creating “a native plant/no-golf area surrounding an ‘island’ green complex in the vicinity of the current 12th green,” reducing golf maintenance in some areas to hand-mowing, and making raised boardwalk causeways the only access to some playing areas.

Other defenders of the golf course maintain on the “Save Sharp Park Golf Course” Web site (SharpPark. SaveGolf.net) that the course has actually helped the animals: “The presence and protection of Sharp Park Golf Course since 1932 turned a salt water estuary into a fresh water habitat. The California red-legged frogs and San Francisco garter snakes need fresh water. Were it not for that fresh water habitat created and maintained by the golf course, there would be only peripheral red-legged frogs or garter snakes, if any.” But Miller argues that this isn’t so. “The habitat pre-golf was freshwater wetlands and there were relatively abundant populations of both garter snakes and red-legged frogs at the site,” he says. “The golf course construction nearly extirpated both species and maintenance activities keep both species at the current marginal levels.”

Sierra Club coastal director Mark Massara expresses skepticism about the possibilities for happy inter-species coexistence. He argues that the oceanside links trample the threatened species’ terrain. “There are a hundred acres dedicated to golf. Where do the animals go? There’s a real imbalance they [golfers] are not acknowledging,” Massara says.

Preserving Pacific coastal terrain may become even more important as sea level rises an expected four and a half feet over the next century. Massara says, “As seas rise, we want to protect upland open space and wetland areas as buffer habitat and wildlife corridors.” Miller, of the Center for Biological Diversity, agrees that restoring some of the former wetlands will protect the park’s wildlife as well as nearby human residents from sea-level rise. “This will make the endangered species more resilient to climate change and saltwater intrusion, and reduce flooding that threatens park neighbors,” he says.

Massara is no fan of the golfing industry; he says that since the middle of the 20th century, courses have overused resources. He says that the 21,000 golf courses in the US each use millions of gallons of water per day, and, generally, eight to ten pounds of chemical fertilizer per acre per year. Golf courses have wrecked entire island coral reefs with runoff of herbicides and fertilizers. While he concedes that the golfing industry has made some progress in addressing damage caused by overuse of industrial chemicals and fossil-fuel-guzzling mowers, Massara says, “Eighty percent of what’s been done is green washing and PR.”

So far, there’s little agreement about how to restore Sharp Park, and how much it might cost. Although Harris and the SF Public Golf Association have suggested some environmental mitigation ideas, they nevertheless want to preserve the park and public golf course largely as they are, without eliminating holes.

Plater claims that this will be prohibitively expensive. He estimates that repairing and shoring up the sea wall that separates the park from the Pacific could cost up to $32 million, at $10,000 per linear foot. San Francisco also already invested $240,000 on one large outfall pipe that pumps water from the golf course.

On top of that—although golf advocates like Harris disagree—the Center for Biological Diversity argues that simply running the golf course loses money for the city. Jeff Miller claims that the parks department “plays hide-the-ball with their financial data—they subsidize Sharp Park by taking money from the general fund (and depriving the natural areas program and other San Francisco recreational facilities that money) to keep it from showing a loss.” By counting this subsidy as income, Miller claims, they “create the illusion the course breaks a profit.” Indeed, San Francisco’s budget analyst recently concluded that the Sharp Park Golf Course brought a net loss of $42,784 to the department for the 2008-09 fiscal year.

Some critics also say the golf course’s seaside location is a financialliability. In an April letter to the Board of Supervisors, coastal ecologist Peter Baye wrote of the cost of maintaining the current golf course, “The City must expect long-term significant increases in maintenance costs, as well as foreseeable catastrophic storm damage and post-storm reconstruction and rehabilitation of Sharp Park golf infrastructure.”

“These flood and coastal hazard risks are extraordinary liabilities: to my knowledge, no other golf courses in California have been constructed or maintained at or below sea level immediately behind a vulnerable, low beach ridge,” Baye continued.

Plater suggests that greatly shrinking or eliminating the golf course could earn the city money: “A restored Sharp Park could be funded by a wetlands mitigation bank. Credits were selling last year at $3.5 million per acre for wetlands restoration.
There are 200 acres that could be restored at Sharp Park (out of about 400). That’s $700,000,000 in gross revenue. No golf model would ever provide that much money to City coffers.”

Consultant and mitigation specialist Allen McReynolds of Mitigation Strategies, LLC, who specializes in habitat conservation plans for municipalities and developing strategic plans for “landscape-scale” eco-system protection, is surveying Sharp Park for potential restoration. “It’s not ‘golf bad, habitat good’—that’s not the point,” McReynolds says. He mentions that options like a nature center with paths for walking or riding would be “a wonderful opportunity for the broader community,” and says that the bottom line is that any restoration plan must adhere to the Endangered Species Act. He has recommended that the city launch a public discussion about what limitations could be placed on the park if it is used as a wildlife preserve—such as banning dogs or bicycles—and which activities may still be allowed, such as hiking and birdwatching. The result, he says, “would be a park designed for both the endangered species and human uses.”

And there’s another bottom line: “The point is, what is our priority as a city?” Mirkarimi asks. A 2004 survey of San Francisco residents found that the most popular recreational request among respondents was for more hiking and biking trails. Golfing
came in a distant sixteenth. (Nationally, the number of people who play golf has been steadily declining since 2000.)

Yet golf has received the lion’s share of some city resources. A Planning and Conservation League California Park Bond analysis from 2005 concluded that “San Francisco used all of its Prop. 12 and RZH [Roberti-Z’Berg-Harris urban open space] block grant funds, over $13 million in total, for the renovation of the Harding Park Golf Course.” Given that Prop 12 specified that its program funds be used “with emphasis on unmet needs in the most heavily populated and most economically disadvantaged areas within each jurisdiction,” it would seem that monies that should have gone to struggling communities have already been diverted to golf.

Mirkarimi points to the layoff of more than 72 recreation directors in 2009, many in poor neighborhoods, as an example of how resources had been diverted from those areas. Isabel Wade, founder of the San Francisco Neighborhood Parks Council, agrees. “Where is the sense of equity?” Wade asks. “Other recreations have to consider cutbacks. Golfers can compromise too.”

And in the end, says Miller, we have to consider our amphibian and reptilian neighbors: “We have a rare opportunity to protect and recover two endangered species that are linked to local history and are an important part of the local ecology.”

So this year the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission launched an international
design competition asking for new ideas to help coastal areas adapt to sea level rise. Designers from eighteen different countries submitted an impressive 130 plans to the Rising Tides competition. Though organizers had planned to name one $15,000 grand prize winner, plus award another $10,000 in prizes, when the results were announced this July the judges insisted that the money be split six ways. “The judges said the six winning proposals tell a story together, and that awarding just one winner was simply not possible,” says Will Travis, the commission’s executive director.

Four of the winning teams are from San Francisco, one from Berkeley, and one is from St. Louis, Missouri.
Together their proposals lay out practical ideas for how the Bay Area could adapt its infrastructure to sea level rise while suggesting artistic visions of how to raise public awareness. For example, winner Faulders Studio, based in Berkeley, proposed a network of laser beams, dubbed the RAYdike system, that would be visible at night thanks to the bay’s perpetually foggy atmosphere, and would depict a twenty-foot tall dike system surrounding the bay, a sort of virtual barrier protecting the shore against rising waters, and warning new developers away from areas subject to inundation. “[The RAYdike system] retains a surprise element,” says architect Thom Faulders, who believes the project’s strikingly visual nature would increase public awareness about sea level rise and encourage people to combat local problems due to global warming.

One team thought that sea level rise might have some redeeming qualities. Derek Hoeferlin, Ian Caine, and Michael Heller, part of the winning St. Louis, Missouri architectural team that submitted the 100 Year Plan, proposed that rising sea level can actually help solve California’s water shortage problems, if the appropriate tools are used to harness it as a way to replenish the state’s freshwater sources. Currently, too much water from Northern California watersheds is shunted to the southern half of the state. The group’s winning entry, which frankly states that it is “political first and foremost,” advocates an end to “watershed-hopping.”

The group proposes instead that marsh regeneration powered by rising tides could generate freshwater for each watershed—including those in Southern California. Tidal energy would be used for the desalination and water recycling efforts. Water would no longer be a commodity to be shunted across the state, but would be a local resource.

The team points out that fresh water access is a problem nationwide. “Being from St. Louis, a city at the confluence of the nation’s two largest rivers in the middle of the nation’s largest watershed, makes us very aware of these water issues,” says Hoeferlin. The team says that other areas affected by sea level rise could adopt similar water reclamation strategies.
“We suggest that all communities engage in a localized examination of these issues. In this case, the term ‘local’ refers to ecological as well as political systems,” says Caine. “The policy-based toolkit that we propose in the 100 Year Plan is designed specifically for Northern California. The challenges and solutions for other communities may be quite different.”

Among the other winning ideas were concepts for a tidal barrier—a “submerged, cable-reinforced membrane anchored to the seabed” beneath the Golden Gate Bridge—that would rise to the surface during extremely high tides to protect the shoreline from floods, as well as a plan for how to manage development along San Francisco’s shoreline while anticipating a changing topography. Altogether, the contest produced a diverse, thought-provoking collection of possible futures for the bay. Says Travis, “One idea and another idea can equal amazing things.”

The winning entries, as well as information about public events discussing sea level rise in the Bay Area, can be viewed at RisingTidesCompetition.com.

About half of the 7.5 acres are planted with gourmet tomatoes, while the rest contains summer and winter squash, peppers, and herbs. Hempel, who has farmed here for four years, employs two interns and a part-time professional crew of four that takes on nitty gritty work from trellising to harvesting. As we make our way through the vines, he pauses occasionally to pluck tomatoes and show them off, describing the varieties and their history.

“Here is our first ripened tomato in the field,” Hempel says, proudly displaying an heirloom from Italy. “It’s a Costoluto Genovese, named for its deep ribs. These are popular and they come on early.”

We amble on, checking out Pink Mortgage Lifters, Speckled Romans, and new this season: Green Days and Duros. Some are shaped like hearts, some like strawberries, and others are striped, ribbed, or streaked with color. Hempel takes a moment to recount the origin of flavorful but oddly named Pink Mortgage Lifters, telling the story of Radiator Charlie, an auto mechanic. He had no formal education or plant breeding experience but created this legendary tomato back in the 1940s by cross-breeding some of the largest tomatoes he could find, and selling the resulting plants for one dollar each. He was able to pay off the $6,000 mortgage on his house in a few years.

Hempel has a PhD in plant developmental biology and has bred many of the forty varieties on his farm. “Half are gourmet heirloom—the best seeds I could find—and half are varieties I bred,” he explains. “We have a lot of diversity, every color and shape. Lots with stripes because those are the ones that I’ve developed, and that’s what I breed for.” Hempel tells me the average average production for tomatoes grown organically in California is 25,000 pounds per acre. Last year he yielded
over 40,000 pounds. “This is really good soil,” he says with a smile.

Earlier today, Hempel toured these rows with a USDA organic certification agent, who visited the farm to renew his certification for another year. Hempel’s farm has been USDA-certified organic since July 2008, and he is required to undergo yearly inspections to assure he is adhering to the standards set in 2002 by the National Organic Program (NOP), when legislation required the USDA to develop national standards for organic products.

Hempel chatted with the certifying agent about his choice of fertilizer (rabbit manure); weed abatement (he plants his rows far enough apart to run the tractor through, which keeps most of the weeds in check); and his farming practices. “It involves looking around, chatting about the farm, looking at weeds, and talking about how you farm,” Hempel explains. “They can
spot red flags. They want to see the crew and get a sense of the work that goes on.” Hempel also must provide records. “If you begin using something new, you must document to show you’re not buying non-organic seeds,” he offers as an example.

If the agent discovers problems such as suspected soil contamination—samples can be taken for testing— gaps in record-keeping, or improper pest management, the farm could have its certification revoked until the issues are corrected.

It’s still a little early in the season; I haven’t hit peak harvest time, from mid-August until mid-September. “Peak flavor occurs when there is just a hint of green stripes,” Hempel explains as he examines one of his varieties. “We pick them early because they ripen just as well off vine as on. The whole Chez Panisse thing about eating only what you pick that day—it doesn’t work
with tomatoes. In fact, some tomatoes require that you let them sit for two to three days. If you eat them the same day, you’re actually eating an inferior product.”

We come across several tomatoes that have been half-noshed by gophers, and I inquire about Hempel’s chemical-free pest control. He gestures toward Poppy and Ladybug, and also adds, “Tomatoes don’t have many pests. The biggest risk is fungus, so you want them off the ground, and don’t over-water.” Over-watering also reduces taste. Hempel also explains that he rotates the squash and tomatoes yearly for good soil health. He spends the winter developing new varieties.

The USDA organic stamp is intended to show that foods adhere to strict quality standards and are grown without chemical pesticides, herbicides, or fertilizers. Prior to national standards, organic certification was conducted by several organizations such as Oregon Tilth or California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF), each with its own set of standards. As the organics
movement gained popularity, the USDA created a standardized certification process to eliminate confusion, prevent fraud, and ensure a level of adherence.

But NOP attracts critics galore, starting with the charge that while large producers of inorganic produce needn’t prove anything, organic farmers must pay to be certified and constantly prove their methods. Moreover, the regulatory certification is a potential barrier for small producers due to increased costs, paperwork, and bureaucracy.

I ask Hempel for more detail about the certification process. “It’s not without effort, but not overwhelmingly difficult or unreasonable,” Hempel replies. “Farming’s just hard in general,” he says. “My point of view is that it protects the term ‘organic’ from large enterprises that would throw the term around loosely if they weren’t required to certify.” Hempel thinks the process forces small farmers to plan ahead. “I don’t think the certification process is energy wasted, and as a consumer, I think it is a valuable protection.”

On his first application for certification, he filled out about a day’s worth of paperwork, and now he renews yearly, which involves time spent organizing his receipts and records and the couple hours touring his farm with the organic certifying agent. He’s been growing organically the entire time he’s had his plot, because one must practice organic methods for at least three years before the farm can be certified.

What are the benefits to being certified organic? “It’s different from what I originally thought,” he explains. “All the high-end chefs don’t give a damn. Consumers at the market don’t care about certification, as long as we said we were growing organic. But the larger stores care. My relationship with them changed immensely and immediately once I became certified. It’s more important to the commercial, traditional stores because it’s what they sell when they put up signs in the stores. Being organic matters if you want to sell through large markets.” Hempel sells to local restaurants, farmers’ markets, and grocery stores.

Some regard the USDA-certified organic stamp as a seal of diluted standards—and are determined to use their own set of standards. For instance, a group called the Mendocino Renegades wants to keep the government out of organics, so they created their own standards that are tougher than those developed by the USDA.

“The USDA was threatening to include sewage sludge and genetically modified organisms into organics at one point,” says Mendocino Renegades founder and committee member Els Cooperider. Sewage sludge is the thick slurry left behind in the sewage plant after wastewater has been treated, and it contains highly toxic materials such as industrial solvents and heavy metals that would be released in soil when used as fertilizer. “That didn’t pass, but it will constantly be a threat, so I decided it was time to turn away from this and do our own thing.” Cooperider owns the Ukiah Brew Pub, the country’s first certified organic restaurant, and she is heavily involved in food policy in Mendocino County. “We were really into local organics, and I suggested a project where we privately certify people who want to be organic,” she says. The program spread by word-of-mouth and now includes eighteen farms.

Founded in 2000, the Renegades are committed to promoting local organic and biodynamic farms, so they don’t certify outside the county—and their farmers can’t sell outside county lines. Their aim is to create an inexpensive, credible organics program for Mendocino County restaurants, stores, and consumers, and the founders structured the program to stay small and local. “We all work on a volunteer basis—no one is being paid,” says Cooperider. “We charge one to three hundred dollars to become certified instead of the four to five thousand [the government charges], so it’s very reasonable.”

The process works in a similar manner to the NOP, except that the initial application process is simpler. “It’s way easier to apply, even though our standards are much tougher than the USDA,” Cooperider explains. “The application is very short and user-friendly. Then our committee will do inspections, and these are done in pairs; that way, someone on the committee is always learning something. The USDA certifiers can’t give farmers advice or references. They’re supposed to go out and take notes for the certification and not be a resource. It’s the opposite with the Renegades––we go around looking at different farms and certifying and renewing,and we’ll give farmers ideas on how to improve soil and get a better crop.”

But is it legal? “We can’t say we’re organic,” says Cooperider. “We don’t care about that because we’re only trying to sell in the county, so those who know Mendocino Renegades know it’s organic, even though the USDA has decided to hijack that word.” There is a section in the produce department at the Ukiah Natural Foods Co-op specifically for Mendocino Renegade
produce, and it is labeled as such. “None of our products says they’re organic,” Cooperider says. “Our products say ‘certified Mendocino Renegades.’”

The Renegades’ model is working so well that farms from other counties have approached them for certification. “We told them we’re happy to help them set up their own Renegade group and get them forms and whatever they need,” she says. “Obviously our program is working, and it’s a rewarding thing to work on. We always have new applicants—it’s growing.”

I wonder aloud if our nationalized organics program can de-federalize and follow the Renegades’ model county by county. “It can, and I think it will, because the USDA organic certification is moving more and more towards big industrial farms,” Cooperider says. “One of the sad things you would see in inspecting big farms was going into the house to look at the paperwork and noticing that the farmer didn’t eat organic, or they don’t have a personal vegetable garden. They’re only into growing organic for the money. You don’t find that with the Renegades. They walk the talk and do everything organic.”

Back at Hempel’s farm, my tour is coming to an end as I stop at the picnic table by the chicken coop to check out the day’s multi-colored harvest. A huge crate is filled with yellow zucchini and a large, fluted, cream-colored summer squash with ten finger-like ribs that come to points at the end—a Yugoslavian Finger fruit. There’s a crate of Armenian cucumbers. The chickens are happily pecking at those gopher-noshed tomatoes.

Although he uses the more cumbersome USDA certification system, Hempel is certainly walking the organic talk—this is the first year out of the last four that he’ll make a profit, though he’s lowered the prices on his tomatoes this season due to the economic downturn. As I leave, Hempel runs after me, calling “Look at this!” He is beaming as he displays his first ripe Pink Mortgage Lifter, fresh from the vine.

In his small office high in the Berkeley hills, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab biogeochemist William Riley laughs too. On his office computer we’ve just witnessed the drama of thermokarst lakes—shallow ponds that form when Arctic permafrost melts and slumps, creating depressions that fill with water. In the winter, those lakes, found in Arctic regions like Alaska and Siberia, freeze over, creating a blanket of ice that traps methane gas bubbling up from decomposing soil on the bottom. Poke a hole in the ice to release the methane, strike a match, and you’ve got tundra pyrotechnics.

But flashy videos aren’t why Riley and colleagues embarked in late 2008 on a five-year quest to model what’s happening up in those Arctic ponds. The fun has dark implications: the methane these lakes release may foreshadow climate change scarier than anything you’ll find in current predictions. That chance is what earned the thermokarst lakes a spot under the (metaphorical) microscope, as part of a US Department of Energy project to measure and simulate natural systems that could have a huge influence on our planet’s climate. Riley and his colleagues at Berkeley, who are translating data about how the methane in the lakes behaves into numbers and equations, represent just one node in a big network of scientists trying to tease out new clues about climate change from the messy chaos of the world.

The $15 million project, called Investigation of the Magnitudes and Probabilities of Abrupt Climate Transitions
(IMPACTS), involves researchers from six national laboratories and collaborators from more than a dozen universities. It should take some of the mystery out of the under-studied but essential field of predicting abrupt climate
change. That’s what researchers call a set of runaway shifts that could happen if the global climate crosses a point of no return, or a point where reducing greenhouse gas emissions (climate change’s cause) would no longer have the power to reduce global warming (its effect). Some experts, including NASA’s top climate scientist James Hansen, fear we may be about to cross the line, though no one can say for sure. Understanding where that threshold is and what might push us past it could mean the difference between slow climate shifts that Earth’s inhabitants might be able to adapt to over the course of the next few centuries, or dramatic, chaotic changes that would transform our world by the time today’s toddlers hit middle age.

If the past is any clue, we could be in for a wild ride. If the past is any clue, we could be in for a wild ride. As far back in the fossil and geologic records as we can see, Earth’s climate has been hopping all over the place; our planet has alternately been an icy snowball, a sweltering sauna, and everything in between. Evidence collected over the past twenty years, ranging from glacial ice cores to sea floor samples to ancient pollens to stalagmites, has convinced scientists that the transitions from one state to another have sometimes been unfathomably quick. Traditional theories assumed that it took thousands of years for large ice sheets to build up during cold phases; newer evidence shows the planet’s climate can drive major changes within just decades. Humanity’s experience of a steady climate is nothing but an historical anomaly. “We don’t have direct human experience of [abrupt climate change],” says William Collins, another Lawrence Berkeley National Lab scientist who leads the IMPACTS project. “That’s biased our thinking about climate change as being something that happens gradually.” In fact, sometimes climate change doesn’t creep up on the planet; it changes the world within a human generation.

One example of abrupt climate shift was a prehistoric doozy of a cold snap known as the Younger Dryas. This “big freeze” started about 12,800 years ago, as the frozen planet was slowly thawing and moving toward conditions much like today’s temperate ones. Suddenly the warming reversed, and within a few decades cold, dry, and windy conditions became the norm for another millennium. Then the cold snap broke, even more rapidly than it began. Greenland’s average temperature
rose by as much as eighteen degrees Fahrenheit in ten years, about the difference between today’s average annual temperatures in Los Angeles and Buffalo, NY.

Scientists are still debating what caused the Younger Dryas’ dramatic swings in climate, which happened under
a very different set of conditions than those we face today. A leading explanation is that a giant lake in central
Canada sent a rush of melting glacial water into the North Atlantic, shutting down the major ocean current that had carried heat north from the tropics. Alternatively, a few researchers posit that the freshwater influx was the product of a comet that exploded above the Earth, melting glaciers. Whatever its cause, the Younger Dryas shows that climate is fickle. The Earth’s climate history features dozens of other known incidents—saddled with abstruse names like the Bolling-Allerod interval and Dansgaard-Oeschger events—of major, lasting, widespread changes that happened within decades.

To understand how the system could change so quickly, imagine the climate as a marble resting in the bottom of a large bowl. Push it a little in one direction with a finger, and it will roll around for a while before it settles on the bottom again. Keep pushing it little by little up the side of the bowl (“forcing” it in a certain direction, in climate terms), and it will climb higher and higher. Let go, and it will eventually settle back where it started. But force it high enough, and the next little nudge could send it over the bowl’s lip and into uncharted territory. That’s an abrupt change. Even if you take the forcing mechanism (your finger) away, the marble won’t roll back to where it started.

Of course, the real climate is much more complicated
than a marble in a bowl, and it’s hard to know what factors might send the system past a point of no return. The IMPACTS tasks represent researchers’ best guesses about mechanisms that might start a runaway forcing process very soon, within twenty to thirty years. The lakes are part of the IMPACTS project because they could contribute to a cycle that pushes the climate past its tipping point. Here’s how it could work: First, rising temperatures cause permafrost to melt. In some places, the ground subsides and water pools to form the shallow thermokarst lakes. At the bottom of the lakes, microbes munch on the defrosted soil, producing methane gas. Some of the gas bubbles up through the water into the atmosphere. The process happens year-round, because the layers of water and ice insulate the microbes from the frigid Arctic winter. Methane, which is over twenty times as effective as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere over a hundred-year period, helps warm the climate. Higher temperatures melt still more permafrost, more lakes release more methane, and a nasty feedback loop emerges. It doesn’t help that the Arctic is warming more rapidly than anywhere else.

Collins calls the handful of phenomena that IMPACTS is studying “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” The project’s scientists are trying to understand how Arctic sources of greenhouse gases, including thawed permafrost and Riley’s thermokarst lakes, might speed up warming worldwide. The surprising dynamics of the Antarctic ice sheet, which is breaking up faster than anyone predicted and could lead to major sea-level rises, and the extent and behavior of frozen methane pellets deep on the sea floor, which could melt, release big stores of the gas, and start a vicious cycle accelerating change. They’re also exploring how factors like dust storms, fires, and plant biology could cause or accelerate mega-droughts in America’s Southwest.

Flammable gas bubbling through frigid, distant lakes doesn’t seem like a big deal in isolation, but then again, neither does driving a car, burning coal, or other human activities that have spewed enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to start changing the climate. Yet within the context of our elaborate climate system, which acts in nonlinear, only partly predictable ways, the thermokarst lakes and their methane, or any of the other phenomena that make up the IMPACTS portfolio, could turn out to be the push that puts the marble over the edge of the bowl. “We don’t know what the risks of abrupt climate change are,” Collins explains. “It’s a lot like building an actuarial table. If you smoke, what’s your risk of dying? If you emit carbon dioxide, what’s your risk of breaking up Antarctica?”

And while the scientists are rushing to calculate the risks these factors pose, the driving forces behind climate change aren’t letting up. “There’s this pressure to get an answer,” Riley says. “We’re running as fast as we can, but it’s possible the system is going to get ahead of us.”

The scariest part about the possibility of abrupt climate change is that it could happen faster than many of the planet’s life forms, including us, could adapt. Sudden, long-lasting drops in precipitation, for example, probably contributed to the collapse of the Akkadian empire in Mesopotamia 4,200 years ago and to the disappearance of the Anasazi from the American Southwest in the 13th century. “Mankind has predicated its existence on the stability of climate zones,” says Collins. “That’s where we plant our crops, that’s where we grow our wine, that’s where we base our cities.” Some anthropologists even correlate the beginnings of agriculture with the pause in drastic climate swings we’ve enjoyed for the past ten thousand years.

If an abrupt change in climate occurs again soon, our surroundings could shift faster than even modern societies could handle. Rising sea level could inundate coastal areas, changes in weather patterns could devastate crops, energy and transportation infrastructure, and leave millions of people cut off from reliable drinking water. One only has to think of California’s current drought, or the 1930s dustbowl, or the disruption caused by natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina or the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, to realize the stress that weather and climate can put on a region’s food supplies and livelihoods. Climate shifts that come on more slowly would allow time for people to adapt: planting crops that use more or less water, shoring up or moving flood-prone roads and buildings, finding substitutes for dried-up hydroelectric power. Real adaptation would require both foresight and resources.

But even the most progressive governments are only beginning to consider what changes may need to happen, and the planet’s poorest regions may be especially vulnerable to sudden change. “What if Phoenix was no longer viable as a city?” Riley asks. “Even under pretty extreme conditions, Americans will be able to adapt. We have the money. But what are you going to do if you’re in Bangladesh, and you’ve got nothing?” Developed nations wouldn’t be off the hook, though, in the event of a global crisis. If, for example, sea level were to rise twenty feet in a century because Antarctica’s ice sheet collapsed, America’s troubles could extend beyond relocating its coastal population. Major climate change could prompt international conflicts over increasingly scarce natural resources, including food and water. “We have no clue what might happen if something shifts worldwide,” says Susanne Moser, a research associate at the Institute of Marine Sciences at UC Santa Cruz, who studies climate vulnerability. “What if there’s turmoil in seventeen places at the same time?”

Hollywood loves doomsday “bad weather” scenarios (see, for instance, the 2004 disaster flick The Day After Tomorrow in which an ice age sets in over just a few days), but do we really need to worry about a violent climate swing anytime soon? Nobody knows. “People didn’t even know this was happening until recently,” says Riley after we watch the fireball video. He’s talking about the bubbling methane, but he could just as easily be referring to other processes that IMPACTS projects are examining, such as the accelerating breakup of Antarctica’s ice sheet. “It’s complicated because the system’s so complicated. There are so many things that we’re still learning about,” Riley continues.

The forecast for our climate is already pretty grim. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the leading body for compiling climate change science, predicts that continuing greenhouse gas emissions will cause global temperatures to warm by as much as seven degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2099, and that sea level will rise over the next century, with harmful effects on human health, economies, and ecosystems worldwide. Closer to home, a report released earlier this year by the state of California, based on the IPCC’s data, warns that “extreme events from heat waves, floods, droughts, wildfires, and bad air quality are likely to become more frequent in the future and pose serious challenges to Californians.”

The magnitude of the changes we’ll face will likely depend on how much and how quickly we cut our greenhouse
gas emissions. The IPCC bases its scenarios on variables like population growth and fossil fuel use, using them to predict how the climate will react under different conditions. Yet the natural processes the IMPACTS team is studying—like the methane escaping from the thermokarst lakes—are missing from the climate models currently produced by research and government agencies worldwide. These previously unstudied factors could substantially alter the climate outlook even under the same emissions scenarios—though nobody knows exactly to what extent. The science just hasn’t been done. “Representing this type of change in models that can project the future of the climate has been really challenging,” Collins says. “It’s only recently become possible from a scientific and a computational perspective. We’re poised to do this now in kind of a unified framework
that’s unprecedented.

For Riley and his colleagues to include the lakes in future models, the team must attach numbers and formulas to a complicated combination of factors, everything from the geology of how permafrost slumps to the physics of how methane bubbles and the biology of how microbe populations act. Their model has to capture the behaviors of millions of lakes ranging in size from a few yards to a few miles across. To make things harder, because the methane spewing from thermokarst lakes was discovered so recently, the researchers are building models without the benefit of a long history of field data.

The team starts by trying to model an individual site. They test their computer program by comparing what it would predict in past conditions to actual observations. Next they do similar tests at many other sites, trying to refine their lake model to match what happens in the real world. Once the team feels confident that their model works well—Riley expects to have it ready by February, 2010—they will plug it into a general circulation climate model, which takes into account hundreds of other systems and processes, like those included in the IPCC report, to mimic the global climate as a whole. With the models coupled, the IMPACTS researchers can start to predict how likely and how sudden abrupt changes might be under different emissions scenarios, and create projections that could guide policymakers in preventing or reacting to climate change.

What if the models show we’re likely to get a dramatic shift in temperature, sea level, or rainfall over a short period of time? “I can tell you that we are in no way prepared,” says Moser, who has worked with the state of California on its adaptation strategies. “We are barely prepared for our ‘normal’ disasters, as New Orleans showed very well. There’s simply a horrific picture you get in scientists’ eyes, how bad it would be to go to that place, but no one has data on what that would mean. Certainly not for the state of California.”

Despite the scarcity of data-based predictions, there have been a few attempts from the policy side to think seriously about the possibility of abrupt climate change. In 2003, two consultants for the San Francisco-based Global Business Network, which specializes in scenario planning, prepared a report for the Pentagon on its national security implications. “Because of the potentially dire consequences,” the report warned, “the risk of abrupt climate change, although uncertain and quite possibly small, should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern.” The report drew media attention in 2004, but the federal government didn’t react in any visible way. Federal and local policymakers rarely discuss or acknowledge abrupt climate change. “We’re driving with a heavy foot on the accelerator and basically closing our eyes,” Moser says.

Admittedly, it can be hard to distinguish whether a change like a regional decrease in rainfall is a short-term blip or part of a large-scale shift. One hope for the IMPACTS models is that they might help us tell if we’re already in the midst of an abrupt change. “Things are changing so fast, it’s possible that we already are,” Riley muses. Collins is more cautious. “The last thing we want to be is alarmist,” he says. “That said, we want to be realistic and we’ll go where the science leads us.”

Riley is optimistic about the progress his team is making, but it may beyond anyone’s capability to figure out what’s really happening in a system as complex and rapidly changing as Earth’s climate, and assign meaningful numbers to nebulous climate-change factors, many of which we may not even have discovered yet. Like the actuaries they’re emulating, the IMPACTS scientists will do their best to figure out the likelihood these small changes will add up to a big shift, and how soon that shift may happen. The rest will be up to policymakers. Even when this project is complete, we won’t be entirely able to predict our future. “There’s only one real experiment,” Riley says, “and we’re living in it.”

But there’s another way to tell the future, and that’s by looking at the past. Paleoecologists use fossils from hundreds of thousands of years ago to deduce not only what the climate was like, but also how the local landscape changed when, say, a major ice age began or ended. UC Berkeley paleoecologist Anthony Barnosky started studying fossils in the Rocky Mountains in the 1980s because he liked being outside and wanted to do fieldwork, but he soon realized he had stumbled upon something much more significant. “There’s a lot that the fossil record actually has to tell us about how what ‘normal’ really means in terms of nature,” he says. “How far are we off of that normal baseline? Are we off of it at all? And if we are, how do we fix it for the future?”

Barnosky recently published Heatstroke, a book examining through the lens of the fossil record what effects climate change will have on major mammal species. Perhaps more importantly, he addresses how quickly those changes might happen, and how our own ideas of conservation and protection of wildlife will have to change as a result. If we want wilderness, says Barnosky, we’re going to have to accept that the climate will change what it looks like—and that means letting some species die out.

Right now, that idea is heresy—how many millions have been spent to protect the giant panda? But Barnosky thinks that preserving undeveloped spaces, and the complete ecosystems within them, is more important to our sense of life on earth than keeping completely human-dependent animals alive. Which isn’t to say he doesn’t want to preserve biodiversity—he’s got some ideas for that, too—only that we have to think about it differently. I spoke with Anthony Barnosky in late July about the idea of wilderness, telling our fortune with fossils, and how to be a responsible environmentalist in the 21st century.

What convinced you that studying the fossil record is key to understanding current climate change?
I was doing grad work at the University of Washington, and at the time there was a big debate about whether direct pressures by people or natural climate change had caused the extinctions at the end of the last ice age, about 11,500 years ago. Since about 2.6 million years ago, there have been about 39 cycles of glacier growth (an ice age or glacial time) and retreat (an interglacial, as we are in now). For at least the last million years, each glacial-interglacial cycle has lasted about 100,000 years ago, with the glacial part of the cycle longer than the interglacial. Around 11,500 years ago, we came out of the last ice age, and into our present interglacial.

During my grad work, I happened upon a fossil site in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, which had a really, really
good sample of communities of mammals that lived during both glacial and interglacial times, long before humans even evolved. It was a really nice natural experiment: What are the effects of climate change if you take humans out of the picture?

The big thing we found by studying that site, after twenty years of work with a huge team of scientists, is that natural climate change seems to affect ecosystems from the bottom up. Normally you see changes in rodent- and rabbit-sized things, or changes in abundance, minor replacements of species. But really not much happens to the big guys, the megafauna. The difference between that and what humans are doing today is that we’re affecting the top end of ecosystems, through direct pressures like hunting and poaching as well as habitat fragmentation. The pace and magnitude of the current climate change means we’re even seeing climatic effects on larger species. The top carnivores and predators are being affected as well as the bottom ones.

Can you give some examples of where we might see this?
The classic example is something like polar bears, which are just disappearing off the face of the Earth. There are other, more subtle examples. In South Africa, where you see many of the large herbivores, big antelope things with spectacular curvy horns and so on, many of those species are actually being pushed out of various African national parks because they’re getting too dry in the dry season. When those animals go, larger carnivores that rely on them for food are going to go too. So you get this cascading effect. There’s the direct effect, like polar bears, then the indirect cascading relationships that end up causing a lot of things to go extinct.

Something I think it’s hard for people to get their minds around is how a loss of biodiversity will directly affect their lives. They hear about some beetle going extinct and can’t really figure out why that’s a catastrophe. Can you articulate
what we will lose, and why we should care?
There are really three reasons. One of them is a very practical reason, which is that it turns out we rely on other species in ways that people just don’t even think about. And without them, human life would be much poorer. A great example is the drugs we use, say, high blood pressure medicine that hundreds of thousands of people use. One comes from a very poisonous snake in South America called the fer-de-lance. It’s the only source of this drug Captopril, a common high blood pressure medication. That’s the only way to get it. The whole pharmaceutical industry has teams of people bioprospecting in remote parts of the world. There’s a fairly large percentage of pharmaceuticals that are derived from wild species. Talk about effects that would result from destroying most of the Amazon: You get rid of a lot of potentially life-saving drugs.

A more subtle example of this is that natural vegetation filters water in a way that’s economically more advantageous than building a filtration plant. So the city of New York buys property in rural areas as the cheapest way to provide water to Manhattan. It’s another example of “ecosystem services.”

Another reason is the moral obligation that some people would speak to, that we share the Earth with other species. And I think there’s a lot to be said for that. And then the third reason I think is that the human species
has evolved with these other species, and we like places with biodiversity. We get something back from it aesthetically, which I think ultimately is the reason most nature preserves exist. We’re a poorer world for not having them.

What does responsible environmentalism look like in the 21st century? How do we have to reenvision our ideas?
The way we’ve tried to preserve species isn’t going to work any more. Trying to keep the place they live in as a protected habitat is reasonably effective, but climate change is now so fast that those protective nature areas are really just islands. As soon as you pull the climatic rug out from under that species, the animals have no way to get from the island they’re on to the island that may have a more suitable climate.

If a wildlife reserve isn’t practical, what are other options?
People are talking about assisted migration, which is what happens now with some species of butterflies. So, species X is going to go extinct in a particular place, but look, eighty miles north the climate is still suitable. Let’s take some representatives of that species and move them to the new place. If we do that, we will be moving species around in order to save them. And that’s great for saving biodiversity if it’s done right. But the flip side of that is that an important aspect of preserving wildlife is preserving the feeling of being in a place that’s undisturbed by humans. And as soon as we start moving species all over, we’re in danger of losing those places. The recommendation I make in the book is to shift our philosophy so we think in terms of two kinds of conservation: one with the express purpose of preserving biodiversity, something like assisted migration; the other, a hands-off philosophy that would let nature take its course with new climate and see what happens.

The wildlands reserves would be places where we do not under any circumstances import any species. And the climate is going to change, so we’re going to lose, in some cases, many of the species that are in there. But it’s important to have those kinds of control plots on nature. We need places where you can still experience the feeling of nature without humans interfering.

For example, one of the world’s most spectacular areas of biodiversity is the Tambopata wildlife preserve on the border of Peru and Bolivia. It’s right on the edge of the Amazon, and climatic models predict that it has a high likelihood of changing from rainforest to savannah. One way you can look at that is to say, well, it’s going to disappear anyway, so let’s get logging trucks in there and make lots of money. Another way to look at it is to say, this place is pristine. Let’s watch it change into a new kind of pristine.

I understand this idea of preserving a feeling of wilderness for people to enjoy. But realistically, a place that’s going to change from rainforest to savannah thanks to human action doesn’t really seem like a wilderness. It seems more like a petri dish.
“Wilderness” is a moving target in terms of specifics. If you define it in a way where people haven’t affected it at all, well, there’s no place on Earth. On the other hand, people have always been a part of nature and interacted with nature, part of wilderness and interacted with wilderness, so I don’t think we’re entirely separate from local ecosystems. There are still a lot of places on Earth where there aren’t too many people—close to half the terrestrial landscape, in fact. And there are places that, if you go to them, you feel like you’re in a landscape that isn’t overrun by people.

That’s the feeling that I think needs to be preserved. There’s a quote from Wallace Stegner in my book: “Better
a wounded wilderness than nothing at all.” I tend to dismiss arguments that say there is no nature, there is no wilderness left. Give me one of those people and let me take them to the backcountry of Yellowstone Park and leave them for a week, then see if they tell me there’s no more nature.

Which specific species should we try to preserve?
There are certain species called keystone species whose disappearance would have dramatic effects on the rest of the ecosystem. Elephants are a good example of that. If they go, open woodland turns to closed forest, and there’s a whole cascade of things that go along with that. Secondly, you want to maintain diversity in the sense that, if you have two equally threatened species, one of which has a whole bunch of closely related species, the other of which is the only such species in the genus, of course you’d want to preserve that one.

What about California natives?
It’s difficult to say exactly. What we do know is projecting where the climate that supports certain species
will actually be in ninety years indicates that neither the California state tree (California redwood) nor the California state bird (California Valley Quail) will be able to live in California.  For keystone species a bit farther afield, a good example is the whitebark pine, which is being severely reduced in Yellowstone Park due to a combination of warming winter temperatures and infestations of pine beetles and blister rust (the pine beetles are moving in because winter temperatures are no longer cold enough to kill them). Whitebark pine cones provide a critical food resource to sustain grizzly bears during certain parts of the year when other food resources are scarce. The grizzlies raid the caches of whitebark pine nuts that red squirrels have accumulated to help them make it through the lean times. Thus disappearance of whitebark pine is likely to cause reductions in both red squirrels and grizzlies.

It seems like a stroke of good luck that many “keystone species” are the sorts of animals that play well on calendars.
It is true that in a lot of cases the keystone species align with so-called “charismatic species,” because they’re often the top carnivores. If you take out the top carnivores, you immediately have increasing herbivore populations. The reintroduction
of wolves into the ecosystem of Yellowstone National Park has brought down elk populations and allowed aspen and willow to regenerate, really increased the diversity of life there.

Do you think humans are going to come around to these ideas, and do what is necessary to preserve not only our ability to live on the Earth but our sense of it as a place?
I have good days and bad days on that. Overall, I’m optimistic in the sense that when the human race recognizes a big problem, we seem to be pretty good at dealing with it. The state we’re at right now is not having recognized that we have a big problem. Still, if you think about awareness of global warming now versus ten years ago, there have been huge strides. It’s kind of a race against time. I think that if we get people thinking about this and recognizing what the problems are, we have a good chance of fixing it. But it’s not going to happen without governmental involvement, and it’s not going to happen without
a grassroots movement. We have to be working at it from both the top and the bottom.

Is there anyone out there now doing work you think others should emulate?
There are some very interesting initiatives going on now. One that’s been around for a long time is a group called the Yukon to Yellowstone Initiative, which has the goal of maintaining migration corridors between all natural areas in the Rocky Mountains. That’s one strategy that is going to be very helpful. I think Patagonia has just launched an initiative, maybe about a year old, where they’re doing similar sorts of things where there are still some semblance of natural landscapes
and trying to connect them by corridors. But of course now we have to think about overlaying projections about climate
on those corridors to make sure the species we want to preserve are going to have climate to move to.

There’s also an idea called win-win ecology, which focuses on preserving biodiversity by doing some fairly simple things like planting native vegetation in your yard instead of lawn. It’s one example of how we can actually design our living spaces and human-intensive landscapes to maximize habitats for other species as well. Those strategies are part of the picture. The ecosystem services angle is also going to be very important in terms of putting values on these services we get from different species. It has to be a whole cluster of strategies.

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.”

The dogs joined a grim list of wildlife, livestock, pets, and humans poisoned by blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria.
That green slime is nothing new—it evolved some 3 billion years ago, during the Archaean era, the first organism to produce oxygen as a waste product. What is new is that in response to dryer, warmer conditions, some of those algae species—especially the few toxic varieties—are proliferating in inland waterways. Scientists, public health officials, and water managers are worried that climate change may amplify a growing problem in California.

“With climate change, with hot, still conditions, the water supply sets up as big incubator cookers,” says State University of New York biochemist Grey Boyer. Boyer considers Northern California at high risk for the varieties of algae that manufacture a toxin. Algae enjoy conditions that describe us to a T: heavy winter rains that wash high-nitrogen fertilizers into creeks and rivers, followed by long, dry summers that dry up those creeks and rivers into quiet, isolated pools and shallows. As global climate change takes hold, some scientists believe toxic events may occur more frequently, and over a longer span of months.

Biochemist Boyer has worked with toxic algae species for forty years; he started out investigating marine red tides, a similar phenomenon but a different species of algae. The blue-green version, he says, comprises thousands of species, with only twenty or so capable of releasing toxins. The general consensus of algae experts, Boyer says, is that while blue-green algae as a whole will love the warming trends of climate change, the conditions are even more likely to favor the poisonous crowd.

The first recorded cases of human illness from cyanobacteria toxins occurred in 1931, along the Ohio River. According to Ian R. Falconer, in his book, Cyanobacterial Toxins of Drinking Water Supplies, the previous year had very little rainfall, and a tributary of the Ohio developed a heavy algal bloom. When rain finally came, that water moved into the Ohio and began making its way downstream, sowing symptoms of vomiting and diarrhea as it went. The most serious case of poisoning involving people took place in 1993, when a newly flooded reservoir in Brazil developed an immense cyanobacterial bloom, and 88 people died.

According to the World Health Organization, health impacts from blue-green algae can be immediate or devilishly long-lasting. For example, one toxin causes liver damage; in 1998, 117 kidney patients in Caruaru, Brazil, developed liver disease, and 47 died, after dialysis with water later found to contain cyanobacterial toxins. People with already damaged livers, such as those with hepatitis or cirrhosis, or children with smaller body weights, are more at risk.

Cyanobacteria offers frustrating conundrums to public health officials. Few of the species are toxic, but it’d take a scientist with a microscope to determine if a specific piece of floating gunk is releasing neurotoxins or not. “It’s a challenging thing to properly warn the public,” says Humboldt County environmental health field inspector Harriet Hill. “We can’t monitor all the freshwater bodies of Humboldt County. All we can tell people is to avoid areas that have blooms of algae.” The county posts warning signs at beaches and at events such as Reggae on the River. She says that she now gets a hundred calls a season, “mostly asking if we’re monitoring this river or that site. People are quite aware that there’s a potential for dog illness.”

Potential is the right word. Blue-green algae is everywhere and nowhere. Says SUNY professor Boyer: “It’s found in every environment, from soil, to water, to melt ponds in Antarctica. It’s small and robust, and it also has the capability to photosynthesize. Some produce spores that travel in the air, some have resting states like seeds. Some can survive for decades if not centuries. It’s hard to get it not to spread.”

Yet it’s ephemeral by nature. ‘We’ve had a half-dozen or so dog fatalities in this area,” he says. “We go back a half-day after the dog dies, and we can’t find anything. The wind blows the blooms to shore. The dogs swim through the water, lick their fur, and give themselves a concentrated dose.” And while dogs have other sources of drinking water, wildlife may not. “The algae takes a couple weeks to set up a big bloom,” says Boyer. “Animals have little choice if it’s the only water: You drink it and die, or you don’t drink it and die.”

Unfortunately, cattle like the taste of the mats of scum left on the shoreline. Recently a range bull died close to a reservoir on the Klamath River, and the suspicion was that he’d been felled by neurotoxins. But it couldn’t be proven, as the bull’s cells were too decomposed to measure the toxin. Humboldt County’s Hill says that initially Fish & Game officials were skeptical that blue-green algae had caused the dog deaths at Big Lagoon because wildlife did not seem to be affected. But Hill and Boyer note that it’s hard to measure wildlife deaths: Sick animals may head back to dens to die or their bodies may be eaten, leaving no trace of the toxin’s effects.

Some local scientists are investigating if the blooms can be harmful to people who come into casual contact with them. California Department of Public Health research scientist Sandra McNeel works with toxins of many sorts—molds, mushrooms, and more. She remembers receiving a call from a public health nurse in a North Bay county, asking if there were tests to determine if a patient had been exposed to blue-green algae toxins. “Our office tends to receive calls that don’t have an organizational home,” McNeel explains, and says that her interest was piqued.

She and her group devised a still-unreleased study on recreational exposure in two reservoirs on the Klamath,
Irongate and Copco. “We wanted to know if the toxins produced by blue-green algae in water became air-borne, and whether people swimming, waterskiing, or boating might be exposed to toxins by the inhalation route,” McNeel says. The study looked at two populations—people doing water activities at Klamath, and people playing in the waters of Lake Shasta, which doesn’t have trouble with blue-green algae. Participants gave blood samples and a nasal swab before and after going out on the water. Results are expected sometime in October.

McNeel notes the difficulty of tracking the toxins: “Most of the toxins reside inside the algal cells as long as they’re alive. You can take samples at various times of day and get totally different readings. And some [algae] can vary their own buoyancy so they can rise during the day to take advantage of sunlight and then sink during the night. It makes it hard to characterize what’s happening, especially in large bodies of water like reservoirs.”

What is the likelihood that blue-green algae will be a future bane? On the plus side, there have been no dog deaths in Humboldt County since 2004, which Hill attributes to successful warnings. On the minus side are factors Northern California has in abundance: heavy winter rainfall, high-nitrogen fertilizer use near into rivers and streams, long, dry summers that can turn tumultuous winter water courses into still pools and ponds. With our hot, dry summers and increasing likelihood of drought, California is a high-risk area for algae of any sort, especially for the toxic species.

“As a scientist I get uncomfortable speculating,” says McNeel. “But there’s good support in the literature to say that as our years get dryer and hotter, as water levels decrease in rivers and reservoirs and the Delta, that lower water levels and increased water temperatures
provide a better environment for blue-green algae to bloom.” She explains that with longer hot seasons blooms may start in May rather than July, and extend later in the year. Toxic blooms could even impact drinking water in reservoirs, as they have in Australia; in 2007, Sydney lost half its drinking water to a large blue-green algae column. Boiling or chlorine cannot remove toxins. In the future, water sources such as reservoirs may need to be covered, as photosynthetic algae requires light to grow.

Boyer says it’s unclear why some species are toxic. “We do know that it’s not to produce toxins to affect humans or animals,” he says. “It may be that [the toxins are] internal regulatory compounds, to control ion balance or a response to salt stress.” Sea-level rise—another result of climate change—may improve conditions for toxic blue-green algae for several reasons: shallow water, fertilizer runoff, still conditions, brackish water. “There’s a concern that with global warming, the salt will increase [inland],” Boyer says. “There is some concern that more brackish water will select for more toxic species.”

That seems to be happening already in the Delta. “The Delta rarely had blooms until about five years ago,” Boyer says. “Now it’s fairly common.” He notes that it’s hard to pinpoint causes, though he believes it’s a combination of less flushing action from the Sacramento
River and more fertilizers washing into the Delta. It’s easy to picture how this could become worse: Many scientists expect climate change to exacerbate storms, which could cause periodic flooding and fertilizer load runoff. When the weather changes, shallower water and pools become perfect spots for blue-green algae growth.

One positive note: Apparently freshwater fish are unaffected by the toxins. “They ingest the toxins,” says Boyer, but “they get rid of it as fast they accumulate. We’ve looked at thousands of fish samples. It’s hard to find toxins in fish.” But fish are not off the hook: “What usually happens,” Boyer says, “is that the algae grows and then dies, the decomposing bacteria uses up the oxygen [in the water], and the fish can die from low oxygen.”

So far, blue-green algae flies under most people’s worry radars, but that may change if the blooms find their way into city water supplies, and if creeks and rivers become danger zones. Hill points out that although algae can adapt to the likely conditions of global warming, it will not be so hospitable to nearly any other form of life. “Here’s something that can fix nitrogen from the air,” she says. “It’s got some traits of bacteria and some of algae, and it’s thought to be the first form of life. Imagine, the very species that produces our oxygen may be the last species left.”

Your career has been distinguished by your affiliation with a particular tool: the sediment corer. Tell me about it.
The main method that I use is looking at various components of sediment that is in lakes, bogs, marshes, or the bottom of the ocean, and I use a sediment corer to get them out. The sediment at the bottom of a lake accumulates with time, so the farther you go down into that sediment column, the further back in time you are going. You can get into that sediment and get snapshots of time going back thousands of years.

What is the advantage of sampling sediment from the bottom of a body of water?
At the bottom of a lake, there is very little oxygen, so anything that makes it down there is going to be preserved because of this anoxic condition—there’s no microbial breakdown or oxidization happening. You can compare one level of sediment to the next, look at frequency changes, and talk about real changes.

You work for the USGS, but you also contract yourself out to clients who want you to get core samples for their research.
There are a ton of scientists out there that work on cores that other people have taken, but they don’t have the ability or wherewithal to get these sediment cores themselves. I have this mechanical side of my brain, where I like working with my hands, so I have designed, built, and refined all these coring devices to push them in different directions. And that has led to a lot of cool trips to various places, like a frozen lake in Banff, Canada or my recent trip to Palmyra, an atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

I’ve been getting into these deep lakes with this hand-operated equipment. I am being contracted out basically for the labor of getting the core. But generally, people who are interested in getting the core have one objective. [For example,] they may be interested in looking at charcoal to reconstruct fire history. And I can have the rest of the sediment to look at geochemistry, stable isotopes, pollen, and pursue my own research interests.

Are clients asking you to look into climate change?
Not necessarily. I did my dissertation and lots of research down in Guatemala, and there was definitely a climate component, but I was also looking at human impacts on the environment. There are so many things you can look at when you are looking at lakes. Lakes are a depositional basin—the trash can of the environment. Everything that happens in a watershed will show up in the sediment of a lake. It washes down and eventually gets preserved. I can look at erosion, deforestation, the human burning of vegetation. I can look at prehistoric Native American activity. For this island core [from Palmyra], the funding is coming from National Geographic,
and the questions [the client] is asking is when the coconut palm arrived on this island, and did the Polynesians bring it as part of their big oceanic voyages, or did the seed arrive here on its own?

The client knows that I am interested in paleoclimatology studies, so she’s going to need one cubic centimeter of sediment from forty samples that size. But there are hundreds and hundreds of cubic centimeters of sediment left for me to dive into and look at precipitation records, sea surface temperature records, El Nino… I can get all this data out of that from this killer spot right in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

In your USGS work, is there a push to study climate change?
Right now, there is a big push toward climate, so I found myself situated nicely coming out of school with this degree in paleoclimatology. Even if you look at the most recent IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report, we have only been taking temperature and precipitation records for a maximum of 150 to 200 years in some places. The statistically reliable data shows this trend toward warming. But we have to know what the baseline is. And that’s what I do.

We’ve gotten the modern instrumental record, but we need to know, over the last 10,000 years, what has climate, precipitation, what has temperature done on its own so that we can really talk about what we are doing to the planet. USGS is interested in that for predictive reasons.

Climate studies can be broken into three components: the paleo studies (which is what I do), the modern monitoring, and the modeling. Basically, you take the modern data and tie it in with the paleo data that goes back thousands of years, and that is what makes a robust model. You can’t model what the future is going to do just using the instrumental data. You have to understand the baseline data in order to judge whether the data from modern monitoring is within the range of natural climate fluctuation. Data from the sediment cores provides the backdrop against which you can judge the changes that have occurred in the recent past.

What are the other tools that scientists use to get climate data from the paleo records?
People take cores out of ice sheets, like the ice drilling that has happened in Greenland and Antarctica. They are very valuable. They go back hundreds of thousands of years. In Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, his giant graph showing the CO2 curve is based on ice core data. Ice cores are based on the same principle—it is a depositional environment that grows with time, so the farther you go down into the core, the farther back in time you are going.

People also look at tree rings. All of the various methods have strengths and weakness. Ice has little bubbles of air trapped in it that are snapshots of what the air was like at that time. They go in and extract that air and quantify the CO2 in it. You don’t get that in the sediment, but the beauty of the sediment is that there is no oxygen, so you get nicely preserved microfossil samples. All these approaches have a suite of analyses that they are ideal for. The ideal is to pull them all together and to synthesize these big records.

How do you actually get the core sample?
I use a gravity corer. I drop it, and it will stick into the mud. It is weighted and has an empty barrel at the bottom. However much weight I have attached to it will dictate how deep it will sink into the mud. I can adjust that back and forth to maximize the mud I’m getting. You can typically go a meter and a half or two meters into the mud.

In Banff, with a hand-operated design, working on ice, I was able to put the corer on a raft, which no one else has done before, and get this thing dialed in. The lagoon in the middle of the Palmyra atoll was fifty meters deep. I have a tripod on my raft, and there is a weight on a guide tube that you lower it in and let it do the gravity thing. I have a rope attached to that weight that goes up into a pulley on my tripod, and I pull it up five feet, then drop it. Then pull it up again. Basically, it’s a percussion. It goes in about a centimeter each time.

Doesn’t it muck up all the layers?
Amazingly, it doesn’t. There’s the sediment-water interface, which is a little bit sloshy, but once you get below that, the best description of most sediment is that it is the consistency of toothpaste.

What’s your favorite thing to look at once you’ve got your core sample back to the lab?
Pollen. That’s my main thing. It’s just amazing. It’s beautiful. It’s everywhere. There are probably 100,000 pollen grains that fell on us today. It’s a complete representation for the plants that are growing anywhere. It’s got a very cool morphology, and I like the process of it. You can count charcoal fragments. You go centimeter by centimeter through a core and get a complete fire history of an area. You can tie that in with the vegetation and look at fuel loads versus fires and how all these dynamics work together.

What has been one of your more surprising finds?
Apart from the dead body I found in the lake in Mexico? I have worked on a number of cores from Guatemala, where I did my dissertation, and the collapse of the Mayan civilization shows up visually in the view of the core. There was such a dramatic shift in the environment when the area was depopulated around a thousand years ago. I look at pollen and all this other stuff and that tells me when exactly that happened. But when I go back and look at the core itself, I see the line that goes from a clay-rich carbonate mud to almost pure organic mud above it, indicating that transition. And it happened on a dime. What caused the collapse of the Mayan civilization is the million-dollar question. I think it was a combination of environmental degradation and climate shift. There was an incredibly long history of deforestation and erosion, and then the climate shifted right when they were really overextended. It’s becoming clear that it was a double whammy.

What’s your personal take on climate change?
It’s a moral issue. I’ve puzzled over our role in climate change. There’s a lot of fear-mongering around climate change. Some populations are going to be severely affected, others are going to be just fine. Some species will go extinct, others won’t. That’s basically the way the earth has been moving along for four billion years. So what it boils down to is, do we have a moral obligation to not push all these other species to the brink? Because we have consciousness and an awareness of what we are doing; because we have the ability to make a decision; therefore we have the responsibility.

On this day, Jordan gives a talk that leaves him choked up, unable to continue. His work, images of huge piles of garbage in his “Intolerable Beauty” series (2003-2005), of the wreckage after Hurricane Katrina (“In Katrina’s Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster,” 2005), and the two numbers projects (“Running the Numbers,” 2006-2009, and “Running the Numbers II, Portraits of Global Mass Culture,” 2009), attempt to radio home to a society in which people matter less each day, and the amount of material we consume is astonishingly, grotesquely enormous. Portraits like these: two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes; 426,000 cell phones, the number retired in the US every day; 28,000 oil barrels, the volume of oil burned in the US every two minutes; one million plastic cups, the amount used on airline flights in the US every six hours; 2.3 million folded prison uniforms, representing the number of Americans in prison in 2005. Terrain’s cover image,
“Organ in Canal near Venice,” is from the Katrina photos; “Oil Barrels” (opposite) is from “Running the Numbers.”

Jordan worries that no one is able to understand the enormity of these numbers. As he said at TED, “I have this fear that we aren’t feeling enough as a culture right now. There’s this kind of anesthesia in America… If we can feel these issues more deeply, then they’ll matter
to us more than they do now”—a condition Jordan believes is necessary for each of us to alter our own assumptions and behavior. Unlike many artists, Jordan is in a headlong fight against abstractions. His final words bring it home to the audience: “I’m not speaking abstractly about this. This is who we are, in this room, right now, in this moment.”

I interviewed him by phone at his studio in Seattle, in August.

Both your parents are artists. What was that like?
Well, my mom was more the obvious artist. She’s a watercolor painter. My dad would take the photographs, so that was the basis of her paintings. She would hang a big sheet of watercolor paper on the wall, project the slide, and loosely draw the outline, and then she would put it on her studio table and start painting. I loved watching the blocks of color flow in. That’s where my interest in color came from.

My father did travel photography at a time you could actually sell travel photos, and then he became interested in fine art photography. My dad’s photography was on the side. He was a businessman in New York. We had a really nice house and a financially stable life in Connecticut, but he hated his job. He could never take the risk of fully living and doing what he loved. I just saw it eat him away. He’s now filled with regret.

I fell for the same story back when I was really young. I was encouraged by my parents to do one of the three respectable careers: become a doctor, a lawyer, or a businessman. I failed out of calculus. I was interested in law, had taken a business law class and connected with it.

I ended up going to UC Santa Barbara, played jazz piano, did a lot of hanging out in the music department. My first wife was doing a graduate degree in Austin, so I went to the University of Texas and finished up my undergraduate degree there and went to law school. I spent ten years as a corporate lawyer.

I had an interest in law because a long time ago I had been falsely arrested and charged with a terrible crime. It was a terrible mistake, but I ended up spending time in jail. Then they decided they didn’t have enough evidence and just dropped it. It just evaporated. I was nineteen at the time and it was very traumatic. It was like getting mugged in an alley. I always had this desire to get a black belt—and that black belt was going to law school. But at the age of forty, I realized I was on the same track as my father of being an angry, regretful man.

With the help of a good therapist, I started looking at all these issues. For all the years I’d been a lawyer, I’d been stuck in the fear of failing as an artist. I spent huge amounts of time photographing—I did five bodies of work that have never been exhibited anywhere. I wanted to do it full-time, but I was afraid of giving up that income and stability.

But then there’s this other fear that’s far bigger and more motivating—the fear of not living my life, not taking the risk. Lots of people tell me how courageous I am, but the truth is that I’m still motivated by fear, just a different kind of fear. In 2003, I bailed out of the legal profession.

One thing that happened to me early on is that I had successful exhibitions in LA and in New York at hugely respectable galleries. It was an intense experience early on, the kind artists wait all their lives for. I had enough of it fast that it was really exhausting. I think a lot of people get a little bit of fame, and they want more, then they realize it’s a huge burden. I got body-slammed. I realized that’s not the point of all this, though it’s incredibly seductive. Fame feels like it brings security when actually it doesn’t at all.

It’s been really interesting and scary lately because I’ve been operating on this illusion of being a famous person as if I’m exempted from the economic crash. My income has pretty much vanished. I’m in a very frightening place right now.

I haven’t really had to struggle with the issues that most artists have to struggle with. I want to be freely creative, but there’s no money coming in. How do I hold on to my principles and ideals and at the same time support my family?

I’ve had a personally hard time lately with watching what’s going on with Obama and the movement. No one really knows what to call it, the green movement. I sense a lot of hopelessness. We thought that once we elected Obama things would go our way. But Obama seems to be in a straitjacket. He wants to pass an energy bill, but those coal companies are hacking away at Obama’s energy plan. The energy plan that’s proposed now is pathetic. It’s the most flaccid attempt at doing something. I don’t think it’s because Obama has sold out. The great turning that we’ve all been working towards isn’t happening.

There’s a lot of appeasement going on as well, like as long as I ride my bike to work then I’m OK, that’s all I can do. And there’s not many people doing even that! Meanwhile, the scientific community is calling for radical change. The first warnings were about people in the future, long after we’d died, like we were going to do something nice for our grandchildren, maybe. Now those worst-case scenarios are the mainstream scenarios, and the time frame is that twenty years from now we’re all screwed if we don’t do something now. People tell me not to scare people, that my call to action should be hopeful. But my own experience is that I am motivated by fear if it’s the right kind. Yes, it’s scary to change, to do some radical act like taking over our government and appointing a council of elders, of eliminating corporations, things we really need to do, but maybe it’s getting scarier to think about not doing it. Once the consequence
of not acting looks scarier than the consequence of acting, then maybe we’ll be able to do something radical. That’s my hope at least.

What was it like for you to take the Katrina photos?
My Katrina photos came after the “Intolerable Beauty” series, with the hurricane hitting soon after coming off a series of exhibitions. I was there for two weeks the first time, and then I went down again. The first few days I was there, all I could feel was shock. It took me a while to get my bearings and experience a sense of grief. It was incredible to look around and see the incredible devastation and realize this is my own country. It erased my sense that Americans are immune from the disasters we see in other countries, and it also made me realize that we can be abandoned by our own government. Of course, many other people have experienced
that abandonment their whole lives, but I had not.

In the “Intolerable Beauty” series, I photographed giant piles of garbage. In that series, I tried to capture the scale of our mass consumption. As I stood in front of these piles of garbage, I thought I was seeing the scale. But as I studied more about it, I realized the enormity of this problem is taking place on so many different levels. I’d read these stats—20 million barrels
of oil, the huge amount of trees, plastic—and then I’d read the cultural symptoms—the high suicide rate among wealthy professionals, the millions of Americans on antidepressants, the millions of people addicted to prescription pain killers.

As I began to more clearly see the enormity of this problem, I realized that my “Intolerable Beauty” series was just touching the tip of the iceberg. I had run up against a limitation of the photographic process. There is no such thing as the photograph of the Mt. Everest of crushed cars because all these waste streams are divided up among thousands of locations. It’s like global warming, there is no way you can see it. It was a real challenge for me. I want to go deeper but I can’t figure out how to do it. It’s an invisible phenomenon. That was the seed of the idea for the “Running the Numbers” series. I wanted to depict the actual quantities of what we consume. And after I did a few. I realized I could also do images of social justice issues.

Which piece shocked you the most?
I have to say it’s the prison uniforms. The actual installation is just shocking. Each uniform in the piece is tiny, the size of a nickel on its edge. You have to practically put your nose on the piece to see what you’re looking at. And to hold those 2.3 million uniforms, it’s 10 x 25 feet. You have to understand that I see my work for the first time when I see it in an exhibition. Otherwise I see it on a computer. That prison piece took me a really long time to do, building the image piece by piece. I thought I got what it meant. But when I saw the actual print installed it was just absolutely shocking, that there were that many Americans imprisoned.

Really, they all have that effect. It’s so hard for us to understand gigantic numbers. It’s assumed that when we talk about these huge numbers that we comprehend them. But I don’t think we do comprehend them. There’s a disconnect going on. We don’t feel anything about these gigantic numbers, and it creates this cultural anesthesia. When the killings were happening in Rwanda, and we hear there are 800,000 people murdered, what does that mean to us? But if we saw their dead bodies stacked in a series of stadiums, if we could actually see those murdered people, we would act.

Talk about the tension between aesthetics and message.
I started with that question in my “Intolerable Beauty” series. I began using beauty to provoke an uncomfortable conversation. If I took ugly photographs of something ugly, people would just be repelled. If I took beautiful photographs of a frightening subject, people would be drawn into the aesthetics of the image, and the message would clobber them while they were unaware. It’s a technique that’s been used for centuries in art and photography. But when I exhibited that work in 2005, it was frustrating because most of the conversations were about how beautiful the images were, and there was very little about the message. In my cell phones image in “Intolerable Beauty,” I made several choices about aesthetics: I put it in perspective, I arranged the cell phones in a swirl, and although most were black, I had some colored phones that gave the piece activity for the eye. So for the “Running the Numbers” series, I decided to get away from that and just make a random pattern of phones, all of them silver. I wanted to just purely illustrate the quantity and get away from the beauty. But it turned out that just the sheer visual perplexity of the image has a beauty in itself.

The jet trails image was just a random pattern, but again, there’s a strange kind of beauty. People say it looks like ice crystals. So my own idea of beauty has changed a lot. But it also made me think about how we can face the horror of our world and still allow for joy. I tend to get into this place where I don’t allow myself to enjoy life because there’s so much bad stuff happening. Now I’m coming to a place where I can feel joy. We can allow ourselves to enjoy life and appreciate the miracle we’ve all been given and to appreciate humor and beauty. So that’s a subtle message I’m trying to put into my “Running the Numbers” series. I find personally the more I can open myself to the horror and really allow myself to feel the full range of feelings about what’s happening, then my ability to feel the good aspects opens up in the other direction. If we live in denial, if we try to avoid knowing about it and our role in the horror, then there’s falseness to the joy.

Chris Jordan’s photographs can be seen on his Web site, chrisjordan.com, and his TED speech can be viewed at ted.com.

Cofounder Gavin Raders is fastening a wooden leg to what turns out to be a potato tower under construction. Raders tests the leg and then turns around, sporting a beard and a smile. Appearing just a couple years older than the young men he is teaching, he’s wearing jeans and a bright orange T-shirt. Armed with a staple gun, they begin to stretch and fasten wire mesh around the legs. “The potatoes won’t need much more than some straw and a bit of compost,” Raders explains.

Raders makes the rounds among the others who have come to help plant the rooftop’s container garden. Some from the volunteer group West Oakland Youth Standing Empowered are busily transferring amaranth and vegetable plants into larger containers. So far this evening’s rooftop work party is turning out to be part education, part fun, and part community-building.

Launched in June, Planting Justice aims to make affordable, nutritious food more accessible by helping urban residents grow their own food; the group also hopes to offer jobs as nursery specialists and community organizers. Planting Justice works with a variety of institutions—
from East Bay schools and San Quentin State Prison to the newly opened Mandela Foods Cooperative in West Oakland—to address health and income disparities in the East Bay. “Planting Justice is a unique but simple model: Plant seeds, train people, grow food, work with existing institutions like schools, churches, stores, and prisons,” says co-founder Haleh Zandi. “We want it to be a replicable model here in the Bay Area and in cities across the country.”

Raders and Zandi have backgrounds in social justice organizing and anthropology. Raders has been a political activist and community organizer since he was eighteen; he organized on campuses and has knocked on more than twenty thousand doors throughout California, New Mexico, and Colorado, working on a range of antiwar, anti-nuclear, and pro-environmental
issues. When Zandi moved to Berkeley in 2006, she joined Raders as a grassroots organizer for Peace Action West. During their time canvassing together, they brainstormed how the block-by-block community-organizing model could be used to address issues of social justice and community empowerment. They later took some time off to study—Zandi earned a masters degree in cultural anthropology from the California Institute of Integral Studies, while Raders practiced permaculture as an intern at the Regenerative Design Institute in Bolinas. When Raders returned to Oakland, the pair realized that by combining the tactics of community organizing with urban food projects, they could make edible landscaping affordable to those who lack healthy food. Thus Planting Justice was born; the two recently applied for nonprofit
status for their fledgling organization.

How has such a young group forged so many links? Its founders attribute their success to being out in the community, actively seeking to work with others. The group is currently funded thanks to the pair’s garden design business, the Backyard Food Project, as well as donations collected through canvassing, and a couple of small grants. Now they are hoping to sow the idea of fresh, local food far from their Oakland rooftop.

Food deserts
Lack of access to fresh, nutritious food is linked with a host of health problems including obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes, but according to the USDA, more than a fifth of households in low-income urban areas are as much as a mile from a supermarket
and have no access to a vehicle. This forces residents to rely on corner stores or fast food restaurants for less nutritious food. In fact, certain urban and rural areas have been dubbed “food deserts.” Oakland-based think tank Food First defines these as areas without supermarkets that sell fresh produce, which “primarily form around low-income populations where families live on tight budgets and lack a reliable means of transportation.”

For many Bay Area residents, grocery budgets are indeed tight: A 2005 UCLA Center for Health Policy Research study concluded that about 33 percent of Bay Area residents are “food insecure,” meaning they cannot afford healthy food. That figure is higher for the area’s black, Latino, and Native American populations.

But the Bay Area may also be part of the solution, as Oakland has begun to take a leading role in the national discourse on a green economy and locally sourced food. With Van Jones—cofounder of Oakland’s Ella Baker Center for Human Rights—now serving as President
Obama’s special advisor for green jobs, enterprise, and innovation, Oakland is on the map as a leader in sustainable efforts.

Raders and Zandi believe that green jobs involve actually working with the soil. “Too often, ‘green jobs’ are thought of as futuristic industrial technologies needing millions and millions of dollars in capital input, started mostly by major corporations that control access to these funds,” says Raders. “The dominant focus is on high-tech ‘clean energy’ jobs. We will provide a much
different model for creating green jobs in our neighborhoods, one that can and should be replicated in any US city with comparatively little money. All you need are people, seeds, sun, water, some space, and a little guidance and inspiration.”

Raders picks up a hose and begins to water the hundreds of container plants surrounding him. “We are going to hire local youth to work at our nurseries in retail and as nursery specialists,” he continues. “After training in permaculture design and implementation, we’ll also hire Planting Justice team leaders, who will each oversee a crew of a few urban gardeners, all of whom will have also gone through our training.” Raders envisions these teams planting edible gardens
both for the group’s nonprofit projects as well as for private clients.

Their Temescal-area rooftop nursery serves as the main incubator, providing most of the vegetable starts and serving as a training site where volunteers learn how to produce food from seed. From these small beginnings they hope will sprout a movement that will change thousands of lives.

Branching out
On a clear Saturday morning in June, workers are about to cut the ribbon on West Oakland’s newest grocery store, the Mandela Foods Cooperative. Located across from the West Oakland BART, the co-op is worker-owned and -operated. While small compared with typical supermarkets, the store carries foodstuffs that until recently had been hard to come by in West
Oakland: grass-fed beef and lamb from local family farms, free-range chicken raised without hormones, produce grown in Northern California, organic canned goods. The bright orange awning above its doors proclaims “People – Food – Power.”

By 10:00 am a small pool of excited people begins to form. The co-op’s eight worker-owners all wear Mandela Foods T-shirts, as well as expressions of excitement and anxiety. Many of them have waited years for this moment. Despite Oakland’s growing reputation as an eco-aware city, West Oakland has long been a food desert. Before the co-op opened, a single grocery store
served the area’s 25,000 residents. To put things in perspective, the nearby Rockridge neighborhood has a grocery store for perhaps every 4,000 residents.

Many West Oakland shoppers made do at corner markets, where canned and processed food is abundant and fresh vegetables rare. When these corner markets do carry produce, it is often expensive. A healthier—yet less frequently available—option is the Saturday Farmer’s
Market near the West Oakland BART parking lot.

As the opening ceremony finishes up, a blessing is given by a local imam invoking the image of Adam as the original gardener, and urging the community to sustain the food collective. Then one of the co-op staffers picks up a pair of scissors and smiles widely while people cheer and snap photos. She cuts the bright orange ribbon across the doors, and people rush in. Within
minutes the store is full of shoppers.

Just inside the door stand shelves of green starter plants—tomatoes, kale, zucchini—that Planting Justice grew from seed and sold to the co-op for $1 each. The group hopes that people will plant them at home. “Before Mandela Marketplace opened in West Oakland, there was no grocery store, and there was no commercial nursery,” says Zandi. “We are making plants available to residents who may then harvest their own kale, artichokes, broccoli, tomatoes.”

The store hopes to give the community more than seedlings, says Dana Harvey, executive director of Mandela MarketPlace, the nonprofit partner that helped provide technical assistance and funding to open the store. The co-op also holds nutrition education and cooking classes. “Part of the culture of the store and setting it up was to be a community resource and not just
a grocery store,” she says.

Door-to-door
Shoppers don’t have to go to the store to find Planting Justice in their neighborhood; sometimes the organizers come to them. A central pillar of Planting Justice is canvassing. A few times a week, Zandi and several volunteers spend their evenings going door-to-door.

“No other food justice organization has a canvass program,” says Zandi. “It is a great way to build community. We provide educational materials, informing people about food justice issues and letting residents get to know our work. This might be the only way some people are able to find out about what is going on regarding these issues.” It’s also a way to alert residents to volunteer opportunities like the rooftop work parties, and to ask for donations that will be used to buy materials for projects such as the garden that they’ve started at Oakland’s Explore Preparatory Middle School.

On one of the first hot days in July, we start our rounds in a neighborhood above Lake Merritt. Zandi is wearing a long Iranian-style shirt and wears her hair down the length of her back; like any good canvasser, she is equipped with a binder of factsheets about permaculture
design and colorful pictures of students involved in recent projects. She is as concrete as she can be with details at the door, telling people how many plants or fruit trees their donation will buy, and how many pounds of food they will produce.

It’s slow-going at first. At most houses, no one answers the door. Others wave us away through their windows. “Oh well, let’s just keep at it,” Zandi says. After a few hours, she’s collected about $75, which she says is pretty good, considering that Planting Justice is a new organization without much name recognition.

Finally, an elderly African-American man opens his door with a smile, noticing Zandi’s canvassing binder. “I’m looking to speak with folks about a school garden project in East Oakland I am working on,” she says, and then asks him if that is something he finds important. “Of course,” he says.

Zandi runs through the mission of Planting Justice, telling him briefly about the garden projects and the importance of creating green jobs in Oakland. The man nods in agreement; it turns out he used to be a grassroots organizer. He recalls the organizing he did through churches for social justice, and he mentions how many families in his neighborhood are radically affected by the dwindling economy. When Zandi asks him if he is able to sponsor the Explore school garden, he turns back inside and comes back with $20. He mentions that his granddaughter loves to spend time in the family’s vegetable garden, takes the Planting Justice flier, and signs up for their e-mail list. Zandi thanks the man for his support and leaves, eyes smiling.

Planting new seeds
Not every would-be gardener can be reached by canvassing; some aren’t free to come outside. One of Planting Justice’s more innovative projects joins with Beth Waitkus of the Insight Garden Program at San Quentin State Prison, which has served over 500 inmates since 2002. This program aims to rehabilitate prisoners through organic gardening, teaching the men practical skills like garden design, soil amendment, and plant propagation that they can one day use on the job. Through the act of caring for plants, Waitkus hopes the inmates will also learn responsibility, discipline, and mindfulness. “We definitely see a transformation,” she says. “Over time, you see shifts in their frame of thinking. We really believe nature can heal.”

The 1,200-square-foot organic garden is in the corner of the medium-security area. From purple echinacea and geraniums to bright sunflowers and roses, the flower garden is a relief in such a monotonous environment. “It’s the only place on the prison yard where men mix freely without stigma from their racial groups. Nature tends to break down barriers,” she says. “Many of the men have described it to me as a sacred space.”

The garden is exclusively flowers, but it is being expanded to include a vegetable garden that Planting Justice is helping to create. The new garden will be built in a fenced-off area at the edge of the prison yard. There will be several 10- and 25-foot raised beds, arranged in a semi-circle. In addition to working in the garden, inmates may take classes. Raders will lead vegetable gardening skills, permaculture, and sustainable food systems workshops.

There are several challenges to the program. First, there has been a change in prison leadership. “Anytime there is a new warden, you have to adjust to a new culture,” Waitkus says. Second, the prisoners who grow the vegetables will not be able to eat them—state prison rules require all inmates to have access to the same food. “It’s a fairness issue,” Waitkus says. “So we looked for the silver lining. The men will be able to cultivate, nurture, and even harvest the food. Then we all collectively decide what community programs we want donate the food to. It is a very positive way to bridge the divide between the inside and outside.”

The organizers envision a post-release employment program, so that the men can use the gardening skills gained inside prison to get nursery, landscaping, or other green jobs. “There is a high recidivism rate in California, with about seventy percent of men returning to prison within three years,” says Zandi.

Waitkus adds, “Even if a handful of people who participate in this program don’t return to prison, this is saving taxpayers tons of money. It costs about $40,000 a year for each inmate. … We are helping to create a safer, more humane, more efficient society—all the while saving
taxpayers’ money.”

Putting down roots
A few weeks after my first rooftop visit, Raders and Zandi host another work party. The seeds planted earlier have sprouted. The raised beds are full of robust tomato plants, flowering borage, and aromatic herbs. The produce will be used for their own kitchen as well as for projects across the city.

Some of Planting Justice’s other efforts are also blooming. This spring, in collaboration with volunteers from West Oakland Youth Standing Empowered, they transformed a two-acre lot at Explore Preparatory Middle School in East Oakland into what Raders and Zandi call a multi-layer “edible food forest.” They dug water-harvesting swales and planted over thirty apple, pear, plum, pluot, peach, persimmon, and nectarine trees. This fall, edible shrubs, herbs, ground cover, and root vegetables will be planted under the trees.

They are working with a science teacher at Explore to make the project part of a curriculum that will include composting, nutrition, and ecology. Students will maintain the garden as part of an after-school program. Not only will they be learning food-growing skills, but the food forest will be a perennial source of thousands of pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables for the students and the surrounding community.

The next step for Planting Justice is to buy a vacant Oakland lot to serve as the group’s headquarters and an ecological training center. Not only will they be able to grow more food and provide more vegetable starts, they will have space to train more people as nursery specialists
and urban farmers. Raders hopes to plant larger, high-yielding gardens that will become “living classrooms.” But for now, they’ll keep tending to the potato towers and potted kale plants on an Oakland rooftop that just might contain the seeds of a more sustainable urban future.