The Nilgiri Hills consists of a heart-shaped region rising almost vertically from the lowlands of the Southern Indian states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka in Southern India. In order to protect its unique population of plants and animals, it was one of the earliest places in the world to be registered as a World Biosphere Reserve Home. The Nilgiris are also home to indigenous populations of India, including tribes such as the Toda, the Badaga and Kota, among others. Today, more than 60% of the grassland has disappeared. These grasslands served as a tank, taking water from the mists and rains and releasing it slowly through the roots of the ancient shola tree throughout the year. Much of this grassland has now been covered with destructive forests of eucalyptus, as well as tea plantations. “The Nilgiris is like the heart of south India,” Founder and Director of Earth Trust, Vanya Orr says during an interview in Ooty, India. “It [the Nilgiris] is the shape of a heart and supplies water and energy to South India, it has a real function.”

Vanya Orr, founder of Earth Trust

Vanya Orr, now 77 years-old, came to India with her mother when she was 60. But her connection to India goes back many years before. Her grandfather was a collector in Thane, Pune and Bombay from 1889-1920. Her great, great, great grandmother came to the Nilgiris at age 7 in 1824, very soon after the first Europeans arrived. Though she never intended to come to India at all, the trip with her mother became a turning point for Orr, and she has been living in India, for the most part, since 1994.

About 20 years ago, a little earlier than Orr arrived in India for the first time, the village people of Cinchona, walked the 540 kilometers (or 335 miles) from the Nilgiri Hills to the state government in Chennai, Tamil Nadu to ask state leaders to intervene on their behalf. As Orr recalls, there was a bitter impasse following the closing of the Government Cinchona Department, and it’s adoption by the Forest Department. The people were required to leave their homes, but they were determined not to. As Orr recalls, “Nobody could move. It just needed one person to step in and shift the pieces.”

“There was a kind of war going on,” Orr says. “Everyone was very cross with everyone else.” The people were suffering, “they kept saying to me, ‘Your grandfather was Superintendent here. You have photos of your grandparents and our grandparents… we are all part of the same story, you have got to help us.’” Orr says she didn’t know anything about anything in India, including how the hierarchy and bureaucracy works, not to mention the language and couldn’t see how she would be able to assist the situation.

The Nilgiri Hills

Orr asked the local people to write down the names of the people in the village, what their skills were and what they wanted to do together, “they brought this list to me a couple days later and they hadn’t got anything in the ‘what they wanted to do’ column, so I said ‘that’s useless,’ I can’t tell you what to do. You have to tell me what you want.” And they said, “No, it’s not possible, all we have done is lost. Our children have no food. We are right on the cliff’s edge… How can we dream? There is nothing and no future for us.”

She went to see the local Collector and the Forest Officer, as she remembers, “You know in England you just chat to people. I wasn’t bothered by their seniority. I suppose now I would be more circumspect!” Unsure of what to do next, Orr spent three days in the house her grandmother lived in, trying to think about her next plan of action. She remembers, “If I came here, thinking I was going to solve everyone’s problems, if this was just an ego trip, what a complete waste of time this would be. I had to know it was more than that.”

After being unable to decide exactly what to do, she went back to England. Things fell into place when she was given 500 pounds to see if going back to India was really something she had to do.

Early on, she was told “You haven’t got any credibility as a foreigner, and even less as a woman.” But it was suggested that she set up an NGO with the women of the village in order to act as a facilitator between the village and the forest department. “In the end, with this group of women, I set up the first Medicinal Plant Development Area in South India.” Today, the women’s group has, more than enough to start their own new projects.

Orr continued to act as a facilitator to re-establish the aromatic herbal fields and nurseries under the auspices of the Foundation for Revitalisation of Local Health Traditions (FRLHT) and the Forest Department. Over the past several years, she has helped set up distillation units for essential oils, making linkages with the Spice Board and other outlets. After this, she left India for a year, but she continued to recall the story of a woman who poured kerosene over herself and burned to death from being desperately unhappy. A year later, the woman’s husband was run-over trying to stop a truck from stealing timber, “You don’t walk away from something like that when it happens, without it having some kind of impact.”After thinking about the people, the soil and the land, she returned from England.

This time, her aim was to give people tools for survival, for women who were in situations of inescapable stress and farmer training, in order to mitigate the destruction of the soil. With health programs, stress management, and organic biodynamic farming and gardening, Earth Trust has a variety of tools at their disposal. “People don’t drink, or become violent for no reason, do they?” she says, “It is a symptom, not a cause. A symptom of woundedness or where we find our companionship. This was the idea, that by introducing these nurturing techniques, it could help people feel as if they were worth something.”

Orr believes that, for Nilgiris, this is a critical time in history, “The whole system of everyday living is built on dependency, it’s so important for people to start taking charge of their own lives.” She adds, “It seems to me, this time, is about trying to enable people in rural areas to survive within compassionate communities.” She also wants to play a role in giving children a feeling that they are able to help build a future, and allow people to be able to return to “working with their hearts.”

When I ask her about her vision for the future, she says, “that there will be clear water flowing from the streams of Nilgiris without poison… that everyone will have their place; animals will have their place, and people will have their place.” I smile and tell her it sounds good. She says, “It is possible, you see, it’s possible.”

I hope so.

The Bainbridge Island electricity dashboard

Bainbridge Island, a short ferry ride from Seattle, was recently given a choice by Puget Sound Energy. Either cut electricity consumption or pay for a new electrical substation for the island to meet rising electricity demand. It turns out that the average Bainbridge household was using 60% more electricity than the regional average, meaning there was a lot of potential energy efficiency gains to be had.

With a grant from the Department of Energy’s Better Buildings Neighborhood Program, the city created an online information network to monitor island-wide electricity use and notify residents when peak demand was reaching the maximum allowed level. When this occurs (typically during a morning or evening hour in the winter), residents are able to view the island’s current electricity consumption with an online dashboard, and adjust their individual use accordingly. The first winter of the program, these efforts led to a 10 MW decrease in peak electricity consumption.

The program also offers free home energy audits (RePower Bainbridge has so far completed 41% of the island’s homes) which, along with energy efficiency upgrades, lower energy costs for residents. Check out the video from Climate Solutions below:

RePower Bainbridge from Climate Solutions on Vimeo.

Half of the world’s population now lives in cities. By 2050, it is estimated that this ratio will grow to over 75%. Put another way, 3.5 billion people live in cities now. Global population is project to reach 9 billion by 2050. That means that cities will need to the housing and infrastructure to absorb upwards of 2.5 billion people within the next 30 years. It is a staggering thought, and one of the great challenges of our time.

An excellent new film on this topic is Urbanized, a documentary by Gary Hustwit. Tackling such a broad subject of urban design in 90 minutes is an ambitious endeavor, but Hustwit largely succeeds.

Viewers are transported around the world, from the slums of Mumbai to the deserted streets of Detroit, where solutions of all scales are presented. From bus rapid transit and bikeways in Bogota to a guerilla art project in New Orleans, the key message from Hustwit is that people and the social fabric are what make cities great, and some of the best solutions to urban sustainability come from deep community involvement.

The film features interviews with some of the heavy hitters of urban planning and architecture, such as Rem Koolhaas and Sir Norman Foster. Many of the cities highlighted are familiar – for example the bike networks of Copenhagen or the High Line in New York. But the film also presents unfamiliar urban solutions, such as novel concepts for subsidized housing in Santiago, Chile and participatory community design of walkways in the townships on the edge of Cape Town.

With cities responsible for upwards of 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions, they have a major role to play in climate change solutions. Luckily, urban residents generally have a smaller carbon footprint than suburban and rural residents. By implementing greater building and energy efficiency improvements, cities could become a model for solving climate change. And guess what, all of that urban fabric will have to be planned and designed.

Former president Bill Clinton, speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting, called out climate deniers and their champions in the GOP.

He said, “If you’re an American, the best thing you could do is to make it politically unacceptable to engage in denial. We look like a joke. You can’t win the nomination of one of the major parties in our country if you admit that the scientists are right … It’s really tragic. We need the debate in America, and every country, between people who are a little bit to the right and a little bit to the left about what the best way is to reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions … and we can’t have this conversation because we’ve got to deny it?”

See the video below:

This past weekend, large excavators began deconstructing two dams along the Elwha river in Olympic National Park. The project is the largest dam removal project to date and one of the largest ecosystem restoration projects in U.S. history.

The Elwha river (photo by S. Neil Larsen 2011

Economic development in the Pacific Northwest has often relied on the abundant natural resources of the area, with timber and salmon being two of the most iconic. In early 1900s along the Elwha river, timber production was prioritized over abundant salmon resources. In 1913, Thomas Aldwell built the Elwha dam 5 miles upstream from the mouth of the Elwha river in order to provide power to a lumber mill and the local community. Despite laws at the time requiring fish ladders, none were installed. In 1926, a second dam was built another 8 miles upstream. These two dams cut off 70 miles of pristine migratory fish habitat, reducing historical salmon runs from over 400,000 fish to less that 4,000 today.

After years of legislation and planning, the dams are finally coming down. Wanting to witness historic occasion, my friend Jesse and I headed up to the Elwha in order to catch a glimpse of the dams and check out the dam removal ceremony happening in Port Angeles. Jesse wrote his thesis on the economic effects of the Edwards dam removal on Maine’s Kennebec River. I was interested in seeing the beginning of a large scale ecosystem restoration project.

Demolition of the Glines Canyon Dam. The excavator is on a barge in the reservoir behind the dam. As you can see, the lake has been lowered about 20 feet (S. Neil Larsen 2011)

Hopping a ferry from downtown Seattle on Friday afternoon, I met up with Jesse on Bainbridge Island and we headed up towards the peninsula. By nightfall we had entered Olympic National Park, and had set up camp a stones throw away from the rushing Elwha river.

The next morning, after a restless night of sleep due to Jesse’s intermittent loud snoring, we hiked up a service road to the Glines Canyon dam. Upon reaching the dam site, we were greeted by an imposing fence preventing us from getting close to the dam. We were able to hike a bit farther up and saw that they had already lowered the water level in the lake and that demolition had already begun on the dam itself.

After snapping a few pics, we headed back down towards the Elwha Dam, where a ceremony was due to start in the late morning. At the entrance, we were halted by a slew of state troopers and local police. At the gate a kind but uninformative trooper told us the event was invite only, and sent us on our way. We later learned that security was tight due to the various dignitaries in attendance including U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salzar, Washington Governor Gregoire, Senators Maria Cantwell and Patty Murrary, and other officials.

So we headed into Port Angeles, where a mini festival was happening down at the town pier, featuring a live feed from the ceremony along with a number of information booths from various environmental organizations. After talking with a number of foresters, scientists, and environmentalists, we sat down to watch the ceremony. It was touching to hear an Elwha tribal leader give an emotional speech about the significance of the occasion. After his tribe having been marginalized in their traditional homeland and having their salmon resources choked off for the last 100 years, his feelings were well warranted.

With the removal of the dams over the next 3-5 years and the opening up of the upper Elwha, many people hope that the salmon will recolonize the watershed. Within 20 years, some predict that salmon and steelhead runs will return to a semblance of their historic levels. The Elwha tribe, situated at the mouth of the river, has agreed to halt all fishing in the river for 5 years in order to speed up the recovery.

The project is not without controversy. The tribe has lobbied for a new $16 million fish hatchery in order to “jumpstart” fish production. Many environmentalists are appalled. Kurt Beardslee of the Wild Fish Conservancy said that “the wild salmon deserve a chance to come back to the Elwha without having to compete with millions of hatchery fish.”

Lake Mills, behind Glines Canyon Dam (photo by S. Neil Larsen 2011)

Members of the Elwha tribe see a different side of the story. Larry Ward, hatchery manager for the tribe said, “there is this whole philosophy of the Elwha being a living laboratory, when in reality, it is the home of the Elwha tribe. After waiting 100 years for the dams to come out, they are not willing to wait another 100 years for the fish to recover.”

Either way, the river restoration and dam removal is a huge win for the local environment. It will also be a test case for dam removal and restoration for other parts of the Pacific Northwest as well as the country.

After hearing a number of speeches by dignitaries, we decided to head back into a the park up in order to make the most of our time. We drove up to Hurricane ridge, affording us awesome views of the Olympic wilderness. It was heartwarming to know that at least in one corner of the planet, the environmentalists are winning.

Check out these links:

Seattle Times video on the dam removal, part of a special section on the project 

A poor-quality video of ceremony (jump to 1:15:00 to see footage of the dam and the start of demolition)

Animation of how the Glines Canyon dam will be taken down

Animation of how the Elwha Dam will be taken down

On top of Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park

The Elwha river valley

How cool is this? A group of engineers at the University of Minnesota (yeah gophers!) has created a multiferroic alloy, Ni₄₅Co₅Mn₄₀Sn₁₀ to be exact, that “achieves multiferroism by undergoing a highly reversible phase transformation where one solid turns into another solid. During this phase transformation the alloy undergoes changes in its magnetic properties that are exploited in the energy conversion device.”

Got it? Well, think about all the incredible energy applications this material could be used for. A lot of things in our modern civilization produce waste heat that we have no use for. Think heat from car exhaust, or waste heat from power plants, or heat from data centers… the list goes on and on.

The real trick will be turning this breakthrough into a marketable product.

Has President Obama done enough to combat climate change? Former Vice President Al Gore certainly doesn’t think so, and has ignited a firestorm in the media following his article in Rolling Stone in which he lays into Obama for his mediocre achievements in climate and energy policy.

“Firestorm” may be a bit of a stretch, but his article is very critical of United States politics, mainstream media, and the mediocre climate policy achievements of President Obama, and has subsequently garnered a fair bit of attention from climate journalists and bloggers. If you haven’t had a chance to read it, it is worth your time. Mother Jones has a summary of the key points.

Gore makes some salient points, particularly in regards to the gravity of the climate crisis:

“It is time to face reality. We ignored reality in the marketplace and nearly destroyed the world economic system. We are likewise ignoring reality in the environment, and the consequences could be several orders of magnitude worse. Determining what is real can be a challenge in our culture, but in order to make wise choices in the presence of such grave risks, we must use common sense and the rule of reason in coming to an agreement on what is true.”

And the gap between perception and reality for many in America:

“The climate crisis, in reality, is a struggle for the soul of America. It is about whether or not we are still capable — given the ill health of our democracy and the current dominance of wealth over reason — of perceiving important and complex realities clearly enough to promote and protect the sustainable well-being of the many. What hangs in the balance is the future of civilization as we know it.”

There was an interesting debate on the PBS Newshour last night regarding Gore’s article, particularly the attacks he makes on Obama’s climate action/inaction. Watch it here in full:

The gentleman from the American Enterprise Institute makes the same tired claim that in times of economic duress people don’t care about protecting the environment. I would argue that many environmental protections are designed to protect human health, the costs of which are vastly outweighed by the positive human health impacts (one thing that is not up for debate is rising health care costs).

Andy Revkin as always has a unique perspective, as does Bryan Walsh at Time.

Many (myself included) were ecstatic when Obama was elected in 2008 because he represented a 180 degree policy shift on important environmental and energy issues from the Bush administration. Over the past year and a half he has admittedly made some great strides in environmental policy (2 steps forward), but in many other instances he has disappointed the environmental wing of his coalition by approving expansion in fossil fuel extraction in this country and caved in the face of pressure from powerful economic and political interests (1 step back).

In the list of priorities for the people of this country, addressing climate change ranks pretty low. People care more about employment, the economy, gas prices, and national security. It is hard for people to take the long view (as an interesting aside, the makers of this 10,000 year clock are trying to influence the public on this very issue).

Political and economic reality have conspired to drastically limit how quickly this nation has moved toward a sustainable future. Unfortunately the planet isn’t waiting for us to get our act together. Our climate system is rapidly approaching a point of no return. And as evidenced by the large number of extreme weather events over the past few years, we can expect a lot more loss of property and human life in the years to come.

Politics is the art of the possible. Could Obama have pushed a bit harder for stronger national climate policy? Maybe. But I’ll take the achievements our nation has made in an optimistic light and hope for more in the near future.

Prediction: Obama ends his 1st term with a set of achievements that appeal to enough of the electorate to get re-elected, despite having thrown the enviros under the bus. He then uses his 2nd term to really push on the environmental and energy policies that us environmentalists have been clamoring for.

In many cities around the world, municipal governments are making dramatic changes to streetscapes. These changes, such as bike lanes, dedicated busways, and other traffic calming measures are designed to both improve safety for non-car users of streets and provide more transportation options for city residents. As is often the case following change, those who prefer the status quo have become vocal in their opposition to these improvements. Wealthy and politically connected residents of Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood have even filed lawsuits to stop the creation of bike lanes.

Check out this video from Streetfilms showing the many benefits of re-imagined city streets in New York City. It’s about more than just bike lanes.

Complete Streets: It’s About More Than Just Bike Lanes from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

Spring is finally here in most of the country, which means it’s time to dust off your bike and hit the road. In the San Francisco bay area, today happens to be Bike to Work Day, an event which encourages commuters to try commuting by bicycle as an alternative form of transportation.

The benefits are threefold:

1. Health – bicycling is an excellent form of exercise.

2. Environmental – bicycles don’t produce air pollution, either local smog or greenhouse gases.

3. Transportation – with a low physical footprint, traveling by bike uses a much lower share of the transportation infrastructure, thereby decreasing traffic and gridlock.

What do you ride for commuting, pleasure, or both? Send us a photo of your bike and we’ll post it up on the blog!

The Earth deserves more than just one day out of the year for us to demonstrate a commitment to sustainability and the planet. Nevertheless, it does help raise awareness, and it’s a great excuse to get out and do something good for mother nature.

Last Saturday we helped out at a habitat restoration project on the Duwamish River, a Superfund site right here in Seattle. A century of pollution by local industry along with straightening the river has made life very difficult for returning salmon. In an effort to restore this waterway, there are a number of ongoing projects along the river aimed at improving conditions for juvenile salmon. We were working at a small estuary that was carved out of some formerly polluted land (which used to be the riverbed). We were helping to remove invasive plants, add mulch to the existing plants, and plant more native species provide habitat and food for migrating salmon. It was fun work on a (comparatively) nice Seattle day.

What sorts of projects (big and small) did you get involved with for Earth Day?