That morning, Moriarty, an Oregon State University graduate student in the department of fisheries and wildlife, working on her thesis on the movements of martens (Martes americana), had been reviewing photos taken by one of her thirty motion-activated cameras in the mountains north of Truckee, California. As she scrolled through the usual candid-camera cache of wind-driven branches, squirrels, coyotes, ermine, and the occasional bobcat, she came across a photo of something quite unique: the hind end of a wolverine, an animal that hasn’t been documented in California for nearly ninety years.

The last known California wolverine was shot in 1922, making Moriarty’s discovery nearly as thrilling for the biological community as the ivory-billed woodpecker re-sighting in Arkansas in 2004. “It’s exciting to have verified confirmation of a wolverine, because there have been hundreds of unconfirmed sightings over the years,” says Moriarty.

Wolverines are the largest terrestrial members of the weasel family; they look like small, long-legged brown bears with large cream-colored stripes running down either side of their bodies. Their tendency to be fierce towards other creatures has earned them nicknames such as “devil bear” and “skunk bear.” Wolverines are very solitary, wide-roaming animals, and are thus difficult to study and count in a consistent fashion. There are estimated to be fewer than 500 wolverines left in the continental United States, although the federal government does not consider them an endangered or threatened species. Subspecies of wolverine exist in northern Europe and Asia as well. Despite low population estimates, it is still legal to trap them in Alaska and Montana.

California once had what biologist Shawn Sartorius of the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s office in Helena, Montana, dubs “a pretty special population of wolverines,” which were more closely related to Eurasian wolverines than other populations in North America. “They were probably isolated in North America for quite a long time before European colonization,” he explains. The reappearance of a lone wolverine in California instantly raised questions about its background: had someone released a once-captive animal or had a wild individual migrated from afar?

“The nearest known population of wolverines is about 600 miles away,” says Kevin McKelvey of the US Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station. He points out that DNA analysis of Sierra Nevada wolverines from museum collections makes it clear that migration between isolated populations has rarely happened in the past. Moriarty explains that wolverines are known to travel long distances—upwards of fifty miles in a day—but 600 miles is a new precedent.

“Wolverines are associated with alpine habitat and don’t usually come below the tree line unless they’re roving males. That means they’re highly dependent on latitude and climate,” Moriarty says. Since the wolverine she caught on camera was indeed an adult male, it’s possible that he was a migrant trying to claim new turf. That would be good news for the expansion of the species, if he could only find a female to share his new digs. “If the wolverines could recolonize the Sierras,” says McKelvey, “it would represent a major increase in their US population and range.”

It became clear to Moriarty that she needed DNA from this wayfaring stranger to determine whether or not he actually belonged to the historic California population. A massive search team to find him, or at least hair or excrement he’d left behind, was put together, including fifteen scientists, two California Department of Fish & Game staff, and myself. The search employed snowmobiles, snowshoes, cross country skis, and even dogs—not hunting dogs, of course, but canines trained to find scat. Special bait stations with several motion-sensing cameras pointed at a hunk of deer meat were set up in hopes of snapping more photos. The stations also included hair snares, since DNA can be gathered from follicles.

In the end, we covered over 150 miles of Sierra Nevada backcountry terrain via human power. Although we never had a live sighting of the wolverine, the baited cameras did snap a few more action photos, and hair and scat were retrieved. DNA tests ultimately proved that the wolverine was most closely related to the Rocky Mountain populations and not a California native.

Word of the displaced beast rapidly spread around the nation. Local TV stations were right on the scene, and then NPR, CNN, and NBC began picking up the story. People began to ask, what might a reappearance of wolverines in California mean for an area that isn’t used to having them around? Armand Gonzales, wildlife program manager with California’s Department of Fish & Game, points out that the major industries in the Truckee and Tahoe areas—residential development, commercial timber harvest on public and private lands, and outdoor recreation—could be affected if wolverines move back into town.

“[If] we’re able to conclude with reasonable certainty that there is more than one, and they are possibly reproducing, then the regulatory oversight of projects like development and harvesting in the area will become much more complex,” Gonzales says. “This would have a direct monetary effect on the local economy, would require redirecting staff time to deal with the additional regulatory oversight, and possibly restrict the timing and location of winter recreation.” He says that the agency continues to receive unconfirmed reports of wolverine sightings.

Historically, wolverines and humans rarely tangled for territory. “Wolverines tend to live in places that are remote from human habitation and even tend to be remote from things like timber harvest,” says Sartorius. “They live very high on mountain slopes so there aren’t a lot of things that people do in wolverine habitat that affect wolverines.” That could change, however, as climate alters. Global warming is an increasingly unpredictable wild card for people who study and manage wildlife. According to current climate models, major ecosystems are slated to undergo range shifts in the coming years, and the animals in those habitats will have no choice but to move, seeking suitable places to live, or perish. “The potential for these types of movements occurring are going to increase with the effects of climate change,” says Gonzales.

So what will state wildlife managers do in the coming days of habitat reshuffling? “Animals showing up in their historic range will not be considered invasive but do have the potential to disrupt the status quo of the ecosystem that has evolved since the animals’ disappearance,” Gonzales points out. “We are working on a climate change adaptation strategy that will address some of the range shifts that may likely occur. We hope to identify and conserve key reserves that possess high potential for resiliency and biodiversity. Then we can plan linkages between them, including linking habitats at higher elevations and altitudes.”

Although the wolverine is listed as an endangered species in California, it still receives no protection under the federal Endangered Species Act. In fact, says Moriarty, “Ironically, wolverines were denied federal protection the very same day that the wolverine was photographed in California.” In part, the federal Fish & Wildlife Service decided that such protections were not warranted because the species isn’t “geographically discrete”—in other words, the population within the continental United States is not totally separated from populations in Alaska and Canada.

While Moriarty’s finding excited biologists, Sartorius points out that it isn’t likely to have much of an impact on future decisions about federal protection. “This wolverine wasn’t a native of the historic [California] population, and it was a male,” he explains. “They are the kind of individuals that are of least conservation value because you can’t establish a population with an individual male. It would have been of much more conservation interest had it been a female.”

Prior to nixing federal protection for the wolverine, the Bush administration also dodged conservation responsibilities for several species that are distributed across North America under the rationale that our neighbors, Canada and Mexico, will protect them. Unfortunately, Canada has been late to the conservation table, implementing its Species At Risk Act in 2003, and the only protective action to speak of in Mexico is largely due to prodding from US organizations.

The nonprofit conservation group Defenders of Wildlife, along with other groups, filed a lawsuit on September 30 challenging the denial of federal protection for wolverines. As Jamie Clark, the group’s executive vice president and the former director of the Fish and Wildlife Service under the Clinton administration, wrote in a press release reacting to the federal government’s decision to deny federal protection to the species, “The future of the wolverine depends upon the US Fish & Wildlife Service doing the job that it was entrusted to do: protect and recover imperiled wildlife within our borders.”

But even if the wolverine were to be listed as a federally endangered species, many believe the Endangered Species Act’s teeth are being systematically knocked out by the Bush administration in its final days. Currently, any project undertaken by a federal agency must include consultation with experts at the Forestry and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service, which independently decide whether a project is likely to threaten a protected species or its habitat. However, under the leadership of Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, the Department of the Interior—the agency that enforces the Endangered Species Act—has decided that these consultations are no longer necessary, and that federal agencies have the expertise to review their own construction and development projects.

These legislative changes will put an end to some environmental reviews that developers and other federal agencies blame for delays and cost increases on many projects. In other words, the Endangered Species Act will be weakened in the name of finishing a job under budget and on time. “Kempthorne is attempting to accomplish anti-ESA legislation through regulation that he couldn’t get passed through Congress back in 2005,” says Kim Delfino, California program director for Defenders of Wildlife. “It’s an attempt at a parting shot by the Bush administration before the November election.”

As the climate changes and snowpacks in northern latitudes shrink, Moriarty believes that government protection and habitat preservation will be key for the wellbeing of the wolverines who depend on alpine environments. “When studying animals with such an expansive geographic range and ability to move beyond international boundaries, it’s very important for us to continue research while preserving critical habitat such that we can sustain biodiversity,” she says.

Unfortunately, the wolverine she caught on camera didn’t stick around long enough to be a part of much research; despite our search, he disappeared. Some researchers lament that more efforts weren’t made to capture, radio-collar, and track the wandering wolverine to find out where he came from and what he was doing here. “To me, this highlights the need for much better understanding not only of where wolverines live but how they navigate between these areas. We know almost nothing about wolverine dispersal routes,” says McKelvey.

“This was such a rare event,” agrees Jeff Copeland, McKelvey’s coworker at the Rocky Mountain Research Station. “My guess is that this individual came there with the primary goal of finding other wolverines. At some point it will fail to do so and will probably attempt to return to its area of origin. How interesting it might have been to be able to track that movement.”

Scientists hoping that wolverines are indeed staging a return to the Sierras can do no more than hope that my friend’s mysterious visitor will wander back… and this time bring a pal.

California Assembly Bill 117, passed into law in 2002 in the wake of the energy crisis, sought to reform California’s energy business by giving city and county governments the power to localize energy production and distribution, and to choose more ecologically sound production methods. In turn, it stripped power-sourcing authority from investor-owned utilities like PG&E, and encouraged investment in local renewable energy. This program is called Community Choice Aggregation, or CCA, and in many ways, it is a complete reinterpretation of California’s current energy system. Renewable energy activists say it is essential for future energy stability and independence, while others, like PG&E, warn that it is too risky and may raise prices.

Even though the law passed six years ago, bureaucratic wrangling has stymied progress, and only now are communities beginning to move towards this model. At a time when the perils of climate change have wide public recognition and reducing carbon dioxide emissions has become a statewide priority, Marin, San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland are all in stages of researching, developing, and implementing Community Choice Aggregation.

To understand how Community Choice Aggregation would work, it helps to compare it with today’s investor-owned system. PG&E provides energy to 15.1 million customers in Northern California. The utility is able to supply power on such a large scale by purchasing it on the wholesale market, signing contracts with power plants, and transmitting energy through an extensive power line grid.

The California Public Utilities Commission regulates the rate that PG&E charges its customers, which both protects consumers from drastic price fluctuations and makes competitively priced contracts an essential part of the utility’s economic success. For PG&E, large traditional energy generators—such as gas, coal, hydroelectric, and nuclear power plants—are attractive energy sources because they offer more energy at lower prices. Small, local, renewable producers, which transmit smaller amounts of intermittent power that often costs more, remain less compatible with the utility’s business goals.

“If you look at the business of the gas and electric utility, it is basically an energy importer,” says Paul Fenn, energy activist and author of AB 117. “That business is inconsistent with renewable energy. If heavy investments are made in local renewables, their carefully established supply chain will crash.”

According to Fenn and other renewable energy activists, establishing CCAs would cause an important shift in the energy business by allowing localities to take over power sourcing authority from large, private utilities, and invest long-term contracts into local, renewable energy providers. For example, Marin Clean Energy, Marin County’s proposed CCA, expects to secure power purchase contracts for wind, solar thermal, landfill gas, geothermal, and hydroelectric energy, which would supply 145,000 MWh of renewable energy. The smaller customer base would allow for a tailored energy supply system, and the government’s tax-exempt status would help offset investments in more expensive renewable energy generation.

Unlike a public power municipality, however, CCAs would still rely on PG&E to distribute the energy they source. The utility would continue to own and maintain power line infrastructure, handle billing, and provide customer service to all residents enrolled in the CCA plan. For many Bay Area cities and counties, establishing an energy aggregator seems like the least risky way to lower carbon dioxide emissions, invest in local renewables, and use less natural gas and coal. “CCA is easier [than public power] because it doesn’t have to absorb the creation of infrastructure, like power lines,” says Marin county supervisor and CCA advocate Charles McGlashan. “The utility continues doing what it does best, but the community chooses its energy source.”

In April 2008, Marin County and its eleven participating cities released a final version of its Community Choice Aggregation Business Plan. If the city and town councils pass the proposal, the county plans to create a Marin Clean Energy Joint Powers Authority in early 2009 and begin sourcing power for Marin municipalities and commercial and industrial accounts by 2010.

Dawn Weisz, principal planner for the Marin Community Development Agency and leading Marin Clean Energy advocate, expects that a CCA will help her county invest in more renewables while meeting or beating PG&E’s prices. To do this, Marin Clean Energy is planning to offer its customers two energy plans: the “Light Green” plan would offer one-quarter renewable energy for PG&E prices, and the “Green Tariff” would charge more for 100 percent renewable power. “The primary goal of Marin Clean Energy would be to purchase 25 percent renewable energy for our Light Green customers, growing to fifty percent in the next five years,” Weisz says. “That would be the maximum amount of renewable energy that we could offer while keeping costs at or below PG&E’s costs.” The Green Tariff option would charge 11.3 cents per kWh, about two cents more per kWh than the Light Green plan.

Weisz believes the financial advantages a local government entity has over an investor-run utility are key to offering competitive prices while also investing in renewable energy. “ First of all, we have low overhead, we have kind of a nonprofit structure,” Weisz says. “We don’t have a large number of staff and large headquarters to keep up. We don’t have to pay shareholder profits. We are tax-exempt and we are able to borrow money at a cheaper rate, usually a five percent discount compared to private utilities. We can also use our bonding authority to build and own our own renewable energy assets.”

Marin Clean Energy would seek to stimulate renewable resource development by providing financing for individual property owners who invest in energy efficiency upgrades, rooftop solar photovoltaic arrays, or small-scale wind projects. Using the same bonding authority that allows governments to invest in large infrastructure projects regardless of immediate financial return—like the new Bay Bridge for example—Marin would have the resources to invest in large-scale solar, wind, biomass, biogas, and ocean power facilities.

CCA proponents say it makes sense to invest in local renewable resources because it keeps money within the community. “We now send $150 million a year to PG&E headquarters; with CCA some of that would be spent locally,” says McGlashan, the county supervisor. He also notes that Marin Clean Energy expects to reduce carbon emissions by 300,000 tons a year and eventually will save customers money by avoiding hikes in natural gas prices.

PG&E is not nearly as confident about the benefits of Community Choice Aggregation. Officials insist that their company provides consumers with the best possible energy prices and is dedicated to lowering emissions and investing in renewable energy resources. “We are really proud that we deliver the cleanest energy in the nation among utilities,” says PG&E spokesperson Darlene Chiu. PG&E’s power, she says, is “over fifty percent emission-free.”

Recently PG&E has been marketing itself as an environmentally friendly company. The corporate Web site encourages energy efficiency, explains PG&E’s commitment to no-emission and renewable energy, and hopes to reach California’s twenty percent renewable energy mandate by the year 2010. The company reports that in 2007 it provided customers with a power mix in which approximately half came from emission-free sources like nuclear energy, hydroelectric power, and renewable sources, with the remaining half coming from mostly natural gas and some coal.

PG&E is also stepping up its pursuit of renewable technology. In 2008, PG&E announced contracts with BrightSource Energy, Inc. to buy 900 megawatts of renewable solar thermal power, and celebrated its advances in facilitating customer-owned solar, which transmits power from small-scale solar panels to the grid. The utility feels it is going above and beyond to provide clean energy for their customers and that a CCA could not do better.

Chiu claims that CCAs will be forced to raise energy rates, and says that such business plans have not provided sufficient data or proof of success. She says that the public should have more information. “We don’t oppose Community Choice Aggregation, we support customer choice,” says Chiu. “We just want to make sure that customers have an informed choice. But we also aren’t going to readily give up customers.” She believes customers will choose a lower price tag over higher renewable energy.

Will buying energy from a CCA cost customers more? It’s hard to say; since California doesn’t have any working CCAs yet, both PG&E spokespeople and CCA proponents are basing their opinions on future estimates. PG&E claims that increasing demand has raised renewable resource prices, and that CCA business plans are overly optimistic with their numbers. Local officials note that investments in renewable energy infrastructure will help reduce prices in the future, and say that they are dedicated to keeping rates low for all customers, including low-income families.

Despite PG&E’s official position, green energy activists and Bay Area officials feel the company is actively fighting the implementation of CCAs, leaving residents with a confusing choice indeed. “We are experiencing vigorous resistance from PG&E,” says Marin County Supervisor McGlashan. “They are trying to claim that we haven’t done our research and that our numbers are off. We’ll know how much renewable power will be available in one year and then we’ll see, but PG&E is trying to convince people that CCA is a bad idea so they won’t vote for it now. They want to scare people.”

Whether or not Bay Area cities approve the CCA business plans currently under consideration, residents of Northern California do have a choice: they can either put their faith in PG&E while applying pressure for necessary changes or commit to reworking the energy system. Both hold risks, but no risk seems greater than inaction. “The challenge of climate change is not simply to replace the brown power supply with a green power supply, but to completely reconfigure the grid,” says Fenn. Our challenge is not to simply turn off the lights when we leave a room, but to seriously consider where our electricity comes from.

First, it helps to understand why solar installers are so crazy for unimpeded sunlight. Solar panels are made of individual photovoltaic cells grouped into columns. If one cell is shaded, production for that whole column shuts down. My brother-in-law Nathan Fleischer, a solar energy expert who spends his days figuring out the best placement for solar panels in schools, explained to me that if a branch casts a shadow along the bottom six inches of a solar panel, it will halt energy production for each column connected to those shaded cells. Even a little shade can have a big impact.

Weighing the benefits

Trees are famously good for the environment: they produce oxygen, create habitats for wildlife, filter noise, cool urban areas, slow soil erosion, reduce the run-off from heavy rains that can lead to municipal drainage issues and flooding, and break down pesticides and other groundwater pollutants into less dangerous compounds.

They’re also great for homeowners’ pocketbooks: planted close to a house, they will shade it from summer heat, reducing cooling costs. They provide shelter from winds in winter, lowering heating bills. The Center for Urban Forest Research estimates that after five years, a tree planted on the west side of a house will lower energy bills by three percent. After fifteen years, the savings rise to almost twelve percent. In short, when we plant trees, they repay us for our investment many times over.

Unlike trees, which take years to grow large enough to shade a house, solar panels start producing clean energy instantly. Manufacturing the panels uses energy from dirtier sources, but since the panels produce clean energy that emits no pollution or greenhouse gases, and use no fossil fuels, you compensate for that energy consumption pretty quickly. It takes between three and thirteen percent of the electricity generated over the lifetime of the solar panels to make up for energy used during their manufacture. That means you come out 87 to 97 percent ahead in the clean-electricity equation in the long run.

Solar power means clean energy not just for heating and cooling but for all of your energy needs, including lighting, cooking, and powering the television. It also directly reduces reliance on dirtier energy sources: for example, in PG&E’s 2007 retail customer electric power mix, 47 percent was derived from natural gas and four percent from coal. Solar power is already proving it can reduce dependence on such energy sources: according to CNN, last year solar panels on homes and businesses in California created as much energy as eight power plants.

What’s more, solar power gives back to the grid when demand is highest. Since it produces the most electricity during peak daylight hours, when energy is most expensive, it cuts bills and reduces the risk of rolling blackouts that can plague California summers.

Counting carbon

Both trees and solar power are celebrated as carbon dioxide management tools. Trees absorb carbon from the atmosphere and store it, creating a “bank” that’s cashed out only when the tree dies and decomposes. It’s hard to pinpoint the amount of carbon dioxide a tree can pull out of the air each year—it depends on its type and size—but estimates vary from sixteen to seventy pounds per mature tree. What’s more, by reducing the heating and cooling needs of homes, trees reduce the demand for energy from carbon dioxide-emitting fossil fuels.

But when it comes to carbon dioxide reduction, solar power really kicks bark. Current photovoltaic technology offers about twelve percent conversion efficiency, meaning it’s able to convert about that much of the solar rays it collects into electricity. At that level, it takes four years of the panels’ assumed thirty-year lifespan to pay back the energy it took to manufacture them, leaving 26 years of pollution and greenhouse gas-free electricity. Using US Department of Energy statistics, if the average American household produced half of its electricity with solar power, over the thirty-year lifespan, each home would keep 91 tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere—plus half a ton of sulfur dioxide and nearly 650 pounds of nitrogen oxides.

Factoring in costs

Solar power may be more effective than trees in the fight against carbon dioxide, but it’s way more expensive. In some cases, trees don’t cost a thing: Utilities and organizations in cities around Northern California have programs offering free shade trees to residents. However, it takes years for trees to mature enough to provide the kind of shade that puts a dent in cooling and heating needs.

Solar costs are high, but credits, rebates, and subsidies make it more affordable. When I plugged in my location and average monthly electricity bill ($29) to the solar estimator at www.findsolar.com, I discovered that covering half of my electricity needs with solar panels would cost me $6,700 up front. The solar finder then calculated all the rebates and credits I’d be eligible for, including some from the state and federal governments and from Pacific Gas & Electric, and estimated that my total out-of-pocket cost would end up closer to $3,500.

Larger-scale production in the coming years will likely bring the cost of photovoltaics down, and some cities, including Berkeley and San Francisco, are looking into additional ways of making solar power more affordable for homeowners. There are also less expensive solar energy options, including solar heaters just for water, and thin film solar technologies, which need larger surface areas to make up for being less efficient, but are less expensive than photovoltaic solar panels.

No matter which you choose, it pays to make the effort. The US Forest Service estimates that mature trees add about ten percent to a property’s value, and you can bet that solar energy systems on houses are a selling point these days as well.

Balancing the choices

Do we really have to choose one or the other? In most cases, no. Select the right spot for new trees and solar panels, and you can have both while maximizing the benefits of each.

Trees do the most energy saving when they’re planted on the western and—to a slightly lesser extent—eastern sides of a house. (Shade trees on the southern side of a house increase the energy you’ll need for heating during the winter.) Solar panels, on the other hand, need a clear south and southwest path. So when it comes to location, trees and solar panels don’t need to clash. This doesn’t, of course, solve problems with shade from existing trees, but it does offer a clear set of guidelines for future planting.

When planting new trees, talk with your neighbors about your plans. Solar is on the upswing, and just because your neighbors don’t have solar panels on their roof right now doesn’t mean they won’t in five years. If your neighborhood has existing trees to work around, consider pole-mounted solar systems on sunnier parts of the property.

Also, choose your trees wisely. Deciduous trees help houses far more than evergreens because they allow warming light to reach the house in the chilly winter months. Likewise, trees with dense branch patterns aren’t as good as those with a looser, more open branching system. And even though big, long-lived trees offer a greater overall benefit when it comes to carbon storage, look for trees that, when fully grown, will be in scale with your neighborhood.

Finding solutions

So how did the battle between those South Bay neighbors end? The court ordered extensive trimming of two of the redwoods, but the controversy spurred a clarification of the California Solar Shade Act, which states that if the trees were there first, solar panel owners can’t force them to be trimmed or removed.

Finding that balance between trees, solar power, and neighbors in the coming years is going to be an issue that will mostly play out over the back fence, not in the courtroom, so it’s vital that we don’t start dividing into warring factions of tree huggers and solar purists. In the quest for a sustainable environment, let’s make the most of both, and do it alongside our neighbors.

But then something happened: global warming took center stage as the environmental issue of our time. The need to transition away from burning fossil fuels became paramount, and some environmentalists began to reconsider nuclear power as a necessary and even preferable part of the energy portfolio. Stewart Brand, founder of Whole Earth Catalog, Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation, is one of those people. “The situation is so much more dire with climate than almost anybody except the professional climatologists know,” says Brand. “With nuclear people, the more they know, the less worried they are. With climate people, the more they know, the more worried they are. It’s that combination that makes nuclear exceptionally green right now.”

Plenty of environmentalists disagree with Brand’s assessment, though they do admit that the landscape is shifting. Climate, the power grid, nuclear generator design, financial incentives, and public resistance are all in flux. Has enough changed to justify an enormous public investment in nuclear power? Will nuclear power help meet the goals of California’s AB 32, which mandates statewide greenhouse gas reductions by 2020?

The low- or no-carbon emission energy resources in California’s current portfolio include most of the renewables (wind, solar, geothermal, and hydroelectric) and nuclear. According to the California Energy Commission, twelve percent of the state’s overall electricity supply is derived from nuclear generators, primarily from Diablo Canyon near San Luis Obispo and the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) south of San Clemente. By some estimates, nearly a quarter of California’s low-carbon electricity supply comes from nuclear plants. The Energy Commission found that a complete life-cycle analysis of nuclear power reveals that its greenhouse gas emissions are comparable to wind, solar voltaics, and geothermal technologies.

Every year, the Energy Commission compiles a comprehensive assessment of California’s nuclear power plants. In 2008’s draft report, the Commission determined that if one of the state’s two nuclear plants were to go off-line for a year, greenhouse gas emissions from power generation would increase by seven to eight percent. Replacement power would most likely come from natural gas-fired plants, with a resulting extra 7 million tons of CO2 churned into the atmosphere.

Baseload Blues

Nuclear energy has a valuable characteristic that many of the renewables presently don’t: it provides baseload electricity, or the minimum needed to meet normal customer demand. The sun might not shine, the wind might not blow, drought might strike a dam’s drainage basin, but nuclear fission can keep the electrons moving along the power grid. Baseload plants run continually, shutting down only occasionally for repairs or maintenance. “The baseload situation drives everything—you’ve got to be able to have juice that is on all the time,” says Brand, who argues that nuclear should be viewed as a low carbon emission replacement for coal, not a replacement for renewables.

The fact that most renewables cannot supply baseload today does not mean that they won’t in the near future, if energy storage technologies improve and their power network can be expanded. For instance, a 2007 Stanford study determined that wind could provide reliable baseload energy if multiple wind farms were connected with transmission lines, thus combining their separate outputs. “If interconnected wind is used on a large scale, a third or more of its energy can be used for reliable electric power, and the remaining intermittent portion can be used for transportation, allowing wind to solve energy, climate, and air pollution problems simultaneously,” says Cristina Archer, the study’s lead author and a consulting assistant professor in Stanford’s department of civil and environmental engineering.

Nuclear Waste: Curse or Opportunity?

The radioactive spent fuel left over from generating nuclear power is one of its greatest liabilities, but some argue that radioactive waste—because it is contained—is better than the byproducts of burning coal. According to the Sierra Club, coal is responsible for 59 percent of the sulfur dioxide pollution, fifty percent of the particle pollution, over forty percent of the carbon dioxide emissions, and most of the mercury pollution in the US every year. In 1993, nuclear physicist Alex Gabbard of Oak Ridge National Laboratory wrote in a seminal article, “Overall, nuclear power produces far less waste material than fossil-fuel based power plants. Coal-burning plants are particularly noted for producing large amounts of toxic and mildly radioactive ash due to concentrating naturally occurring metals and radioactive material from the coal. Contrary to popular belief, coal power actually results in more radioactive waste being released into the environment than nuclear power. The population effective dose equivalent from radiation from coal plants is 100 times as much as nuclear plants.”

Admittedly, comparing anything to coal sets a pretty low bar. Moreover, nuclear waste remains semi-homeless. In 1976, California prohibited the construction of new nuclear power plants until there is a method of permanently disposing of the waste. Six years later, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act made the federal government responsible for the permanent disposal of spent nuclear fuel. The US Department of Energy (DOE) was supposed to start taking possession of the spent fuel by 1998, but that never happened, because its underground permanent repository at Yucca Mountain has been mired in lawsuits and controversy. At this point, 2020 is its most optimistic opening date. By then, operating commercial reactors will have created more spent fuel than can be stored at Yucca Mountain, so new repositories will be needed.

In the meantime, California’s nuclear wastes are being stored at reactor sites. Plant owners Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison are being forced to construct more dry cask storage facilities onsite and to double up on the number of spent rods in their storage pools. The more densely that spent fuel assemblies are packed, the higher the risk of radiation release from earthquakes or terrorist acts.

Brand notes that other countries do not think about nuclear waste in the same way that the US does. Canada, he says, “treat[s] the storage not as a ten-thousand-year problem but as a hundred-year problem,” by building interim facilities meant to store the waste for seven generations, after which future Canadians can decide if it should be recycled or permanently discarded. Another way we could approach waste, Brand suggests, is to sell it to the Russians, who are willing to permanently store it for the US.

Recycle, Reuse, Reduce?

The US nuclear power industry gets much of its fuel from Russia’s decommissioned nuclear weapons. “Unlike any other weapons system which turns into scrap when you get rid of it, when you dismantle a nuclear weapon, it’s quite valuable,” says Brand. “It’s one very intelligent use of a lot of the uranium that has already been mined and engineered into these horrible weapons. You get a double win on that one—you get rid of the damn weapons and get free high quality energy out of them with no carbon dioxide coming out of the process.”

The Megatons to Megawatts program is a government-to-government agreement between the US and Russia launched in 1993. According to the United States Enrichment Corporation, which administers the program, as of September, 345 metric tons of bomb-grade uranium has been recycled into 10,010 metric tons of low enriched uranium for nuclear power plants, equivalent to 13,795 nuclear warheads eliminated. Virtually the entire US fleet of nuclear reactors has used fuel from this program.

The concept of recycling warms environmentalists’ hearts, so it is no surprise that the term is being used in conjunction with nuclear power, instead of “reprocessing.” Weapons are often spoken of as being “recycled” into civilian fuel for power. Spent nuclear fuel is said to be “recycled,” meaning that portions that can be reused for fuel are reclaimed. But many of the positive connotations of “recycling” don’t really apply to nuclear fuel.

The reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel has been either prohibited or unfunded in the US since the ‘70s, because the process is notoriously vulnerable to nuclear proliferation. Spent nuclear fuel that has not been reprocessed is heavy, bulky, and extremely radioactive; a terrorist or rogue state would be hard-pressed to acquire and transport it for the purpose of making weapons out of it. When spent fuel is reprocessed, however, the desired components become easier to obtain and handle. Separated plutonium becomes a concentrated powder; only twenty pounds can make a bomb. Studies by the National Academies, the National Commission on Energy Policy, the Harvard University Project on Managing the Atom, and the MIT Interdisciplinary Study have all concluded that reprocessing is unnecessary, uneconomic, and counter to nonproliferation goals. In its latest assessment, the California Energy Commission agrees.

Reprocessing costs more than storing used fuel. France reprocesses most of the world’s spent fuel. Yet a French government study in 2000 found that reprocessing spent fuel at La Hague cost approximately twice what storage would have. Moreover, reprocessing doesn’t reduce the amount of waste, although it does reduce the length of time that the waste remains dangerously radioactive, and the volume of the intensely radioactive waste is smaller. Still, a large quantity of intermediate-level waste is created, and deep repositories like Yucca Mountain are still necessary. And reprocessing is negative in that in a conventional reprocessing plant, radioactive emissions are released into the atmosphere during routine operations. Spent fuel storage has a much better safety record than reprocessing plants.

In 2006, President Bush created the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), a federal R&D program meant to address nuclear energy’s Achilles’ heel. Brand calls GNEP “one of the only things President Bush did right.” One of the key objectives of GNEP is to recycle nuclear fuel using new technologies that are proliferation-resistant and can recover more energy and reduce waste. A variety of new reprocessing techniques have shown promise in the lab, but they have not yet been scaled up. The Department of Energy estimates these technologies could be available in ten to twenty years, but the Nuclear Energy Institute estimates fifty. The GNEP goals are ambitious and the costs exorbitant, but some have faith that flaws can be engineered out of the reprocessing system.

Soon, the US will be in the business of recovering plutonium from our own surplus weapons. However, controversy is already swirling around the reprocessing facility planned near Aiken, South Carolina after Daniel Tedder, an independent expert hired to review the contractor’s plans, found them shockingly inadequate and filled with safety problems. He has publicly complained that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has harrassed him about his reports and pressured him to “water them down.”

The Government Gravy Train

Nuclear power plants (and reprocessing plants) are costly to build, and they depend on government subsidies and loan guarantees to be competitive. Large reactors can cost $2.5 billion to $4 billion each; it takes decades to recoup the investment. As part of the 2005 Energy Policy Act, Congress granted approximately $10 billion in new subsidies to the nuclear industry.

Many environmentalists fear that public investment in nuclear will gobble up dollars that could be invested in renewable energy and energy efficiency. The National Resources Defense Council warns that the cost of nuclear power is prohibitive and makes it uncompetitive on the free market. NRDC’s position paper states “a national cap on carbon emissions would certainly help reduce nuclear’s significant current cost differential with large coal- and gas-fired power plants, but it will not ensure that nuclear stays competitive with these smaller, cheaper, cleaner, faster, and more flexible distributed sources of electric power generation.” Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute has argued that, “every dollar invested in nuclear expansion will worsen climate change by buying less solution per dollar.”

They may have reason to worry: According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in its 2008 R&D budget proposal, the DOE requested funding increases of ten percent or more for hydrogen and nuclear technologies while requesting funding decreases for all other renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies.

Stumbling Blocks

Even if the nuclear industry got the green light to start building a fleet of new plants across the country, obstacles stand in the way. Global warming has created unpredictable precipitation patterns and drought. Current nuclear plants rely on billions of gallons of water for cooling; it’s why they are built alongside rivers, lakes, and oceans. According to the Associated Press, 24 of the nation’s 104 nuclear reactors are located in areas experiencing the most severe levels of drought. Plants sited on inland bodies of water may face complications related to dropping water levels. Alternately, even small rises in sea level will impact nuclear facilities that use ocean water. Future generations of nuclear power generators may rely on other means of cooling, but many of those technologies are not yet field-tested.

It also takes over a decade to plan, license and build a nuclear plant. Worse, there’s a bottleneck in the supply chain: only one factory in the world, Japan Steel Works, is able to manufacture the central part of a nuclear reactor’s containment vessel in a single piece. The handful of other manufacturers worldwide able to make large forgings are gearing up to produce parts for the nuclear industry, but even then, capacity will be three or four pressure vessels a year. Other manufacturers are researching alternative methods to make the components as well as reactor designs that don’t require single-piece vessels.

Power Grid Paradigms

Many environmentalists are content to let nuclear power fade into history because they believe that the current paradigm of the energy grid, featuring large, centralized power plants, is outdated. The evolving model involves decentralized generation, often called “the Internet for energy.” Just as in a few decades, computers went from room-filling behemoths to millions of personal electronic devices capable of communicating with millions of others, likewise, large power plants will give way to millions of small power producers that are located where the power is used. Many power consumers will also become power generators, feeding power back into the grid.

Both private and public money is chasing this vision. Recently, North Carolina State University was awarded a $18.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a “smart” grid that can “store and distribute alternative energy from solar panels, wind farms, and more,” allowing individual citizens to harvest their own energy and sell it back to power companies. This September, Google and General Electric announced a partnership to promote greater use of renewable energy in the US and cooperate on technology projects. According to the Financial Times, the companies’ first priority is to lobby Washington to promote an expansion of the US electricity transmission grid to reach more renewable energy sources, and to lobby for the creation of a smart grid.

A smart grid could assess energy prices in real time using “smart meters,” which would be installed in homes and businesses. Energy consumers could adjust their power devices to take advantage of best prices. This would mean a more efficient power grid and a diminished need for polluting peaker plants. In some cases, the expansion of the transmission grid would aid efficiency by shortening the distance energy must travel to the end user.

PG&E has been moving in this direction; the company’s goal is to install 10.3 million digital electric and gas meters with data communication functions for all customers by 2012. The company has already hooked up 25,000 solar-generating customers to the electric grid, and these customers can choose to sell all or some of the electricity their solar panels generate to PG&E.

New Small Nukes

Stewart Brand insists that a decentralized model does not preclude nuclear power generation. Indeed, a race is on worldwide to produce a new generation of small nuclear reactors that can live on a barge or sit in a hole in the ground for decades. “These are not the reactors that my generation went out and fulminated against,” Brand says. “These are better in all the respects that we worried about.” In an effort to wake up the hibernating US nuclear energy industry, the DOE is soliciting bids for new nuclear reactor designs. The winner gets $100 million over 5 years while seeking a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Construction of the winning design could begin by 2015.

According to Phil McKenna in The New Scientist, over sixty designs are under development around the world. Among the contenders: Berkeley’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is designing the “Small Secure Transportable Autonomous Reactor,” or SSTAR, a 20-megawatt power generator that ships fully assembled with a thirty-year fuel supply sealed in a tamper-proof cask. Instead of using water for cooling, the SSTAR is surrounded by a meter of lead that carries heat away from the core. Toshiba of Japan is working on the “Super Safe, Small and Simple,” or 4S, a unit the company is intending to install in Galena, Alaska to supply the remote town with a steady ten megawatts for thirty years. The whole unit then would be shipped to a reprocessing facility. None of these nascent designs are perfect: some engineering solutions lead to new design vulnerabilities. For coolant, the 4S uses liquid sodium metal, which reacts violently with water. Contact with moisture in the air could cause it to burst into flames.

The End of the (Power) Line

The operating licenses of California’s nuclear plants expire in fourteen to seventeen years; if extensions are granted, they will operate another twenty years before arriving at the end of their lifespans. New nuclear plants will not take their place so long as the law remains the same, and the federal nuclear waste repository remains unready. Barbara Byron of the CA Energy Commission says, “The only means for changing this requirement would be if the California Legislature repealed these laws or passed an amendment that would exempt a new nuclear plant.”

The Fresno Nuclear Energy Group, a consortium that includes Republican State Assemblyman Chuck DeVore and chairman of the Fresno Utilities Commission John Hutson, is raising money to build the first new nuclear reactor in California since the early ‘80s. The group is talking openly of overturning California’s 32-year-old law, but is waiting for California opinion polls to reach sixty percent approval ratings for new nuclear energy facilities before it begins collecting signatures for a ballot initiative.

They may not need to wait long. In July, the San Francisco Chronicle, citing a Field poll, reported that for the first time since the ‘70s, half of Californians support building nuclear plants in the state. “The assumption is that California is now and forever allergic to nuclear,” says Brand. “Gavin Newsom and Nancy Pelosi are taking the same line as Barack Obama, which is that nuclear needs to be part of the mix. We may see a surprising switch in this area because there is so much need for power.”

The R&D race is on to overcome limitations of both nuclear and renewable energy sources. Whether nuclear remains part of California’s low-carbon mix fifty years from now is uncertain. For now, the issue remains…radioactive.

California’s Renewable Portfolio Standard program mandates that twenty percent of our power must come from renewable sources by the year 2010 and 33 percent by 2020, so by some standards, getting part of that power from the sea is a smart bet. The ocean is not only the largest potential source of renewable energy on the planet, but one of the most reliable, since its wave action is always “on” in a way that wind and the sun are not. Extracting energy from it produces no carbon dioxide, and a new ocean power industry could conceivably create a multitude of clean-tech jobs. All that energy “going to waste” on our northern coastline is beginning to look good to private companies hoping to exploit the waves and tides. But a tangled bureaucratic web, and a number of hard-to-answer questions about ocean energy’s impact on the marine environment, still loom in their way, and it’s made observers wonder if ocean power is worth the trouble.

The principle behind ocean power is no novelty to Californians; Sutro Baths, operated by tidal action, opened in 1896 in San Francisco. Tides pumped water uphill through canal works blasted into the rocky shore just below the north end of the Cliff House near Sutro Cove. The water emptied into six bathing tanks, with the tides capable of moving 1.8 million gallons per hour during high activity.
But using the ocean waves or tides to generate electricity is a much newer idea, and one that’s highly adaptable. Wave power can be harvested by several methods: one device looks like a regular buoy but as it bobs in the waves, it acts as a piston. Water is drawn into the center of the cylinder when a wave pushes the buoy upward. As the wave drops, the water is pressurized and forced out. The compressed water turns a turbine, which creates energy that moves from an underwater cable to the power grid.

Another means is an underwater arm that is pushed around in circles by wave action. Then there’s the Pelamis wave energy converter, which looks like an enormous chain of linked sausages floating on top of the water. Each of the “sausages” is a horizontal buoy, and power is generated in the joints between them. As the waves move the buoys back and forth, the motion of the joints is translated into power. Tidal energy, on the other hand, harkens back to those giant dams: stick a turbine in the path of the running tide and let the movement of the water spin the blades.

There are both environmental and bureaucratic impediments to ocean power, however—and opponents maintain that ocean energy’s barriers are greater than those of other renewables. Among them: it’s expensive, there’s great confusion and disparity as to the applicable licensing agencies, there’s a lack of clarity as to whether tax breaks or subsidies afforded to other renewables apply to ocean energy, and no certainty as to property rights. The last touches on a particularly prickly question: who owns the real estate, when that real estate is open water?

All these questions came into play starting in February 2007, when British Columbia-based ocean energy developer Finavera attempted to establish a pilot project off the coast of Washington state in Makah Bay. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) granted a conditional permit in December 2007, which was then challenged on the grounds of property rights, the Clean Water Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act, the Endangered Species Act (in particular, due to concerns about the welfare of the marbled murrelet, a threatened seabird species), tribal water quality (part of the installation is on land owned by the Makah tribe). In March 2008, FERC gave the company a preliminary go-ahead for the pilot project, but points relating to the Clean Water Act and the Coastal Management Act remained to be defined—and this is all before the environmental review.

How energy-harvesting devices might impact the ocean environment is hard to determine, since there are very few sites active in the world. Many are in Europe; the US has only a handful of experimental sites, including Makah Bay. Few of the new proposals on the table in California have made it far enough through the development pipeline to warrant environmental impact studies. When I expressed frustration with the lack of information to Sam Schuchat, council secretary of the California State Coastal Conservancy, he replied, “I think you’re having trouble finding documents because I don’t think there are any, or many. As far as I know, no ocean power proposal has gone through the [full] permitting process in this country yet, so no research has been generated.”

However, scientists are certainly already pointing out troubling possibilities. Last autumn, Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center hosted a workshop on the ecological effects of wave energy, at which fifty scientists mulled a host of unknowns. Among the items up for discussion: the possibility of marine mammals, seabirds, large fish or turtles becoming entangled in cables, of the structures affecting fish by changing migration routes or attracting predators, of chemical pollution as paints, metals and hydraulic fluids leach into the water over time, and of the projects changing the shoreline itself by altering the water’s currents and sediment distribution.

A report summarizing the workshop’s discussion sessions outlined dozens more far-reaching concerns. For example, because power generation will create electrical and magnetic fields, it could have a disruptive effect on species like salmon, crab, rays, and sharks that rely on electromagnetic fields to navigate and find food. Additionally, the noise coming from buoys, cables or the facilities themselves could confuse or disrupt the feeding habits of animals like whales and dolphins, or become so troubling to some kinds of acoustically sensitive fish that they leave the area. The result would be a “sound barrier” surrounding the facility that animals would avoid, and that could create its own problems: the disappearance of some fish species would deprive animals further up the food chain of their prey, and gray whales that head further to sea to avoid the noise could become a better target for killer whales. Perhaps one of the most surprising species that could be affected by wave farms? Surfers. Extracting energy from waves would make them smaller as they roll in towards shore.

The OSU gathering is not the only one to have flagged concerns about ocean power. A group of policymakers and scientists assembled by the University of Cambridge in 2008 identified “disruption to marine ecosystems by offshore power generation” as one of the top 25 environmental threats to the UK of the future, along with climate engineering, controlling invasive species with engineered viruses, and nanomaterials. This April in New York, the Global Marine Renewable Energy Conference also devoted a panel to discussing environmental questions.

Even those in the ocean power business aren’t quite sure what environmental effects it could have here in California, mostly because none of them are far enough along in the proposal process to have done an environmental impact report yet. Because of the confusion over regulation and licensing, the application process has been ill-defined, to the point, says Johanna Partin, renewable energy manager at SF Environment, a city agency, that “It’s not entirely clear yet where in the process an environmental assessment should take place.”

Yet companies abroad, farther along in the scheme of things, point out that environmental impact assessments are likely to take place at the very end of the process, because they’re so expensive that they’re not worth doing until the project is a sure thing. “With a price tag in excess of 500,000 UK sterling [US $900,200] they are not undertaken until deployment becomes a reality,” says Michael Burrett of Embley Energy, Ltd, a British ocean power company that has developed a floating wave energy converter called the Sperboy, which is now moving into the full-scale prototyping stage. In addition, says Partin, “European companies have federal backing for their work, whereas here in the US there are very few federal dollars for ocean power. Our ocean power is mostly privately funded.”

Environmental questions about the local effects of wave power are likely to remain unanswered until more of the proposals for California projects work their way through the development pipeline—and it’s a very long one. Getting a preliminary permit for a hydrokinetic project entails a three-year period in which a company is allowed to perform a pilot study. During this period the permittee conducts investigations and secures data necessary to determine the feasibility of the proposed project. Wording in the permit specifically prohibits irreparable damage to the site. After the three-year period has passed, the project may be scrapped, enter yet another round of study, or go forward via application for a commercial-sized project license. The company determines the first two options, while the commercial license must be approved by FERC.

So far, preliminary permits for ocean power sites have been granted in ten US states and several others are pending. Here in California, says Roger Bedard of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in Palo Alto, “There have been six preliminary permits granted by FERC for ocean power projects in the state of California: one for tidal power in the San Francisco Bay [beneath the Golden Gate Bridge], four wave power permits out of Humboldt Bay [near Eureka], and one wave permit off the Mendocino coast [near Fort Bragg]. There have been no commercial project licenses issued in the state of California as of yet.”

Thus far, the only US commercial project license—the step after a preliminary permit—granted by FERC is to the still-disputed project by Finavera at the Makah Bay site in Washington state. A preliminary draft environmental assessment for the Makah Bay project acknowledges that development could create ecological, land use, and aesthetic conflicts, and enumerates a few pre-emptive environmental measures included in the proposal, including making sure that marine life can’t be sucked into the pressurized water flow, and putting attachments on buoys to make sure that seabirds and mammals don’t perch atop them. Yet overall, the review gives the proposed project a thumbs-up, concluding that it would not alter currents, water quality or shoreline erosion, and would not pose a danger to wildlife.

However, FERC’s permitting process is far from the only hoop to be cleared before power-generating devices go in the water. Says San Francisco’s Partin, “For the proposed tidal power project under the Golden Gate Bridge, there are an additional sixteen local, state, and federal permitting agencies that have to be applied to before we can ever start producing commercial power.”

When it comes to projects further out to sea, there may be even more regulators. FERC is currently the federal regulatory body in charge of hydrokinetic power, although the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration maintains control over ocean thermal energy conversion (creating energy from the movement of the ocean’s thermal layers), and judging from conference documents, NOAA wants a larger role in other ocean energy projects. Other possible players are the Army Corps of Engineers, which regulates offshore wind energy, and the Minerals Management Service, which regulates offshore oil and mineral exploration. FERC’s jurisdiction is limited to inland and near shore activity but Partin explains that there is debate about exactly where “near shore” ends. She says that the permitting procedure now being used for ocean power is based on large-scale inland hydro, which doesn’t address the ocean’s specific issues. In fact, several federal and state regulatory agencies and experts are calling for FERC to come up with a permitting process suited to ocean power.

Despite the regulatory nightmare, private companies are still lining up for a shot at what could become a very lucrative California industry. “Finavera Renewables Inc. and California Wave Energy Partners, LLC have preliminary permits for the waves coming into Humboldt Bay,” says Bedard. Utilities giant Pacific Gas & Electric is in the planning and permitting phases of a research venture called WaveConnect. “This permit is for two sites, one out of Fort Bragg in Mendocino County and the other out of Eureka in Humboldt County, where technology development companies can place their equipment for testing and showcasing and hook into PG&E’s underwater cable that connects to the grid,” Bedard explains. On September 30, PG&E received a $1.2 million grant from the Department of Energy to develop wave energy in the two North Coast counties. The project beneath the Golden Gate Bridge teams the city of San Francisco with PG&E as well as with Oceana, a tidal energy technology development company.

Just how much power can these companies harvest? Well, that’s debatable. A 2005 study conducted by EPRI raised hopes by claiming that an average of 35 megawatts of extractable tidal power flowed under the Golden Gate Bridge, enough to power around 1,300 homes. “Much to everyone’s dismay, a subsequent study conducted by the URS Corporation reported only one and a half megawatts of extractable power,” says Partin. “The large discrepancy had a lot to do with the estimates of what percent of the power could be extracted with no major environmental impacts. The original study was using between ten and fifteen percent where current estimates are closer to five. Another issue is that these estimates are site-specific. We were disappointed in those numbers, but it’s still something that the city wants to be supportive of. If we can be helping to promote ocean power and other renewables around the world, we’re still looking into it as a possible demonstration site.”

With all of the unknowns facing the new industry—the cost, the energy yield, the environmental impact—it’s hard to tell what role ocean power will play in California’s quest for renewable energy. “Is it worth it?” Partin muses. “The answer is, we don’t know yet.”

Shafer’s house is an original, and his business, Tumbleweed Tiny House Company, designs and builds similar structures for anyone who wants them. A fully built, custom-made tiny house costs about $40,000; the plans cost $1,000. Anyone willing to put in the time to collect recycled materials, says Shafer, could use his plans to build his or her own house for around $10,000. And lest you worry that 89 square feet is not sufficient for you and your cat, never mind your spouse and children, Shafer has thought of you, too: the largest “tiny house” he offers is 900 square feet, with multiple bedrooms.

“My definition of small house can go up to and beyond 4,000 square feet,” he says. “If a large house is being used very efficiently by a bunch of people, I think that can be very beautiful. And I would still call that a small house.”

Born in Iowa and raised outside of Los Angeles, Shafer returned to Iowa as a teenager and lived there until just two years ago, when he towed his first tiny house back West. Around Sebastopol, he’s one of a few people who design and build tiny houses. (Exact numbers are hard to come by: Most building codes don’t accommodate tiny houses, so tiny-house dwellers don’t always advertise their living arrangements. “Most of them are totally secretive,” says Shafer, adding, “there’s three or four of us who are out of our tiny closets.”)

The trend seems to be catching on: companies like Shafer’s are thriving in Texas and California, and tiny house Web sites exist across the Internet. Shafer’s work has been featured in the New York Times and other major media outlets, and he’s sold houses to people as far away as Australia and Taiwan.

When I met Shafer in late September, the national zeitgeist about housing seemed to be shifting. For decades, politicians had emphasized homeownership as the key to prosperity and the attainment of the American dream. But the collapse of the housing market and subsequently the wider economy signaled to many people the end of infinite credit, and with it, infinite expansion. The shift puts Shafer, who runs a for-profit company, in a unique position. On the one hand, he is offering a small-scale, sustainable vision of what it means to own a home. On the other, he is doing it as part of an industry that by definition requires consumption. Can the two be reconciled?

With that tension in mind, Shafer and I sat down (in two tiny chairs) to discuss the logistics of tiny living, reformed McMansion dwellers, and whether building houses can ever really be green.

How do people respond when they first set foot in one of your houses?

People get really excited about it. I can only speculate as to why, but from my own perspective it seems like in a tiny house there’s just no room for the extras. The superfluous space, the superfluous parts are done away with, and all you’re left with is this essence of home. And I think that’s an archetypal hot button for people. We all love a homey home.

And there’s so much potential. People immediately intuit that a smaller home equals freedom. With a tiny house, you really eliminate a lot of the mortgage payments and vacuuming and what-not. All that time is time then spent on things you actually want to do with your life.

You’ve said that you don’t see a real difference between a big house and a small house, provided that people use the space well. So why not just live in an apartment?

Ideally people would live in apartment buildings. They are more efficient, they’re better for the environment and better economically—because of all the shared walls, there’s less loss of heat, less surface area, less wasted space between structures. But that said, 85 percent of Americans do want a detached house. I’m in that category. I figure as long as people want detached houses, detached houses will have to be built more efficiently.

Doesn’t that limit people to living in rural areas, where there’s space for a number of detached houses? That seems to go against the idea of fighting sprawl.

I actually prefer high-density; if a city is well designed, it doesn’t feel crowded. It’s a balance—if we’re not going to build sprawl we’re going to have to increase the density of our existing built environments. But there’s more than one way to create high-density environments. The most common is to go up vertically with high-rises, and not everybody likes that. I haven’t seen it done yet, but I like the idea of putting tiny houses on rooftops as penthouses. I like the idea of pocket neighborhoods—little villages of freestanding houses.

If you got to design one of these villages, what would it look like?

Variety would be key. It’s great to outsource: I don’t have to have a huge library, I can just go four blocks from here and be at the Sebastopol library. So I do like the idea of small houses being near other functions, near the city. I also think it’s healthy to have private space for every member of the household. I’ve seen a lot of [intentional] communities that work, and I’ve seen a lot that don’t. The ones that worked are those that paid attention to private space. Those that thought they would just go totally against the grain of the suburb and ignore privacy for the sake of community, they don’t do any better than the suburbs. I lived in one of those; it was pretty horrible. I’m just lucky I had my house there with me.

Does the housing market affect you?

It doesn’t seem to have had a negative effect so far. If anything it seems to be good for business—there’s a lot more interest now. The reason I set out to do this was in hopes people might see how ridiculous an exclusively McMansion-oriented culture is. The current situation, both economically and with the housing market and the environment in particular, is perfect for getting people to think outside the bigger-is-better paradigm. So there is an upside.

But if people have no money to buy things with, I suppose we’ll see a sharp increase in the sale of plans, of people building things with recycled materials, and doing things more efficiently than buying prebuilt houses from us.

That’s a very non-capitalist thing to say.

I’m not really into the growth model.

But this idea of voluntary simplicity, of paring away what’s unnecessary, seems like it might ultimately put you out of business. Is that something you think about?

My original goal was to build a tiny house to show people how they could live simply and happily. I hoped that other people would just run with the inspiration, but now that I’ve got a business based on it I still hope they come to me and give me some money. It’s paradoxical. But as long as people actually buy the plans from us, then we’re in business.

Are many of your customers reformed McMansion dwellers?

Our e-mail box is kind of like a confessional. For some people it’s like, “I live in a giant house, but I promise I’ll move into a smaller one someday!” Of course we’re not about that sort of thing, though if that’s what they want to do, that’s great.

People who see there’s actually something else out there besides oversized housing, which is all that has been offered for a long time, they’re like, ‘Oh, wow.’ And they decide to move from their oversized house into a small one. It’s a shift in the way America’s thinking.

Do you consider yourself an environmentalist?

Well, I always like to say that there is no black or white in green. We all can do something no matter what our weaknesses are, so I focus on building small. When it comes to building houses, that’s the greenest thing you can do. The best thing is just not to use materials in the first place whenever possible.

Doesn’t building at all go against that?

Of course, reducing is the best way to go. Recycling is infinitely more wasteful. The best thing you can do is move into pre-existing structures. That said, the second-best thing you can do is build less, use fewer materials, and along the way you might as well use more sustainable materials, renewable stuff. But it’s all a balancing thing. If you’re going to build a house from totally treated lumber, it’s better to do it on a small scale.

So is it green to build small?

Building smaller has never been touted as a really green thing to do. Buying less doesn’t really behoove many businesses. “Less” is just not a marketable thing. But it turns out there are ways to push it.

Say I’m going to buy a house. What’s the first thing I should think of?

Paying attention to what’s actually needed is a good way to start. People don’t even know what they need to be happy, especially in a culture of excess. So they just buy everything and hope something will cover it.

When I see an oversized house, I see a lot of waste, and it’s ugly to me. When I see a small house I see the essence of house, and I see it as very beautiful.

Tom Philpott is another such critic. Founder of Maverick Farms, an educational nonprofit farm in North Carolina, and food editor and blogger at the environmental Web site Grist (Grist.org), Philpott believes the US version of Slow Food has largely failed to adopt the social justice mandate of its founding credo—a credo born in the Italian communist movement of three decades ago. Recognized as Slow Food’s founder, former Italian labor activist Carlo Petrini helped articulate the movement’s principles of “good, clean, and fair.” Food must be good (authentic and delicious, a source of pleasure), clean (grown or produced in an environmentally sustainable way), and fair (adequately compensating those who grow or produce it, as well as working for access to good food across socioeconomic lines).

It’s that fair part of the equation that those like Philpott think have eluded the US movement, which is more explicitly consumerist than Slow Food in other parts of the world. Though Slow Food USA has worked nationally to support school garden education initiatives similar to Berkeley’s fourteen-year-old Edible Schoolyard program, critics charge it’s been a movement more interested in talking about pricey artisanal goodies than supporting public policy solutions to problems like food security in low-income neighborhoods.

In June 2007, Philpott posted a piece on Grist.org called “Slow Food Fight: Ruminations on Food, Class, and Carlo Petrini.” Like some other Slow Food critics, Philpott is passionate about the movement’s ideals, even as he feels it hasn’t always lived up to its ideals. “For all its good work,” Philpott wrote, “and despite its roots within the Italian labor movement—Slow Food has itself been hounded by charges of elitism. The critique goes like this: Who but a rich few can spend time wringing their hands over whether, say, a cheese that’s been made in some Tuscan village for hundreds of years goes extinct—a cheese that only the well-off can afford anyway? Yet Slow Food’s class problem really applies to the sustainable food movement in all industrialized nations, including the US. In short, our economy runs on cheap food; many people rely on it to feed themselves; and advocates of farmers’ markets, CSAs, and organic food are asking people to pay more for food without giving them a strategy for raising wages.”

I spoke with Philpott earlier this year, just as organizing for the Slow Food Nation festival was gearing up.

What’s behind your critique of Slow Food and class?

I should say that I’ve got a lot of respect for Slow Food and Carlo Petrini, also the leaders of the movement in Northern California. Alice [Waters] and Michael [Pollan] are wonderful.

I do think class is a blind spot. I’m a food lover. I got interested in Slow Food maybe nine years ago when I was living in New York, got really into the idea of protecting endangered products. I think they’ve done incredible work internationally, probably most especially in places like Europe and Mexico. Here in America, we don’t have as many traditions to save—that’s one of the reasons it comes off as elitist here. Rather than preserving something indigenous here, they tend to celebrate traditions from Europe.

But they could do that and still have an economic critique of the political economy that creates inequalities, that makes two different food systems. I mean, we’ve seen a renaissance of wonderful farmers’ market foods in this country; a lot of the population has at least some access to them. I do know some places where these traditions are extremely vital—like there’s a place down in Arizona, a Native American reservation. I know some people down there, and they’re in crisis: Obesity rates are off the charts because people have given up their traditional diet. An organization there is working very hard to revive an indigenous, heirloom variety of bean that’s really delicious, and supposedly has fantastic nutritional qualities and helps regulate blood sugar. I don’t know if Slow Food is involved or not, but that’s an example of one place where Slow Food could be extremely useful. Sometimes Slow Food can be a really vital part of people’s lives, and I do think it has a role to play in the United States. But we’ve destroyed so much in the US; we’ve wiped out so many food and farming traditions. In this country—unlike other places in the world—it’s not really a matter of endangered subcultures hanging onto those traditions for survival.

Michael Pollan has defended the American Slow Food movement by pointing to the endangered foods it’s saved from commercial extinction. Do you think the whole notion of saving something that sounds as esoteric as, say, Iroquois white corn itself smacks of elitism?

I think the answer is yes. If they’re going to focus on projects like that then they are going to open themselves up to charges of elitism. I mean, if you’re living in New York, or Brooklyn, you’re not going to care about some variety of corn that’s going extinct in the Southwest. We’re not going to have a sustainable food system that respects biodiversity and respects flavor and quality unless we do broaden it and make it accessible to a much wider part of society.

What is the dominant trend these days? The dominant trend is more corn than ever, more soybeans grown than ever before in the US, grown at an extraordinary level. Fertilizer prices are skyrocketing—fertilizer companies are basically printing money these days! The way things are going now it’s pretty dire. With all that going on, all those challenges to a sane food system, a really key challenge to the sustainable food movement is to broaden its access.

The social justice mission of Slow Food goes back to the roots of the organization. The original message I found to be extremely exhilarating, this energy of the left, the idea that, before Slow Food, the left dismissed pleasure as a bourgeois concern. The whole idea of turning flavor into this political act, the idea that I’m going to refuse McDonalds and stop at an artisanal shop instead, I think all that was really powerful and a great message. The organization should remember its roots in the old Italian left. I do think Slow Food is sincerely trying—of course they’ve heard these criticisms about access before, they’re nothing new. I think they’re really stung by them. But I think that tension that this kind of criticism creates can productively exist in the organization. In the end, I think it can only be good for the movement.

St. Clair and his wife Kymberly, a librarian, and their two children make their home in Portland, Oregon. I spoke with him about the state of the environmental movement today and what hope he sees for creating a livable future.

You’ve argued that the US environmental movement became less focused on grassroots action during the Clinton administrations.

When Clinton came to town, a lot of grassroots environmentalists were caught by surprise. Because not only did you have political co-option going on early on in Clinton’s time, but you also had this new kind of environmentalism being adopted by Clinton and [former Secretary of the Interior Bruce] Babbitt and [former vice president Al] Gore, which was “We’re going to get rid of regulations, and we’re going to replace them with risk assesment, cost benefit analysis, and using market sources.”

Clinton comes out of the DLC [the Democratic Leadership Council], and of course, Babbitt was in the DLC, Gore was in the DLC, and these ideas were being bandied about there. What they didn’t want to do was to piss off their corporate backers. And environmental laws and regulations, if they’re strictly enforced, exact economic costs for these corporations. So right out of the gate, you had betrayals … and deals cut. [Including deals with] sugar barons and real estate developers in the Florida Everglades, you had a very famous evisceration of the Endangered Species Act [involving] the California gnat catcher.

So, right out of the gate, it’s the National Forest Management Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Everglades and the Endangered Species Act, all being gutted …with this sort of cost benefit analysis approach. And then the full force of the betrayal comes to light when NAFTA raises it head. Bush had tried to push through NAFTA three times, and he had been beaten back in the Congress by a coalition of labor groups, environmentalists, human rights groups, and old-line Democrats. And [under Clinton,] John Adams, the former head and founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, bragged about breaking the back of that coalition. At that point it was all over for institutional environmentalism in DC. These groups are no longer membership organizations in any sense in which the members have rights. If you’re a member of the NRDC, you don’t have any rights in determining what their policy will be.

You have a right to their junk mail.

You have a right to junk mail, and that’s a fundamental shift in the character of these organizations; they’re not at all grassroots anymore. And so if your members don’t have rights, all they’re good for is money, so you drill them, like the oil companies want to drill ANWAR. You’ve moved to DC or New York, you’ve got offices in LA and Seattle, and they’re very expensive buildings, and [you need] to keep up the institutional flow of cash. So your members aren’t providing enough money, where do you turn? You turn to foundations.

And that’s another change that happened in the ‘80s, and it really took hold during Clinton’s time. These big groups became increasingly dependent on corporate foundations for their budget. Many of these foundations are the progeny of the oil companies. Look at the major three that are funding the environmental movement: Pew Charitable Trust, that’s Sun Oil; W. Alton Jones, another oil company; Rockefeller Family Fund. Those three foundations basically control the environmental movement. And let’s put it this way: They’re not out for regulation, they want you to practice real politics, and number two, they like the neoliberal approach.

If you look at the board of directors of the large environmental groups, they’re filled with corporate executives. From the timber industry, to the oil industry, to the real estate industry, to the airline industry, to the nuclear power industry, they’re there, on every one of these boards. They’re rich, they’re corporate, and they don’t want you shaking things up. So [the environmental groups] are like Gulliver, they’re pinned down. They’re shackled by their source of money, shackled by their relationship to the Democratic Party, shackled by the fact that their boards are controlled by corporate executives.

Do you think there are signs that people in the US have become aware of this problem and that groups that are scrappier and not spending as much money on overhead are getting stronger?

If you’re fighting mountaintop removal in West Virgina, you’re well aware that you can’t count on these [big green] groups for help. Because it’s West Virginia, oh, that’s Robert Byrd’s state, we’re not going to get into direct conflict with him. Other than that, I don’t think there’s much. The environment isn’t even talked about in political campaigns much anymore … aside from these airy homilies about global warming, or green jobs to try and reinvigorate the economy. But the problems that people are facing in inner cities with air quality, the fact that urban air quality, the risks of getting cancer are about as great as if you were a four-pack-a-day smoker. Walking outside your house, it’s a hostile environment. And these issues aren’t talked about at all in our two-party, one-body political system.

It’s a tragic waste that hundreds of millions each year are going to these large organizations. What it means is that people are now left to fend for themselves, to mount their own resistance. So you have these rebellions taking root, and they’re not under the control of these large organizations … I mean they can certainly use the help, but the help isn’t coming, so they’re not controlled by them and not boxed in by the playground the nationals have chosen to play on. Some have been wiped out, that’s the way it is. But it’s all happening under the radar of the mainstream media.

In the early 1990s, some journalists were talking about the limits to growth. As the ecological crises have gotten more dire and potentially more fatal to the human species, it seems like that’s not such a discussion anymore in the mainstream.

What they would like is sort of the Gore approach, which is painless optimism. And that’s not the way it is. These issues, down at the grassroots, are life and death issues. They’re not being reported, they’re not part of policy. There aren’t any easy solutions, there aren’t fifty easy ways you can save the planet. That’s what they want, but that’s not going to do it. And you can’t shop your way to a better planet.

Difficult choices are going to have to be made in terms of growth, in terms of energy. I mean, California is essentially out of water. What are you going to do, are you going to spend billions of dollars to build a peripheral canal that won’t even solve your problem? Meanwhile, the ecology of your state is crashing. What are you going to do, steal Oregon’s water?

We’re not going to get our way out of this energy crisis as long as the energy system remains centralized. It’s just not going to happen. I mean look, solar power has gone nowhere. Right at the end of the Carter era—it wasn’t just Reagan—Atlantic Richfield and British Petroleum bought up patents for photovoltaics. Check out the book Who Owns the Sun? by Daniel Berman and John O’Connor. They see large solar generation as being inevitable, but they want it to remain in the hands of large corporations. Until we can break out of the cycle of depending on centralized control of energy distribution we’ll have these problems. If you democratize energy production you can begin to enact the kind of fundamental changes we need. Municipal utility districts, like what you have with SMUD in Sacramento, are a good way to go toward a future system of people powering their own energy.

But if the question is the future of the atmosphere of the planet, I don’t think that’s going to get you very far. Certainly you’ll have more control over choosing sources of energy that you’re going to use. But ultimately they’re still connected to the power grid and it’s going to be very difficult. Unless you’re a huge municipal utility district the size of San Francisco, you’re not going to have the capital in order to invest in large solar production plants, or geothermal, or wind power. So frankly, I don’t think there are any solutions, because I think the climate crisis and the extinction crisis are beyond our control.

Thirty years ago, if we’d made radically different choices, perhaps… There’s an element of hubris in this [that recalls] British philosopher David Ehrenfeld’s view of technology and the environment, the arrogance of humanism. Ehrenfeld wrote an influential book that came out in the early ‘80s called the Arrogance of Humanism … kind of precursor to Deep Ecology, but a much more disciplined philosopher than any of the deep ecology people. The idea that a technological solution can stall or reverse climate change is almost the same kind of hubris that got us into this mess.

So from my point of view it comes down to, what’s the best way to live your life? If these issues are important to you, in a moral way, then you have to disconnect from the grid. And more than that, you need to be essentially generating your own power. You need to have control over your own power. And perhaps be in small collectives along the lines of what Amory Lovins talks about in terms of soft energy paths.

You need to grow your own food in community gardens. What it’s going to require, even to feel good about yourself, as the planet careens toward a kind of climate Armageddon, is a radical downscaling. What we’re being offered is a kind of short-selling of the environment. The solutions from Gore, the solutions of many of the mainstream environmental groups, are a kind of profit-taking as the planet hurtles toward a radical reshaping of the global ecosystem which I think spells doom at the end of the line for mammalian species. That’s what these solutions are about. They’re about how to make money, how to capitalize off the anxiety and panic and guilt and hopelessness that many people feel about the state of the environment.

Amory Lovins was way ahead of the curve back in the ‘70s, he was talking about issues that are just now sort of nosing their way under the tent. Amory is trying to develop environmentally neutral forms of transportation. In a way he’s trying to work radically within a very corrupt system. I have a lot of respect for him. He’s been working on this car for twenty years or so, and that’s a lot of time and investment [laughing] in something that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, and in the end will have such a minimal, micro-fractional influence on the state of climate, on the state of the atmosphere. But you can see how you get sucked into this. It’s like being pulled into a black hole.

Do you have a sense that as the global economic crisis gets worse that it could be dramatic enough to have a positive effect on the sustainable future of humans on the planet?

I don’t think so. I think the deterioration of the current economic regime in the short term will have dramatically dire economic consequences for a lot of the things I care about. Forests, endangered species… there’s not going to be the capital to invest in large-scale sustainable projects. What you’re going to see is the opening up national forests. A lot of the public estate is going to be at risk. As the economy tumbles south in what I think is going to be a prolonged recession, if not depression, if you look historically, those situations have always had very dire consequences for the ecology of native ecosystems.

We’re already fighting resource extraction; now we’re going to be fighting them at a much more intensive level. I think you’re going to see governments act to preserve themselves by giving away the public estate in the name of job production, in the name of whatever. Taking down dams in the Columbia River in order to protect salmon species in the middle of a depression, that’s not going to happen. The dams went up in the middle of the [‘30s] Depression.

So, no… I’ve heard these arguments but I don’t buy them. Look at Africa, which has been mired in something beyond a depression for fifty years. It’s been disastrous for ecosystems.

Will the economic crisis result in foundation money drying up for the big environmental groups and for smaller ones?

Well, that is a positive. These major foundations have been like cloning shops for environmental groups. They control their agenda, they want all of them to look the same, behave the same, be utterly predictable, and dependent upon their money. Once you get on the foundation dole, it’s like becoming like a meth addict. A lot of them, certainly the smaller groups, will lose their funding first, and that’s going to be a very good thing. The weaning process is going to hurt for a while. But when they emerge from that, they’re going to be much better off. That’s what I’m interested in—the varieties of resistance to industrial capitalism and neoliberalism, the forces that are exploiting the planet. The first mission of the foundations was to take critiques of capitalism off the table. Hopefully in the future, you’re going to be seeing, five to ten years from now, much more indigenous radical and unpredictable, organic environmental groups that will end up being much more effective, much more healing for people.

You want it to be fun, like Edward Abbey says… of all the movements out there, the environmental movement should probably be the most fun. You can see what you’re fighting for, the kind of direct actions and protests that you can engage in are much more exhilarating than a lot of other issues. And it has to be fun, otherwise you’re going to burn out. One of the things the foundations have done is turn it into a bureaucracy. It’s easier to control that way.

Do you see the environmental justice movement as holding hope for a shift toward that kind of activism?

Yeah, I do. Environmental justice became a sort of passing interest of the foundations in the ‘90s. But the big money never came. It was the same old white Eastern elites pimping off of their issues, with the exception of Greenpeace, which probably was the only big environmental group that had a commitment on environmental justice issues in the Mississippi Delta Region, in Cancer Alley. They actually went there and listened to people living in the chemical soup bowl. And they put their expertise at direct action, how to train people in Cancer Alley, how to shut down a chemical plant for a day with a protest.

The other groups remained in DC, they put out their White Papers, and when interest eroded in environmental justice they moved on to something else. I think people will be happy to extract themselves from the likes of the Environmental Defense Fund and the NRDC.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A week before Thanksgiving, disaster struck in the form of a four-footed feline: a bobcat killed seven of the birds, and Thode faced a $350 loss. It was not an auspicious beginning, but Thode, a member of Sonoma County’s 4-H, soldiered on.

The following year, he increased his poult order, raised his turkeys, and found a processor—someone who would slaughter and dress the turkeys for the table. Days before Thanksgiving, the processor had a stroke. Scrambling, Thode found someone else who charged twice as much, reducing young Thode’s profit by nearly eight dollars a bird. From that batch, he saved out four breeders, birds that were excellent examples of Bourbon Reds. In January, he brought them to Stockton, to the state’s biggest poultry show, where one was crowned State Champion Turkey. Four days later all four were dead, perhaps killed by the same nefarious bobcat.

It was another devastating blow for a twelve-year-old who loves his turkeys. But the young poultry producer’s fate was about to take a strange twist. That very afternoon he got a call from Slow Food USA’s Randi Sidner, who suggested that Thode and his 4-H friends raise heritage turkeys for the Russian River branch of Slow Foods.

What exactly is a heritage breed? These older breeds grow more slowly than commercialized breeds, which have been bred to make more money for the meat industry by putting on the poundage as quickly as possible. (Commercialized meat chickens grow so fast that some die of heart attacks at five or six weeks old, a month shy of slaughter.) Because profit margins rule the world of meat, heritage breeds have gradually died out, with poultry hobbyists their only champions.

But the hobbyists knew a secret: the slower-growing turkeys and chickens develop more taste over their longer lives. And that is right up the alley of Slow Foods USA, part of a worldwide movement begun in Italy, that advocates for local production of delicious and nutritious food, the sort of meals over which one wants to linger. In the turkeys’ case, growing great dinners is only part of the mandate; Slow Foods has partnered with the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy to promote breeds in danger of extinction. The breeds considered heritage by the ALBC are Beltsville Small White, Chocolate, Lavendar/Lilac, Jersey Buff, Midget White, Narragansett, White Holland, Black, Bourbon Red, Royal Palm, Standard Bronze, and Broad-Breasted Bronze. Of these, only the last is not in danger. Five breeds are considered critical, with only a few breeding flocks in the country, and two, the Narragansett and White Holland, are considered threatened.

Sidner listened to Thode’s sad tale, offered sympathy, and asked him to identify his biggest obstacle. Surprisingly, the bobcat didn’t take top honor—processing did. Thode explained that it cost too much, and the turkeys had to be driven off-site, which upset them and therefore Thode. Sidner said she’d deal with the processing problem if Thode would raise the birds. Thus was born the Slow Foods Heritage Turkey Project.

True to her word, the following year Sidner located a processor who owns a duck farm. He had a mobile trailer outfitted for processing birds, and he was able to come to Thode’s home. Thode, meanwhile, had recruited several others to participate in raising birds, including his younger brother David. That year they raised a hundred turkeys, some auctioned off at a Slow Foods event. Finally Thode made money on his turkey venture, in addition to, he says, garnering “Customers for life.”
Now seventeen, Thode and his 4-H partners raised over 200 turkeys this year, almost double the past output. Some friends, twins whose last name happens to be “Holland,” chose Holland Whites for their project, while Zachary and his brother David got a batch of different breeds from the hatchery. Thode continues to keep a few breeders, and the bobcat lately has not been a bother (knock on wood).
A question remains: if these heritage turkeys are in such danger of extinction, do you really want to eat one? The truth is that unless they have a commercial purpose, such as gracing holiday tables, their gene pool will eventually die out. Increasing their numbers as part of a food project is their best opportunity to continue as viable breeds. And why deny yourself a truly memorable slow dinner? “They taste so much better,” says Thode’s mother, Catherine.

Thode explains that all turkeys developed from the old Bourbon Red variety. The birds now used as commercial turkeys were selected to contain more white meat, around sixty to seventy percent of their total weight. This means they’re considerably drier when cooked. To combat dryness and increase weight, some turkeys are injected with liquid, but a lot of trouble goes on in American kitchens on Thanksgiving morning in an oftentimes-futile attempt to bring juicy meat to the table. Workarounds include brining, basting, and artfully arranged foil tents.

The heritage birds contain more meat per weight, and that meat tends towards a fifty-fifty split of dark and white. Dark meat bastes the white meat, so the heritage birds naturally turn out moist without being watery while tasting more like turkey.

Will heritage birds replace the commercial breeds? Not likely, as the growth difference is substantial. Commercial turkeys are big enough to process at three and a half months, reducing feed and housing costs for the producer, while a heritage bird might take twice as long. “The birds gain flavor over that period,” argues Thode. “Feed has a lot to do with [taste] too.” The Russian River heritage birds are raised outside and fed organic grains. They can eat seeds, scratch for bugs, and nibble leaves and other greens. And they embody the ground zero of sustainability: They can mate naturally. The giant plump white-meat breasts of commercial birds prevent the male from mounting the female; all commercial turkeys are bred by artificial insemination.

Thode’s mother, born and raised in Southern California, says she never thought she’d be raising turkeys—and the experience has had unexpected results. “That first year with Slow Foods, the processor came to us. The next year, we brought them off-site. It didn’t feel good. This time we’ve again found someone who will come to us. The birds are in their own habitat, and I know they’re handled humanely because they’ve never left my sight. I am very aware that commercial birds haven’t been handled like this, so the turkey project has been a metamorphosis for me. Now I find it hard to buy birds at the store.”