Two teams from the Massachusetts-based Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences are on Arctic expeditions this summer to study declining shorebird populations. Many threatened shorebird species, including some that are seen in New England, breed in Arctic habitat. One Manomet team is at the Canning River Delta on the north coast of Alaska and the other team is on the uninhabited Coats Island in Canada’s Hudson Bay. The Greenblog is running periodic updates of their work, part of the Arctic Shorebird Demographics Network, a research project with 16 camps across Alaska, Canada and Russia.

King Eiders are constant companions on the tundra, where they breed in large numbers. Like many birds, they have very warm inner feathers called down. They bring their own, but we have to borrow some of theirs to stay warm. (photo courtesy of Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences)

By Brad Winn
Manomet Conservation Specialist

Something was flopping on the tundra like the arm of a fur coat in the persistent Arctic winds.

It was not a live animal, but the gray form stood out from the low vegetation around it. I walked the edge of a partially frozen pond to get a better look. It was the billowing remains of what had been a King Eider nest. The undulating arm that had caught my attention was actually thick belly down from the female eider. She had pulled the down from herself to line the nest before laying her clutch. It had been holding her four eggs off of the still frozen ground and against her belly, keeping them perfectly insulated.

The night before I found the nest, the wind had carried a mere wisp of eider scent to the nose of an Arctic Fox. That’s all it took. With a nose more sensitive than a bloodhound, the fox moved up the stream of air until he found the source, the sea duck and her eggs. Eiders are strong ducks, and the female had evaded capture but not her eggs.

The fox had carefully lifted each one from the bed of down and quickly cached it within yards of the nest. Without the heat of the down and the incubating adult eider, the eggs would stop developing and the embryos die. Now they sit, future self-contained protein meals for the fox, preserved by the cold tundra, neatly tucked away.

The essence of the Arctic landscape, including Coats Island where we are now, is the enumerable clues of nature hidden within this immense vastness.
We are camped beside a small river that flows north to the coast. Like most geographic features in remote wilderness, the river has no name. (photo courtesy of Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences)

Like the batten of eider down, we encounter evidence of stories that could be unfolding as we watch, or some that might be decades old. Like the set of moss encrusted antlers sticking straight out of the ground where a bull caribou had been pulled to the ground by wolves nearly 30 years before. Or today, footprints across the silt of a quiet pool show where a pair of snow geese walked just hours before as they searched for small mats of algae locked in receding ice.

The land is alive and we are extremely fortunate to read all of its stories.

By Doug Struck
Globe Correspondent

Electric car owners in Massachusetts pay less than half as much for fuel to go the same distance as gas car owners, the U.S. Department of Energy says.

The agency has worked up a comparison it calls the “egallon” for each state. In Massachusetts, electric vehicle owners pay the equivalent of $1.46 to go about 28 miles, the average distance that gasoline car owners go by paying $3.50 for a gallon of gas (if they are driving a 2012 model car), according to the department’s calculation.

That makes the smug ratio about 2:1 for EV car owners. But the “egallon” figure underscores a point sometimes overlooked: the fuel for electric cars, while a lot cheaper than gasoline, is not free. It depends on the cost-per-kilowatt of generation by the power station creating the electricity. In New England, a switch to natural gas generation by power plants has kept prices low. The growing numbers of wind and solar electric generators have the potential for even lower electric costs.

The “egallon” calculation is just for fuel, of course. The price of the vehicle and the maintenance costs for the car help determine the complete cost of your transportation. And the egallon is based on an average for comparison with gas cars: some gas cars get more than 28 miles-per-gallon in their driving, and many older cars get a lot worse mileage.

Still, it is a measure of the future. Sales of hybrid-electric and electric-only cars are on a slow-but-steady rise, taking a firm foothold in our vehicle infrastructure. Electric chargers are sprouting up in and around Boston. My colleague Jonathan Satriale reports that with the addition of 12 new chargers at a parking lot near the TD Garden there are about 100 public chargers in Boston and about 250 in the metro area. They are found in area hotels, in front of City Hall, at the Boston Common garage, and near Fenway Park, among other places. They serve a still-small group of trailblazers, Satriale reports: the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles lists 262 electric vehicles in Boston, and 1465 in the state.

Electricity prices are historically much more stable than gasoline prices, which have whipped American drivers with wild and unexpected fluctuations. The Energy Department concludes that ought to be a draw for car buyers contemplating the plug-ins. Not to mention the environmental benefits.

By Beth Daley
Globe Staff

Developers today announced a new, more easterly route of a proposed controversial transmission line that will carry hydro power from Canada to Southern New England.

Two northern New Hampshire sections totaling just under 8 miles of the 187-mile Northern Pass project will now be constructed underground. The project had run into major roadblocks from environmentalists and residents, who argued it would scar an unbroken vista of rolling hills, forests and farms. Some groups launched an effort in recent years to buy land before developers could, while other residents refused to sell.

"(Burying the lines) is very expensive; it is not something you do lightly," said Gary Long, president and chief operation officer of Public Service of New Hampshire, a subsidiary of the project's parent company Northeast Utilities. The company had originally said it would propose a new route six months ago. "We have worked hard to develop a new proposal that is better for New Hampshire and responsive to feedback we've received," Long said.

The Northern Pass project has raised a host of economic and environmental issues comparable in New England only to the deeply controversial Cape Wind project that proposes to place 130 turbines in Nantucket Sound.

First proposed in 2010, the Northern Pass project is a partnership between Northeast Utilities and Hydro-Quebec. Some 147 miles of the proposed corridor, including a portion through the White Mountains, is already an existing Public Service right of way. But there had been no right-of-way for the most northernmost 40 or so miles that the project needed.

The new route, Long said, goes through less populated areas and will make the project less visible. The project would bring 1,200 megawatts of energy into New England and, developers say, 1,200 jobs during construction.

Environmentalists said the project is now relying more heavily on state and other public lands, yet Northern Pass has not been given any authority to run the line on - or under - those lands yet.

"The new route has the same flaws that have doomed the project to date, primarily the lack of consideration for the communities that would unnecessarily bear all of the burden of the project and none of the benefit,'' said N. Jonathan Peress, Vice President and director, Clean Energy and Climate Change for Conservation Law Foundation.

Globe correspondent Evan Berkowitz contributed to this report.

By Beth Daley
Globe Staff

President Obama will release a broad climate plan later today that will include the first federal carbon emission limits on existing power plants, expanded wind and solar energy production on federally-owned lands and a renewed international focus to jointly reduce emissions with high-emitting countries such as India and China.

The plan, to be announced at Georgetown University, does not give a timetable for the power plant rules, which Republicans say will make the United States less competitive, but directs the US Environmental Protection Agency to work with states, industry and others to develop them. The administration’s actions will not require approval of Congress, which blocked previous efforts to pass legislation aimed at slowing global warming. However, it is likely to face lawsuits and political opposition.

Obama will make up to $8 billion available in loan guarantees to encourage energy efficiency and innovation for cleaner fossil fuel technology; create enough wind and solar projects on public lands by 2020 to power more than 6 million homes; and reduce carbon pollution by at least 3 billion tons by 2030 through setting appliance and federal building efficiency standards.

Carbon dioxide pollution is increasing globally, and is now at 400 parts per million; many climate scientists say levels should be no higher than 350 parts per million to avoid severe impacts of rising temperatures and seas and more severe weather. Obama early on attempted to take a leading role in global warming but international efforts to develop a meaningful climate treaty failed in his first term and were soon eclipsed by the faltering economy.

Power plant emissions comprise the largest stationary source of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States although vehicles and industry also release the heat-trapping gas.

New England has moved away from coal-fired electricity in recent years as domestic natural gas has become cheaper, although new rules could hit Brayton Point in Somerset, the region’s largest coal-fired power plant.

Other initiatives in the president’s speech will include a renewed emphasis on adapting to climate change, including support for climate-resilient investment.

Internationally, the plan calls for major emitting countries to work with the United States on global warming. Secretary of State John Kerry, visiting India Sunday, urged such cooperation. The plan also calls for the end of US financing of new coal-fired power plants.
Business and environmental groups early today said they supported the plan.
“The President’s plan to address climate change makes total sense. It is clear that the Administration has done the math,” said Robert F. Rivers, President of Eastern Bank,
Boston.

Alden Meyer, strategy and policy director at the Cambridge-based Union of Concerned Scientists said “President Obama has a little more than three years to cement a lasting legacy on climate change, and he’ll need every last second.”

Two teams from the Massachusetts-based Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences are on Arctic expeditions this summer to study declining shorebird populations. Many threatened shorebird species, including some that are seen in New England, breed in Arctic habitat. One Manomet team is at the Canning River Delta on the north coast of Alaska and the other team is on the uninhabited Coats Island in Canada’s Hudson Bay. The Greenblog is running periodic updates of their work, part of the Arctic Shorebird Demographics Network, a research project with 16 camps across Alaska, Canada and Russia.

Coats Island Team -- Early Days
by Stephen Brown/Director of Shorebird Science

We left Iqaluit (Nunavut Territory, Canada) a day late on June 17th, a minor miracle in the Arctic where travel is almost always delayed by weather. It was an auspicious beginning to our field season. We gathered for a group photo at the plane and said goodbye to Iqaluit for the 435-mile flight across Baffin Island and Hudson Strait.

We have been looking at maps of northern Hudson Bay for many weeks preparing for this trip. Staring at a map of North America long enough, you can convince yourself that it isn’t very far from Iqaluit to Coats Island (only a few inches on the map!). But as you sit in a bush plane for hours watching the icy bays, rocky islands and hundreds of miles of open water go by, you realize the true scale of the landscape. There were no signs of human habitation on our entire trip, only a vast Arctic wilderness.

Our pilots were exceptional in pulling off a graceful landing on a Coats Island “airstrip” – in reality only a rocky ridge next to a river. They used less than half the available space and came to a stop directly next to our cabin. Nobody had visited the cabin since the last crew was here in 2010 and we were delighted to find it intact.

Shortly after landing, Manomet Conservation Specialist Brad Winn saw a polar bear in the distance. We were also happy to see that the noise from the plane sent him off in the opposite direction and we hope he finds places to rest and hunt far from our camp. So far we haven’t seen any other bears, which is fine with us.

It has been typical weather for the Arctic so far, in the 30s at night with light snow and a little warmer during the days. But out in the field the wind howls constantly at 15 to 25mph. It has also rained heavily several times, something we are not used to from our work on the north slope of Alaska where rain is rare.

We have had a few days in the field now, and are starting to get a sense of the landscape and the habitats where the birds are likely to nest. This habitat is different in many ways from Alaska. Near our camp the tundra is dominated by frost boils - where fine muds are thrust to the surface by cycles of freezing and thawing over many years. You can easily sink up to your calf in the soft sucking mud. Fortunately the tundra gets more solid as we work toward the coast where most of the shorebirds are located.

We have seen about 15 pairs of Semipalmated Sandpipers, although many are quite far from camp. We have also seen many other shorebirds, including American Golden-Plovers, Dunlin, White-rumped Sandpipers, Red Phalaropes and even one Pectoral Sandpiper pair, quite rare in this area. We are constantly serenaded by tundra waterfowl we pass along our nest searching routes, including many Snow Geese and Canada Geese.
A lone Arctic Fox barked at us for quite some time yesterday for intruding on his territory, then gave up and continued on his way.

We have found a few shorebird nests thus far, but with only 2 or 3 eggs, a clear sign that it is still early in the season. Now the race is on, we are fully set up but with such a late spring we will need to work very fast to accomplish our goals of finding and catching enough birds to attach our tiny transmitters. We will keep you posted as our work progresses and we hope to have our first transmitter out in the next few days.

* Photos courtesy of Manomet.

This is from a press release from the Union of Concerned Scientists:

Kevin Knobloch, the president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, will take a new post as chief of staff to Department of Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz. Knobloch will depart UCS on June 21 and start at DOE on June 24. Dr. Kathleen Rest, UCS’s executive director, will oversee the organization as it searches for a new president.

Statement from Kevin Knobloch:

“The bar for leaving my post is very high, and I would only do so for a call to public service of this order. The priorities of Secretary Moniz and the DOE, including reducing carbon emissions, expanding clean renewable energy, and reducing the threat of nuclear weapons and fissile material, have been passions throughout my career. This is a strong opportunity to improve the health and safety of all Americans."

By Doug Struck
Globe Correspondent

Want to know who’s killing the planet? A research group at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has pulled together a nifty list called “The Greenhouse 100” of the top climate polluters in the country.

No surprise: the list is dominated by major power companies, primarily those that create electricity from burning coal and other fossil fuels. What is intriguing is the massive amounts of greenhouse gases they produce. The top three power companies alone produce more than five percent of all of the greenhouse gases emitted in the country.

“It was pretty striking. It means if you could do something about their emissions, you could make a significant dent in the problem,” said James K. Boyce, an economics professor and director of the environment program at the Political Economy Research Institute at UM Amherst.

The list also underscores a strategic reality: to reduce the runaway growth in greenhouse gases, which already promises to wreak major changes on our planet, we must make a major industrial transformation to switch off electric plants that burn fossil fuel. Changing consumer behavior by conservation or efficiency will not do the trick.

“If you don’t address the power plants, you are really missing the elephant in the room,” Boyce said in a telephone interview.

Boyce’s group tapped into information collected by the Environmental Protection Agency on greenhouse gas pollution by each major emitting facility in 2011. Then the group traced the ownership of the facilities, and added up the collective greenhouse gas responsibility of each corporate owner.

So the number one climate change polluter, according to the study, is American Electric Power, which has 36 facilities—most of them power stations—in nine Midwest and Southwest states. Duke Energy is second on the list, and Southern Company is third.

The federal government, largely owing to its size, is fourth on the list. Included in the government’s major polluting facilities is Hanscom Air Base near Bedford. Because only 11 percent of Massachusetts Power comes from coal-burning plants – most electricity is from natural gas, with help from nuclear power and Quebec hydropower-- the state has relatively few facilities on the list.

“Compared to places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Georgia… Massachusetts is a relatively clean state. Certainly we do better than most,” said Boyce. That is of limited consolation: the particulates emitted by coal plants affect the local population, but greenhouse gases contribute to a global problem.

Boyce said the research institute decided to compile the list to try to make useful the mountain of data collected by the EPA, most of which is tucked away on inaccessible databases that are of little help to the public.

“We thought that in terms of the debate over responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, it’s important for the public to have a clear sense of who were the main actors, what are the main sources of emissions,” he said. “This can be useful for socially responsible investment community, for regulators, for consumers.”

\Massachusetts facilities on the list are Brayton Point and Salem Harbor coal power plants owned by Dominion Resources; oil and natural gas plants in Cambridge and Sandwich owned by Genon Energy; oil and natural gas plants in Medway, Charlestown and Weymouth owned by Exelon Corp.; five landfills or waste disposal plants owned by Waste Management Inc.; small plants in Milford, Bellingham, Blackstone, Everett, and Holyoke owned by IPR-GDF Suez North America; and five landfills owned by Republic Services Inc.

By Doug Struck
Globe correspondent

Federal officials are increasingly alarmed by the toll of climate change on the nation’s forests, as vast tracts of the West and Southwest erupt in flames, and bark beetles and other bugs turn swaths of lush green into dead, brown moonscapes.

A report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in February predicted that “wildfires, insect infestations, pulses of erosion and flooding, and drought-induced tree mortality are all expected to increase during the 21st century.”

Last week, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said we have to do something about it. In announcing the creation of seven USDA hub offices to help farmers and foresters deal with global warming consequences, he offered up blunt testimony on the need:

“I am not here today to give a scientific lecture on climate change. I'm here to tell you what we're seeing on the ground,” he said at the National Press Club. “We're seeing more severe storms. We're facing more invasive species. More intense forest fire threatens communities each year.

“The latest science tells us that the threat of a changing climate is new and different from anything we've ever tackled,” he warned.

New Englanders would seem, at first, to be in an enviable position. Climate change will bring both winners and losers, and New England forests are likely to experience a longer growing season, warmer temperatures, more moisture, and an increase in the carbon dioxide that trees convert to food.

“There will be effects that sound like a good deal. Some of the effects will lead to increased growth,” said David R. Foster, head of the Harvard Forest, a 3,500-acre research tract in Petersham.

“This is not the West, where we have to worry about the forest burning up. Dead trees are not going to lead to catastrophic forest fires here,” he said in a telephone interview.

But an altered climate will change the mix of trees, favoring some species and stressing others. That changing mix will invite new pests and diseases, some of which will thrive in a warmer climate.

There already are signs. A tiny insect called the woolly adelgid is spreading northward with more mild winters. It has devastated forests in the Great Smokey Mountains, and is likely to eventually wipe out the stately hemlocks from the northeast, Foster said.

And on Martha’s Vineyard, an outbreak of native caterpillars—surviving through warmer winters that in the past would have killed them—have wiped out hundreds of acres of stately oaks.

“The native species went into an outbreak mode that hasn’t been seen before,” Foster marveled. “That really hasn’t happened in great numbers elsewhere. It hasn’t happened since. Those kinds of things will happen more and more, but they will be unexpected.”

New England is the most forested region in the country, with forests covering 33 million of its 42 million acres. The forests here rebounded from the clear-cutting of colonists, but the wooded area peaked toward the end of the last century, and is declining. Foster and others are campaigning to reduce the losses in order to preserve large unfragmented tracts of forests that are resilient and sustainable.

They are faced with both the impacts of climate change and the encroachment of humans on the forests. The worst scenario is where one feeds the other, he said.

“The last thing you want to do is act abruptly and make quick decision” because of climate change, he said. “There’s a natural tendency to try to go in and fix things, to cut down dead trees, eliminate things that ‘look bad.’ But you often do much bigger damage by coming in with heavy equipment that damages the forests even more.”

“The single best thing we can do is conserve as much as we have now, as much as we can,” he said. “The more that we fragment and perforate and compromise existing natural systems by putting housing in the middle of them and influencing them in the variety of ways that we do, the more stress that’s going to be put on them.”

By Doug Struck
Globe Correspondent

The latest event in a spate of strange and fierce weather always prompts a question to scientists: does this come from climate change?

The usual answer from wary researchers: Well, no one weather event can be attributed to climate change.

But a researcher at Rutgers University believes that for many kinds of weather, the answer is a much more affirmative “yes.” Her explanation for that link also answers the question of why we should care about those maps and photos of the shrinking Arctic ice cap.

Jennifer Francis told a recent conference on the Arctic warming at Tufts University that the warming polar region is changing the pattern of the jet stream. That stream, all-important in the weather we see in the northern hemisphere, is created when air flows “down” toward the Arctic from the rising warm air of the temperate region. As the earth rotates, it spins this flow to the right, creating the jet stream.

Francis, a research professor at the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers, said the Arctic is warming two-to-three times faster than the rest of the atmosphere, and that slows the speed of the air sliding toward the north.

Like a slower-moving river, the jet stream then meanders more, snaking further north and south, which in turn brings to a crawl the usual west-to-east movement of weather patterns across the northern hemisphere. When that happens, local weather systems linger and grow: droughts become more severe, wet weather creates more floods, and – as New England saw this winter—nor’easters can barrel up the Atlantic coast as the usual traffic of new weather systems from the west is stalled.

This pattern, which creates what the weathermen describe as “blocking” high or low-pressure areas, helped steer Hurricane Sandy up the coast in October, and left the middle of the United States vulnerable to a succession of tornadoes, Francis said. It has left Great Britain in a funk of seemingly endless cold wet weather this spring, and produced an
unusual spell of warm weather over Greenland, accelerating the ice melt there.

“What we are finding is that these north-south swings in the jet stream are getting larger, and when they get larger it increases the likelihood of creating “blocks,” Francis said in a telephone interview.

This model does not account for all extreme weather events, but it helps explain the relationship between the warming climate and the documented rise in extreme weather events over the past four or five decades, she said.

William Moomaw, who co-hosted the Tufts conference with Crocker Snow, director of the Edward R. Murrow Center at Fletcher School, said the theory makes sense. “All weather is imbedded in the climate of today,” and thus affected by a warming of the planet,
he said.
With the retreat and the thinning of sea ice in the Arctic region, there is 80 percent less volume of ice than 30 years ago, Francis said. The remaining ice is “broken, thin and fragile.” Francis said it seems obvious that a warming Arctic would have profound effects on the global weather system.

This theory is “an explanation for why we see the kinds of events that seem to be increasing,” she said. “It’s another aspect of climate change that I think we can link directly to changes in weather patterns.”

(Photo credit: NASA)

By Beth Daley
Globe Staff

The call came while I was riding my bike.

“I have awful news,” my husband said as I struggled to hear him while undoing my helmet strap.

Andrea was dead.

I sunk to sit on a nearby curb. Andrea was more than the wife of my husband’s first cousin: She was the person who grabbed my hand as I was introduced to the expansive family I had married into and didn’t let go of me. She was a force of energy and curiosity, a fantastic athlete, the kind of person who – and this really happened – set out to run a half
marathon and finished a full one.

Until she became sick. It started around Christmas 2010. Andrea was tired – so tired the family first thought she had chronic fatigue syndrome. Her brain was foggy. She had to take a leave from her teaching job. Lyme disease was considered, but she never had the bulls-eye rash and she never tested positive. Doctors were flummoxed.

I saw her during this time; waif-thin and confused. “I get lost driving home,’’ she told me, smiling weakly, horrified.

As Andrea got sicker, she found a doctor who honed in on Lyme as a possible reason for her illness and sent her blood to a laboratory that interprets results more liberally than what the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends. The results were not definitive but it suggested Andrea maybe did have Lyme. She started a course of antibiotics in May 2011 and suddenly, got better. She danced at a party.

Yet after four or five months, she regressed. Andrea got sicker and thinner. She couldn’t sleep. She made a decision to go on intravenous antibiotics, but it did not seem to help at all. In April 2012, sick, bedridden, out of her mind with insomnia and depressed, she took her life.

I don’t know if Andrea had Lyme – several tests indicated no, one test indicated yes. All I know for certain was that she was so, so sick.

At a celebration of her life, hundred and hundreds of people came. Lyme was a constant refrain. Everyone, it seemed, had a story about it – those who found a tick, took antibiotics and got better. But there were other stories, those like Andrea’s, where people didn’t get better. Some were sure they had Lyme. Others weren’t sure what they had. Calls were made to get to the bottom of these illnesses.

This series is my attempt to do so.

Lyme disease can be a hard journey, but one 15-year-old Cape Cod teenager has turned her experience with the disease into a passion to educating others about it.

Marissa Freeman, who first got Lyme at age 9, recently received a community service award from Nauset High School for volunteering 100 hours of her time to educate the public about Lyme disease, a tick-borne illness that can cause flu-like symptoms early on and debilitating arthritis, neurological issues and other serious symptoms later.

“I get a brick in the hall of fame at school, it’s pretty cool,’’ said Marissa. Her mother, Lisa, who also suffers from Lyme, helped start Lyme Awareness of Cape Cod, dedicated to the education and awareness of Lyme and other tick-borne diseases.

After Marissa started at Nauset this year, she connected with teacher Christine DeSimone, of Brewster, who became ill with Lyme in 1998. DeSimone had been to 17 doctors before being diagnosed and she knew the struggles of the disease. The two recently tied green ribbons – a symbol of Lyme – around trees at school.

Marissa has also helped with multiple events during May, proclaimed Lyme Disease Awareness Month by Gov. Deval Patrick. Despite being fatigued, she aided with bowling fundraises, to a Lyme day at the State House.

At nine, Marissa began losing weight and suffering from deep fatigue. Alarmed, her parents searched for answers until the exhausted youngster was diagnosed with Lyme and treated. She largely recovered but this past March, her grades began slipping and she became deeply tired again. Her doctor diagnosed her with another tick-borne disease.


“I just feel I have a really bad memory, I feel really spacey,’’ said Marissa. “I feel like I can’t focus or think straight.”

She says the Lyme work comes naturally; she wants to help others understand the disease to prevent them from becoming as sick as she has been.

By Doug Struck
Globe Correspondent

Boston will become cool and green by planting 100,000 trees before 2020, Mayor Thomas M. Menino promised in April 2007. He said it “will make people feel better about where they live.”
So, halfway to the deadline, how’s it going?

That’s unclear. The city’s official Climate Plan Action Update 2011 said a comparatively meager “4,000 new trees, public and private” have been planted since 2007, and acknowledged “progress toward the 2020 goal has slowed.”

Calls for an update to the city’s Parks and Recreation Department were referred to the Boston Natural Areas Network, the non-profit now running the “Grow Boston Greener” program.

Jeremy Dick, who is in charge of the program, said the city’s figure sounded low. He said he thought “20 to 25,000” trees have been planted, a five-fold multiple of the city’s figures, but still off the goal by half. He could not explain the discrepancies, and said an accurate tally was made in spring 2012. But he declined repeated requests for that accounting, saying, “I’m not sure a story on the problems would be positive.”

Whatever the total, Tabatha White is toiling away, trying to plug the holes in the cityscape. She is a forester and tree planting coordinator for the parks department. Whenever anyone calls the city with a request, or she sees a vacant spot, she checks out the surrounding overhead wires, measures for handicap access on the sidewalk, picks from about 20 native species, and calls in the backhoe.

Last fall she planted about 700 trees, she said; this spring she hopes to hit 900.

It’s a struggle to make an urban environment green, she said. Many spots are not suitable. The city’s bustling development fells others. And about five percent of her plantings die from natural causes—“if you can call living in a sidewalk natural,” she says.

“I don’t like seeing the dead ones,” White said. “I live here in the city. My eyes are always open for open pits, whether I drive or ride or run, or go out for the evening. I feel really good when I can go back there and see that I’ve planted a tree.”

The mayor’s goal was among an array of programs to respond to climate change. Increasing the urban “canopy” would absorb carbon dioxide, help control storm water runoff, cool buildings and sidewalks, and look better, Menino said.

One of the threats to the tree plantings, though, is the city’s leaky gas pipes. Nathan Phillips, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University, led a study in 2011 that documented 3,300 natural gas leaks from the aging infrastructure.

Natural gas is mostly methane, and starves tree roots of needed oxygen. “It’s a contributing factor” in tree mortality, Phillips said. “It’s detrimental to their health.”

Phillips says such the city is just beginning to come to grips with the gas leaks. But “overall, in terms of Boston going ‘green,’ what the mayor has done is tremendous,” Phillips said. “Having said that, there’s always room for improvement.”

By Doug Struck
Globe Correspondent

Hurricane Katrina had finally spent its fury and died, when I stepped cautiously through the broken doorway of a brick building in New Orleans called the Lafon Nursing Home of the Holy Family. Inside was the smell of death and echoes of a desperate struggle. Mattresses had been used to float patients in floodwaters; wheelchairs were crushed into corners; the chapel had been used to lay out the bodies.

As a fellow reporter and I pieced together the tragic last hours at Lafon in 2005, we learned of frantic calls when the power failed, of heroic struggles by the staff to hoist patients from the first floor as flood waters tugged at their waists, and then of five days without food, medicine, or relief from the killing heat. Aides trapped with their patients fanned the elderly, swabbed them with soiled cloths, and tried to make them comfortable as they died. In all, 22 elderly patients perished when the Lafon Nursing Home was suddenly crippled.

Such scenes, repeated during Katrina at medical facilities ranging from small nursing homes to New Orleans’ sprawling Memorial Medical Center, have haunted hospital planners. Planners like Hubert Murray, an architect who helped design Boston’s new Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital.

“We need to learn from these previous disasters, and that is what we are doing,” said Murray, now manager of sustainable initiatives for Partners HealthCare, Spaulding’s owner.

In designing Spaulding, the planners dictated that the vital electrical and mechanical system components be placed on the roof, rather than on ground level where they would be vulnerable to floods. They placed the main electrical cables in concrete cases, running to a ninth-floor circuit room. They planned for a four-day supply of fuel for generators and co-generators on the roof. They put windows that can be opened in all of the patient rooms, in case the air conditioner fails.

The design changes were incorporated in a facility with sweeping views of the harbor and bold innovations for patients, as Kay Lazar recently detailed.
But there were pushbacks on some of Murray’s suggestions.

“The mechanical engineers were grumbling because operable windows makes life difficult to balance the HVAC, the electricians were bellyaching because that wasn’t where they usually place the electrical systems, and NSTAR wanted the electrical switching on the ground where they could get at it,” Murray recalled.

“We held out. We said, ‘No. Look, this is a real risk,’” he said. “We read the accounts of what had happed in Hurricane Katrina.”

The biggest risk, perhaps, was putting the new hospital at the old Charlestown Navy Yard. The hospital is built on landfill over old mudflats, and climate change is bringing a swelling sea and the likelihood of more severe storms.

In 2008, the architects took the early concepts for the hospital and compared them with reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the leading authority on global warming. Those reports indicated a global sea level rise anywhere from 30 inches to 60 inches by 2100. Other studies predict an even faster sea rise in Boston, where tides, winds and geography are bringing New England coastal increases much higher than the global rate.

The architects raised the building design by as much as they could-- by one foot-- to put it 3 1/2 feet above the level of a flood so severe it is predicted only once every 100 years, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They strengthened sea walls, steepled the garage driveway to block water, and contoured the grounds for drainage.

“That’s pretty good, but not perfect,” Murray said.

As a final safeguard, the hospital has no patient rooms on the first floor. The worst case scenario for sea level rise by the century’s end, combined with a tremendous storm, could put 30 inches of water on the first floor, Murray admits. That will be messy, but will not touch patient care and the hospital can keep working.

“We greatly reduced the risks,” he said. “But we didn’t reduce them to nothing.”

Architect David Burson, senior project manager for Partners HealthCare, said the calculations were made with the goal of keeping Spaulding in the city, rather than at a remote suburban site. The accommodations to climate change were made to protect that bet.

“Hubert Murray really pushed us to take it to the next level. Katrina was still fresh in everyone’s mind,” Burson said. “We think we have pretty healthy margins now.”

By Doug Struck
Globe Correspondent

The scenes of Hurricane Sandy rampaging through New York City last October stunned city planners on the East Coast, posing a question of whether to withdraw from the waterfront.

“It was, oh my god, it can happen here, too,” mused Brian Swett, Boston’s environmental director.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has proposed using $400 million to buy beachfront homes and raze the buildings, leaving beach buffers from the sea.

Not Boston. The rapidly rising sea levels and prospects for more violent storms have not diminished the city’s appetite for developing its waterfront.

“No one is saying ‘retreat,’” said Vivian Li, president of the Boston Harbor Association. Her association completed a report in February that illustrated in sobering detail the double-whammy of higher seas and fierce storms.

Had Sandy hit Boston five hours earlier, at high tide, six percent of Boston would have flooded. In 2050, with the sea level expected to be as much as 2.5 feet higher from climate change, a Sandy-like storm at high tide would flood 30 percent of the city, the report showed.

Rather than shy from building on the waterfront, however, developers are calculating how they can adapt to floodwaters, Li said in an interview in her office.

“Even after Sandy, even after our report, there hasn’t been an impact on property value. The cranes cannot move faster here,” Li said. “They are going to develop areas that are clearly vulnerable, and they are going to adapt.”

“We have ten million square feet of real estate development right here in the innovation district,” said Swett, an in interview at City Hall. Buildings can be constructed several feet higher, ground floors can be designed to expect flooding, crucial systems like electricity and air conditioning can be put on roofs instead of basements, ground-level windows can be shuttered and upper windows opened, he said.

“Our waterfront is relatively less developed” than some other cities, Swett said. Until the Big Dig replaced I-93 in 2005, the elevated highway had isolated the waterfront and discouraged development. Now, he said, developers have a chance to do it right.

“I think we have the opportunity in Boston to be the most climate-resilient city in the country,” Swett said. “We know better what to do than cities that developed ten of 15 years ago.”

The property owners “are not in denial,” Li added. “They are not saying there is no risk. They are saying we can adapt.”

One of those developers, Joseph Fallon, explained on a recent WCVB “Chronicle” program how he will adapt to climate change while building a massive hotel-condo-marina project at Fan Pier on Boston’s Seaport.

“We’ll raise the grade 12 to 18 inches, and then we will raise the lobby floor. So we are starting to add feet. Everything we do we start above what the normal elevation would have been 100 years ago when they were building down here.”

“I think we are on the right track,” Swett said. “I will never be able to check the box and say we are prepared for climate change. It’s an ever-changing perspective. All we can do is say we are more prepared than last year.”

By Doug Struck Globe Correspondent

CONCORD -- Henry David Thoreau took walks. He called it “sauntering” around Walden Pond, where he wrote about living in the wilderness between regular strolls into nearby Concord to deliver his dirty laundry to his mother and collect her apple pies.

Time passed, and some of his sauntering trails were covered by a town garbage dump. A large muddy lot at the base of the now-closed dump is occupied by rotting compost piles, mounds of gravel, recycling dumpsters, and logs cleared from the last winter storm. A field of solar panels will bloom there this summer.

Now a proposal to locate a school bus depot there has pitted school officials against a conservation group that wants to preserve the memory of Thoreau's trails. The group, the Walden Woods Project -- started by Eagles rock star Don Henley, a Texan inspired by Thoreau as a teenager -- has made Concord a tempting offer. We’ll pay you $2.8 million, the group says, if the town foregoes stationing its 36 yellow school buses on the land.

“We want to conserve this because of its history, because of the potential for development, because of its key location in conserved land, because of its potential for wildlife and trail connectivity,” said Kathi Anderson, executive director of the Walden Woods Project.

“It’s a landfill. It’s a closed landfill,” averred Maureen Spada, chair of Concord’s elected school committee. “It’s a very appropriate place to park buses.”

The group’s lucrative offer, and the opposing plan to pave over two of the 34 acres and put a three-bay maintenance shop and a hut for the bus drivers on the property, will clash at the annual Town Meeting in late April. Voters will be asked to approve one proposal or the other by a two-thirds vote, and the choice has stoked a sometimes acrimonious dispute in the town of 17,000.

“There are some pretty strong opinions on this,” acknowledged Christopher Whelan, the town manager.

Concord does not take Thoreau and his cherished pond lightly: The name “Thoreau” or “Walden” is on two main streets, a school, and 15 businesses listed in the town phone book, including a liquor store, a nursing home, a mortgage company, and a country club.

The dispute over the planned bus depot is entwined -- as these things often are in small towns -- with other arguments, current and past. When the school board tried to outsource the bus service last year, residents rallied around their familiar drivers and said ‘no.’ The board ruffled more feathers by pushing blueprints for a new high school without a bus depot included on the site, and then by naming the old landfill site as the best spot for the depot.

“We were shocked” when the school committee zeroed in on the former landfill, Anderson said. Sure, it is not so pretty and is “degraded,” she acknowledged. Town residents began dumping garbage there in the mid-1950s. It was closed in 1994 when Concord embraced curbside pickup and started trucking its garbage to Fitchburg.

The garbage mound was sealed in clay, contoured to give it some curves, and planted with wild grass. But it still is a place of last resort for unwanted stuff: the town stores salt and concrete blocks there, the Boy Scouts bring in 500 used Christmas trees each year for mulching, and gardeners haul bags of leaves and shorn grass to add to the richly-odored compost piles.

Thoreau’s steps are buried under tons of old garbage.

“Its obviously not a pristine site,” conceded Whelan, the town manager.

But the Walden Woods Project sees it as a missing piece of the conservation ring surrounding Walden Pond, and has tried to get a restriction on the land for decades.

Anderson suggests the school committee is playing poker: forcing the town voters to choose between putting the depot on the landfill site or outsourcing bus service and their drivers. Spada responds that a committee, which she headed, made an “exhaustive” search of other sites for the school buses, and found none that was not expensive, restricted by zoning, or too near residents who would be bothered by the early-morning chorus of diesel engines.

“This was the best site,” she said. “There is no zoning, no wetlands, no vernal pools” and no close neighbors.

Spada and other supporters say parking the buses at a landfill would hardly sully the Walden experience. The bus pad would be separated by trees from a parking lot for Walden Pond, and the throngs who visit the pond to swim and hike in the summer must walk down into a glacial kettle, out of sight of the old landfill.

She argues that the conservation restriction would bind the property from future uses, such as expanding the composting or erecting wind turbines.

That is the point, Anderson responds.

“If it is not protected, it could become a mini-mall, an office park, a shopping area,” she said. “One hundred years from now, 200 years, what’s going to happen if we don’t protect this landfill?”

Devotees might search Thoreau’s writing for guidance on the question. Anderson shrugs at that effort: “I’ve learned over the last 23 years to not make the assumption that I knew what Henry David Thoreau would think,” she said. He fit well in Concord: “He was a contrarian.”

(Christian Marks/TNC)

Majestic American elm trees in New England that have survived decades of a ravaging disease are being called upon to help create a genetic armor to help future generations resist the disease’s devastation.

Scientists from The Nature Conservancy are climbing high into trees in a handful of locations this spring to clip small branches in hopes of developing new Dutch elm-disease resistant strains of the stately tree.

“We’ll make the most resistant American elm varieties among them available to the public, as well as planting them in our own floodplain forest restoration projects on the Connecticut River,” said Conservancy ecologist Christian Marks. “One day, maybe, these incredible giants once again will lend their beauty to our parks and streets and their strength to our floodplains.”

American elms, among New England’s largest trees, once dominated the forest canopy, creating an ecological niche that provided shade and absorbed floodwaters, according to The Nature Conservancy.

But the Dutch elm fungus that entered the country in the 1930s changed all that, cutting a swath of destruction that has resulted in the death of some 100 million of the graceful, arching trees.

The disease kills by choking the tree. The fungus clogs the tree's vascular system, which delivers waters to leaves and branches. Eventually the tree withers and dies.

In coming days, aided by Chesterfield arborist Jim McSweeney, Marks will visit several Western Massachusetts sites to take sample branches. Others are also being taken from sites in Connecticut and Eastern New York.

“The disease has had a profound impact on trees that were treasured by so many people in city parks and streets,” Marks said. “It also had a dramatic impact on floodplain forests along New England’s rivers.”

The elm still is the second most abundant tree species in the floodplain forests of the Connecticut River watershed; however, today’s elms are typically much smaller than those that preceded the disease, and the unique niche the larger trees created has largely been lost. Restoring it would benefit these crucial floodplains, according to Marks.

Scientists are crossing samples from the most promising trees among these large elms with American elm selections developed by the U.S. Forest Service that are already proven to be highly tolerant to Dutch elm disease. The offspring from these controlled crosses will be planted at floodplain forest restoration sites. Once the elms reach sufficient size, the trees will be tested for disease resistance.

This is the third year of this elm restoration project. So far, cuttings from nine elms in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont have been collected, and 20 crosses have been completed. This March, cuttings will be collected from at least 16 more elms, according to the Conservancy.

One of the hardest things about protecting endangered whales is finding them – as I recently found out when reporting a story on North Atlantic right whales.

But now, the New England Aquarium is using GIS to track the leviathans to better understand the possible impacts of humans and the maritime industry on right whales from ship strikes and fishing gear entanglements. The technology also helps track animals wearing satellite tags and helps monitor various marine species and habitats as humans encroach on their ocean surroundings.

Brooke Wikgren, an assistant scientist and GIS specialist at the Aquarium will discuss this emerging research at a free public lecture at the Aquarium’s Harborside Learning Lab on March 28 at 7 p.m.

From an Aquarium press release: “With an increasing human population, GIS can be effective in researching how vulnerable marine animals live and thrive in the ocean.
Fishing, food, shipping, industry, and energy sources are all expanding, but consequently, there are competing demands on wildlife. Wikgren will discuss how GIS can determine how these different uses interact and overlap so better planning and solutions can minimize problems for marine animals. She also looks at ocean use conflicts as well as mapping marine species and habitats. She monitors satellite tagging of marine animals that have often been rehabilitated at the Aquarium after injuries or strandings, and she has assisted with geospatial research of the Phoenix Islands Marine Protected Area in the Central Pacific Ocean.”

To register, please go to www.neaq.org.

The Massachusetts League of Environmental Voters, a non-partisan, non-profit advocacy group, has a new chairman and four new directors on its governing board.

Board member Chuck Anastas, of Westborough, was elected Chairman of the Board. Chuck replaces Tom McShane, a principal at Dewey Square Group, who will remain a board member. Chuck is co-founder and Managing Partner of Durand & Anastas Environmental Strategies, Inc., and oversees the company’s permitting and regulatory business. Chuck served from 1999 – 2003 as Chief of Staff at the Massachusetts Executive Office of Environmental Affairs, where he was responsible for oversight of the Secretary's initiatives and managing senior staff activities, including operating and capital budgets, municipal harbor planning, and the land protection program.

New board members are Erik Balsbaugh, a Senior Associate with Dewey Square Group’s Boston office, Jennifer L. Ryan, a board member of the Massachusetts Non-Profit Network and the Arlington Land Trust, and former Legislative Director for Mass Audubon, Mark Jester, President of the Berkshire County League of Sportsmen, and Doug Pizzi, principal of Pizzi
Communications Company and former Press Secretary at the Massachusetts Executive Office of Environmental Affairs.

U.S. Rep. and Senate candidate Ed Markey Wednesday introduced a new version of bill to combat seafood fraud by tracking fish from a boat to a diner’s plate.

Markey amended earlier legislation he filed in July to reflect input from federal agencies, fishermen, consumer and conservation groups. The new bill will require information already collected by fishermen, such as species name, catch location and harvest method, to be made available to consumers and requires imported fish to have equivalent documentation. It also expands the ability of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to refuse entry of unsafe or fraudulent seafood shipments.

The bill comes after several years of high-profile reports, including in the Globe, of rampant seafood substitution of species on restaurant plates.

For more information go here

and here.

(photo by Todd McLeish)

Some people still question if narwhals – the world’s most northernmost whale with its seven-foot long spiral tusk - still exist. They do – although the mysterious creatures are facing an uncertain future as their icy world melts because of climate change.
Natural History writer Todd McLeish goes deep into the narwhal – from its mythology to biology in Narwhals: Arctic Whales in a Melting World. McLeish will be speaking on March 2 at the Harvard Museum of Natural History at 2 p.m. and on March 8 at Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge at 3 p.m. We caught up with him recently to learn more about the “sea unicorn.

Green Blog: What made you choose to write about Narwhals?
Todd McLeish: loved frogs and turtles as a kid, and I remember thumbing through the encyclopedia when I was about 9 and seeing a picture of a narwhal. It’s been something I’ve been curious about ever since. After writing a couple of books about rare New England wildlife, I was looking for an animal far from our area that I could write about, and I was reminded of my interest in the narwhal. It has so many interesting angles to pursue — the purpose of the tusk, its connection to the unicorn myth, climate change, subsistence hunting, and more — it was the perfect subject.

GB: You describe an amazing scene of Narwhals when you were visiting Baffin Island. Tell us about it.
TM: We were camped on a beach high above the Arctic Circle, and while it was midnight, the sun was still shining. We awoke to heavy breathing outside our tent, and it was a group of narwhals that were just 30 yards from shore with their tusks pointing skyward, as if they were jousting. We stood for an hour watching this amazing display of social behaviors while we were wearing nothing but our long underwear in 35 degree temperatures, not wanting to take the time to put on warm clothes because we didn’t want to miss anything. I’ll never forget that moment.

GB: What do Narwhals sound like underwater/above water?
TM: Above the water you mostly hear their breathing as they surface, which sounds somewhat like most other whales you might see on a whale watch here in New England, though one biologist described the sound of a distant pod of narwhals approaching as a herd of farting elephants. But underwater, listening through hydrophones, they make all sorts of bizarre barnyard noises — mooing, creaky doors, sheep-like sounds, clicking. Some of it is probably for communication, some of it is from their echolocation.

GB: How is there population doing?
TM: By most accounts, their population is doing rather well at the moment. The best guess is that there are about 80,000 narwhals living around the islands in the eastern Canadian Arctic and along the coast of Greenland.

GB: Is climate change already affecting Narwhal’s and if so how?
TM: It is difficult to tell whether climate change is affecting them yet, but biologists claim narwhals and polar bears are the Arctic species most vulnerable to climate change. Narwhals aren’t very flexible in terms of their habitat requirements or the food they eat, so they’ll have a hard time adapting to changing environmental conditions. Plus, as Arctic ice retreats, it will open up even greater vulnerabilities — their chief predator, killer whales, will have greater access to narwhal habitat, commercial fishing will expand in direct competition for the narwhal’s preferred foods, oil and gas exploration will bring with it threats of oil spills and noises that will disturb them, and diseases and parasites that they aren’t used to could move northward from the south. While narwhals seem to be doing well now, their future is precarious.

GB: What was the most difficult part of researching or writing the book?
TM: No doubt, the hardest part for me was spending time in an Inuit hunting camp in northern Greenland where I learned about the importance narwhals play in Inuit culture. I’m a wildlife lover who wants to protect threatened species, so watching narwhals be hunted and then carved up for food was emotionally difficult for me to watch. But the Inuit have few other options for food, and the whales provide so many important nutrients that there is no heart disease in the region. So as challenging as it was for me to watch, I learned to understand and accept the practice as necessary in some Arctic communities.

GB: What is the narwhal’s link to the unicorn myth?
TM: For centuries, early Arctic explorers would acquire narwhal tusks from the Inuit and sell them in Europe as unicorn horns, which were supposed to have healing properties. The story goes that if you drank from a cup made from a unicorn horn, you wouldn’t get sick, so all the royal families acquired tusks and the Catholic Church even ground them up into powder to put in the sacramental wine to heal their parishioners. When it was finally revealed that the tusks came from a whale, it reinforced the belief in unicorns because people claimed that if a sea unicorn existed then a terrestrial unicorn must also exist.