At home, Wilson had been waste-conscious, choosing products with less packaging to reduce her impact on the environment. At the hospital, she found that approach impossible to maintain. As Samantha’s stay dragged on, the piles of supplies the doctors needed to keep her healthy kept multiplying: diapers, bandages, oxygen tubes, feeding bags. “Everything from gauze squares to little plastic fittings for this or that hose comes packaged in big plastic containers that are sterile,” recalls Wilson.

The waste bothered Wilson, but it seemed inevitable. “How can you not [create trash]?” she asks. “Because of course you can’t reuse this. They [the doctors] are there to fix kids, so they’re going do whatever the protocols say they have to do.” Because Wilson’s first priority was her daughter’s health, her environmental unease slipped into the background. Besides, she didn’t have solutions. “My thinking didn’t go much beyond, ‘This is a situation that needs to change at some point.’”

Many people who work within the hospital system agree that things need to change. Because of their efforts, a new, greener mindset has been creeping through the bright corridors of California’s healthcare establishment, as administrators reconsider everything from the trash hospitals create to the cleansers on their floors to putting solar panels on the roof. But reducing the ecological footprint of healthcare isn’t easy; hospitals’ efforts to treat the sick can affect the world beyond their walls in many ways. For one thing, hospitals are big energy users: An average hospital consumes twice as much energy per square foot as a commercial office building. Hospitals deal with toxic substances including pharmaceuticals, medical waste, laboratory chemicals, and radioactive waste that take extra work to dispose of and that can contribute to environmental pollution. Hospitals buy and use vast quantities of supplies—not just specialized medical equipment, but electronics, paper goods, food, and bed linens. To prevent disease, they use chemicals and packaging to keep things sterile.

All these aspects of a hospital operation add up to a big environmental footprint, and it’s one that is likely to grow. Nationwide, more than 100 million square feet of medical building space are constructed every year, and experts predict that healthcare’s share of the economy will continue to expand. In 2004, spending on hospital care made up almost four percent of California’s total economy.

Hospitals have an important role to play as California works to cement its status as a leader in environmental responsibility. But can they get there?

An uphill climb
As Wilson experienced, hospitals often face conflicts between reducing their environmental impact and delivering state-of-the-art care. “Patients are the top priority, so whatever we do we have to make sure to protect quality, to always have the patients in mind,” says Dominican Sister Mary Ellen Leciejewski, the ecology program coordinator for Catholic Healthcare West (CHW), a San Francisco-based nonprofit that operates the state’s largest system of hospitals.

Other challenges to going green include hospitals’ tendency to operate on tight budgets without a lot of wiggle room for extra costs or investments, the sheer size and complexity of hospital operations, and the tangled web of health-related regulations hospitals must navigate. Then there’s mindset: “There’s a high burden of proof for us,” explains Dr. Preston Maring, a gynecologist and administrator with Oakland-based nonprofit healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente. Health providers make decisions based on proven science, and that same way of thinking can permeate decisions about running hospitals. Even a facility that’s actively working to be more sustainable is likely to shy away from any unproven, cutting-edge ideas, like an eco-friendly flooring material that one hospital rejected because administrators doubted it would last long enough. “Within a healthcare institution, you have to know ahead of time that what you’re doing is the right thing to do,” says Maring. With such a risk-averse attitude, hospitals tend to lag behind when it comes to making green choices.

Healthy earth, healthy people
Despite the obstacles, over the past decade a growing number of hospitals have begun to view a concern for the environment as inseparable from their main mission of promoting good health. Because of their position in the community, hospitals can play a leadership role. “As a healthcare facility we have the opportunity to model health and healing,” agrees CHW’s Leciejewski. “We help people continuously make the connection that our health is aligned with good soil, pure water, clean air.”

Spurred by the largely successful campaign in the late ‘90s to eliminate toxic mercury from hospital waste, several national organizations have made cleaning up healthcare their mission, including Health Care Without Harm, a global coalition working to reduce pollution in the healthcare sector, and Practice Greenhealth, a nonprofit that provides information and support on topics such as clean energy, green building, and waste management. These organizations, both based in Arlington, Virginia, serve as clearinghouses for ideas percolating through the hospital community: that health extends beyond the hospital doors; that what hospitals do affects the larger world; that the environment matters.

In California, those ideas have received a warm reception, and a number of local institutions are working towards sustainability. “These are our recycling bins,” says a smiling Sister Leciejewski, pointing at the large containers lined up along a back driveway at Dominican Hospital, a CHW affiliate in Santa Cruz and Leciejewski’s home base. The bins are standard blue trash containers, but Leciejewski is clearly proud of them. “We recycle all our paper, after we print it double-sided,” she says. Next she points out the spots for collecting metal furniture, light bulbs, food waste, batteries, electronic waste, and plastic wrap.

There’s nothing unique to a hospital about these waste streams, even though they can make up 95 percent of what a facility throws out. But managing it right is important, something Dominican recognized in the ‘90s when employees pushed for recycling programs like the ones they used at home. (Today, Dominican has won almost a dozen awards for waste reduction and environmental leadership.)

Keeping track of which waste goes where is especially crucial when it comes to “the bloody stuff,” as Leciejewski puts it. Disposing of medical waste is expensive and energy-intensive; anything that goes in one of the red biohazard bags has to be treated as possibly infectious and either sterilized or incinerated. Dominican makes sure that employees know exactly what goes in the red bags (used bandages, for example) and what shouldn’t (pizza boxes). “The first year we started emphasizing that we saw a real drop in cost and waste. Now it’s just how we do business,” says Leciejewski.

Being mindful of what comes into the hospital is just as important as dealing with what leaves it. “We’ve been trying to redesign things, talking to vendors to figure out what comes through the front door,” Leciejewski explains. A hospital system of CHW’s size has enough leverage to influence the marketplace. For example, when nurses at Dominican got sick of opening three separate packages of supplies every time they delivered a baby, they convinced their supplier to consolidate the packs into one, reducing the amount of trash.

Still, challenges abound. In 2001, Dominican set up a program to recycle the special “blue wrap” plastic packaging that keeps surgical and medical supplies sterile before use. It was a great success, diverting eight tons of the stuff from the landfill in its first year, but the company Dominican had been working with shut down. The hospital couldn’t find a replacement that wouldn’t ship the waste to China, something Leciejewski is reluctant to do. Now it goes back in the trash.

In spite of the setbacks, Leciejewski remains optimistic. “We realize we can’t do everything. Sometimes it’s baby steps, and we just keep on the journey. Sometimes it’s leaps of faith, and we move ahead.”

An apple a day
One place where Leciejewski is moving ahead fast is in Dominican’s vegetable garden. Tucked on a small plot of land bordered by the cafeteria and a parking lot, the garden, now in its sixth year, offers a touch of serenity amidst the bustle of the busy hospital complex. By summer, the thirty raised beds will brim with onions, tomatoes, eggplants, pepper, carrots, cauliflower, and herbs, lovingly tended by volunteers from the staff and the local community. The organic bounty will head straight to the plates of employees and visitors. (The garden isn’t big enough to provide for patient meals.)

The idea of serving fresh, organic, locally grown foods is one that’s gaining popularity throughout the hospital community. In 2007, the California Medical Association passed a resolution encouraging hospitals to promote a healthier and more sustainable food system. As of May 2008, over a hundred healthcare facilities had signed a pledge, sponsored by Health Care Without Harm, committing to the goal of providing local, nutritious, and sustainable food. Local signers include all of CHW’s facilities, the St. Joseph Health System in Sonoma County, and the John Muir Health System hospitals in Concord and Walnut Creek.

The idea behind both the resolution and the pledge is that the negative impacts of industrial farming—pesticides, overuse of antibiotics in livestock, land degradation, high fuel use for transporting food, to name a few—are not just an environmental but a public health issue, and one in which hospitals need to take an active role. For many hospitals, though, that’s a big leap: A 2005 survey by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine found that only sixteen percent of hospitals used organic ingredients, and fewer than a third were even consistently offering meals that were healthful for people, much less the environment.

But change is on its way. The Kaiser hospital system, for example, is working to source food for patient meals from small and mid-sized local growers, to provide hormone-free milk, and to offer healthy options in its vending machines. “There’s so much room for connecting people to good healthy food,” says Kaiser physician Preston Maring.

Maring is also working to bring locally grown food to the larger community; in 2003 he started a weekly farmer’s market at Kaiser’s Oakland Medical Center, where he practices. Staff, patients, visitors, and the community so appreciated having organic, farm-fresh produce at their fingertips that Kaiser has expanded the program to include weekly markets at 32 hospitals in four states. Kaiser found that 71 percent of people who attended the markets said they were eating more fruits and vegetables as a result. “What people eat is the most important thing for their health,” he emphasizes.

Green from the ground up
Changing what goes on inside the hospital, however, is only part of the solution. Hospitals are also starting to consider integrating green designs and technologies into the buildings themselves. For example, green building standards encourage use of interior materials that don’t emit high levels of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Such materials help keep indoor air healthy, especially important for vulnerable patients. Similarly, buildings designed to provide lots of access to daylight help reduce the energy used for lighting and have been shown to speed patient recovery and improve mood.

Yet certified green buildings have been slow to catch on in the hospital sector. “Part of the issue is that the timeframes are so long,” says Larry Koller, program manager for the Mills-Peninsula Hospital Replacement Project in Burlingame, a new building set to open in 2010. “The idea of green is relatively new to the construction industry, and in 2000-2003,” when the team was designing the project, “a lot of the products were not around.” As an example, Koller points out that if they were designing the hospital today they might include solar panel technology that was prohibitively expensive in 2000.

Still, the new Peninsula Medical Center will incorporate a few green elements. The team worked hard to design a climate control and ventilation system that could pipe outside air into each room separately (to prevent germs from spreading between rooms) without using much extra energy. The system now serves as a model for other facilities.
Kaiser Permanente has also been working to incorporate green elements into its new buildings. In October 2008, Kaiser opened a facility in Modesto that features sustainable details such as a small rooftop solar array, permeable
pavement in the parking area that allows rainwater to filter through it, and low-VOC carpet made with recycled materials, a product that didn’t exist until Kaiser asked manufacturers to design it. Kaiser plans to incorporate green elements into many of its new hospitals.

Money matters
Moving forward, hospitals are bound to profit from the innovations in sustainable technology, from renewable energy to green cleaning products. As more hospitals develop green solutions, even the most conservative institutions will have solid models to follow. For example, the US Green Building Council is currently in the pilot phase of LEED green building certifications designed specifically for healthcare.

Yet the hospital sector is subject to the all the perils of the current economy. While sustainability advocates have worked hard to couch their arguments in terms of long-term cost savings (Practice Greenhealth even has a publication called The Business Case for Greening the Health Care Sector), many sustainability changes require an initial investment that may be unpalatable during a recession.

Even if the progress that many institutions have demonstrated expands, there’s a long way to go before the entire industry is as green as it could be. No matter what percentage of its trash a hospital recycles, or how local its food is, or how sustainable the building, the uncomfortable truth is that modern medical practices have a big impact on the environment, as Wilson saw during her stay with Samantha. Possibly the best way for each of us to reduce the impact of hospitals on the environment is to do our best to avoid using them. That means making lifestyle choices like eating well and exercising, and advocating for better access to good food and laws that clean up our air and water. Environmental illnesses are becoming endemic in our society, and in many cases, the way we treat illness is still bad for the Earth. In the end, the greening of hospitals will need to extend far beyond their walls.

Towards a Greener Practice

Even as many hospitals work to reduce their environmental impact, some activists say the medical community is just scratching the surface. “Primarily the green is going on between the administrators and the support staff, and it’s leaving out the clinicians,” declares Dr. Joel Kreisberg, founder and executive director of Berkeley’s Teleosis Institute, a nonprofit that advocates an eco-conscious medical system.

Kreisberg’s idea is that reducing healthcare’s footprint has to go beyond efficient buildings and recycled paper, straight to the heart of what goes on between doctor and patient. If doctors can help keep people from getting sick in the first place, they can prevent a lot of harm to the environment. That means asking patients about their lifestyle—diet, exercise, exposure to chemicals—and helping them make positive changes.

Doctors can also help reduce pharmaceutical pollution by trying alternative treatments when appropriate and prescribing only as much of a drug as a patient needs. Simply being aware that medicines might someday end up in the ecosystem is a big step for some clinicians. Teleosis offers courses in green healthcare to help practitioners understand how they can protect the environment: “We have to connect all the dots,” Kreisberg says.
To find out more, including how you can safely dispose of unused medicines, visit www.telosis.org

Ron Pugh, a US Forest Service special agent in charge of illegal activities on public lands, has spent the past few years concentrating on illegal marijuana grows. Marijuana “gardens”—a misnomer on a grand scale—are responsible for the majority of thirsty straws draining rivers and creeks that cross public lands. Pugh flips up a slide showing the spread of illegal grows across the nation. “This, “ he says ominously, meaning Mendocino and Humboldt counties, the crown jewels of US marijuana production, “is not even one of the heaviest pockets.”

In 1995, foreign nationals, mostly Mexicans, began growing marijuana in Southern California mountains and parks. By ’97, grows had spread into every national park on the West Coast. In 2001, those grows expanded from California, Oregon, and Washington into Idaho, and now are spreading like a giant ink stain across the center of the country’s park and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands all the way to the East Coast.

Says Pugh about the sheer volume of grows, “This is not a hippie thing.” He’s come prepared with a list of comparisons between a “hippie”grow and a DTO site—one maintained by a drug trafficking organization. A traditional garden on public lands, Pugh says, has one or two growers and fewer than fifty plants. The gardener, who lives locally, hikes in every other day or so, carrying water for his plants. Firearms are uncommon, and locations are predictable. “They’re within a quarter mile of a road,” Pugh explains, “and they’re rarely uphill. White guys are lazy.”

The DTO sites, on the other hand, are as remote as the growers can get, often three miles from the nearest road. They contain an average of 6,600 plants, tended by an average of seven growers who live in tents the entire season, from May to October. The growers are aided by scanners, radios, night-vision goggles, an arsenal of weapons, and truckloads of plastic pipe to divert area streams to their plants, sometimes from as far as a half-mile away. When they abandon the site in the fall, they leave behind mountains of trash, about as much trash as a small city dump.
What they bring in is just as bad. “They smuggle in pesticides from Mexico,” Pugh says, “more potent than you can buy here. And believe me, they don’t care about the creeks.” When Pugh describes growers mixing chemicals directly in the creek to pump onto their plants, a moan ripples through the audience.

In a later email exchange, Pugh says that he’s had trouble getting people to understand the ramifications of the crisis: “That’s why I go to great effort to point out that we aren’t dealing with `just marijuana,’ but a huge environmental issue,” Pugh says. “Basically everyone cares, to some degree or other, about that.” Pugh gives his presentation about twice a month, he says, to spread the word to new people: “When they become informed,
they become outraged,” he says. “And outraged people demand action.”

The US Forest Service is not a drug agency, though recently DTO sites were reclassified as crime scenes, which allows inter-agency cooperation with local and national law enforcement. The agency can now sift through trash for phone numbers, receipts, and other tips that could extend criminal prosecution past the hired help and up to the drug lords at the top of the chain. Pugh evokes laughs when he quickly corrects himself while explaining how the combined law enforcement effort needs to locate Mr. Big—“or Ms. Big. Well, I’m pretty sure it is Mr. Big.”

Pugh emphasizes that while the marijuana grows are an enormous drain on resources both financial and environmental, they are also a huge safety issue—after all, these are public lands where anyone can hike. If you stumble on a scene, Pugh advises, retreat immediately and call for help; during this past season, DTO growers killed two hunters on BLM land in Humboldt County.

The Forest Service has no funding for cleanup and depends upon volunteers to help out. Pugh estimates that it takes $5,000 per acre to remove DTO infrastructure and another $5,000 to restore the site. “Eradicating these grows is a number-one national priority,” he says, explaining that he’s met with state and federal Congressional delegates
frequently over the past two years and that Dianne Feinstein, a member of the Senate Committee
on the Judiciary, is particularly concerned.

Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman supplies the local picture, noting that the county’s per capita sales of rat poison are the highest in the nation; growers buy rat poison by the pallet because watering the grow sites attracts rodents. This poison ultimately contaminates the soil and creeks while poisoning raptors and other animals that eat the dead vermin. DTO growers also routinely shoot wildlife.

Most of all, they consume water. “As you go downstream on the Eel, the river should grow,” says Allman. “Instead, it gets smaller because people are pumping into storage tanks and directly into gardens.” Allman estimates that 3.6 million pot plants are grown on public lands—“That’s 3.6 million gallons of water a day,” he says, “pumped out of our creeks and rivers.” Allman pledges to respond to anonymous GPS reports of pumps and hose: “I’ll pull pumps,” he promises. “We’ll fly tributaries. I want to see the salmon come back.”

Salmon are equal opportunity victims, not just impacted by foreign nationals growing pot on public lands. As fisheries and watershed scientist Patrick Higgins points out, many of us are killing the creeks and rivers by supporting agriculture that relies on illegal diversions and unpermitted dams. Higgins, from Arcata’s Kier Associates, comes armed with graphs showing the number of illegal diversions and dams outnumber permitted diversions all along the North Coast and in Napa and Lake counties.

Higgins recalls fishing in Mendocino County’s Outlet Creek during the ‘60s, when it was loaded with steelhead. By 1996, because of illegal drafting, parts of the creek were dry in the summer, stranding fish in deep pools—pools from which diesel pumps lift water daily. Higgins says there are 1,700 illegal diversions in Marin County alone. Flyovers show illegal ponds everywhere, for vineyards and other agricultural uses. The Napa River used to have Coho salmon, the Navarro is dry, and so is the Gualala. Creeks dry between pools that often become clogged with algae that grows in the too-warm, too-still water. When the algae blooms, it releases a nerve toxin that has poisoned dogs and wildlife.

By email, Higgins sent a chart showing the difference in fish populations during El Niño and Niña years—populations fluctuate depending upon drought and full water flows. Through drafting and illegal dams, we’ve created a couple decades of drought-like conditions, even though we’ve actually had wet years like 2005. When a real drought comes along—as it has now—the fish are already stressed and in historically low numbers. “We have a regional crisis,” Higgins says. “There’s something called public trust. We all own the fish, and we all own the water. We’ve lost public trust in this culture.”

Higgins has a laundry list of those not “minding the store,” including the California State Water Resources Control Board: “seldom seen and completely ineffective,” he charges. The water board says that because of limited resources, its enforcement style is informal. It tends to respond to violations by issuing retroactive permits for illegal diversions that may have existed for years: “They send people a postcard or an email and call it informal enforcement,” Higgins says. He calls for profound reform, including requiring that all diversions carry a permit and that management of surface and groundwater be turned over to a state agency with public trust as its watchword. Illegal dams should be torn out, he says, and unpermitted diversions penalized by administrative fines of $500 daily. “It’s just a grab,” Higgins concludes. “When you disturb landscapes, the landscape reacts. If you change the nature of a watershed, you change everything.”

That’s bad news, because phthalates are everywhere, most commonly found in cosmetics, toys, plastics, and food packaging. Even worse, researchers have recently turned them up in a very unexpected place: prescription drugs. Could the drugs you’re taking to improve your health potentially worsen it?

Dr. Russ Hauser, professor of Environmental and Epidemiological Health at the Harvard School of Public Health, has been studying the effects of phthalates and other environmental chemicals on fertility and pregnancy for over a decade. He and his associates recently began to take a closer look at the ingredients in pharmaceutical drugs. Hauser and his team scour databases listing ingredients in medications to determine which medications may contain phthalates, then use data from prescription drug users’ urine samples to correlate their use of the suspected medications with urinary levels of phthalates. He mentions that there are hundreds of studies on phthalates in rats but only about a dozen or so studies that have explored health effects in humans.

Studies in lab animals show that exposure to phthalates causes infertility and a range of reproductive tract malformations, particularly in males. So far Hauser has tallied 47 meds approved by the FDA with ingredients—usually contained in a pill’s time-release coating—that could contain phthalates. Based on urinary analysis of prescription drug users, the most common medications Hauser’s team believes contain phthalates are Asacol, used for irritable bowel disease; Prilosec, taken for heartburn; and Respbid, a bronchodilator.

“We started these studies four years ago with a single medication, and we’ve now demonstrated that several meds have contributed to phthalate exposure,” says Hauser. During a 2003 study, one of Hauser’s test subjects showed levels of phthalates a thousand times greater than anyone else in study. The researchers concluded that the high phthalate levels resulted from the enteric time-release coating on the Asacol that he was taking for inflammatory bowel disease. The enteric coating is a barrier applied to drugs to control where it’s taken up in the digestive system. “Phthalates are present in time-release coatings because it’s part of the drug delivery system,” says Hauser. “The coating prevents the drug from being broken down in the stomach, so it will be delivered to the colon, the area of disease.”

Although the FDA does not currently regulate or test for phthalates, some officials and scientists are As of January 2009, California became the first state to ban products for children and babies that contain more than residual quantities of phthalates. In the same vein, the NRC is now urging the Environmental Protection Agency to reexamine the way it assesses phthalates’ toxicity to humans, and to prioritize cumulative risks rather than individual exposure. The European Union restricts the concentrations of several phthalates in children’s toys and has also banned phthalates from cosmetics.

Hauser mentions that he does not plan to notify the FDA of his findings, but he maintains that “Our role as researchers is to identify sources of exposure, whether it be from medications or other sources, and the FDA or EPA should use that information for risk assessment policy, policy setting, and potential regulation.”

Hauser and his group hope to assess over-the-counter drugs and nutritional supplements in the future, as well as generate a more complete list of which prescription drugs contain phthalates. Hauser wants to continue testing and research to draw more conclusive data about phthalates and cumulative risk exposure in humans. “We’d ultimately like to look at not only exposure but also potential outcomes: identify populations potentially exposed to phthalates
at high levels and look at potential health risks.”

After all, shipping organic produce long-distance takes a toll on the environment, and at grocery stores,
it’s not always apparent just how far this organic lettuce or those pesticide-free apples have come. Head to
the store, and you’ll likely find produce identified only by country of origin—if at all. Meanwhile, locally produced foods have a growing appeal. Since 1994, the number of farmers’ markets in the US has increased 167 percent, as more people have realized that buying straight from the farm provides health, environmental, and economic benefits to their communities. But because locally grown food isn’t as accessible as organic at most grocery stores—and because it may be grown using conventional farming methods—which option is ultimately better?

Your health
When it comes to health, local produce has one major advantage over imported produce: Since local produce doesn’t have to travel far, it’s often fresher and more nutrient-rich than produce (including the organic kind) that has been shipped. Even under ideal transportation and storage conditions, produce loses many of its nutrients soon after being picked. For instance, according to a Penn State study, spinach kept at 39 degrees Fahrenheit (about the temperature of an average refrigerator) loses about fifty percent of its folate within eight days.

There’s another nutritional difference as well: Food picked for long-distance transport is often harvested while it’s green, before the nutrients present in ripe fruits are abundant. Smaller, local farms are more likely to wait until fruits and vegetables are ripe before harvesting. So fresher, in all likelihood, means more nutritious.

But locally grown foods are not necessarily organic, and conventional produce has its drawbacks. Just as I don’t want parabens in my hand lotions, phthalates in my perfume, or Bisphenol A in my canned tomatoes, it follows that I’m not too crazy about the idea of pesticide residue on my produce. Many pesticides are recognized carcinogens, and though the Environmental Protection Agency specifies levels that are safe for use, I have a hard time believing that “just a touch of poison” isn’t harmful, especially when listed effects include paralysis, cancer, and organ damage.

The environment
Locally grown food has a shorter distance to travel to market, and that makes an environmental difference as well. Unlike apples from New Zealand or grapes from Chile, produce grown regionally doesn’t need international
flights or the long-distance trucking system to get to its destination, so the carbon footprint of an apple can look more, well, like an apple, and less like the shadow of an airplane.

Local farms also preserve green space and limit suburban sprawl. Less sprawl means fewer commuters, lower carbon dioxide emissions, and cleaner air. More green space promotes a greater diversity of wildlife, offers migrating birds more rest stops, and is pretty nice to look at, too.

But even when it’s shipped from far away, organic produce provides environmental benefits for its home base: Because it is grown without pesticides, toxins are not circulated to groundwater, farm workers, and consumers.
Pesticide runoff kills fish and wildlife, gets into drinking water, and threatens the pollinators that are an integral part of agriculture.

The community
Locally grown produce plays a role in keeping our communities vital, and it is part of what makes the Bay Area and Northern California unique. After all, we have the rare privilege of being able to grow excellent food year-round, and we should celebrate by enjoying this bounty.

Purchasing locally is best when you can interact with someone from the farm, because these one-on-one interactions can help you find out how things are grown and let you make better buying and eating decisions.
Buying from local producers supports smaller farms and gives buyers a connection to where their food originates, a connection easily lost in the aisles of shiny waxed fruit at large grocery stores.

Buying from regional growers also supports the local economy, which seems extra important lately as small businesses struggle with the current economic crisis. According to a study published by the New Economics Foundation in London, food produced and sold locally infuses the local economy with about twice as much money as food brought in from far away.

The catch
If buying local is so great, why isn’t it the standard?

Well, for one thing, it’s not feasible everywhere and in all seasons. On a recent trip to Boston, I looked around at the snow-covered ground and across the frozen Charles River and realized that, in winter, eating locally can get pretty bleak. We’re all too used to the crunch of a fresh carrot to eat only seasonally available foods.

Another reason why you don’t see much locally grown food in chain grocery stores is the problem of scalability. While the large scale of industrial organic farming allows growers to work with companies that supply many stores, local production tends to be much smaller and more decentralized. It’s not as able to meet the large-scale demand of chain grocery stores’ ordering structure.

There are other issues to consider as well. Produce exports play a significant role in other nations’ economies—
for instance, in 2004 Chile exported $24 million worth of fruit to the US. And swearing off food that’s not grown locally would leave us with nothing more than vivid memories of pineapples and bananas.

The answer? Look locally
Even with its limitations, buying from local producers has a lot of appeal, and, at least to me, seems just as worthy a label to strive for as organic. For many people, embracing locavorism requires adjusting shopping habits, but when you add up the benefits, the extra effort makes sense. Luckily, there are plenty of options for people looking to localize, especially in the Bay Area. If you don’t already, head to your local farmers’ market, preferably a smaller one that has relationships with local farms, or head out of town to a nearby farm stand. If those aren’t available, think about joining a CSA, or Community Sponsored Agriculture program, which connects city dwellers with farms via a weekly box of fresh produce.

Encourage your local grocery stores, whether they’re chains or independent, to start stocking more local produce. Try to eat seasonally. If you’ve got a sunny spot in your yard, get up close and personal by growing some of your own fruits and vegetables.

Best of all, local produce often is organic. While a shift towards eating locally grown food may take a bit more effort and cost a little more, the benefits are clear. Eating locally may not work for everyone, everywhere, and all the time, but here in Northern California our soil, sun, and seasons give us abundant opportunities to savor the local flavor.

It’s a nonprofit. It’s a spa. It’s a shelter. It’s a progressive school. And it’s got computers, chairs, maybe even sofas, that expose their users to polybrominated diphenylethers, a class of flame retardant that is a major component in the manufacture of plastic computer casings and polyurethane-foam furniture padding.

11:00 a.m. Field trip.Your daughter’s class visits a nearby farm, where palling around with pigs and goats destined for slaughter makes many children vow to become vegetarians. As they make these vows, they inhale toxic ammonia that is a component in fertilizers and decaying animal manure. Extensive exposure to this corrosive gas can cause lung damage.12:10 p.m. Lunch.
No animals were harmed in the making of this salad. But if the greens aren’t organic, they might have been treated with pesticides.
1 p.m. Gym class.
Playing soccer at school, your son gulps lots of fresh air. He runs. He jumps. He rolls. But if it’s on artificial turf, he faces exposure to lead, which has been linked with brain and neurological disorders. The US Consumer Product Safety Commission has been investigating turf toxicity ever since high levels of lead were reported in synthetic playing fields last year. The turf’s rubber padding has been found to exude toxic volatile organic compounds including styrene-butadiene, which the EPA classifies as a probable human carcinogen. If he’s playing on real grass, he risks exposure to pesticides.
3 p.m. School’s out.
Your kids spend the rest of the afternoon at friends’ homes. Your daughter and her pal give each other manicures—and thanks to the nail polish, a hefty helping of phthalates, a group of chemicals employed to increase the flexibility of plastics in a wide variety of products from mini-blinds to food packaging to sex toys. Phthalates are now undergoing research by government agencies investigating possible links to cancer as well as hormonal and reproductive disruptions. Another common nail polish component is toluene, a solvent that has been linked to liver and kidney damage, cancer, and nervous system disorders. Your son and his buddy build things with plastic blocks in a damp basement, possibly exposed to allergenic mold on the walls and asbestos in old insulation. The blocks, like many such toys, contain chromium, arsenic, mercury, and lead.
5:10 p.m. Fill ‘er up.
After work, you visit the service station. Smell that gas? You’ve just inhaled benzene, a carcinogenic volatile organic compound that is present in gasoline fumes. One of the twenty most commonly used chemicals in the United States, benzene has been linked to high rates of leukemia among gas station
workers and auto refinishers.
5:20 p.m. Commute.
While listening intently to a public radio program about global warming, you double your daily exposure to diesel exhaust.
6:00 p.m. Keep fit.
Nothing beats twenty laps in the pool. So much bare flesh, so many germs inadvertently slurped. The last two decades have seen a steady rise in what the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention call “recreational water illnesses,” or RWIs, which affect the skin, ears, and eyes as well as the respiratory and gastrointestinal and central nervous systems. The most commonly reported RWI symptom of all, diarrhea, can be caused by germs such as Cryptosporidium, Giardia, Shigella, Norovirus, and E. coli, which enter the water through the fecal matter of fellow swimmers. RWIs can also be contracted in hot tubs and spas.
6:45 p.m. Home again.
Sleek granite countertops make your kitchen feel closer to nature than lino or tiles. But fierce debates are raging among scientists, consumers, and countertop manufacturers about potentially high levels of radon in granite surfaces. Many consumers are now having their kitchens tested for levels of this radioactive gas.
7:15 p.m. Dinner.
Swordfish steaks: Protein-packed and easy to make, they require just a dash of salt and pepper. No need to add mercury, because it’s already in the meat. Along with shark, halibut, and king mackerel, swordfish contain unhealthy levels of this metal. Today’s polluted oceans make mercury a hazard in many sea creatures; larger and longer-lived species retain the most dangerous quantities. Over time, mercury poisoning can cause brain and kidney damage as well as central-nervous-system disorders. Repeated exposure can also imperil unborn babies and induce miscarriage.
7:45 p.m. Dessert.
Rushing to watch your favorite nature show? Quick, open a can of fruit—and continue your heavy-metals meal. If it’s imported, the can might have been manufactured with lead solder from which lead has leached into the contents. Prohibited in US can manufacture, lead solder is a common feature of imported canned goods.
8:10 p.m. Kickin’ back.
Delight in the antics of those madcap meerkats while relaxing on the couch, whose polyurethane foam padding and cushions have been treated with flame retardants containing benzene and formaldehyde.
8:15 p.m. Rug fun.
Your kids rollick on the carpet, facing possible exposure to flame retardants.
8:25 p.m. Here comes Fuzzy.
Your pets join the fun and get a lot of cuddles for being so cute. And you get possible exposure to pesticides if they wear flea collars and/or if they’ve been doused with flea powder.
10:30 p.m. You need your beauty sleep.
Soften. Silken. Smooth and soothe. And increase your daily dosage of formaldehyde, mineral oil, talc, and other toxic ingredients found in beauty products.
11 p.m. To bed, to bed.
Sweet dreams.

It all started on September 14, 2006, the day the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that a virulent variety of E. coli , strain O157-H7, had infected and sickened fifty people. E. coli can cause cramps, diarrhea, and ultimately kidney failure. The Federal Department of Agriculture reported that bagged spinach probably caused the outbreak and urged consumers not to purchase or eat fresh spinach products. By the first week of October, 204 people had fallen ill in 26 states, and three had died. Scientists traced the pathogen to Natural Selection Foods (commonly known as Earthbound Farms), in San Juan Bautista, California.

An FDA recall sent spinach sales sliding so low that the industry lost around $80 million; the recall hit California growers, who produce 75 percent of all leafy greens, especially hard. Grocery store owners and national retailers like Wal-Mart pulled all bagged spinach dated between August 17 and October 1. No fresh spinach was sold for five days.
The overwhelming scope of the outbreak and the deadly nature of O157-H7 spurred intensive media coverage, which left leafy greens growers and processors scrambling to assure their products’ safety. By 2007, the beleaguered bagged greens industry, nervous over profit losses, potential lawsuits, and an increasing pathogen problem, united to centralize food safety standards. Nearly every greens producer in the state signed onto the optional California Leafy Green Products Handler Marketing Agreement (LGMA), which sets safety and sanitation standards for produce handlers. Today the LGMA has 120 certified participants who together produce 99 percent of the leafy greens in California.

Although the LGMA has been successful in increasing sales and lowering contamination, an over-zealous application of its safety advisories has produced another result: a war against wildlife and a reversal of hard-won efforts to encourage farmers to conserve wild areas near cultivated fields. Perhaps because the FDA has not yet determined the original source of 2006’s deadly E. coli strain or its mode of transport to the contaminated
fields, the industry has adopted a zero-sum approach to food safety. Everything is a potential culprit and must be sterilized, even nature.

Some conventional processors and national retailers, using the LGMA’s more benign metrics as a guide, began imposing highly stringent regulations, coined “super metrics,” in an attempt to create “sterile farms” and remove all risk of pathogen contamination. Mice, frogs, birds, pigs, and deer have been incriminated as potential pathogen vectors, and auditors and food safety consultants demand that farmers tear out hedgerows and other vegetation, kill wildlife, and erect fences in the name of consumer safety. In an attempt to remove risk from a natural and inherently variable product, the bagged greens industry has pitted human health against the environment.

The industrial debacle
“It all changed after the [2006] outbreak,” says Dale Coke, founder of Coke Farm, a 300-acre organic produce farm in San Juan Bautista, California. The veteran baby greens grower stops his white ATV and points to a neighboring conventional farm where carefully plowed, unplanted rows stretch straight for acres, framed by razed edges and ditches doused with herbicide. PVC pipes filled with rodenticide line eight-foot-tall fences topped with barbed wire, while a large sign demands “Think Food Safety.”

While these ordered features, designed to keep wildlife out, conform to the efficiency requirements of leafy green processors and distributors, fertilizing and processing methods could spread disease far more efficiently than, say, a mouse. For example, contaminated irrigation water is a likely E. coli vector. Pathogen-carrying water sprayed on lettuce fields before harvest can make it into processed, ready-to-eat bags despite the chlorine baths used by processing plants. Researchers have also suggested that fields fertilized with improperly treated raw manure from livestock could spread contamination, as can feces deposited by wild animals.

Large-scale growers use machines to cut thousands of pounds of leafy greens at the stem and ship them to processing plants, where tons of lettuces from various farms are washed together and sealed in plastic bags. Millions of bags of greens are produced each week. One load of fresh-cut lettuce carrying E. coli pathogens could contaminate thousands of bags before being shipped across the nation, and the technologically advanced bags keep greens fresh for over two weeks, making them effective incubators for the bacterium.

According to the Community Alliance with Family Farmers and the FDA, since 2002, all E. coli outbreaks associated
with lettuce and spinach have occurred in processed, fresh-cut, bagged greens. “We have a record of fourteen outbreaks from 2002 [to today] linked to fresh-cut leafy greens,” says FDA press officer Stephanie Kwisnek. “They were all in sealed bags.”

Killer bugs and wildlife
Hundreds of strains of E. coli live in the environment and in our intestines, many of which pose little threat to human health. Serotype O157-H7 is a nasty new pathogen, a likely product of antibiotic use in the industrial beef industry. Detected for the first time about thirty years ago, O157-H7 is virulent, highly resistant, and, unfortunately, is often found in our food, particularly in meat products. While the pathogen is eliminated easily by heat (industry insiders call cooking a “kill step”), leafy greens remain a possible carrier since they are eaten raw.
Scientists and health officials widely recognize Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) as the primary source of the bacteria. Highly populated cattle-growing operations house and feed thousands of animals for at least 45 days before slaughter. According to the CDC, since 2003 the nation’s 238,000 feedlot operations have produced 500 million tons of manure, and anywhere from two to fifty percent of a herd can carry O157-H7 and shed the bacteria in their poop. In a public presentation last November, Dr. Robert S. Lawrence, director of the Center for a Livable Future at the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said the high concentration of stressed animals, sub-optimal hygiene, and the abundant use of antibiotic treatments encourage O157-H7 contaminations to spread quickly through feedlot animals. “The fecal veneer that covers the entire earth increases dramatically in a feedlot,” quips Dr. Lawrence.

Massive cattle feedlots may be the top reservoir of E. coli O157-H7, but it is still uncertain how the pathogens travel to farms. However, some farmers fear that wild animals living near these feedlots are ingesting contaminated feces and then depositing O157-H7 on or near a leafy greens farms or water sources, thereby spreading the contagion. The FDA’s Kwisnek points out that for the 2006 outbreak, “The exact cause has not been determined and probably never will be. … However, some of the waterways were contaminated with cattle and wildlife feces, so the farmers are taking action.”

In order to mitigate all possible vectors, Scott Horsfall, CEO of the LGMA, says that food safety auditors focus on potential causes of contamination: worker sanitation, manure, water, and wildlife. “There is a certain amount of scientific evidence that wildlife can be a carrier of E. coli,” says Horsfall. “So they are definitely one of the risk factors.”

“Wildlife must certainly be considered as a potential vector for E. coli,” agrees Will Daniels, vice president of quality, food safety and organic integrity at Earthbound Farms. “The problem is that we grow produce basically in the wild… The idea is to identify if there is a risk and then develop realistic control measures.” Yet although the producers’ and auditors’ concern is real, the science some have cited to justify the removal of wildlife is contradictory. Diana Stuart, a grad student in the Environmental Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz, has compiled statistics from a variety of studies that show most wild animals have a low chance of carrying E. coli: deer (up to two percent), wild birds (up to one percent), and rodents (none). Feral pigs are the only wild animals proven to be significant vectors of E. coli, with up to a fifteen percent carrier rate.

Field of contradictions
Many privately hired food safety auditors and consultants are attacking nature with unwarranted zeal. A 2007 Resource Conservation District of Monterey County Survey reports that of 181 responding growers, operating a combined 140,000 acres of row cropland, 47.7 percent were asked to discourage the presence of wildlife, and nearly all of these—40.7 percent of the 181 responding growers—complied.

“Discouraging wildlife” included removing filter strips, hedgerows, grassy waterways, and windbreaks to create large, sterile buffer zones between row crops and along field and property edges. From a conservation perspective, growing native plants along farm boundaries is highly beneficial, and environmental protection agencies have universally promoted the practice over the last two decades. It is intended to improve water quality, reduce erosion, increase microbial diversity in the soil, and provide habitat for native species. Yet about fifteen percent of the responding growers reported that auditors advised them to remove ponds and waterways, including tailwater recovery ponds and catch basins, and half of those growers complied. Nearly all of the surveyed farmers had adopted at least one practice—typically the removal of surrounding habitat vegetation—to deter the presence of mice, birds, frogs, pigs, and deer on farms.

Ironically, the removal of vegetation may increase the presence of pathogens in waterways. At a Wild Farm Alliance-
sponsored Food Safety Teach-In in San Francisco last November, Danny Marquis—a conservationist at the Natural Resources Conservation Service of Monterey County—said that conservation practices like hedgerows and filter strips can intercept airborne dust, chemical drift, and detain water-borne pathogens. Removing tailwater systems and sediment basins—practices that catch irrigation runoff and help filter the water before it re-enters the ecosystem or is reused on the farm—worsens water quality, increases sediment, and causes erosion. Even Natural Food Selections, which adheres to some of the strictest processing standards within its plant, acknowledges that wildlife is essential to a healthy environment and farm. “We need to take a little more realistic and progressive approach to mitigation,” says Earthbound’s Daniels. “We consider wildlife an integral part of the process.”

Even LGMA’s Horsfall notes that some of the safety metrics are over-the-top. “There are conflicting requirements out there causing a lot of confusion and I think there are excessive requirements, based on what I know,” says Horsall. “I think what everyone needs to focus on is setting one set of scientific requirements.”

Conflict of cultures
Dale Coke, one of a handful of farmers who refused to join the LGMA, has been selling organic greens mixes for over twenty years. The contrast in farming styles between a conventional farm and one of Coke’s fields is appreciable. Instead of straight, ordered rows, a cilantro patch abuts lettuce rows and workers pick winter greens by hand. Coke worries about the new leafy greens marketing environment and the stringency of the super metrics. “If growers get used to the unwarranted metrics you could get more sets of practices that mean nothing,” he explains. “And if they get some kind of consistency that they come up with for all commodities, it would be even worse.”

At the heart of the issue is a conflict of culture: Everyone cares about food safety, but problems arise because so few people know or care about farming. The result is a set of metrics that farmers think are irrational. Ken Kimes, who grows sprouts and other microgreens in Aptos, has dealt with food safety regulations for years. He believes that most auditors struggle with the idea that farms are, after all, outside. “You know, having birds flying around, it’s deadly!” he says dryly. “I had one [auditor] tell me that every time a bird pooped, it’s salmonella.”

Farmers are quick to point out that some things can never be controlled completely. Although agriculture has historically sought to control nature by isolating and harvesting productive plants and killing pests, respect and understanding of the natural world has been generally accepted as well.

Tom Willey, owner of T&D Willey Farm in Madera, feels the problem is at root one of increasing incidence of virulent pathogens in the industrial meat business, and that removing wildlife from farmland misses the point. He blames our nation’s obsession with sterility and the beef industry’s over-reliance on antibiotics for burgeoning superbugs. “The whole food safety baloney is not gonna go away,” Willey says. “It’s going to continue raising its ugly head. And I think a reason for that is because the industrial animal industry, through their production practices, are creating some dangerous microbes that small farms have a hard time protecting themselves against.” Reducing the predominance of O157-H7 on feedlots would require a reworking of the industrial cattle industry and the abandonment of excessive antibiotic use in livestock, regulations that fall under the domain of the USDA.

The risk associated with bagged greens is reducible, but regardless of the industry’s attempt to control surrounding wildlife, it’s never been entirely stamped out. Last September, 45 people in five states were sickened by bagged fresh-cut iceberg lettuce. The FDA has traced the source of the pathogen back to California, but the story got so little attention that neither the FDA nor the CDC even mention it on their Web sites. Four months later, the LGMA does not even know if one of its members was responsible, leaving little confidence that its measures are working.
Despite two years of regulations, E. coli outbreaks in bagged leafy greens have yet to be eradicated. Rather than reviewing, adjusting, and updating the self-regulatory framework of the LGMA and leafy greens processors, the FDA has taken a hands-off approach to industrial regulation and has also failed to foster cooperation between the agencies that oversee the meat and produce industries and that set environmental standards. The consumer is left to decide how much risk to take when eating pre-washed greens—and at what environmental cost those greens are produced. “It’s hard to talk about tolerating a certain amount of risk in food to save the environment or be sensible,” says farmer Kimes. “It’s kind of like everybody has to be on the zero-risk path. And this is where the burden comes in for the small farmer, and actually the large farmers too… there is really no way to mitigate and create zero risk.

A few months later, Herberman was standing before the House Subcommittee on Domestic Policy, explaining
why he’d sent up this warning flare. After all, pinning down whether mobile phones—or the many antenna towers that relay their calls via radiofrequency (RF) signals—actually cause cancer or other health problems has been a notoriously tricky scientific endeavor. Studies investigating their risks have often been ambiguous and confusing, partly because cell phone technologies are still relatively new, and partly because many cancers take years to develop. Phones’ long-term impact on children, whose brains absorb more RF radiation than those of adults, also remains unclear.

For Herberman, some early study results are troublingenough to warrant caution: “Despite the lack of consistency in outcomes in all the cell phone publications, there are several well-designed studies that suggest that long-term (ten years or more) use of wireless phone devices is associated with a significant increase in risk for glioblastoma (glioma), a very aggressive and fatal brain tumor, and acoustic neuroma, a benign tumor of the auditory nerve that is responsible for our hearing,” he testified.

Yet despite worries about their long-term effects, mobile phones are popular because they offer clear-cut short-term health and safety benefits: They can be a lifesaver in emergency situations, and help parents keep tabs on their kids’ whereabouts from a distance. According to the Wireless Association trade group, there are close to 270 million subscribers in the United States—that’s out of about 300 million Americans.

Cell phone companies have been all too eager to stress their products’ harmlessness. Cell phones emit “non-ionizing radiation,” similar to the kind produced by microwave ovens and cordless phones. (X-rays, on the other hand, are a form of ionizing radiation.) These items may heat up when used, but this form of electromagnetic radiation has long been considered unable to change the DNA of an organism—and DNA breakdown is a possible precursor to cancer.

But cell phones’ explosion in the marketplace, and users’ tendency to wear them close to the body and hold them repeatedly to the same ear, have led scientists to take a second look. The results of international studies have been mixed. Probably the most thorough research so far is the thirteen-country Interphone study overseen by the World Health Organization, which received some funding from the cell phone industry. In some cases, as in the Nordic countries and Britain, cell phone subscribers who used the devices for ten years or more reported higher rates of glioma brain tumors on the side of the head on which they most often used their phones. But scientists relied on people’s recollection of which ear they used for phone conversations and how often they talked on the phone, and human recollection is not always reliable.

On the other end of the spectrum, Germany found no link at all between cell phone use and cancer. Both Israel and Japan, which have large populations of heavy cell phone users, urged more research. The Israeli study suggested there may be an association between heavy mobile phone use and the risk of salivary gland tumors but called for further study. Japanese researchers also said they needed a larger sample size to confirm any link between cell phone use and cancerous tumors.

In 2008 Swedish oncologist Dr. Lennart Hardell, who was one of the first to study the health risks of cordless and mobile phones, tried to clarify these mixed results by doing a detailed analysis of the Interphone data, as well as data from several other contemporary studies. Because some studies included data on people who used cell phones infrequently, or who had not used them for many years, Hardell suspected that their cancer risk findings
were too low. When Hardell focused on only the studies that evaluated decade-long exposure, he noticed that all of them showed an increased risk of glioma on the side of the head used for telephone calls.

Other concerns have been raised about how cell phones affect the ambient environment in neighborhoods where antenna towers—also known as base stations—are located. To offer the most affordable and complete coverage, cell phone carriers are placing these base stations nearly everywhere: in schools, churches, apartment complexes and businesses, subjecting nearby residents to whole-body radiofrequency exposure. In some cases, people living or working near these structures have complained of health problems like insomnia, headaches, and dizziness;
studies have attempted to link antenna towers with everything from memory problems to heightened body temperatures, but with little consensus.

Ultimately, it’s even harder for researchers to assess the health risks of cell towers than of the phones themselves. For one thing, holding a cell phone close to the body has more impact than standing near a cell tower. Additionally, because symptoms like headaches are so general and hard to pin to one cause, it’s difficult to prove correlation. So far, authorities like the World Health Organization have concluded that “there is no convincing scientific evidence that the weak RF signals from base stations and wireless networks cause adverse health effects.”

Nevertheless, concerned people like environmental consultant Cindy Sage, owner of the Montecito-based firm Sage Associates, think that further federally funded studies are needed. “Although scientific studies as yet have not been able to confirm a cause-and-effect relationship, these complaints are widespread and the cause of significant public concern in some countries where wireless technologies are fairly mature and widely distributed,” Sage wrote in a report presented to the BioInitiative Working Group, an independent group of international scientists, researchers, and public health policy professionals in the area of electromagnetic fields. “For example, the roll-out of the new third-generation wireless phones and related community-wide antenna RF emissions in the Netherlands caused almost immediate public complaints of illness.” (Sage is equally leery of the phones themselves: “I have one for emergencies, but I don’t use it,” she says. “I think this is an experiment on the human race I don’t want to participate in.”)

The ambiguities surrounding the health effects of base stations bring the debate to a local level. Take the High Street area of Point Richmond, where a T-Mobile antenna installation has been the focus of litigation, neighborhood infighting, and reports of medical problems.

At first glance, the rooftop base station is easy to miss despite its size and breadth of coverage. The antennas
are enclosed in an inoffensive orange box, which up close has no lid and measures six feet tall and seven and a half feet wide. Inside the enclosure are six thick pipes—the antennas—with smaller, more intricate boxes attached to them. According to Rod De La Rosa, senior manager of external affairs at T-Mobile, a typical installation can handle a hundred voice and data users simultaneously. “Our increasingly mobile society requires an increasing number of mobile services,” he says. “People rely on their mobile phones for much more than just talking—they listen to music, send and receive emails and text messages, swap photos, and even contact emergency services.”

But despite the subtlety of the orange box, some neighbors say its effects have been all too apparent. Freelance writer Robin Carpenter and her husband Andrew Olmsted own a three-story Victorian house on High Street. In 2007, a few months after the base station was installed on an apartment complex fifty feet from their bedroom window, the two say they began to feel ill. “I had nosebleeds and skin rashes,” says Carpenter. “The visual disturbances and blinding headaches were the worst. I wasn’t sleeping and was feeling depressed.”

Eventually Carpenter and Olmsted say the toll on their health became too much. They relocated to west Marin, paying rent there and the mortgage on their Richmond house. In west Marin, where, she says, “there is no cell phone reception,” Carpenter started sleeping through the night again. The nosebleeds, rashes, and other symptoms subsided. Then she returned to Point Richmond to check on the house. “When we came back, within a week, the headaches were coming back,” she says.

Another High Street resident who asked not to be named for fear it would interfere with pending litigation
said that within two weeks of the installation she started having headaches, muscle aches, and nosebleeds. She had to rearrange her furniture and move her home office away from the antennas. She wants to move but has run into difficulty selling her home. “The subject of moving has been a discussion for a year,” she says. “But we are financially trapped. Also, we have had real estate agents [make] it clear that the cell tower is a big issue and must be disclosed and would have a negative impact on the sale price of the house.”

The base station garnered plenty of neighborhood opposition before it was installed at 260 Water Street, says the building’s manager Anthony Tripp. Tripp, along with his wife Sandy, lives in the apartment directly beneath the antennas. “I couldn’t find one person [who favored the installation], other than our landlord and his wife,” Tripp says. “There wasn’t anyone. The general reaction was quite negative. It [the base station] magically appeared there without anyone’s foreknowledge.” Tripp says he and his wife have not experienced any health symptoms related to the antennas, but they are concerned about possible long-term effects and the lack of community input regarding
its presence.

Disgruntled neighbors circulated rumors, including one that the apartment building’s owners, Gerald and Janice Feagley, were receiving $25,000 a month for renting installation space to T-Mobile. (The couple’s attorney, Kathleen McKinley, says that figure is more like $2,000 a month.) On June 2, 2008, Carpenter and Olmsted, along with ten other named residents and their organization, Richmond Residents for Responsible Antenna Placement and Planning (www.rap4richmond.org), filed a lawsuit against T-Mobile, the city of Richmond, and the Feagleys. The plaintiffs accused the city of failing to provide public notice and conduct public environmental reviews of the antennas, violating residents’ due process rights. They also claimed that T-Mobile’s tower “generates far more power—and poses a correspondingly greater threat to public health and safety—than most other cell towers.”

But federal law makes it hard for neighbors to protest. The monumental Telecommunications Act of 1996, passed during the Clinton administration to promote competition in the industry, prohibits residents from blocking the installation of cell phone antennas on public or owner-approved land, including schools, churches, and apartment complexes, for health reasons. Legally, residents can block the installations if they can prove electromagnetic fields exceed limits imposed by the Federal Communications Commission or the structures violate local zoning ordinances, but they cannot fight the cell phone service providers for fear their products
will give them cancer.

T-Mobile says it is very cautious about adhering to federal limits. “Typically we have an independent third party engineer check our equipment against prevailing standards with the FCC,” says De La Rosa. “Typically our exposure is less than one percent of the maximum exposure allowed by the FCC.” Kathleen McKinley, the Feagleys’ attorney, says the Water Street installation meets federal exposure and health standards. Those who feel the government’s guidelines are too relaxed “need to take the issue up with the federal government rather than attack private individuals that haven’t done anything illegal,” she says.

The local court system agreed with her: on September 10, 2008, the residents’ lawsuit was dismissed by Judge Barbara Zuniga of the Contra Costa County court system on the grounds that she had no jurisdiction over a federal issue like the Telecommunications Act. She declined to hear the case again in November after Carpenter’s
attorney filed a motion for reconsideration.

The failed lawsuit has left the neighborhood swirling with bad feelings. The Tripps say people have moved out of a nearby apartment complex as well as refused to move into the neighborhood because of the installation. Still, the Tripps are offended at the vitriol directed at the Feagleys. “The other people were too aggressive,” Sandy Tripp says of their most vocal neighbors. “They were spreading nasty rumors. They weren’t going about it the right way.”
For their part, Carpenter and Olmsted feel they were personally attacked for speaking out against the antenna installation. “‘You are the ones that devalue the property by speaking up!’” she recalled neighbors saying. “It’s an interesting mindset.”

Now the couple is mulling the next move in light of dwindling alternatives and resources. They are trying to negotiate with their mortgage lender to see if they can freeze their house payments—or even receive help with legal bills—until the dispute over the antenna is resolved. The other option is a short sell. “We will probably end up losing our home and not have property in Richmond,” Carpenter tearfully says. “But we are fighting this battle for Richmond. We feel this is important. If we lose our house, we know we helped others keep theirs safe.”

The couple, along with Richmond city councilmembers and engineers, has also drafted a 27-page ordinance they hope will become a model for cities and towns across the country. In it, the group asks that future
antennas be placed on sites at least 1,000 feet from “residential uses, schools, daycare centers, hospitals, and mixed-use areas.” It stipulates how the equipment is to be installed and calls for regular radiofrequency readings by an independent contractor paid for by the wireless service provider. (If approved, the ordinance could be finalized this spring.)

One more consolation prize: for their work with RAP, Carpenter and Olmsted received a citation for public service from Richmond Mayor Gayle McLaughlin on January 27. “We’ve been getting calls from around the country,” about antenna issues, Carpenter says. “We try to be a good resource so people don’t have to spend as much time as we did trying to figure this out.”

Given the confusing studies and the fact that cell phones are a part of modern life, what is a concerned person to do? One could stop using cell phones—but almost no one interviewed for this article was willing to do it. After all, cell phones can be awfully handy if you’re ever sick, hurt, or lost. One local mom, Melinda Reilly of Orinda, reacted cautiously to Dr. Herberman’s warning about children’s cancer risk. “I got myself, my husband, and daughter ear buds,” she said. She’s relieved that her seventeen-year-old daughter uses the phone largely for text messaging, which according to Herberman, is the safer way to go.

But others say cell phones are a small risk in an otherwise risky world. Elaine Lindelef, a partner at a computer-consulting firm in Mendocino County, says she is not worried about her family’s cell phone use. “If you walk down a busy street every day and breathe in the fumes of all the cars, that is more of a carcinogenic exposure than talking on the phone,” she figures.

McKinley, the Feagleys’ lawyer, expressed a similar sentiment about the towers themselves: “People are exposed to all sorts of chemicals short-term and long-term. Living near 580 and the bridge and exposure to automobile exhaust is probably more damaging to them than living near a cell antenna.” As T-Mobile’s De La Rosa points out, even if worried people just keep a cell phone on hand for emergencies, it still validates the need for antennas everywhere. “People expect coverage where they live, work, and play, and to be able to provide that level of coverage, these antenna facilities are necessary,” he says.

For those looking to reduce their electromagnetic radiation risk, Herberman recommends not carrying the cell phone on the body, unless its keypad is positioned towards you so the phone’s electromagnetic fields “move away from you rather than through you.” He also recommends using speakerphone or a wireless headset to avoid placing the phone on your ear. If you must put the phone to your head, make sure to switch ears regularly and keep the conversation as short as possible. And try to avoid using the phone when there is bad reception such as in a moving train or car, Herberman urges. While it’s still too early to know for sure how cell phones might impact human health, anyone who’s worried may want to consider this a bug in their ear.

Which is why marine scientists Katie Harrold and Aroon Melwani are standing waist-deep in the bay near Arrowhead Marsh, dragging a ridiculously awkward twenty-foot-wide seine net through the wetland in pursuit of tiny, bottom-of-the-food-chain fish. Frigid bay water laps at their rubber waders as they shuffle forward by inches to draw in the net. The bay-bottom mud is several inches deep, gooey like custard, clingy like glue, and stinky like the rotten cesspool of decay that it is. There is grumbling about the cold, and envious muttering about another scientist on the project who hurt his back and can’t participate in net-dragging excursions.

Once they’ve walked the net closed, Melwani and Harrold haul it out of the water and over to the bank, where both plop down in inch-deep muck and start unfolding the twine. At the bottom is their quarry, a giant blob of mud and inch-long flopping things, some of which are the crucial “biosentinel” fish they need to tell them how much mercury has entered the food chain in this corner of the bay. Using their bare fingers, Melwani and Harrold start grabbing fish, storing the useful ones in Ziploc bags and chucking the rest back into the water. Of course, there are not enough fish in the first round for all the testing they want to do, so they’ll have to drag the net another two or three times, at which point Harrold looks up at me, her face and glasses splattered, her hands dripping brown, and says, “So, you want to take a turn with the net?”

About a year ago, the US Environmental Protection Agency approved an updated plan for water quality objectives
in San Francisco Bay. One of the plan’s conclusions: It’s going to take time to get mercury levels in sediment where we want them, something on the order of 125 years. San Francisco Bay Water Board engineer Richard Looker presented this model to a group of scientists at a meeting in October, titling his PowerPoint slide “@@@!!! This is going to take a long time!”

The slide got an appreciative laugh from the scientists, although there are plenty of reasons to think that maybe it won’t be quite that hard. (“That 125 years is a really, really rough estimate,” Looker told me later. “People had wanted to know, and that was the best I could do.”) Ridding the bay of mercury won’t be easy, though. “There’s just a lot of mercury in the system,” Looker says. “The only way you lose mercury is it gets buried, it goes out the Golden Gate, or it evaporates. It doesn’t just degrade like a chemical, it has to be physically removed.” Even worse, the question of how mercury ends up in fish—and where it comes from in the first place—is still murky as bay mud.

These are the basics: Mercury gets into the environment in a number of different ways, from natural sources like volcanoes to urban sources like coal-fired power plants or stormwater runoff. In Northern California, mercury was historically used in gold mining, and many of the watersheds in the Sierra and Delta show high levels of mercury from California’s Gold Rush days. Most of the mercury used in gold mining came from mines in the New Almaden area of San Jose, where for decades it has washed down the Guadalupe River and into the southern part of the San Francisco Bay, which still has the highest mercury levels of any part of the bay.

But all this stuff in the air and water is regular ol’ mercury, and one of the odd parts of the puzzle is that regular ol’ mercury isn’t harmful to people or wildlife when it’s in the water. The damaging stuff, the kind that gets into the food chain, is a specific form of mercury called methylmercury. A confounding thing is that there isn’t necessarily a consistent relationship between the amount of mercury in the water, air, and sediment, and the amount of methylmercury in the food chain in that area. It takes a certain kind of bacteria to convert mercury into methylmercury (a process called methylation), and those bacteria are found in areas with lots of vegetation and living organisms. Which is confounding thing number two: In Northern California’s aquatic environments, those areas tend to be wetlands.

Ironically, these areas, which environmentalists have long struggled to save, can create and amplify methylmercury;
in some cases restoring wetlands may resolve one eco-hazard while accidentally worsening another. Even stranger, some areas methylate more than others, which has led to delays and confusion about whether to attempt restorations.

This nasty surprise became known in the mid-1990s, just as scientists and managers in the Bay Area were starting
to map out the West Coast’s largest wetland restoration project. The bay has lost eighty percent of its historic tidal wetlands, and getting them back is a huge priority for scientists and environmentalists. Wetlands are environmentally imperative for a huge variety of reasons: They sequester carbon, filter pollutants from the water, provide crucial habitat for birds and fish, control sediment, and are an important buffer against sea level rise.

The ambitious plan to have 100,000 acres of tidal wetlands ringing the San Francisco Bay by 2030—an almost unequivocally beneficial project—has had to confront the reality that no amount of restoration can return the bay to what it was. The omnipresent mercury that lurks in the environment, waiting to be methylated by restored wetlands, is one reminder that our attempts at restoration could just be making other problems worse.

“Wetlands are in virtually every respect a good thing, in terms of the benefits they provide to the environment and society,” Looker says. “It kills me that there’s a blemish on the reputation of wetlands. But they’re just doing what they do, and mercury methylation is a consequence.” If there was a king among Northern California’s mercury-
in-the-food-chain scientists, it might be Darell Slotton. A research ecologist at UC Davis, Slotton has defined the scope of the mercury problem in the bay and Delta and pioneered a key methodology for studying it. Starting with research in gold-mining-legacy Sierra watersheds, Slotton has spent years identifying the right kinds of small critters, called biosentinels, to study methylmercury patterns in the food chain.

For the most part, it’s useful to focus on animals that have very well-defined, local home areas (so you can identify where the mercury enters the system), wide distribution (so you can compare areas), short life spans (so you can better identify when the mercury enters the system), and regular habits (so you can test seasonally to see if methylmercury is more of a problem at certain times of year). Slotton works mostly with small fish, particularly certain smelts and Mississippi silversides.

After identifying rough patterns of methylmercury in the Sierra and Coast Range in the 1990s, Slotton and other
researchers funded by the CALFED Bay-Delta Program program turned their attention to untangling the wetland methylation scene. The Delta has had major restoration projects along its main channels, and as he set out Slotton expected to find higher levels of methylmercury in animals around those projects.

Yet when the results came back, the highest levels of methylmercury were actually in the periphery of the Delta. The restoration projects in the central and south Delta and Napa-Sonoma Marsh had relatively low levels. “It’s kind of the opposite of what we expected to find,” Slotton says. “There are certain kinds of wetlands that disproportionately
pump out methylmercury in certain conditions. But it looks like a lot of what’s out there being restored is fortuitously not a problem area.”

In some ways, that was great news. But because nobody quite understood why areas could behave so differently,
this mixed result made life very complicated for people who were trying to bring back the wetlands. A typical conversation between a scientist and a restoration manager around the turn of the century might have gone something like this:
Scientist: Not all restored wetlands amplify methylmercury.
Restoration Manager: Great!
Scientist: But some do.
Manager: Ah. Which ones?
Scientist: Uh, no one is quite sure.

So how did the people overseeing this gigantic wetlands restoration project know which areas to rescue?
That was Steve Ritchie’s mercury headache. Ritchie was the guy who, informed of the mercury-wetland connection
in the early 2000s, had to help the US Fish and Wildlife Service decide whether to proceed with wetland restoration projects in the South Bay’s salt ponds. Ritchie already knew that the salt ponds and restored wetlands ringing the area south of the Dumbarton Bridge have some of the highest total mercury concentrations in water and sediment of anywhere in the bay. He didn’t know what effect those new wetlands would have on methylation.
Ritchie convened a scientific working group and asked for a yes/no answer: “‘Should we do this at all?’ People said, ‘Yes, but look for ways to be cautious,’” Ritchie recalls.

“The consensus was that habitat is so much of a limiting factor for species that the risk is worth it.” In other words, they’d chance it for the sake of restoring badly-needed wildlife habitat. Especially risky was the area around the Alviso Slough, at the mouth of the Guadalupe River, where mercury had washed down the river and been trapped in the subsided salt ponds for decades. Ritchie asked a group led by Letitia Grenier at the San Francisco Estuary Institute to take a close look at salt ponds and nearby restored wetlands in the Alviso area, and to predict what might happen if the rest of the salt ponds were restored.

Grenier picked three biosentinels: birds, fish, and flies. Between 2006 and 2008, she and her colleagues collected hundreds of each, stalking through the marsh to collect tiny long-jawed mudsucker fish and brine flies (which are, as Grenier puts it, “sacrificed” for the cause), or jab needles into sparrows (which give blood and then are released). The South Bay hadn’t been studied in this way before, so it took a while to identify the best sentinel species and how to catch them. “The fun thing about all of this is you have to learn how to do it,” Grenier said. “You’re like a hunter-gatherer.”

The results were again encouraging: It appeared that animals in the salt ponds had higher levels of methylmercury
in their blood or tissue than animals in the restored wetlands nearby. Although the results from 2008 aren’t available yet, Grenier’s conclusion at the end of 2007 was that turning those particular salt ponds into wetlands would reduce the amount of mercury in the food chain. Ritchie decided to go ahead with a cautious, and reversible,
restoration plan.

“There’s nothing here that says you shouldn’t move forward, but whatever happens you’ve got to monitor it,” Grenier says. However, she says, it’s imperative to start now. “Given that the loss of our wetlands is happening, and sea level rise is happening, if we’re going to make marshes, we’ve got to start letting them accrete tomorrow, not in five or ten years as we dither about mercury.”

The apparent randomness of which areas are prone to methylation could have led to a great deal of dithering among experts about which areas to restore. Fortunately, over the last several years Slotton and others have isolated a pattern that appears to explain why some wetlands amplify mercury concentrations and others don’t. They started their research by getting better seasonal data, increasing the number of sites where they were collecting fish several times a year from three to 26. They noticed that their data showed huge seasonal spikes in mercury at some sites.
They started working backward, asking, “Well, what happened before this spike?” Slotton says. His answer: “Oh, the San Joaquin river jumped its banks and flooded a bunch of farmland. Six weeks later, we see mercury spiking in the little fish fifty miles downstream. You can link just about every one of the mercury spike events we’ve identified
to this issue of occasional flooding.”

Slotton says that there’s basic chemistry at work in the wet-and-dry cycles: When sediments containing mercury dry out, it changes the way the mercury is bound to the sediment, so that in the next flood it’s much more readily
converted into toxic methylmercury. In other words, seasonally flooded wetlands and floodplains seemed to be generating the most methylmercury.

In 2006 and 2007, Slotton added sites where he could test that hypothesis, and the two-year span of the project turned out to be perfect: In 2006 the region recorded historically high rainfall and severe flooding, and the following year there was a drought. The difference between the fish downstream of those areas during those two years was dramatic.

In July of 2006, at some sites downstream of major seasonal flooding, Slotton was capturing two-to-three-inch fish with mercury concentrations “that would be of concern in a thousand-pound swordfish,” he says. A year later, in the drought period, he captured the same kind of fish in the same place and found a tenfold decrease. “That was it,” Slotton says. “This is the most compelling evidence we’ve had to date.” Regardless of where the marsh is located—scientists have looked at similar data from Napa Marsh and sites in the South Bay—it now seems clear that episodic flooding plays a major role in creating new pulses of methylmercury, and moving them into the food chain.
Slotton’s finding was exciting for managers in the Delta region, where much of the wetland is in so-called “managed marshes”—diked-off areas where the flow of water in and out is controlled by private hunting clubs to make the habitat more friendly for migratory birds, particularly ducks. The results of the research suggest that the clubs could change the way they move water around, even slightly, and have a big effect on methylmercury concentrations. (Not that this would be easy—historically, the hunting clubs, scientists, and environmentalists have not necessarily communicated well with each other.)

But that’s the Delta. In the San Francisco Bay, where most of the marshes slated for restoration are tidal—not diked off, and not human-controlled—the question of where the mercury actually gets into the fish and birds of the bay is still a mystery. Isolating those sources would be the first key to controlling the problem. The second key would be figuring out which sources are more likely to affect wildlife. “If we can answer that second question, that gives us a tool to prioritize our actions,” Looker says. “If we find that industrial mercury is most likely to enter the food web based on its chemical form and where it is discharged, that may give us reason to have additional controls on industrial projects.”

If scientists can figure out what’s causing the mercury to get into the food web, and identify the methylation
hotspots, they might be able to reduce the bay’s level of harmful methylmercury even if its total mercury concentration remains high. That’s why Slotton and Ben Greenfield, a scientist at the San Francisco Estuary Institute, are currently conducting a huge survey of small fish from more than 100 sites around the San Francisco Bay, designed to give even more exact answers about how and where mercury gets into fish. And that’s why Katie Harrold and Aroon Melwani—and I, apparently—are standing in the bay collecting fish.

These topsmelt and gobies may hold clues that will help Greenfield and Slotton find a clear pattern for how methylmercury enters the bay. “What would be really useful is if we suddenly found that all the mercury in the bay was coming from one pipe, and we could just close that one pipe and all our problems would be solved,” Greenfield says, although it probably won’t be that easy. “The more likely outcome is it’s going to be a little bit of this and a little bit of that. We’re trying to figure out what is the this and that.” When they do, it may mean much greater control over the mercury side effects of wetland restoration projects, which is why collecting those small fish seems so imperative.

I accept Harrold’s offer of a turn at the net, don chest waders and rubber boots, and wade out into the water. Negotiating a heavy net full of mud and fish (and one Tecate can) while standing in bay mud that’s up to your shins is no easy task. As Melwani walks toward me to close up the net, one of my boots goes calf-deep into the mud. I yank, and my balance goes backward, but my foot doesn’t move. Then I’m teetering, taking my hand off the pole that holds up the net, wobbling. Finally, there’s nothing else to do but subside quietly backward, in my most dignified manner, into the muddy shallows.

There is a lovely squelching sound as I land on my back, and my hand, propped out for balance, sinks in up to the wrist. Melwani looks at me sympathetically, continuing to hang onto his end of the net; he is much more practiced at this than I am. “Sometimes,” he says, with his very best kindergarten-teacher voice, “we all have to sit down.” As I sit there in the mud, thinking about spending the next three days in a hot shower, I’m reminded again that with mercury science, nothing comes easy.

The first newsletter on health and environment written for the general public, Rachel’s now has a circulation between ten and eleven thousand readers. Montague defines his audience as grassroots activists, but he notes that about a hundred EPA officials read it, and dozens of other subscribers have “dot gov” email addresses. Government-
funded publications do a good job of covering relevant material, Montague says, but non-specialists find them a hard slog. Rachel’s mission is translating technical material for a lay audience, thereby educating local communities on human health and environmental justice issues. I asked Montague how Rachel’s got its start.

PETER MONTAGUE: In 1978 Love Canal was discovered by Lois Gibbs because her children weresick and there was this black crud oozing into her basement, and it was oozing into the playground at her kids’ school. So she started knocking on doors in her neighborhood and asking ‘Is there any illness in your family?’ And she made a little map of it and showed that there were sick kids all around Love Canal. I had been doing anti-nuclear work out in New Mexico, where I lived and was on the faculty at the University of New Mexico. I was aware of the hazards of radiation but didn’t know very much about chemicals. What Lois revealed—and the media immediately picked up—was that there were hundreds of thousands of these places where chemicals had been dumped into rivers or into the soil. It soon became clear that every landfill in the country was some kind of toxic disaster. A citizens’ movement, now known as the toxics movement, arose because people saw what Lois had done and they were concerned about their kids. By 1985 there were at least seven or eight thousand local groups working on toxic chemicals. But there was a huge absence of technical information. People would hear of benzene or dioxin, and they
had no clue what that was. So I started a dial-up database called the Hazardous Substance Databank that you could dial into if you had a computer with a modem. This was before the Internet. In those days there were things called bulletin boards that you could use to communicate. I plugged into that community and put this database online.
As I was doing the research to keep that up to date I realized I could extract stuff and send it out on paper. So I started Rachel’s News as a single sheet of paper printed on both sides. The first issue came out in 1986. Nobody could remember the name of the hazardous substance databank, so I renamed it the Remote Access Chemical Hazards Electronic Library. It was the RACHEL database.

When I was in New Mexico, and even before that, I had become convinced from knowing Ralph Nader and Barry Commoner that citizen action is the only way that anything gets done in this country. If citizens are not on the case, government is not going to start fixing problems. They’re getting tremendous pressure from industry day in, day out, to sit on their butts. And they’d rather do that than anything else because it doesn’t cost them anything, and it doesn’t get them in trouble. As soon as they pick on a problem they’re liable to get in trouble, so they don’t want to do that. But citizens have to have some facts to get government to do anything. My newsletter was aimed at giving people facts that they could use to fight City Hall.

BEN TERRALL: Have your goals changed?
My goals have not changed. But the people who fund toxics activism changed their minds. They decided
they didn’t want to support citizen activism. It took too long, and you couldn’t point to huge successes… they decided they wanted to fund policy work.

The toxics movement has now turned into a policy-debating society. There are lots of activists out there fighting dumps, fighting incinerators, and nuclear power plants, and nuclear waste dumps, and all kinds of stuff, but the infrastructure to support them as a movement is gone. Back in the early days Lois Gibbs had seven regional
organizers who would come to your town, and they would help you beat up the mayor or write a press release and contact the press or do whatever it took… hold a demonstration, whatever you needed to do. They’d help you find a local scientist.

They were what Lois Gibbs called “larger than locals,” organizations that would try to have an overview of what was going on in the state. They would make their presence known to grassroots activists and they would try to be the glue that held the movement together by providing knowledge and awareness of what other people were doing.

As the global economy gets more and more interconnected, do you think that regulation of toxics can be standardized at an international level?
Mark Schapiro’s recent book Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What’s at Stake for American Power argues that due to its inadequate regulation of pollutants, the US is beginning to look like a backward country compared to other industrialized nations. Shapiro’s book shows how Japan and Europe provide financial and legal incentives to keep their citizens safer from contamination. There is much more consciousness about regulation in those countries.

Europeans, who seem less beholden to money than we are, have passed regulation that’s pretty far-reaching. If you want to sell products in Europe you need to give information about your product. If Monsanto wants to market products in Europe, they have to come up with data backing up its claims. The Europeans are way ahead of us and are dragging us into the modern world kicking and screaming. In terms of regulation here in the US, we’re not going to be able to effectively regulate anything, whether chemicals or use of land in Western states, until there’s effective campaign finance reform. It’s a reality that people in the environmental movement don’t want to grapple with. They’re happy to devise new policies, even though in private they may acknowledge that the current system won’t enforce those policies.

How do you see individual human health connected to the overall health of the planet?
They’re inextricably connected. The Earth is the only place in the universe conducive to human life as far as we know. By putting fluorocarbons in the atmosphere we almost made the planet uninhabitable. CFCs almost made the surface of the planet uninhabitable. We should have learned from that, but we didn’t. We’re playing with fire, risking making our only home inhospitable. Cancer, autism, attention deficits, nervous system disorders, immune system disorders are all warning signs. Evolutionarily we grew up as a species in a certain chemical environment, and now we’re changing it. The increase in human disease conditions is surely evidence of that.

What do you think is the greatest challenge to creating a healthier world?
I think the greatest challenge to creating a healthier world is our firm belief that an economy has to grow year after year or it’s a failed economy. We have exceeded the capacity of the Earth to absorb the consequences of our economic activities, and as a consequence we are destroying our only home. Our footprint is already so large that we have exceeded the Earth’s capacity to absorb the byproducts of our economy. We have got to learn to live without economic growth. We need what’s called a steady state economy where we are merely replacing the stuff that’s wearing out rather than creating new stuff.

You’re thinking of Herman Daley’s [former World Bank economist, now a critic of the “Washington Consensus” status quo] model?
Exactly. Those ideas seem entirely foreign right now. But they’re not foreign to Gus Speth, who wrote the important recent book The Bridge at the Edge of the World. This is the first time that a thinker who you would have to call mainstream has injected these very radical prescriptions into the public discussion of what needs to happen. Capitalism is a system that either grows or collapses. That’s just the way it is. There’s no such thing as a steady state in capitalism. You’re either growing at a healthy clip, like seven percent per year, or you’re collapsing into a recession or a depression. A recession is defined as the absence of growth for two consecutive quarters. So you can either have a healthy economy that’s destroying the planet, or you can have a collapsing economy that may be taking some of the pressure off the planet but is putting thousands of, or tens of thousands of, people out of work and not providing the human benefits that an economy is supposed to provide. But most people in the mainstream would rather destroy the planet than contemplate changing capitalism.

It’s surprising that people are saying that by 2010 or 2011 things will be back on track, when what they mean by that is that we’ll be back to growing at our old rate. As if peak oil wasn’t a real problem, or as if the destruction of the oceans was not accelerating, or as if global warming was not happening, or as if chemical contamination of the entire planet was not worsening year after year. It’s like there’s this huge disconnect between what people see as the economic problem and the really fundamental problems that are simultaneously emerging in the biological platform upon which the economy rests. The Wall Street folks seem like they’re deaf, dumb, and blind to the fact that the biological platform on which the human economy rests is being trashed every bit as bad as the human economy is being trashed. Or maybe the loss of the biosphere is even accelerating more rapidly than the destruction of the human economy. But they think that the economy is somehow floating in the atmosphere, disconnected from the biological systems that produce everything we need.

We either explicitly or implicitly make most of our decisions on cost-benefit analysis. We weigh the costs of doing something and the benefits of doing something. And if the benefits either directly outweigh the costs, or if we just don’t know—we don’t have enough information—we assume, we give the benefit of the doubt to economic activity, that it will produce benefits that are greater than the costs. The assumption underlying that system is that the costs can grow without limit.

So it doesn’t factor in toxins in the environment, for instance.
It doesn’t factor in all the cumulative costs of cutting down forests and warming up the atmosphere
and dumping toxins into the environment and fishing all the fish out of the oceans and converting all the forests into farmland and then spreading pesticides and fertilizer on that farmland—all of those decisions to do those things are justified in the sense that the benefits to humans are very large and the costs are presumably smaller than the benefits. But those cumulative costs are now catching up with us.

In the context of protecting the biosphere, the precautionary principle says we must assume at this point that whatever we are about to do is going to be harmful, unless we can show that it won’t be harmful. And if you can show that it won’t be harmful, then by all means, let’s do it. But until that time, it’s probably not a good idea. So it shifts the burden of proof onto the proponents of some new change that would significantly affect the biosphere.
The second thing is you have to look for the least harmful way to achieve it. So it puts a permanent obligation on economic enterprises to continually look for the least harmful way of doing business and to phase out old ways as soon as a new better way becomes available.

A third change that a precautionary principle would entail would be that regulatory officials, like the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, will often say explicitly—she said this when she was the head of the EPA in New Jersey—my job is to balance between environmental protection and the economy… I want to protect the environment but I’m not going to do it in a way that harms the economy. Well, in a world in which our only home is being destroyed and the rate of destruction is accelerating, that is a completely wrong picture of the role of government. The role of government is to protect the biosphere.

New evidence appears every day that we are ruining our only home. Government must stop that, that is government’s duty, to make it possible for all of us to survive. And if government doesn’t do that, then government has failed and needs to be replaced.

Yet at a roundup meeting held in Mendocino County’s Laytonville in July, fire officials seemed almost ebullient, explaining that the fires had swept through grasses and scrub but damaged few large trees. In fact, said the officials, you couldn’t ask for better fires; decades’-worth of overgrowth burned in days. The end result sounds a lot like what Jensen and McPherson advocate in Living with Fire. Don’t fight wildfires; instead let them burn out scrub, dead wood, and undergrowth, saving older trees and returning fire-prone habitat to what it is meant to be.

The two write that during the past decades of fire suppression, we have aimed to defeat fire, not live with it. Humans have a healthy fear of fire, and elected officials and fire marshals find it popular—or mandatory—to adopt a zero-tolerance attitude towards blazes on wildlands and parks. Rather than accepting the reality of living in the West, where fires have burned for millennia and vegetation and animals have adapted to fire’s successive and certain return, we allow property owners to build in wildlands and on the borders of national and state parks and then assume the obligation of protecting that private property at astounding costs, including the lives of firefighters.

Living with Fire lays out the downside of fire prevention policies. The two authors argue that firefighters’ lives must come first, not protection of private property. Fifteen lives were lost fighting the lightning fires, and the fight cost well over $210 million. Much of that money was spent protecting private homes and businesses. That figure doesn’t include the work that remained to clean up the effort of fighting the fires. Fighting fires has a drastic impact on the land, far more than the effects of periodic fires sweeping through. Diesel spills and chemical bombardment leave contamination behind, while bulldozing roads and firebreaks creates erosion and sediment in creeks and rivers.

McPherson and Jensen favor a more sensible approach, especially in these years of drought and economic stress—learn to live with periodic fires. Remodel your house to make it as nonflammable as possible, and follow the hundred-foot thinning rules, removing most trees and vegetation over four feet tall within 35 feet of your home. In the outer 65 feet, you eliminate grass, weeds, and dead wood, replacing it with natives and drought-tolerant species. The inner circle is irrigated, creating succulent, hard-to-burn growth, while the outer 65 feet is mostly dry, at least after the natives get established.

Guy McPherson is professor of natural resources and ecology at the University of Arizona. Sara Jensen (recently married, now Sara O’Brien) works as a private lands conservation associate for Defenders of Wildlife. I interviewed her at her home in Portland, Oregon.

How did you become interested in fire and fire management?
I wrote my MA thesis at the University of Arizona on similar material. One chapter is adapted from my thesis. Guy McPherson was my master’s advisor, and he had written material, some too political for him to publish. Guy suggested we write a book together, but it didn’t fit together as easily as we thought it would. I rewrote it with Guy’s help.

Guy likes to lead with the political side. We toned it down a little bit. To have the science taken seriously we had to make sure we weren’t being unnecessarily idealistic in the writing. It’s easy to make enemies with this topic.

What would you do if you could institute three policy changes?
I would want to see a huge national campaign on thinning brush and small trees around your house and a call to shelter in place during fires. You reduce the flammability of your home by having a nonflammable roof, using appropriate building materials, not keeping your woodpile or propane tank next to your house. And you clear the area around your house. As long as houses are more flammable than forests, we’re not going to make advances in dealing with forest fires.

Then we need a broader campaign to educate people about fire. We’ve come a long way in the past few years, but we need to do more to help people develop a tolerance for fire. And I’d like to see them leave the wilderness and roadless areas alone. I have more sympathy for the thinning argument living in Oregon than I did when I was in Arizona. But I still think thinning is not a landscape-scale solution. We’re not going to thin the eastern side of Oregon and reintroduce fire. In the vast majority of American landscapes on public land, you’re going to have to reintroduce fire. The cost of fighting fires and the damage from fighting them is just too great to bear. You’d want to see those areas treated with fire or more or less left alone.

Guy and I and another colleague wrote an article about the environmental impacts of fire suppression. Once you start thinking about it, it’s overwhelming—scooping water out of wetlands, using diesel around creeks and rivers, road cuts.

If I’m going to be an idealist, I think we need a new governance structure to deal with long-term problems. Fire suppression seems to work on the same time scale as elections and budgets. We need a structure that deals with long-term planning and solutions. All agencies struggle with this problem. They work on a budget year, and you’ve gotta spend the money or not. It’s really constraining in terms of reintroducing fire. It’s crazy to spend all this money to put fires out.

I work almost exclusively on climate change now, and a lot of the problems and solutions are the same: trying to figure out how to make natural systems and social systems interact without colliding. The sticking points are the same.

Environmentalists are often charged with bringing frivolous lawsuits to prevent clearing out underbrush.
It’s hard to judge if that’s been the case. I work for an environmental group now, and Defenders of Wildlife has been pro-thinning in dry forests. There are some appropriate places for thinning. But I appreciate the fear: the common attitude is that if you give them an inch they’ll take a mile. And often that’s been true. I can understand the tendency to say we’re going to draw a line in the sand.

Who benefits from the Healthy Forests initiative? [The Healthy Forests Restoration Act, passed in December 2003, allows thinning and fuel reduction in federal lands and national parks. Environmentalists feared that smaller trees and brush would be ignored in favor of marketable timber, leaving behind logging roads, slash from timber cuts, and diesel contamination.]
I was kind of baffled by that. I’d be really curious to see who, if anyone, took advantage of those categorical exclusions. I think I know who it was designed to benefit, but the implementation of policy doesn’t always play out. If it was designed to open public forests back up to logging, I don’t know that it succeeded in that either. The timber industry is still struggling with small-diameter wood. So I don’t know if it really made any impact at all.

How do the roadless areas factor into abandoning fire suppression?
I wouldn’t want to limit it to wilderness or roadless areas. We’ve set aside large areas of land with the intention that they’re natural areas for posterity. I don’t see the reason to manage those lands for any private group besides the general public. There’s no reason to manage for oil companies, timber companies, or people who live along the edges and don’t want to deal with fire. What’s funny is that people have become more risk-averse. Or perhaps it’s that people have become less able to judge risk. You can’t get more risky than to build your house on the edge of a stocked forest. People’s attitude towards government agencies is that of a customer. They expect to be protected and given what they want. An attitude towards fire is that the government wouldn’t let me build here if it wasn’t safe. The government has played into that perception with its agencies to ensure food safety and to demand that people wear seatbelts, for instance. Now it seems that people have an inability to assess or cope with risk. It’s not clear to me what caused that.

Can you predict how global warming could impact fires?
Tony Westerling did a study in 2007 that showed a strong correlation between climate change and wildfire in the West. They clearly showed that on top of human mismanagement and fire suppression, there was a clear indication that climate change is making fire more frequent or more intense. What happens is that the fire season becomes longer; there are more fire-prone times. Plus a higher amount of carbon dioxide causes more plant productivity, so the forest is more loaded. Overall at least in Western US, it’s pretty clear that the fire picture is going to get more extreme. Some parts of the country may actually be wetter.

How does wildlife cope with fire?
Some cope very well. There’s an iconic photo of two deer standing in a creek as fire rages around them. A lot of wildlife can flee, a lot can cope. Of course, plants and smaller animals are not mobile. But we know that almost all of these species evolved with fire. Pretty much everything in northern America evolved with some level of fire. From that perspective, the problem is landscape fragmentation. A system that had a number of methods of coping with periodic fires just doesn’t have those options. I’d like to be able to tell people not to worry about wildlife, but realistically speaking, with species that are on the edge anyway, we can’t say that. I wouldn’t want to say that wildlife is not endangered, but you have to take the broad view. You’re not going to do species any favor by changing out their ecosystem. Fire is a key part of nutrient cycling—it defines the edge of sagebrush and juniper ecosystems. Where fire is excluded, now it’s juniper. [Because of fire suppression, juniper has encroached into meadows and clearings.] There’s no easy answer.

The California fires were expensive in terms of money, lives, and energy lost. As the global economy changes and energy prices go out of sight, we may not have the money to fight fires. What can we do to minimize the losses?
We won’t have the money to do this. If you were interviewing Guy, he’d say we won’t have the oil to do this. The answer is to make communities fire-safe and not try to make a whole ecosystem fire-safe. When you look at it like that, it’s hard to believe people do it any other way. It’s politically easy to try to suppress fire on public lands. Fire managers themselves are becoming smarter about dealing with defensible space. They’ve gotta do this in the context of political pressure and an angry public. It’s going to be a message that takes a long time to get out to people.

Have you cleared around your new house?
(Laughs) It’s pretty cleared, meadows in all directions. We have a little bit of shrub around the house. But it brings up an interesting point. Will we as homeowners be able to say, “I’m not going to clear around my house, and I don’t expect you to defend it either?” We need a whole new way of thinking about how to deal with private property and public agencies. For people with small properties, the solution is to have fire-safe houses. I was really encouraged when I was in Arizona. Some districts were starting to come up with cooperative agreements with the Bureau of Land Management and private ranchers on doing joint burns. It actually made it possible to burn large swaths of fire-dependent ecosystems. Once you get all the neighbors on board, the insurers on board, you could burn hundreds of acres, even thousands of acres. That gives me a lot of hope. It’s very encouraging.