by Ashley Ahearn

Imagine yourself for a moment on the slopes of Washington’s Mt. Rainier, near Puget Sound, one of the highest peaks in the western United States. “We are on the hike to Comet Falls in Mount Rainier national park. We’re looking at a number of cascades that are rushing down a rock canyon and we’re sitting over a wood trail bridge” says Tom Uniack who doesn’t have to imagine it.

As conservation director of the Washington Wilderness Coalition he comes here often. Mt. Rainier National Park is one of the natural jewels of the northwest. And it seems utterly untouched by the changes that have rippled across the US in the years since 9/11. But a bill now pending in Congress could change that.

HR1505, as the bill is called, would allow the Department of Homeland Security to build roads, transmission lines, and security installations on any federally owned land within 100 miles of the US coast or border.

Tom Uniak says that includes national Forests, wilderness areas and National Parks like this one. “The bill is written in a way that all these things, potentially, if seen as part of the national interest or national security, could apply and laws could be exempted.”

Altogether, the bill would allow DHS to override 36 environmental and other laws on these federal lands in the interest of border security, including such bedrock laws as the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.

The idea gives some environmentalists night sweats. But supporters say it just makes sense.

Representative Rob Bishop is the Utah Republican who introduced HR1505: “Wilderness designation in no way should trump border security.” Bishop says current law allows federal land managers to “bully” the US border patrol on public lands. “They can do what they need to do on private property, it’s only on public property that they’re restricted and that is ridiculous. That’s simply asinine.”

US-Canada Border Crossing North of Eureka, MT (Photo: Raymond Hitchcock/Flickr)

“To my belief it’s because 80 percent of the Arizona border with Mexico is federal property, over half of that is wilderness designation, Endangered Species habitat, conservation habitat where the border patrol is limited to the kind of access they have and what they can do,” says Bishop

But opponents of HR1505 say the bill would give unprecedented authority to a single federal agency to ignore environmental laws. Jane Danowitz, of the Pew Environmental Trust in Washington, DC, says there’s a lot more at stake than just the Arizona desert or Mt. Rainier. A huge amount of public land would fall under the bill’s scope.

“We’re talking about some of the nation’s most popular national parks and beaches. Glacier National Park, the Florida everglades, beaches along Cape Cod, the great lakes and the California coastline.” Danowitz says the bill is overkill.

“After 9/11 national security for all the right reasons jumped to the top of America’s priorities but the sweeping waiver of our bedrock environmental laws has little to do with accomplishing that goal.”

What it does have to do with, Danowitz asserts, is a rising anti-environmental movement in Congress. “There’s going to be a lot of things happening this fall in Congress that are under the radar. There are more than 70 provisions that would undo longstanding protections for clean air, clean water, wilderness, endangered species.”

Regardless of the intentions of its sponsors, it’s not just environmentalists who oppose this bill. The very agency that supporters say will benefit the most from HR1505 – Customs and Border Protection – doesn’t want the power it would be given.

When asked about a testimony in July in which the Customs and Border Protection* said it opposes 1505, Congressman Bishop replied: “I will tell you right now privately, when I talk to people who are current Border Patrol personnel as well as those who are retired Border Patrol, they have a different story than this current administration has.”

Along with Representative Bishop, HR1505 has 48 co-sponsors in the House, all Republicans. The bill, which is officially titled the National Security and Federal Lands Protection Act, will begin working its way through the House early this fall.

Ashley Ahearn reports for EarthFix, a public media project that explores the environment of the Pacific Northwest.

Petermann Glacier in northwestern Greenland (left image July 28; right image August 5)

A massive iceberg broke off Greenland this week. It’s the largest break in Greenland in 50 years, setting off alarm bells among climate watchers. Anchor Jeb Sharp speaks with Dr. Robert Bindschadler, one of NASA’s leading climate scientists, about the break.
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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

JEB SHARP: The death toll has topped 1,100 today from flooding and landslides in China. The grim milestone comes amid reports of continuing floods in Pakistan, and an unrelenting heat wave in Russia. Scientists say none of this extreme weather can be directly linked to global warming. But they say it all does fit into the models of what a warmer future might look like. Meanwhile there’s another bit of news raising climate-related alarms. The break-off this week of a massive iceberg from Greenland. Robert Bindschadler is a glaciologist with NASA. He says the location of the ice collapse makes it especially troubling.

ROBERT BINDSCHADLER:  This is happening right at the northern tip of Greenland, so what it tells us is that these dramatic events have extended from the southern part of Greenland where we’ve seen them before all the way to the northern limits. So all of the Greenland ice sheet is now involved in this dynamic.

SHARP:  One of the concerns often about these kinds of events is rising sea levels. Is there any reason to think this one iceberg could contribute significantly to rising sea levels?

BINDSCHADLER: It likely will in a fairly small way and the way it will is that before it calved it was part of an ice shelf. A floating ice tongue connected to the ice sheet and because it’s been removed, there’s less resistance to the flow of the ice sheet into the ocean, so as a glaciologist I would expect the glacier to speed up a little bit and that will contribute a modest increase to sea level rise.

SHARP: And in terms of other impacts I think one of the things that really scares people is the idea that this huge chunk of ice could hit ships or oil rigs.

BINDSCHADLER: It doesn’t move too fast, but you don’t want to get in its way. It’s likely to get caught up in the circulation in the Arctic Ocean and move around for many years.

SHARP: How do you think of the future of the arctic when you think about it? If there’s more ice melts and that means more human activity up there in terms of exploration, numbers of boats. Do you have a kind of nightmarish picture of too much stuff all going different directions and one bumping into the next?

BINDSCHADLER: Yes, I would say it’s disturbing to think about what the near-term future is of the arctic because it’s really chaotic up there. So everybody in the world should kind of keep an eye out on how disruptive climate change is to the northern societies because that’s a harbinger of things to come for everybody on the planet.

SHARP: Dr. Robert Bindschadler is a senior fellow at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• Downriver Productions

Frobel: This was the place where I started bird watching on the borderline, 1975.

Kai Frobel was just 16 when he took up birding along the militarized border between East Germany and his home in the west, armed only with binoculars and Wellington boots.

Ahearn: “So did your parents know you were out on the border watching birds?
Frobel: “Not only my parents. He he he!”

The East German Intelligence Office kept a file on Frobel. They thought he was a spy for the West. But Frobel was really just in it for the birds. He realized that without people in the buffer zone, bird populations were thriving.

Kai Frobel

Today, nearly 20 years after the border disappeared, they still are. Frobel switches back to his native German to identify the birds calling from the underbrush.

There’s a Yellow Hammer, Frobel says… a Marsh Warbler, … a European Whitethroat…

Frobel says endangered birds came to depend on the no man’s land as habitat elsewhere was lost to industrial agriculture. And he says he knew that if East and West Germany reunited, this place would need to be protected.

So just weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Frobel called a meeting of like-minded Germans from both sides of the border. The European Greenbelt Initiative was born.

Twenty years later, groups from nearly two dozen countries are still patching together a network of over 14 hundred protected areas, stretching more than 5,000 miles across the heart of Europe- from Finland in the far North to Albania in the Balkans.

Alois Lang

About 500 miles Southeast of Kai Frobel’s town, Alois Lang climbs an old guard tower near the once-militarized border between Austria and Hungary. A wide swath of swampy grassland and a shallow lake dotted with waterfowl stretches out below him.

Lang: “Its one of the key places for bird migration between northern Europe and Africa.”

Lang is director of ecotourism for Neusiedlersee-Seewinkel National Park, which shares management of roughly 350 square miles here with its Hungarian counterpart across the border.

Lang:  “We have approximately 150 species that are migrating that need the area here as a resting and feeding place, and another 150 approximately is breeding here. That was the reason why the greenbelt was identified as the only positive heritage of cold war times.”

Some of the protected areas along the European Greenbelt are public parks like this one. Others are managed by partnerships between private landowners and conservation groups. Some are designated as UN world heritage sites while others are just scraps of fallow urban land.

Perhaps nowhere were the divisions of Cold War Europe more strongly pronounced than in the city of Berlin.

Jesse Shapins

Today trains pass along two sides of a stretch of abandoned green space in the southern part of the city. In the mid 1900′s, this area was a rail yard. But when the Berlin wall was built in 1961, the trains stopped coming. Jesse Shapins is an American urban historian who’s lived and worked extensively in Berlin.

Shapins: “What’s happened over the last 40-50 years is that an enormous park has grown up over all of these train tracks.”

What was once a bustling knot of tracks, with trains coming in from all corners of the continent, is now the Natur-Park Schöneberger Südgelände. But it wasn’t a sure thing that this spot would remain a refuge for nature. When the wall came down, Berliners had to fight to keep these 44 acres from being redeveloped. Shapins says it’s an urban wildlife oasis…

Shapins: “What we have here now is an incredibly diverse ecosystem… Over 350 types of plants… there’s over 50 different types of large mushrooms… there’s over 30 different types of birds… you can even find over 60 different types of spiders.”

The green jewels along the old east-west border are an ironic positive legacy of a very dark period in European history.

Still, not all conservationists believe that protecting big stretches of the buffer zone is a good use of scarce conservation resources. Some are also wary of preserving vestiges of the political boundaries that so many in the region fought-and died-to erase.

Anna Grichting

But for others, protecting natural areas along the old frontier is a critical part of the healing process.

Grichting: “It becomes a sort of ecological backbone. You try to use this as a way of implementing ecological building ecological planning, ecological architecture.”

Anna Grichting is a Swiss urbanist and architect who’s studied military buffer zones around the world, including Berlin. She’s standing outside a chapel that was built to commemorate the people who died trying to cross the Berlin Wall. Grichting believes the greenbelt project gives people the opportunity to use nature to heal political divisions.

Grichting: “The actual populations who are close to the borders are often collaborating especially on questions of ecology. I think ecology’s very interesting because it’s something that brings people together despite their nationalities.”

20 years after the Iron Curtain crumbled, conservation groups in countries up and down Europe continue to work together to produce habitat and biodiversity maps of the green strip they’re trying to protect. There are also plans to develop extensive network of bicycle paths… along what was once a strip of land mines, guard dogs and barbed wire.

For the World, I’m Ashley Ahearn, Berlin.

photos: Ashley Ahearn

• CO2 fixation in basaltic rock in Iceland
• Fighting Global Warming by Turning CO2 into Stone
• BBC animated guide to climate change

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World. In the past year Iceland has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. First the banks collapsed, then the economy, and then the government. But here’s something that survived – a research project aimed at removing excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it beneath the earth’s surface. CO2 emissions contribute to climate change and rising sea levels and many countries, including the US, are investing millions to develop so-called CO2 sequestration technology. The project in Iceland is especially promising as Ashley Ahearn reports.

ASHLEY AHEARN: Driving southwest from Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital, the land looks like crumbled Oreo cookies – miles and miles of them strewn beneath a steel-gray sky. The volcanoes that formed Iceland spewed out hot magma which cooled into a porous black rock known as basalt. Iceland is 90% basalt and scientists here think all that rock might be as good as gold in the fight against global warming. The key – like so much else on this volcanic hot spot – may lie underground.

ALMAR SIGUROSSON: [SPEAKING ICELANDIC]

AHEARN: Almar Sigurosson is driving me up a rocky slope toward white yurt-like structure surrounded by workers in hardhats.

SIGUROSSON: Actually they’re drilling and tapping off energy from the volcano and the heat has been here for thousands of years and we can expect the heat to be here for other thousands of years.

AHEARN: So we’re driving up a volcano right now essentially?

SIGUROSSON: Yeah. Last eruption here was for two thousand years ago so don’t worry.

AHEARN: Sigurosson works forks for Reykjavik Energy. The company taps the steam and boiling hot water that surged through the rocks beneath this volcano to produce enough electricity for two thirds of Iceland’s population. We’re heading towards what’s a bore hole.

SIGUROSSON: This is bore hole that goes down three kilometers. And from these [INDSICERNIBLE] there comes mixture of steam and water and the steam then goes to the power plant and turns the turbines.

AHEARN: This is the kind of clean geothermal energy that environmentalists love. But along with the steam this plant also releases a small amount of naturally-created carbon dioxide, a key greenhouse gas. That led company officials to start thinking about how they might be able to capture and store that CO2 to keep it from adding to the global warming problem. The answer, they realized, might lie in the very rock that harbors the steam and hot water – Iceland’s ubiquitous basalt.

JUERG MATTER: When these types of rocks are exposed to air then they react with the air and with rainwater and the process is called weathering. And the minerals – they get decomposed because of that weathering process.

AHEARN: That’s Juerg Matter. He’s a geologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. The weathering process he’s describing is important because basalt doesn’t just decompose. The minerals in the basalt bond with CO2 to form new carbonate rocks transforming the CO2 from a gas to a solid in the process. The reaction is exciting for scientists and CO2 emitters alike because it keeps CO2 out of the air virtually forever. And there’s more good news. Basalt is the most common rock on earth. Juerg Matter says there’s potential to capture a significant amount of CO2 by pumping it from power plants into underground deposits of basalt around the world.

MATTER: We could basically sequester – the estimates are – a billion tons of CO2.

AHEARN: And the project backers say the potential could be much greater. The reaction between basalt and CO2 happens extremely slowly in nature. But Matter hopes the deep injection process will help speed it up. That’s where the geothermal plant in Iceland comes in. It’s the first real-world test site of this sequestration concept. Holmfriour Siguroardottir takes me down another road near the plant’s main buildings to see where the sequestration magic might happen. Siguroardottir works in Reykjavik Energy’s Innovations Department which has partnered with Juerg Matter and other scientists on the project.

HOLMFRIOUR SIGUROARDOTTIR: Right now we are approaching the injection wells where we have been doing all this preparation work. You can’t so much on the surface. Everything is happening below the surface.

AHEARN: A couple of white tubes stick out of a patch of brown earth – only a hint of the giant science experiment that’s about to begin beneath our feet. Starting this weekend Siguroardottir says her company will begin pumping a mixture of ground water and CO2 from the geothermal plant 600 meters down the white tubes into the porous basalt below.

SIGUROARDOTTIR: That will seep into the basaltic rock where it will react with the minerals in the rock and we are aiming at forming carbonates – carbonate minerals – where it will fixed. It will be there as a mineral not as a gas.

AHEARN: That’s important because the big criticism of other carbon sequestration schemes is that the carbon would be stored as a gas which could escape back into the atmosphere. About 200 meters away from the injection tubes two other bore holes will allow researchers to take samples of groundwater downstream. They’ll analyze the water to find out how much CO2 has bonded with the rock; how much new rock is being produced; and how fast the reaction is taking place.

GORDON BROWN: So that’s a major step in the right direction – to be able to actually monitor what’s going on in time.

AHEARN: Gordon Brown is a geology professor and Stanford University. He’s been studying the problem of CO2 sequestration for 40 years. That’s loner than most scientists have even recognized that rising levels of atmospheric CO2 are in fact a problem. But Brown takes heart in the possibility that the Iceland research could lead to a breakthrough.

BROWN: It’s an old problem and it’s exciting to me that finally we’re starting to actually do things that might lead to some solution. Ultimately we need to fix this problem and I’m beginning to see the hope that it might actually be fixed within my lifetime.

AHEARN: Of course this CO2 solution isn’t yet set in stone. Knowing how the basalt reaction works in the real world is only a small part of the puzzle. Among the big questions are how to minimize the need for large amounts of water as well as the possible seismic and ecological impacts of altering the rocks that make up the very ground beneath us. But many in the field think this kind of research has a lot of promise. Reykjavik Energy has invested $11 million in the project here in Iceland which it calls CarbFix. Another team of scientists is working on a similar project in the Columbia River Basin of eastern Washington. Holmfriour Siguroardottir of Reykjavik Energy says basaltic rock isn’t hard to find. In fact, as the most common rock on the plant it’s conveniently located beneath some of the most densely populate places.

SIGUROARDOTTIR: A big part of India is made of Basaltic rock. So perhaps in the future we can use the [INDISCERNIBLE] as component to a coal power plant they are using there.

AHEARN: Anyone who figures out a safe and reliable way of locking up CO2 emissions could be in a position to make a lot of money as countries start to crack down on greenhouse gas pollution. Siguroardottir says that’s also part of the company’s thinking.

SIGUROARDOTTIR: Of course in the back of our head we look at it as a business opportunity. But let’s see how it works out.

AHEARN: The first tests of Iceland’s CarbFix experiment are scheduled to begin this weekend. For The World I’m Ashley Ahearn outside Reykjavik, Iceland.

WERMAN: Carbon sequestration is just one of the many kinds of stories we bring you every week on our World Science podcast. In this week’s podcast we’ve got the latest news on warming temperatures in the arctic. You’ll also hear interviews with two scientists who are sailing the Pacific as part of their research. One’s digging through the ash of volcanic island in search of insect life. The other is, well, rummaging through something called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. You can find the podcast at The World dot org.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.