In a modern-day version of the Odyssey, Circe is played by Wal-Mart, Odysseus’ sword is represented by sanctions meted out against the retailing giant for its environmental law violations, and doubting Eurylochos is the environmental community.

In April Wal-Mart pledged to donate $35 million over the next ten years in partnership with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF). Called “Acres for America,” Wal-Mart will set aside an acre for conservation for every acre it has developed or will develop under its ten-year plan. Projects based at the Grand Canyon, Catahoula National Wildlife Refuge in Louisiana, and the Downeast Lakes Forestry Partnership in Maine were among those receiving the first awards. Wal-Mart spokesperson Tara Stewart says the offer is retroactive to 1962—the year of Wal-Mart’s founding—and includes “every store we’ve owned, operated, and leased.”

The amount of land to be set aside from the initial round—321,000 acres—more than doubles what Wal-Mart currently occupies or plans to occupy over the next ten years. Stewart says Wal-Mart’s acreage stands at 88,000. The company’s expansion plans call for 5,000 acres a year over the next ten years. This means Wal-Mart plans to put a store, parking lot, or distribution center on more than 138,000 acres by 2015.

While the object of Acres for America is to offset the environmental impact of a corporation such as Wal-Mart, skeptics abound. Jody Jones of the Maine Audubon Society is one. Maine Audubon was among several groups contesting a proposed Wal-Mart store to be built near the Penjajawoc Marsh in the central Maine town of Bangor. Penjajawoc is home to hundreds of bird species, some of which are listed statewide as endangered.

Jones is happy that the Downeast Lakes will be receiving a grant from the Acres for America to purchase 312,000 acres of forestland. But she notes that this land, in the northern part of the state, is less desirable than, say, the area around the marsh. “Habitat and real estate are alike in that it’s all about location, location, location,” Jones observes.

There is other land, including that near Penjajawoc and in the southern part of Maine that Jones says has huge conservation needs—and provides homes for many endangered species—but because it is highly desired by developers, it has a high real estate value. Jones wonders where Wal-Mart’s conservation priorities were when it was trying to get permits for the land near Penjajawoc. “A year and a half ago, there was an unwillingness to work collaboratively,” she recalls. “They fought tooth and nail—tooth and nail—to build what they wanted to build, the way they wanted to build it.”

Might Wal-Mart be using Acres for America as a public relations ploy to soften objections to even more acreage than that currently on its drawing board? “We’re going to offset an acre for an acre,” insists Wal-Mart’s Stewart. “We’re not going to develop more to offset more; that’s the first time I’ve heard that question.”

Even on its face, an acre for an acre is low-balling in the realm of mitigation efforts, says Jones. “It’s not one-to-one,” she says. “It’s a higher ratio because as you remove habitat you have to preserve even more to make up the difference.”

That Wal-Mart is participating in this program is cause for celebration from the perspective of the NFWF’s executive director John Berry. The concept came from one board member who broke down conservation efforts into four facts: Wide areas of land are sought for conservation; a lot of money is needed to get the land; a lot of American companies leave a big environmental footprint; big box stores like Wal-Mart are doing well financially. This set of facts led NFWF to Wal-Mart’s headquarters a year ago. “This is the biggest capital infusion to preserve land in the history of this country, and it’s the largest charitable donation we’ve ever received,” says Berry.

But is it real, or is it well-timed PR? Tracy Sefl of Wal-Mart Watch says Acres for America must be viewed against the backdrop of the giant retailer’s behavior on other environmental issues. A timeline of the past 18 months shows a different side of Wal-Mart and would read something like this:

• January 2004: Wal-Mart agrees to pay $400,000 to settle claims that its Sam’s Club stores flouted the Clean Air Act in 11 states.
• May 2004: Wal-Mart is fined $3.1 million by the US Department of Justice for environmental violations due to excessive stormwater runoff at construction sites in nine states.
• October 2004: Artists and intellectuals in Mexico petition President Vicente Fox over Wal-Mart’s plans to build a store at the foot of the 2,000-year-old pyramids of Teotihuacán.
• November 2004: Wal-Mart is fined $765,000 for violating Florida’s petroleum storage tank laws and blocking state inspectors from reviewing maintenance records at the company’s automotive service centers.
• February 2005: Wal-Mart is hit with $160,000 worth of fines for violating the Clean Water Act at construction sites in Georgia.

“Wal-Mart’s record tells a very different story,” says Sefl. “They have a pattern where they violate the law, wait until they’re caught, pay the fine, and then they move on.”

Another fact that makes Sefl question the effort is that Wal-Mart hasn’t changed its behavior in any way other than partnering with NFWF. In the Odyssey, the skeptical Eurylochos was eventually proven wrong with respect to Circe. Circe did change her behavior and helped Odysseus and his men return to Ithaca.

But this proof took time, as Sefl observes about Wal-Mart. “Look, we’re strong supporters of a corporation’s efforts to become a better citizen, but change of this magnitude doesn’t happen overnight.”

Supporters say the program helps save endangered fish. Environmentalists charge that the program is a water-marketing ploy to pay businesses—with taxpayers’ money—to comply with the Endangered Species Act. Created as a four-year experiment in 2000 by the consortium of state and federal agencies known as CALFED, the Environmental Water Account is supposed to protect fish in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta from being caught and killed in the gargantuan pumps that lift Delta water 244 feet up and into the California Aqueduct. It has not worked out that way.

Fishy figures

“The Environmental Water Account was the most controversial unit of CALFED,” says Michael Jackson, a water law attorney who has represented environmentalists, rural counties, and fishing groups. “Standing alone it is a nightmare of special interest graft.”

Here’s how the program works. When the massive State Water Project pumps near Tracy are killing too many Delta smelt or other threatened fish, the Department of Fish and Game orders the pumps to be slowed down—not stopped—so that the fish can escape their pull. Money—from state and to a much lesser extent federal tax revenues—from the Environmental Water Account is then used to buy water stored somewhere south of the delta.

I asked Jim White, a staff environmental scientist with the California Department of Fish and Game, if there were any studies on the effectiveness of the Environmental Water Account in protecting fish. “We are continuously monitoring the abundance and distribution of a variety of fish species in the estuary,” White says. “By that measure, considering the fact that the abundance of a number of those species has dropped off in the last few years, if that were our only measure, you’d have to wonder about the results.” Translation: since the Environmental Water Account has been in play more fish have been killed in the delta, and if the purpose of the program is to keep the fish alive, it is not working.

Christina Swanson, a staff scientist with the Bay Institute who has written two reports on the Environmental Water Account, is frustrated by the lack of evidence showing fish benefits. “The agencies have not done what they said they would in terms of collecting and analyzing good information,” she says. “There is no good data supporting the Environmental Water Account giving benefits for fish. There are hypotheses, people saying, ‘Well, I think it works.’ The only thing it has been shown to do is guarantee water supply for south of delta contractors at tremendous cost to the public.”

The Environmental Water Account’s failure can be traced to its early identity crisis. Since the program began in 2000 it has been presented—depending on the audience—as a species protection program or as a “water reliability program” for those thirsting for delta water. Again a translation: “water reliability” means any actions taken to protect threatened species will not result in less water pumped south. Now, with pressure on the state to increase pumping through the South Delta Improvement Program, the Environmental Water Account looks like a publicly funded mitigation plan for even more water to be pulled out of the delta.

Who gets the water?

When the state goes shopping for water, officials keep track of who they buy water from, but they cannot tell you who ends up getting it. This is because the Environmental Water Account uses a water marketing scheme that looks a lot like insider trading, where straight lines between buyers and sellers are a threatened resource. I asked Dean Reynolds of the Department of Water Resources Office of Water Transfers who gets the Environmental Water Account water.

“Water is purchased to make up for curtailments in pumping,” he says, “but then that water becomes part of state water project operations. No one requests Environmental Water Account water. Rather, slowing down the pumps creates debt within the State Water Project. For example, say Kern County Water Agency requests 20,000 acre-feet for a given month, but the project can’t pump that much out of the delta. The water is delivered from San Luis Reservoir. So now there is a debt in San Luis. The Environmental Water Account fills that hole.”

Does this mean that the water is somehow shipped from Bakersfield 200 miles north to the San Luis Reservoir near Gilroy? “The water obviously doesn’t turn around and go the other way,” Reynolds chides. “You can’t turn water around and move it the other direction, well I guess if we reversed the pumps we could, but& What happens is the water ends up getting exchanged. The water is exchanged for other water.”

A curious fact about the Environmental Water Account is that those making the demands for water that the account is meant to fill are the same ones selling the water to the account. In fact, the largest seller to the program south of the delta is none other than the largest privately owned agribusiness in California, Paramount Farming Company.

Privately owned by Los Angeles billionaire Stewart Resnick, Paramount created a paper company in the 1990s through which to buy and sell water. This company, Westside Mutual Water Company, is also the largest single owner—with 48 percent—of a 20,000-acre stretch outside of Bakersfield that overlies a once empty aquifer, formerly owned and developed by the state.

In1996, Paramount helped take over the state land and run its operation as a water bank. Paramount and others pump water into the empty aquifer in years with heavy rainfall and pump it back out again in drier years—the idea behind the state’s development of the area as a drought water bank. Since 2000, Paramount has been profiting from the rain by selling millions of dollars of water to the Environmental Water Account. The first year of the program alone Westside received $8 million in taxpayer funds for water, and the state cannot tell you whose garden hose or coffee mug was filled with that water.

So when the state turns down the pumps to supposedly keep from killing too many fish and then goes shopping south of the delta to make up for the slower water shipments in the California Aqueduct, it seems to be buying water from those who clamor in Sacramento for “water reliability.” This, says Michael Jackson, is essentially taxpayers paying businesses to comply with federal endangered species law. “There will be a day in which environmental laws are enforced again,” Jackson predicts, “and if this mockery that is the Environmental Water Account dies, that day will come a lot faster.” —John Gibler is a policy analyst with Public Citizen.

They found a way when StopWaste, the Alameda County Source Reduction and Recycling Board, offered information to help Peerless go green. “We were already on the way to being more environmentally conscious, and we wanted to be recognized for doing so,” says Vukasin.

Vukasin and Brouhard invited StopWaste’s suggestions and worked to bring the business in line with the board’s recommendations. They put in energy-saving equipment and changed packaging to reduce waste. “We try to recycle everything we use,” says Vukasin. Although the process was a “hefty investment,” Peerless reduced its waste by 85 percent, earning it the 2002 StopWaste award.

And the business also earned its stamp of approval, becoming an Alameda County certified green business. “Becoming certified has changed the way we produce, roast, and package our coffee, and run our business,” sums up Vukasin.

The Bay Area Green Business program is a partnership of environmental agencies and professional organizations that work together to certify environmentally friendly businesses, making it possible for consumers to “shop” green for products and services. The program originated ten years ago in Alameda County, as officials pondered the best way to handle the county’s hazardous waste. A light bulb flashed: let’s nip this problem in the bud by reducing waste before it begins.

Waste reduction is just one piece; county officials envisioned conserving energy, reducing pollution, recycling, and managing water resources. A task force hammered out a set of standards, and businesses began to apply for certification and recognition. A small EPA grant, paired with local funding, allowed pilot counties Napa and Alameda to offer certification to auto repair shops. More than 500 businesses later, the program has spilled into seven Northern California counties and now recognizes printers, wineries, hotels, landscapers, restaurants, and home and business services that have successfully negotiated the standards. Coordinated by the Association of Bay Area Governments, the program, funded by city governments and local utility services, is implemented by green business coordinators in each of the counties. Cities such as Sacramento, Santa Cruz, and Monterey have adopted the model and are developing their own sets of standards.

Alameda County coordinator Pamela Evans says that about 180 businesses are certified green in the county. “These businesses see themselves as filling an environmentally preferable niche,” Evans says, adding that consumers want to know where they can spend “green dollars.” Evans says that “becoming certified by a third party is an opportunity for businesses to put their money where their mouths are if they’re already on that track.” The program does away with green-washing—pretending to be green while doing little to be so. The businesses don’t pay for certification, but they must adopt recommendations of agencies such as StopWaste before they can display the green certification. The program’s goal is simply to help businesses reduce their environmental footprints.

Evans spreads the word by attending events such as the Sustainable Business Alliance; recently, the chambers of commerce of San Leandro, Albany, and Emeryville launched initiatives to attract green member businesses.

Businesses that wish to be certified must perform at a minimum level in each of the five standards: energy, water, and materials reduction, and waste and pollution prevention, with different compliance requirements for each industry. “We want to make sure that the requirements accurately affect what’s safest for the specific workplace,” says Evans.

For the auto repair industry, which faces some of the most challenging requirements, the difference could mean switching from petroleum-based to water-based cleaning solvents. Repair shops often also revamp hazardous waste disposal methods. Offices switch to energy-efficient equipment; hotels use flow-restricting showerheads and low-flush toilets to conserve water, and managers are coached about how to read water meters and check for leaks. Food service facilities use energy-saving cooking equipment and compost food waste. All businesses are encouraged to practice source reduction measures by avoiding materials that are not recyclable. Businesses must also implement a minimum of six “good housekeeping” practices such as preventing contaminated water runoff into creeks or the bay.

When a business feels it meets the mark, in comes an assessment team— assembled from employees working in environmental agencies and resource conservation utilities—to verify and make further suggestions. Businesses that don’t make the cut are advised about ways to improve. “Some businesses have blind spots, or perhaps they’re not aware of alternatives,” Evans points out. “We’ll go the extra mile to help if they’re initially not close to meeting a specific requirement.” The process usually takes about three months to complete.

Approved businesses must be reassessed every three years to ensure they still adhere to the standards. All the hard work pays off: businesses receive recognition through listings on the program’s web site and in city and agency newsletters; businesses get press and promotional event coverage, window decals, and certificates, and they are able to use a Green Business logo in advertisements.

The program is educational for business owners and employees alike. “I really learned a lot by going through the certification process,” says Robin Burns of Elbow Grease Cleaning, the first eco-friendly house cleaning service to be certified in Alameda County. “It shed light on the advantages of maintaining a sustainable business.” Employers enjoy improved employee morale—there’s a feeling of pride associated with working towards environmental good—and compliance standards call for employee participation. Some businesses offer awards or recognition to employees who take the initiative to implement green practices at work.

Critics wonder about contradictions involved when green businesses are not selling green products, often the case in the auto industry. To this, Evans replies, “We’re not certifying products, we’re certifying processes in the community. A well-run business has a small environmental impact in its ongoing operations.”

Peerless is happy with its green stamp. “The process was very noninvasive, and the coordinators were so easy to work with,” says Vukasin, who declares the initial investment well worth the effort. He says that Peerless’s greening has been cost-effective in the long run and has “helped us become better neighbors in our community.”

Construction pros no longer have that excuse—not since the Green Fusion Design Center opened in San Anselmo. It’s a mecca for both homeowners and builders—at its 4,000-square-foot showroom, you can salivate over flooring (Clic technology cork planks, Marmoleum in ice cream colors), plasters in earthy colors from American Clay (you can trowel them on Sheetrock, but you must apply a pricey primer first), countertops nicer and warmer than that marble slab you had in mind—save the latter for the morgue. Milk paints, Tulikivi masonry stoves, organic bedding—it’s not just walls and floors.

What does it mean to build green? Owner Greg Snowden uses a comprehensive method to determine which products to carry—and he rejects 90 percent of those he considers. Some are green but must be shipped long distances. Some are local but aren’t as good or as reasonably priced as a choice from further away. After nearly a year in business, Snowden fields plenty of manufacturers’ product pitches, so he spends part of each day investigating alternatives and weighing competing factors.

The center also carries home furnishings—Snowden says he sleeps on a natural rubber mattress called Green Sleep. Another, Shepherd’s Dream, is all wool, with an all-wool topper called the Snuggler. Asks Snowden, “How much more natural can you get?”

Cleanup of the site had been under supervision of the Water Board, but after a November 2004 California Assembly Committee hearing in which speakers voiced concern that the agency was ill-equipped to handle such a difficult project (see “Ravaged Roost,” Winter 2005), the responsibility was divided between the Water Board and the DTSC.

The governing bodies reached their decisions to shift sole oversight to the DTSC after Contra Costa County Public Health Director Wendell Brunner wrote in a letter to Richmond Mayor Irma Anderson that he believed “the Regional Water Quality Control Board has neither the expertise nor experience to handle a site this complex.” While both agencies are sub-branches of the EPA, the DTSC requires stricter regulation and greater community participation.

The resolution is a major victory for Bay Area Residents for Responsible Development, an organization formed to ensure responsible cleanup of the Superfund site. Sherry Padgett, who believes her health was affected by chemical releases migrating from the site while she worked across the street at Kray Cabling, Inc., notes that the portion of the site under DTSC oversight has been managed much more strictly since November than in the years when the Water Board had control. She notes one example in which activity on the site was shut down due to potentially hazardous dust migrating from the parcel. “That had never happened before—it was the first time ever,” she says. Already, the DTSC has begun working with residents to form a community advisory group after receiving a petition containing 80 signatures of community members, gathered by longtime resident Ethel Dotson.

Yet anxiety over the future of the South Richmond parcel still lingers, especially in light of DTSC’s December 2004 reclassification of site materials as hazardous waste. Padgett voiced her concern in an online web posting after witnessing discolored water at the marsh. “In addition to the orange- and chartreuse-colored water, what other not-so-obvious toxic substances are flowing in and out of the marsh into the bay and underground aquifer?” she asked.

The resolution requesting the change in oversight to DTSC was pronounced a “win-win resolution” by Richmond Mayor Irma Anderson and a step in the right direction by area workers and residents. In question is how far DTSC will take the newly awarded jurisdiction, including determining exactly how toxic the 350,000 cubic yards of excavated material piled and temporarily capped is, and whether the shoreline marsh, a habitat of the endangered California clapper rail, can be restored.

“There is a danger that human intervention will accelerate and intensify natural climate changes to such a point that it will become impossible to adapt our socio-economic systems in time… The human race can lead itself into this climatic catastrophe—or it can avert it.”

No, that isn’t Greenpeace talking. It’s Swiss Re, one of the largest insurers in the world. I don’t know about you, but I have some rules of thumb that guide me in my daily life. One of them is that when actuaries start spewing incendiary rhetoric, be very afraid. Because the next thing you know, some tart from a place called Babylon shows up at your door, asking for a place to stay “for a few days.”

And when the Pentagon and the World Bank, possibly the two most conservative institutions in the world, say that an imminent global climate change catastrophe is plausible and “should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern,” I half expect four creepy horsemen to show up looking for said Babylonian tart, saying that they’re “her ride.”

The Pentagon report, according to the stodgy British publication The Observer, is particularly troubling because the authors were Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network. Not exactly your credentialed eco-types and certainly not people who could be characterized as “liberal wing-nuts,” as the right loves to call people who worry about the environment.

An imminent scenario of catastrophic climate change “would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately,” the report concludes. As early as next year, widespread flooding because of sea-level rise will create major upheaval for millions, the report says. Note to self: Call realtor about beachfront property in Nebraska.

Not to be left out—but mostly concerned with the recruitment spin—the Army has decided to use fighting environmental degradation as a tool to attract and motivate the ecologically minded to sign up to protect and defend Bambi. Perhaps the Army is ahead of the Rush Limbaugh Curve here, understanding that when the chips really take wing, everyone among us will be an environmentalist.

All of these reports, plus a few recent guided missiles—such as Michael Crichton’s fictional State of Fear or Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus’s essay, “The Death of Environmentalism”—have proven grist for the cyber-mill, often in exchanges so vitriolic and polarized that they make you wonder whether humankind’s acquisition of language was, on balance, a good thing. Typical is an exchange from the Web site of a British journalist named Melanie Phillips who has written on global climate change, mostly to say that it’s a crock. She writes that “the British government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, has said that global warming is a more serious threat to the world than terrorism. His remarks are utter balderdash from start to finish and illustrate the truly lamentable decline of science into ideological propaganda.” The reader commentary starts out “Melanie, you really are an idiot” and goes downhill from there.

President Bush and his supporters downplay the idea of global climate change and dispute, ignore, or minimalize key reports, even those from our own government. They tend to argue that everything will be fine if we just let the marketplace take care of the problem, if indeed we even have a problem, which still has not been proven. Their mantra is, in essence, don’t worry, probably there is no problem, and if there is, technology and the free market will resolve it.

That sounds like the response several years ago of a US public health official who responded to a domestic outbreak of necrotizing fasciitis—that’s flesh-eating bacteria to you and me—which had just dissolved several people’s faces, arms, and torsos. He explained the symptoms—the most definitive being flesh falling off your body parts—and then cautioned listeners “not to panic” if this started to happen to them. As if there could ever be, even theoretically, a better time for panic than when your face is dripping off your skull.

The left isn’t blameless, either. The radical worst talks about international conspiracies, vague plots to kill 200-mpg engines to keep us dependent on fossil fuels, and criticizes others for not being liberal enough if they don’t believe worst-case scenarios about the end of the world as we know it. (As Monty Python once observed in The Life of Brian, the only people the People’s Front of Judea hated worse than the Romans were the Judean People’s Front.)

The worst of the right, on the other hand, dismisses melting snowpacks and other current observations as anecdotal, computer models as junk science, and the press and almost everyone else as manufacturing a crisis to further their own agendas. Besides, even if there is a general warming, they say, human activities are not the cause, unless scientists can prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

But then what kind of proof is left, after direct observation, statistics, and computer models all have been deemed suspect? When you get right down to it, nothing short of cockatiels in Canada is going to convince that crowd; it has a pat way to dismiss any argument not to its taste.

Meanwhile, moderates are frustrated by the whole tenor of the debate. Typical is this post from the Melanie Phillips site: “I deplore the fact that the whole global warming issue has become a liberal/conservative issue. It’s not and shouldn’t be. If someone whose general social and political policies I disagree with makes a single statement I agree with, does that change my attitude toward social and political policies? Of course not. Questioning the ‘war on CO2′ does not make me a socio-political conservative. Even if I turn out to be wrong, it doesn’t affect my politics. Another example: in my opinion, the Bush administration is on the right track regarding arsenic in water and on the wrong track regarding oil drilling in the ANWR. Both opinions are based on my views of the issue, not on whether I voted for Bush (I didn’t) or whether I am a member of Sierra Club (I am).”

Crichton’s State of Fear only muddied the waters (er, icepack), when he alleged in his fictional work and the accompanying book tour that global climate change is a sham designed to get more funding and attention for both scientists and the environment. So it’s a work of fiction criticizing scientists for allegedly maintaining a fiction and for being too political. He also rakes the press over the coals for going along with it. Then Crichton goes on the TV book tour, accusing scientists of engaging more in politics than in science. His hyperbole is picked up by the folks who think global warming is at best bad science and at worst, a UN plot, and that any minute, the black UN helicopters, staffed with angry people from developing countries and furious Beneluxers tired of treading water, are going to be strafing your neighborhood.

So, after rooting around in blogs for months, I was thoroughly depressed. If, as most of the evidence suggests, global climate change is already happening and mankind is contributing to it, then all of the anti-climate-change rhetoric is acting as Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, paralyzing important action on real problems. Moreover, how can the public ever be expected to pierce the fog to decide what is true and what isn’t? This isn’t the era of Newton, when the very top scientists in the world could get together and argue using language and concepts—like calculus, physics, and biological taxonomy, for example—that we now expect bright high school students to grasp. Even well-meaning, well- educated people who genuinely care about the environment are confused, and the complexity of the science requires whole scientific communities—meteorologists, mathematical modelers, programmers, biologists, chemists, and physicists—to collaborate to reach conclusions that are often complicated, provisional, and qualified. It’s enough to make you want to retreat to a cave—preferably in the Himalayas.

So I was somewhat relieved to talk to Steven Krull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes, which does polling on social and political issues. I asked him if the most recent round of Crichton-esque controversy has changed the way people view the environment. “No, that’s a very marginal line of thinking, and it doesn’t show up in our work. Policymakers believe that [those thinkers] are very significant and very vocal, which sometimes makes [the policymakers] make bad decisions. People are remarkably stable in how they view climate change and the environment in general.”

How do Americans—the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions—view global climate change, then? “It’s still very abstract. They think of it as a problem more for their children than for themselves. They still think there’s a debate going on, and they don’t think the consensus is as definite as it really is.” For now, he says, “It’s something for grownups to deal with, and the grownups are squabbling about it.”

Is there any hope of moving people toward less fossil fuel use and greater concern about climate change? Here, Krull provides some hope for those hoping to effect change in attitudes. “One thing working in the issue’s favor is that people link global warming with air pollution, and water and air pollution are near the top of most people’s environmental concerns,” he says, adding that the concern over “things in the food and air is very immediate.”

Americans aren’t unwilling to pay to solve the problem, says Krull—we’re willing to tax ourselves to fund environmental issues. Surveys consistently show that the public would be willing to spend an extra $15-$25 per month to combat global warning, and they would even tolerate a moderate tax on oil to develop alternative energy sources. “Politicians think that the public is totally unwilling to accept taxes, but that’s just not true. If they know it’s really going to be applied toward the cause and not disappear into the maw of big government, they’ll support it.”

Then why aren’t we, on average, willing to do sensible things—either individually or collectively—to make sure that we don’t face a problem that most authorities say will be horrendous if it is, in fact, real? Is it because, as the authors put it in “The Death of Environmentalism,” early successes in the environmental movement led to “a strong confidence—and in some cases, bald arrogance—that the environmental protection frame was enough to succeed at a policy level?”

The article goes on to charge that “the environmental community’s belief that their power derives from defining themselves as defenders of ‘the environment’ has prevented us from winning major legislation on global warming at the national level.”

Krull says that it’s a little more complex than that. People realize that “The biggest cost is going to be mobility. Mobility will become more distributed by wealth, and we don’t like that.” For any change, he says, “You’d need a strong leader to say, ‘This is how it is, and this is what we need to do.’ Then I think people will listen, and say, ‘Well, OK, I guess that’s right.’” Americans, in particular, says Krull, also believe that technology will help solve the problem eventually. “I think a lot more Americans hold that belief than Europeans,” he says.

Krull says that environmentalists might get further by focusing on the loss of fossil fuels rather than their after-burn effects. Preliminary research indicates that people might respond better to conserving fossil fuels because they will eventually run out than because they might be creating a greenhouse effect. Some groups are already focusing on this, less as a strategy than as a way to ready people for a more agrarian, locally based future.

Meanwhile, the right counters that global warming might actually be good for us, citing improved production for some crops and warmer winters for people in cold climates.

Is there a grownup in the house?

Amy Kiser: The Pentagon partly sponsored your study. How did this partnership occur?

Nathan Glasgow: The project was co-sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Office of Naval Research. They were interested in the project for tactical, logistic, and strategic reasons; they realized that fuel efficiency may be a key parameter. What we see is a shift away from the military fighting large land-based wars to being deployable anywhere in the world on a moment’s notice. Fuel inefficient platforms slow down this deployability and may also decrease effectiveness. For example, for each fighting force, there are between two and three logistical units. The logistical units are primarily hauling fuel. The savings of any unit of fuel will be multiplied through the supply chain.

Making vehicles lighter and reducing drag are central tenets of your strategy. You see great potential in using carbon composites for auto bodies. But aren’t composites petroleum-based?

Bicycle frames are an example of the transition to carbon composites, aluminum, and lightweight steel, all of which can be used to make cars lighter, stronger, more efficient, and better performing. The amount of petroleum required to manufacture a light, strong vehicle would be rapidly dwarfed by the amount of gasoline saved driving it. Furthermore, these composites have a high potential for being able to be recycled. Large markets do not yet exist because it’s primarily used in aerospace and high-end sports cars, but as the volumes go up, it appears likely that a market for recycling could appear.

A centerpiece of your strategy is ramping up production of biofuels, including ethanol. Many environmentalists dismiss ethanol as a subsidized giveaway to corn-growing states, because the petroleum inputs required to produce it nearly equal the petroleum it replaces in your tank. Is that thinking outdated?

Conventional ethanol technology uses corn in the US and sugarcane in Brazil. Currently, over a quarter of Brazil’s gasoline demand is met with ethanol. There are new ethanol technologies, called cellulosic, which have the potential to be cost-competitive with gasoline without subsidies and also have about twice as much energy output per unit of feedstock input as conventional ethanol technologies. We know of three pilot plants that are making cellulosic ethanol on a small scale. It has yet to be done on a commercial scale, but there’s good pilot plant data and companies are rapidly moving forward to commercialize the technology. We are technology-neutral and would like the market to choose the winners.

Elsewhere, taxes, standards, and government mandates force foreign automakers to push the technological envelope. In the US, those kinds of government incentives are political suicide. Is the market-based approach you favor born of your professional bias as economists or it is rooted in an understanding that certain government solutions will not be embraced here?

The latter. Although we’re trained as economists, we don’t think of ourselves solely as economists. We see the market, up to a point, as being able to lead us in the right direction. To use Amory’s quote, “Markets make a splendid servant, a bad master, and a worse religion.” We think that policies should be market-oriented. That’s not our bias; it’s what we think will work here in the US. Ideally, the government should lead the transition. If they aren’t going to lead, they should follow the states’ lead. And if they aren’t going to do that, we’d just hope they would get out of the way and stop providing perverse incentives.

What’s an example of a perverse incentive?

The so-called Hummer tax credit for small businesses is an example of an incentive not in line with the country’s best interests. Electricity is also usually mispriced, and 48 states reward distribution utilities for selling more electricity and penalize them for cutting customers’ bills.

Do you see California as uniquely positioned to take the lead on some of your recommendations?

Absolutely. California would be great for a number of reasons: one, for the amount of gasoline the state consumes. If California were a country, its oil consumption would rank third in the world. Two, because of the enormous number of new cars in the state. And three, because the state leads the country with automobile emissions statutes. One easy thing that California could do—and this one’s going out to Arnold—is government fleet procurement… for someone in the administration to say, “We’re going to buy best-in-class fuel-efficient vehicles for all our state and local government fleets.” This would not only show consumers that these vehicles are available, safe, and reliable, it would give manufacturers the guaranteed demand they need to produce them. If every state would do this and the federal government would follow, it would send a very strong signal to manufacturers.

RMI proposes a new option to guide consumer choice toward fuel-efficient vehicles: “feebates.” Explain the concept.

A feebate is a combination of a fee and a rebate that a consumer will encounter when they purchase any vehicle. Within any size class, a fee placed on inefficient vehicles will pay for a rebate placed on efficient vehicles. It’s revenue-neutral to the state or federal treasury and it would continuously drive improvement, because you could ratchet up the median point within any size category to push technology.

Many Americans associate the post-oil-embargo 1970s with long lines at the filling station and the advent of ugly compact cars. RMI views that time as a positive touchstone. Why?

We think of that era as an example of what can be done and what has worked before. For example, during the period following the 1979 oil shock, the US cut its oil use 17 percent, while our GDP increased 27 percent. So we’ve done it before, and the roadmap that we suggest to get our country completely off oil is less aggressive than what occurred during that period. With the advent of new, advanced materials it is now possible to have a large pickup truck, but to make it strong and lightweight, which increases its safety and makes it much more efficient.

How do we move beyond the cultural stereotypes that gas-guzzling = tough, that heavy = safe?

The truth is quite the opposite. In the military, making a vehicle more efficient will give it longer range. It will require less refueling, so it will be subject to less vulnerability, increased performance, and lots of other beneficial characteristics. The same is true with light vehicles. These heavy sluggish trucks we drive have slow acceleration because it takes longer to get all that weight up to operating speed. Lighter vehicles accelerate much faster. They would also corner much better because they would have reduced top-side weight. Real-world examples will help change the public misconception. You see a number of stars driving the Toyota Prius right now, and there’s a six-to-nine month wait period to buy one.

There are some great alternatives to petroleum products out there: like the asphalt replacement made from concrete and chipped tires. Who most needs to know about these alternatives?

Decision-makers in general. Companies would lead this transition. There are a number of roles the average citizen could play. One would be to demand more efficient vehicles, as we are doing now with the Prius. The average citizen can share information with people in their local, state, and federal government, as well as heads of companies they may know or boards they may sit on.

It’s a common American sentiment that “technology will save us.” Yet research and development funding is being slashed everywhere you look. Is there a gap between our belief in our own ingenuity and the amount of innovation happening?

It does not appear right now that our federal government is focused on funding large-scale energy efficiency technologies. However, there is a lot of great innovation happening in the business community.

Gasoline prices in America don’t accurately reflect the massive subsidies paid by our tax dollars. Do you think you will live long enough to see honest energy prices?

Absolutely. I’m young! Our message is very optimistic. We’re not a forecasting agency. We are saying what we can do if we make this a national priority. We could get completely off oil within the next few decades.

This is hardly a new question for Shyaam Shabaka, a 64-year-old former public health worker devoted to solving the paradox of Richmond’s inner city: in a community “totally inundated with environmental and social problems,” he says, the low- income populations most adversely affected are usually “the least engaged” in finding solutions.

“The work I’m doing now is public health work,” he explains. “I don’t think people have yet understood how things like asthma, obesity, and lack of education parallel poverty.”

Earlier, at an Earth Day celebration of 2,000 people, Shabaka demonstrated his beehives and planted a host of veggie crops. Our destination now is EcoVillage Farm Learning Center, almost six acres of creek-bordered land Shabaka has spent the past three years developing into a hub for youth to learn about growing food and the local ecology.

As we pass through central Richmond, Shabaka points out the lawn in front of Kaiser Permanente Hospital where he sells organic produce to health care professionals and patients. We drive on through the Iron Triangle, an area denoted by rusting railroad tracks and a high concentration of pollution—the combined efforts of ChevronTexaco, General Chemical, and other industries that have moved business elsewhere but left their toxins behind. Shabaka’s other farmer’s market is here, in this home to poor blacks and immigrants, many of them Southeast Asian. As we roll through streets bordered by one-story houses where few flowers—or anything green—punctuate the gray of the sidewalks and blur of hazy sky, he draws my attention to a pair of sneakers hanging from a telephone wire.

“Those shoes are to mark territory,” he says, explaining that neighborhood gang members are kings inside their boundaries, yet know little of the opportunities beyond their hard-won turf. “Right now they’re like dogs fighting over a fire hydrant. I want to show them the whole world is theirs, that they have a responsibility—to the birds, to the trees, and to other people in it, too.”

Shabaka’s EcoVillage Farm, a couple of miles east of the inner city, offers urban residents an altered reality in which food is pulled from the ground (not plastic-wrapped on liquor store shelves), water flows in tributaries across the land (not from leaking faucets), and as much attention is bestowed on cultivating community (not maintaining deadly sidewalk wars) as is given to growing the squash and the peppers and the beehives. Though teenagers already attend EcoVillage workshops ranging from creek restoration to social justice, the site is still in its early phases. As Shabaka puts it, “We are being while we’re becoming.” Part of being includes birth; in late April, EcoVillage Farm had two week-old black lambs frolicking among its well-established rare heirloom fruit trees and the tall, soft grass.

The process of acquiring the property began almost three years ago, when the former owner preferred Shabaka’s proposal of using the land to work with kids to a housing development. After transforming multiple Bay Area inner-city lots into community gardens, only to have the owners decide to sell the newly productive soil, Shabaka realized that securing a permanent swatch of soil was a necessary step. “Building one community garden after another was certainly not sustainable,” he recalls. “I had to reflect on what I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing—transferring knowledge and experience to youth to help them.”

Now, bolstered by a loan from the Trust for Public Land, a grant from the Coastal Conservancy, and a recent grant from the California Department of Parks and Recreation, Shabaka can proceed with his vision: creating a butterfly garden, a wetland, and an agroforestry area; removing the ivy suffocating the native buckeyes and laurels along San Pablo Creek; making earthen structures and constructing a classroom yurt, building a bigger greenhouse and carving one continuous trail along the creek.

“We’re working on a timeline of five years, but 90 percent of the work will be done in two,” Shabaka says. “Each new thing will be an educational project that will enhance the area and the community.”

The approach is straightforward: rather than bombard kids with an onslaught of eco-buzzwords—”sustainable,” “permaculture,” “organic,” “watershed”—these vital concepts are demonstrated through hands-on doing. “People take a situation that is very simple and complicate it. It’s just growing food.” Shabaka smiles. “These kids on the corner in North Richmond? They are very, very bright, but using big words is intimidating, so we have to find points of relation.”

To teach about watersheds and agroecology, for example, Shabaka and a Richmond High School biology class are trying to figure out what’s behind the fish parasite explosion in the Sacramento Delta. To test their hypothesis that pesticide runoff is a major factor, students caught sample fish and sent them to a pathology lab at UC Davis.

“The learning that will take place around this is incredible,” Shabaka says, noting that this one project is not only a lesson in chemistry, watersheds, and the disaster of monocropping, but it’s also about environmental justice. The parasites affect bluegills, a species commonly caught by Asian and African-American subsistence fishermen and taken home for dinner. The parasite devastates local bluegill populations but doesn’t harm the black bass, another Delta fish species—one that, unlike the bluegill, brings in large amounts of money from sport fisherman. If the parasite affected the black bass, Shabaka argues, the problem would have been solved long ago.

After exploring EcoVillage Farm, we travel northeast towards De Anza High School. Burnt rubber “donuts” decorate the parking lot; 20 feet away lie 12 acres of meadow, fertile soil ready for student-led food production, one of Shabaka’s many ongoing projects.

EcoVillage is visited daily by De Anza students fulfilling their “civic learning” requirement. Though many, particularly Latino and Asian students, have recent connections in their families to farming, they still must be “reintroduced to the land and environment from a different perspective,” not as hired hands working for a profiting boss but as engaged decision-makers cooperating to help crops grow. This is especially true, Shabaka says, for African-American youth, whose grandparents often carry demeaning, violent associations with working the soil.

Amidst the farmer’s markets, workshops, lamb-birthings, and fish experiments, Shabaka is organizing car washes, bake sales, and general “beggings” with junior high students to raise money to attend the World Summit for Children and the Environment in Japan at the end of July. “Kids are seedlings,” he says, and just like the starter plants in organic soil in the EcoVillage greenhouse, they require healthy surroundings in order to survive and, better yet, thrive.

Back in the Iron Triangle, where North Richmond residents deal with the death of community members daily, there has to be a reason—something to care about—to want to stay alive. “If today is hell, you might as well check out of here today. And the youth,” Shabaka shrugs knowingly, “suffer myopia anyway. But if you can get them to see how a seed is growing, you can translate that to our selves, our lives.” In the end, EcoVillage is about something greater than how to grow food or identify native plants.

Shabaka sums up the vision: “Basically, it’s instilling hope.”

Lakoff believes progressives must take back the content of the national debate. In his 2004 book, Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, a how-to manual much used by answer-seeking progressives, Lakoff suggests how liberals can reframe their values. He recommends that the left get on the offensive, stop engaging in the right’s often-unethical or besides-the-point arguments, reclaim the arena of morals, and articulate values that matter.

When the left seems to be hampered by telling truths that people don’t want to hear—e.g., global climate change—how do environmentalists convince a public, increasingly polarized as evidenced by talk radio, about the need to address critical environmental issues? How do you get the SUV-driving soccer mom (Republican or Democrat) to see the bigger picture, the longer-term picture, to take personal responsibility for environmental issues rather than just dealing with her family’s immediate needs?

Irene Barnard asked Lakoff about the fractured political climate in America today.

Irene Barnard: The environmental movement, as well as the left in general, has been in crisis. What strategic initiatives could progressives employ that would benefit the environment?

George Lakoff: There are three types of strategic initiatives. The first is a multifaceted initiative, which says it does one thing but really has other effects as well. An example for the right is tax cuts, which also cut social programs and environmental defenses. Another example is tort reform, whose real purposes are to eliminate any possible public intervention, even if harm is being done, and also to defund the Democrats, as most tort attorneys are big contributors to the Democratic party.

The second type is the wedge initiative, such as the right’s use of gay marriage, which has already deeply divided the left. The third is the slippery slope initiative, which inevitably leads to other steps. A conservative example is allowing some privatization of Social Security, which would ultimately lead to its complete elimination.

An example of a left-wing strategic initiative is the New Apollo Project, with its $300-billion-dollar investment in alternative energy, which would affect several different areas: jobs, which would remain domestic and not be exported overseas; health, where medical problems such as asthma would be alleviated; and foreign policy, because you’d eliminate our need for Mideast oil. The project would create a major Third World development program, where former energy consumers would become energy producers and would no longer need to borrow money to pay for oil or interest on loans.

An example of a leftist wedge initiative is the issue of mercury: nobody, right or left, wants his or her children to be drinking water tainted with mercury. This could also qualify as a slippery slope initiative, because once people widely accepted the idea about mercury, you could then move on to other poisons.

Looking at the bigger picture in general is important. The problem with the Democratic Party, and also the environmental movement, is that they tend to focus on isolated issues, but people don’t vote on issues; they tend to vote in terms of their identities. The majority of Americans identify themselves as environmentalists, but they don’t vote as environmentalists. The word “environment” itself suggests that it’s a separate thing, outside of you, whereas people vote in terms of what’s inside them.

Health, jobs, religion, hobbies, families and their recreation—these kinds of identity points are outside of ecology, which is a science. The word “environmentalism” adds a component of nurturant morality to that science. It’s important to separate the two. Seventy percent of Americans support the environment—and that includes a lot of Republicans. Environmentalists are people who care about their own and their families’ health, conservative religions concerned with preserving God’s environment, sportsmen who want to be able to eat what they hunt and fish, etc.

Identifying these notions of identity, and matching them with various types of Republicans, will tell environmental groups where they need to go to reach out. They need to expand the notion of environmentalism to include more than science and morality—to be inside us, not just outside of us, a part of us rather than something separate.

Many problems of the left as a whole are also reflected in the environmental movement. You were cited as a major influence in Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus’s essay, “The Death of Environmentalism,” which faults environmentalists for being too narrowly focused. Do you think linking environmental with other issues will be an effective strategy?

It all depends on how well it’s done! The essay mostly supports environmental organizations, but I don’t agree that it’s time to give up. I’ve worked with many environmental organizations, and they know what needs to be done and where they need to go from here.

You use family structure as a metaphor for the defining characteristics of conservative and liberal worldviews. In the “moral order” of the conservative, “strict father” type, humans are placed above nature. The liberal point of view is more egalitarian. With two such differing ideologies, is it worth reaching out to conservatives?

Not all conservatives have this moral order in all aspects of their lives. They may appear to have the strict father model in operation but can still be thought of as “partial progressives” that environmental leaders must recognize.

How do corporations, traditionally “evil” in the liberal value system, play into this family model?

Not all corporations are evil, it’s just that liberals have focused on the corporations that do bad things. Most businesspeople are honest and try to do the right things, unless they happen to be under pressure not to. It’s very important for environmentalists to support and recognize ethical business and to support corporate reform such as accounting that is full, open, and honest. For example, eliminating and making illegal such externalization as dumping, not paying for proper disposal, forcing the public to pay part of the costs. This is also an important strategic initiative for progressives and environmentalists: to make business ethical.

Yet conservatives see their moral order as the dominant one in nature. Does the right’s use of terms such as “Clear Skies” and “Healthy Forests” come into play here?

The right uses Orwellian language where it knows it’s weak, when it tries to sell an unpleasant idea to the public.

How do you argue against the American value that self-interest is the highest concern?

The question assumes that rational arguments work, but they don’t. You need to change the argument, to develop an entirely new system.

Is “putting a positive spin” on an issue another way of reframing it?

Reframing is not re-spinning. Spin uses framing, but is more of a surface idea, an attempt to avoid embarrassment. Framing is deeper, and goes to the heart of what you believe and how you understand. I don’t think anybody on the left should use spin or Orwellian language. Framing adopts an explicit system of thought and tries to use language that best expresses that system. We must feel it in the gut, in order to articulate explicitly what we believe.

How would you reframe global warming?

The environment is not separate from health, labor, or foreign policy, contrary to thought by “purely” environmental organizations. Framing doesn’t work issue by issue, you must establish a whole system of frames for everything you believe. That way you don’t have to worry about global warming separately because the position naturally would flow from your belief system. It must become a personal issue, understanding what global warming means in terms of your own identity, your moral vision, and how you identify who you are.

Do you think liberal frames will increase political participation in a climate of consumerism and apathy?

Yes, if they give a moral vision. Those who are apathetic, cynical, and alienated are often deep-down idealists who don’t see an idealistic alternative and need one presented to them.

But after visiting Portland recently, I’ve been wondering if we’re green—or blue—enough.

Portland’s Willamette and Columbia rivers are home to several endangered and threatened species of fish. Like all cities throughout the country, Portland is subject to a myriad of federal laws regulating stormwater and urban runoff—the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, and the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, to name a few. But what Portland is doing differently is seizing every opportunity to retrofit its old concrete and asphalt hardscape with ecoroofs, “green” streets and parking lots, bioswales, stormwater planters, “rain” gardens, and even a “stormwater wall,” all with the goal of capturing and filtering urban runoff before it flows into the rivers.

Linda Dobson, program manager for the city’s sustainable stormwater team, enumerates the problems caused by unrestrained urban runoff. “Whenever it rains, stormwater that isn’t properly managed races over streets, rooftops, parking lots, and other impervious surfaces picking up oils, dirt, chemicals, and other pollutants,” she says. Those pollutants get carried into streams and rivers, an unhealthy diet for fish and other critters.

The old way of moving stormwater was to get it out of sight, out of mind as fast as possible—via pipes and other “hard” infrastructure, says Dobson. But Portland is making its stormwater visible—and even pleasing to the eye. “Green streets” have stormwater “planters”—mini wetland gardens set below grade between the sidewalk and street—into which runoff from the street flows via cuts in the curbs. There, the water can collect (as it would in a pond) and be filtered slowly by plants before infiltrating the ground. Local businesses, supported by small grants from the city, have come on board. New Seasons Market on Division Street, one of the newly targeted “green streets” in southeast Portland, uses a series of inter- connected stormwater swales around its perimeter to collect runoff from the roof, outdoor plaza, and parking lot. Rain from one downspout pours onto a quirky metal sculpture before filtering into a stormwater planter. Ninety percent of the average annual rainfall the site receives is captured.

The only stormwater innovation New Seasons doesn’t have is an ecoroof, but lots of Portland’s buildings do. Tom Liptan, environmental specialist with the city, and self-described “stormwater geek,” is busy unpaving roofs. He put an ecoroof—what he calls a “living roof”—on his own garage in 1996 and has been the impetus behind the city’s dozens of stormwater planters and at least 30 green roofs throughout the city. An ecoroof differs from a more formal rooftop garden in that it is covered with a fairly thin layer of soil (versus container planting in boxes). Using drought-tolerant, low-maintenance plants, Liptan describes it as its own ecosystem, with the soil microbes treating urban pollutants and the plants attracting bugs and birds.

On a tour of downtown Portland, Liptan showed me more opportunities for retrofitting the built landscape with natural systems. These solutions don’t have to be big. A six-foot-square stormwater planter between a parking garage and a school filled with wetland plants filter out the bad stuff that would normally end up in the Willamette River. We visit Montgomery Street, which will soon become a “green street,” landscaped with slightly below-grade planters in the curb strip.

We stop to examine an ecoroof atop a public housing project. Liptan has monitored the roof for three years and found that 60 percent of even a large storm, one that drops over three inches of rain, is absorbed by the roof, and some evaporates. “The air is the infrastructure!” he tells me as we walk the rooftop. He stops to investigate insects hovering over a wildflower. “The roof reduces the amount of stormwater the municipality has to treat or manage. It reduces wear and tear on the system,” he says. “Ecoroofs are the best stormwater detention facilities you can buy. They retain all sizes of storm events whereas stormwater vaults and even ponds only retain certain sized storms.”

For those not quite as keen on ecoroofs, like developer Ed McNamara, principal of Turtle Island Development, there are other alternatives. McNamara built two apartment buildings—144 and 122 units—as a redevelopment project in a blighted area of town. To deal with stormwater, he and Liptan and other city stormwater staff came up with the idea of installing formally landscaped planters into the central courtyard. Looking at the planters, installed somewhat below grade, you might not guess that they are runoff treatment systems. On the second building, McNamara used more stormwater planters and a couple of small ecoroofs. “None of it was permitted by code at the time,” says McNamara. “But it all made sense.” McNamara recalls thinking that if this was the future of stormwater management, he wanted to be part of it.

In contrast, developers in the Bay Area have fought new, more stringent NPDES stormwater regulations. Builders of all new developments of over one acre in the Bay Area are required to treat stormwater on site—but that number was “negotiated” up from the original requirement of 5,000 square feet, according to Jan O’Hara with the S.F. Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board. In 2006, the requirement will be lowered to 10,000 square feet; the same number applies to redevelopment sites. The Water Board’s Keith Lichten says that many of the large new developments (which tend to be those sprawling out beyond built-out urban areas) do include onsite stormwater treatment. But the large size requirements—10,000 square feet—make it less likely that redeveloped sites in the Bay Area will see the kind of innovations Portland has made.

Part of Portland’s success is due to the fact that, over the past several years, it has acted aggressively to win over $1.5 million in grants from the EPA for innovative stormwater projects. The city also mounted an impressive public awareness campaign using demonstration projects at schools, commercial buildings and parking lots, and on residential streets. Several neighborhoods are now on a waiting list to have stormwater curb extensions—small areas that extend out from the curb and are planted with wetland plants— installed on their streets. And over 38,000 homeowners have disconnected their roof downspouts from the stormwater system, redirecting them into gardens, swales, planters, or cisterns. (The city reimburses homeowners for the disconnection or will do the work for them.)

Disconnecting, says Dobson, has removed over 768 million gallons of roof water each year from the storm drain system. The downspout disconnect program, she says, is a kind of metaphor for the rest of Portland’s stormwater efforts. “Whether you’re disconnecting downspouts or disconnecting impervious surfaces from the pipe system, it’s the same idea,” she says. But perhaps most importantly, Portland has learned to view itself through a watershed lens. That, says Dobson, means that in addition to restoring a stream, they look at problems upstream, which often contributed to downstream degradation. “I think there is no one silver bullet,” says Dobson, when I ask her which stormwater solutions have been most successful. “We want to try all those things—planting large canopy trees, getting ecoroofs to intercept the rainwater. Then as it hits the surface, we’ll intercept it wherever we can—with green streets, rain gardens, stormwater plants, swales, etc.”

Here at home, things are not looking as green, and, according to Water Board regulators, the development community is resisting new approaches to treating stormwater. There are a few signs of hope. The San Francisquito Watershed Council is planning to build two demonstration projects—one treating a commercial parking lot and another retrofitting a residence in Palo Alto—this year. And a neighborhood group in San Francisco’s Mission District jackhammered up the concrete public right-of-way along their street and planted gardens with the goal of creating more permeable surface. Perhaps—just as in the creek movement—citizens need to lead the way.