dukenvironmentNICHOLAS SCHOOL OF THE ENVIRONMENT FALL 2009

HUDS NRIVERTHE DREDGING OF THE

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features

The Dredging of the Hudson River

Two Associated with the Nicholas SchoolPlay a Role in this Benchmark forEnvironmental Cleanup

Discovering Uncharted Interior Pathways

Using an Armada of Specially DesignFloats, Lozier and Bower Take a New Lookat the 'Great Ocean Conveyor” with MajorImplications for Global Climate ChangeResearch

Anticipating How Trees Will 'Duke it Out'with Global Warming

the log

Personally Speaking: Breathtaking and Wounded

Our Food Supply by the Numbers

Robert Redford photo spread

Special student awards

Public Trust Doctrine Could Aid Management of U.S. Oceans

Wyatt Hartman Receives Dean's Award forOutstanding Graduate Student Paper

Assessing the Pros and Cons of Geoengineeringto Fight Climate Change

Forty Nicholas School Faculty and StudentsPresented Research at 2009 ESA Meeting

Mangroves Save Lives in Storms, Study of 1999Super Cyclone Finds

New Policy Brief Reviews Options for ImprovingU.S. Residential Energy Efficiency

forum

Can They Stop the Impending Train Wreck?

action

Nicholas School Students Make a Splash inthe Local Fisheries Market

Policy and Geography Shape Tropical Parks'Success in Stemming Deforestation, NewPaper Finds

alumni news

As Policy Advisor, Robert Bonnie Wieldsthe Carrot Not the Stick

International Conservation Leader,Sustainable Energy Advocate Receive TopNicholas School Alumni Awards

Fresh Markets for EnvironmentalEntrepreneurship

annual report

upcoming events

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a note on the magazine

Due to recent budget cutsand our ongoing commitmentto preserve our environmentand forge a sustainablefuture- we have streamlinedand shortened the print ver-sion of the magazine. Someof your favorite sections likeclass notes are revisedmonthly and will be in theonline version. Come see thenew and updated online magazine at

nicholas.duke.edu/dukenvironment.

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dukenvironmentis published twice a year by the Nicholas School of the Environment.

Editor Scottee Cantrell

Art Director Amy Chapman Braun

Senior Writer Tim Lucas

Contributing WritersMonte Basgall, Laura Ertel, Erica Rowell, Donna Selland Robyn Walker

PhotographyJared Lazarus, Jon Gardiner, Megan Morr and LesTodd, Duke Photography; Judy Rolfe; Kristina Loggia;Ed Hyman; Ari Friedlaender; Robyn Walker; Noah Yavitand Heidi Hausman

Student Assistant Robyn Walker MEM’10

Web Editors Stephanie Thirolle and Brian Johnson

Thanks to the Nicholas School offices of External Affairs and Career Services for their assistance.

Need to get in touch with dukenvironment?

Subscribe (free)Visit us online at nicholas.duke.edu/dukenvironmentOr e-mail dukenvironment@nicholas.duke.edu

Change of AddressE-mail dukenvironment@nicholas.duke.edu or call 919-613-8111

Editorial CommentsE-mail Scottee Cantrell at dukenvironment@nicholas.duke.edu

© Copyright 2009 The Nicholas School of theEnvironment at Duke University

AdministrationWilliam L. Chameides, Dean

Susan Lozier, Chair, Division of Earth and Ocean Sciences

Ram Oren, Chair, Division of Environmental Sciences and Policy

Cindy Van Dover, Chair, Division of Marine Science and Conservation and Director,

Duke University Marine Laboratory

Emily M. Klein, Senior Associate Dean, Academics

Tim Profeta, Senior Associate Dean and Director, Nicholas Institute for Environmental

Policy Solutions

Chandra Christian, Associate Dean, External Affairs

James Haggard, Associate Dean, Finance and Administration

Scottee Cantrell, Assistant Dean, Marketing and Communications

Susan Gerberth-Jones, Assistant Dean, Information Technology

Karen Kirchof, Assistant Dean, Career Services

Cynthia Peters, Assistant Dean, Enrollment Services

Board of VisitorsMarshall Field V P’02, Old Mountain Co., Chicago, IL (Chair)

John H. Adams L’62, H’05, Natural Resources Defense Council, New York, NY

Ann M. Bartuska, USDA Forest Service, Washington, DC

Lawrence B. Benenson T’89, Benenson Capital Partners LLC, New York, NY

Richard H. Bierly, Morehead City, NC

Brent F. Blackwelder T’64, P’98, P’01, Friends of the Earth, Washington, DC

Lawrence E. Blanchard T’72, Dermatology Associates of Virginia, Richmond, VA

Robert F. Bonnie MEM/MF’94, Environmental Defense, Washington, DC

Kenneth H. Close T’81, Argus International, Washington, DC

Thomas F. Darden, Cherokee Investment Partners LLC, Raleigh, NC

Kathryn S. Fuller P’00, P’04, Ford Foundation, New York, NY

F. Daniel Gabel Jr. T’60, P’02, Hagedorn & Co., New York, NY

Jeffrey L. Gendell T’81, Tontine Partners, Greenwich, CT

Harvey J. Goldman T’68, P’98, P’01, Goldman Consultants Group LLC, New York, NY

Lynn E. Gorguze T’81, Cameron Holdings Corp., La Jolla, CA (Co-Vice Chair)

John S. Hahn T’74, P’06, P’10, Mayer Brown LLP, Washington, DC

Cindy Horn, CP Management Co., Woodland Hills, CA

Todd C. Jorn T’76, P’11, Pfife Hudson Group, New York, NY

Sandra Taylor Kaupe, Palm Beach, FL

Edgar Maeyens Jr. H’72, Park Avenue Dermatology Clinic, Coos Bay, OR

Mark D. Masselink T’79, P’08, P’11, Moore Capital Management, New York, NY

Brian N. McDonald MF’84, ILIM Group, St. Petersburg, Russia

Anne H. McMahon P’82, Durham, NC

J. Thomas McMurray E’76, G’78, PhD’80, P’08, Marine Ventures Foundation, Jackson Hole, WY

J.K. Nicholas T’89, B’96, Chelsea Clocks, Chelsea, MA

Nancy Ragland Perkins T’93, MEM’97, Office of U.S. Sen. Judd Gregg, Washington, DC

Frank W. Peterman, The Wilderness Society, Atlanta, GA

Robert Pinkard P’10, Cassidy & Pinkard Colliers, Washington, DC

Randolph K. Repass E’66, West Marine, Watsonville, CA

Paul D. Risher E’57, P’88, Risher Investments, Stamford, CT

Sally-Christine Rodgers, Watsonville, CA

Truman T. Semans Jr. T’90, B’01, Green Order Inc., New York, NY

Ruth G. Shaw P’09, Charlotte, NC

Arthur L. Smith T’74, P’03, Triple Double Advisors LLC, Houston, TX

Brad G. Stanback T’81, Winterberry Farm, Canton, NC

J. Blake Sullivan MF’89, Sullivan Forestry Consultants Inc., Americus, GA (Co-Vice Chair)

Stephen A. Wainwright T’53, P’80, P’86, Duke University, Dept. of Biology, Durham, NC

Wayne F. Wilbanks T’82, Wilbanks, Smith & Thomas Asset Management, Norfolk, VA

Alumni CouncilMichael Pentony E’87, MEM’96, NOAA Fisheries, Gloucester, MA (President)

Claire Agre T’02, West 8, New York, NY

Kirsten Cappel MEM’04, U.S. EPA, Washington, DC

J. Marc Dreyfors MEM’90, The Forest Foundation, Durham, NC

Julia Elmore MEM’06, USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service, Asheboro, NC

Brent Fewell MEM’91, United Water, Harrington Park, NJ

Christopher Galik MEM’02, Climate Change Policy Partnership, Durham, NC

Robert Jacobs T’84, Classic Hydrocarbons Inc., Ft. Worth, TX

Leslie Jamka MEM’99, Hazardous Substances Research Center, Manhattan, KS (President-Elect)

Marian Keegan MF’82, Hemlock Farms Community Association, Lords Valley, PA

Jonathan Kelsey MEM’97, NOAA Office of Legislative Affairs, Washington, DC

Emily Lindow MEM’01, NOAA Office of International Affairs, Washington, DC

Courtney Lorenz MEM’06, Skanska USA, Durham, NC

Bruce Molnia M.A.’69, U.S. Geological Survey, Reston, VA

Richard Pandullo MEM’81, Trinity Consultants, Morrisville, NC

Mark Pfefferle MEM’88, Montgomery County Planning Department, Silver Spring, MD

Robert Piotrowski G’74, Marathon Oil (ret.), Biltmore Lake, NC

Emily Duncan Rodgers MEM’06, Environmental Resources Management, Denver, CO

Gwynne Rogers MEM/MBA’02, Natural Marketing Institute, Harleysville, PA

Anna Stark MEM’05, U.S. EPA Energy Star, Washington, DC

Heather Nixon Stevenson MEM’83, McGuire Woods LLP, Richmond, VA (Past President)

Cynthia Van Der Wiele MEM/MF’98, Sustainable Communities Development, Chatham County, NC

Tali Trigg, Student Representative, Durham, NC

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HUDS NTwo Associated with the Nicholas School Play a Role in this Benchmark for Environmental Cleanup

BY ERICA ROWELL

RIVER

THE DREDGING OF THE

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The Hudson River’s impact onAmerican history is nothing short ofstunning. For millennia, the Hudsonhas showered riches on the region:bountiful food, scenic vistas, and animportant transportation route, toname a few. Today, a new chapterawaits the river. The mighty Hudson ispoised to become the nation’s biggestenvironmental cleanup story—or elsea lesson in how not to clean a toxicwaste site.

The removal of PCBs from theHudson has been a long time coming.For decades, General Electric dumpedcontaminants into the river, foughtlong and hard against a cleanup, allthe while denying health problemsrelating to the polychlorinatedbiphenyls, the collective name for thegroup of 209 synthetic compoundsbetter known as PCBs. But then in

2002, 18 years after nearly two-thirdsof the Hudson was designated aSuperfund site, GE did an about-faceand stopped balking.

On May 15, 2009, the dredging of the Hudson River began.

“It’s the most challenging projectI’ve ever worked on,” says DavidRosoff MS’90 (geology), the HudsonRiver on-scene field coordinator forthe Environmental Protection Agencyand one of two alums associated withthe Nicholas School who are workingon the project. “It’s a challenge towork with the best people in thisindustry. … Technically, the challengesare immense—controlling re-suspension;dealing with quality-of-life issues;working six days a week, 24 hours aday, very close to residents; dealingwith noise, lights, and odor com-plaints; the extensive amount of data

• Reduce the cancer risks and non-cancerhealth hazards for people eating fishfrom the Hudson River by reducing the concentration of PCBs in fish.

• Reduce the risks to ecological receptorsby reducing the concentration of PCBs in fish.

• Reduce PCB levels in sediments inorder to reduce PCB concentrations in river (surface) water that are abovesurface water applicable or relevantand appropriate requirements.

• Reduce the inventory (mass) of PCBsin sediments that are or may be bioavailable.

• Minimize the long-term downstreamtransport of PCBs in the river.

(from EPA’s 2002 Record of Decision)

OBJECTIVES OF THE PROJECT

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THE DREDGINGPROCESS:Following the PCBs from theRiver to Their New Residence

DREDGING AREAS WHEREPCB LEVELS ARE HIGHEST

State-of-the-art dredgers remove sediment from predetermined areasof the riverbed and load it onto hopper barges. When full, the scowsare sent via the Hudson River/Champlain Canal to the dewatering/processing facility in Fort Edward, a 120-acre site constructed forthe project. The barges are off-loaded into a size-separation process.Coarser material goes to a staging area near the rail yard. The finersilt, where most of the PCBs lie, is slurried with water and pumpedto a dewatering building. There, filter presses squeeze out the waterand press the material into filter cake. The water is cleaned at anon-site water treatment plant and eventually returned to the river.The filter cake is delivered to a storage area, where it is eventuallyloaded along with the coarse materials onto trains bound for a Texaslandfill where the material will reside in a tightly controlled situation.

that we have to look at every day.”The cleanup covers the upper 40

miles of the roughly 200-mileSuperfund site that runs from HudsonFalls, N.Y., all the way to New YorkCity. The pressure on Rosoff and hisEPA team seems as intense as the project’s scope is vast.

Says Rosoff, “This is going to be abenchmark for environmental dredging.”

A Contaminant Runs Through ItThe Hudson flows from its primarysource high in the Adirondacks, LakeTear of the Clouds on New York’stallest peak, Mount Marcy, to the tipof Manhattan. Between Albany andthe Battery, the river is a tidal estuary,something the Lenape must havesensed—Muhheakantuck, their namefor the river, means “river that flowstwo ways.”

Throughout, the Hudson teemswith life, from the phytoplankton atthe base of the marine food web tounderwater plants that host inverte-brates, and on up the chain. Morethan 200 fish species swim it—fromimportant anadromous types like sturgeon, shad and striped bass tomollusks, crabs, and shrimp.

Archeological findings indicateHudson fish have fed humans for millennia. Today bald eagles, peregrinefalcons and snowy egrets call its environs home and hunting ground.

A nexus of recreation, culture, and commerce, the Hudson journeysthrough landscapes that inspired theHudson River School, passes by West Point—George Washington’s“key of America”—and streams pastthe estates’ of artists (WashingtonIrving), inventors (Samuel Morse), U.S. presidents (FDR and Martin Van Buren) and other American titans(Frederick Vanderbilt and John D.Rockefeller). Dotting the riverbanksare industrial sites past and present—from foundries, paper mills and powercompanies to plants of corporate powerhouses like International Paper,General Motors and GE.

For much of the last century GEoperated two capacitor-producingplants in Hudson Falls and FortEdward, using its own blend of PCBoil—trademarked Pyranol—as an electrical insulator. In the eyes of electrical equipment manufacturers,PCBs were a “miracle” chemicalbecause of their stability and inflam-

mability—the very characteristics thatmake PCBs environmentally dangerous.

From the 1940s through 1977 GE’s two plants discharged about 1.3million pounds of PCB-contaminatedwaste into the river.

“That was just the standard backthen,” says Rosoff. “If you havewaste, you put it in a river.”

Part of the trouble with this wastestream is that it lingers and likelycauses cancer.

In 1966, a report in the Britishjournal New Scientist gave rise to newconcerns over PCBs, concerns thatdate back to the thirties, shortly afterMonsanto began producing them. Instudying DDT, Swedish chemist SorenJensen happened upon the startlingfact that PCBs are everywhere: “in hisown, his wife’s and his baby daughter’shair. As the baby is only five monthsold, her father concludes that she gother dose of PCB with her mother’smilk.” (“Report of a New ChemicalHazard,” New Scientist 32 (1966), p. 612.) A flurry of reports followed.

As early as 1971, The New YorkTimes cited “possible health hazards”associated with PCBs along withwarnings by Nobel scientists that

PCBs could damage ecosystems “irreversibly” on a global scale.Around the same time, PCBs startedshowing up in Hudson River fish, andthe first actions were taken to protecthuman health.

“Most people aren’t in contactwith PCBs in the riverbed,” explainsRosoff. “However, the fish are, andthe fish are consumed by people. As aresult of heavily contaminated fish..,,the Department of Health in NewYork State issued a ban of all consumption of fish in the upper 40 miles of the Hudson.”

That was back in 1976; the ban is still in effect. The destruction of thefisheries, so vital to the region’s economy,was one of the first victims of thewidespread PCB release. Says Rosoff,“The hopes of this project are toreturn the Hudson to a usable resourceand to eliminate the potential risk people have from consuming fish fromthe river.”

By 1977 the federal government’sconcerns over the health risks PCBsposed reached a tipping point: theToxic Substances Control Act essen-tially prohibited the U.S. manufactureand sale of PCBs.

But long after GE stopped usingPCBs, the chemicals are still Around—and still leaking from the Hudson Fallsplant into the river. (GE is conductinga separate cleanup under New YorkState’s supervision to remove contami-nation from the plant site and plug thesource.) The problem has spreaddownriver: each year about 300-500pounds of PCBs cross over the TroyDam into the lower river.

Back in 1984 when the riverbecame a Superfund site, remediationwasn’t seen as an option.

“The technology in the 1980s didn’t exist to dredge the river withoutunacceptable levels of resuspensionand redeposition,” explains Rosoff.That was then.

Anatomy of Today’s High-TechDredging Project Fast-forward to 2002. With cutting-edge dredge tools available. EPA determined the PCBs must go. And so began design work followed byconstruction, and a raft of sedimentsampling to locate the worst areas ofcontamination.

In the spring of 2009—the quadri-centennial of Henry Hudson’s sail up

the river that took his name—GEstarted “pinpoint” dredging , using the Global Positioning System (GPS)satellite navigation network and abucket-load of other high tech, muchof it custom-built for the project.

“This is the most state-of-the-art,advanced equipment out there,”explains Rosoff.

Plugging some 50,000 data pointsinto a Geographical InformationSystem (GIS), General Electric createddetailed maps of the dredge targets.

“Those maps [are] .... on thedredge barges … hooked into a GPSsystem which is used to position thebucket to do cuts,” says Rosoff.

Sensors on each moving part of thebucket and excavator tell operatorsexactly where in space they are andhow deep they must dig. Anothermechanism prevents dipping beyondthe pre-determined scoop specs. Thusthe pinpoint accuracy of PCBhotspots..

“Overall, the remedy is a massreduction remedy,” says Rosoff.“We’re trying to remove a large volume of the PCBs … as opposed to trying to remove all the PCBs fromthe river, which is impossible.”

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This project’s initial phase, to lastthrough the fall, entails bank-to-bankdredging of the contamination site’supper six miles. A peer-review processwill follow, after which GE and EPAwill make any necessary adjustments.Phase II, expected to last about six years, will tackle the remaining 35 miles.

Rosoff reports that the progress isgoing well, but not “without bumps inthe road.”

Three months in, 115,000 cubicyards of sediment had been removedbut without meeting cleanup targets.That meant new cutlines had to bedrawn, followed by residual dredging.(If PCB levels are still too high aftertwo residual rounds , GE can opt tocap the contaminants.) Such learningas they go makes this foray a criticalpart of the project.

“I wouldn’t call Phase I a testcase,” says Rosoff, “but it’s certainlygoing to be evaluated heavily for themuch longer and more voluminousPhase II.”

Keeping the Community Safe and Informed Whether one is a long-time resident of

the area or someone just passingthrough, it’s impossible not to noticesomething going on. While varioustug, personnel, and monitoring boatsrun the river, dredgers work it, all dayand night, except for Sundays. Lightsilluminate the nighttime work.Monitors in bright-orange casing sit in the river and pepper its shores,measuring light and noise levels andair and water quality, and standing asvisual reminders of the kind of quality-of-life standards at the project’s core.

“The project has a lot of parametersto keep the public safe and minimizedisturbance to their daily lives,” saysMelanie Chapman MEM’06, an environmental scientist with Ecology& Environment (E&E), one of theconsultants working with EPA. “Thereare a lot of things going on … notonly in the river but in people’s back-yards as we do floodplains work. (Seesidebar.) There are also new people inthe area. There’s vehicular traffic.”

As a check on GE’s own monitoringand reporting, Chapman’s teaminspects the cleanup site and investi-gates potential disturbance issues: “Is the project too loud? Is there lightshining on someone’s house in the

middle of the night? Is there an odorpreventing people from being outsideand enjoying their yards?”

While navigation and odor issuesmust be relayed by the public, noiseand light have specific numerical standards not to be exceeded.

Most important are the air andwater quality standards. If those arenot met, action is swift.

In late July elevated levels of PCBswere detected in the air and waternear one of the dredging sites. EPAresponded immediately, cutting backon dredging and putting up wind-screens to catch the off-gassing ofexcavated sediment. Longer-termadjustments are also in the works.

“We’re pushing GE harder to putmore engineering controls in place toprevent these air conditions,” saysRosoff, who notes that past projectshave not had such extensive monitoringor public involvement.

Daily updates and information onPCB levels are available through anEPA Web site (www.hudsondredgingdata. com). Informational flyers arehanded to boaters at the locks.Community meetings are held regularlyso that residents can learn directly

The PCBs are not confined to the riverbed into which they weredumped. They have grossly contaminated the two GE plants wherethey were used, have even spread beyond the Hudson’s banks ontosome residential properties.

“We have the dredging corridor where we’re doing physical in-riverwork,” explains Melanie Chapman MEM’06, who works on the floodplains with David Rosoff MS’90. “And then we have … the flood-plains work.”

Though the process for the two is very similar, the floodplains workis in its nascent stages.

“We go in and sample the sediment in people’s yards, agriculturefields and in backwater areas,” says Chapman, “and try to figure out ifpeople are using this area of their yard, and what they’re using it for.[Looking] at that and the results of the sample, we … do kind of a riskassessment.”

From that, they determine which places require immediate action,which can wait for further assessment, and which are relatively clean.

“We’re getting a much better idea on both sides of the river ofwhere the hot spots are, where the sediments have settled,” explainsChapman. “We want to make sure people are safe today even thoughwe'll still be dredging for a few years.”

SIDE PROJECT: Floodplains Work

40 MILES: area to be dredged

200 MILES: rough area of PCB-contaminated site

$750 MILLION: EPA’s estimated costs

$650 MILLION: amount GE claims to have spent already

$1 BILLION+: projected costs if Phase II goes as planned

about the project’s many movingpieces.

Getting the community onboardwith the project had been a tall hurdle.GE had spent years and millionsspreading a PR campaign against anykind of cleanup and downplaying thehazards of PCBs. But when the tideturned and scientific informationabout PCBs was widely publicized, the community largely came around.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the influx of Regional workers mighthave jump-started the local economy.

Rosoff lacks hard numbers, butsays, “We’ve spoken to several business owners who have related tous an increase in patronage.”

Still, at times, the imposition to the sleepy hamlet is palpable. At acommunity meeting in mid-July, residents aired a number of grievances.Chief among them were noise and air

quality complaints.“We’re dredging in some of the

worst places in the river and thedredged sediment is off-gassing,” says Rosoff.

“For air emissions,” he continues,“the standards we use are for chronicexposure over a six-year time frame,so one day of an exceedance is not an issue from a health standpoint.”

It’s when there’s a trend, he says,that big adjustments must be made.

With short-term controls in place,EPA and GE are working on longer-term fixes. And they are keeping lines of communication open.

“We’re talking to the entire com-munity and entire world about whathappens when you remove this type of gross contamination,” says Rosoff.

If people recognize the disturbanceaspect of the project, many also recognizethe importance of cleaning up the PCBs.

Rosoff underlines the need to succeed.

“The local community … andfuture projects all over the country are depending on our success,” saysRosoff, “So there is a heavy burden,not knowing whether or not the project is going to work the way it’sbeen planned because we’ve neverdone anything at this scale.”

He sees the restoration as a chanceto return the historic river to its former magnificence, where its fish are plentiful and safe to eat.

“Perhaps down the road,” saysRosoff, “Fort Edward and the upperHudson River won’t be known forPCBs but instead for the place ofserenity and beauty that it is.”

One of the project’s biggest hurdles is the resuspension of PCBs—the disruption anddistribution of contaminantsinto new areas.

The following measures are being taken to limit resuspension rates:• Extensive monitoring - There

are strict performance standards for water and airquality. If these are exceeded,immediate steps are taken. In addition, a number ofquality-of-life parameters are in place.

• Environmental clamshelldredge bucket - Though the buckets are speciallydesigned to clamp shut,

riverbed debris such asbranches and rocks are often scooped up, preventingthe buckets from sealingcompletely.

• Silt curtains - Protection walls are put up around alldredging areas, which in project parlance are calledCertification Units.

• Sheet piling - This strongerbuffer against PCBs distributionis an alternative to silt curtains. Phase I has a testsite using sheet piling todetermine its effectiveness.

• Sorbent booms and carbon-impregnated containmentmaterials - These contain and collect PCB sheens.

MINIMIZING RE-SUSPENSION

Erica Rowell is managing editor of Dean Chameides’ blog, TheGreenGrok.com.She is based in New York City.

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new online learn more about the project atepa.gov/hudson

new online image slideshownicholas.duke.edu/hudson

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THE PROJECT BY THE NUMBERS

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Breathtaking andwoundedDespite the Rough, Natural Inhospitableness of Antarctica, Human Industry has had an Unprecedented Impact on its Environment

by Ari S. Friedlaender

Assistant Research Professor AriFriedlaender recently came back from thefirst of two voyages south to Antarctica aspart of MISHAP: the Multi-scale andInterdisciplinary Study of Humpbacks andPrey. His science party was made up ofseven researchers and students from Duke’sNicholas School, and another eight fromother institutions around the country. Thiswas the first scientific trip sponsored bythe National Science Foundation’s Officeof Polar Programs specifically designed tostudy whales. What the team found was,quite literally, fantastic. Read on.

I made my first trip to Antarctica 11years ago. I was young and eager, naïveand impressionable, over-excited andunder-clothed, and in no way prepared for what I was about to experience. I washooked before passing through the furious50s (a particularly treacherous stretch ofthe Southern Ocean) and since then havedone whatever I could to make this placepart of my life.

Antarctica does not provide a lot ofbreathing room. It does not yield, is not

forgiving, and does not give away secretsfrom its cold clutches easily. Mostly ittakes your breath away.

Consider the early explorers who challenged the limits of humanendurance, both physical and emotional,to measure and conquer this land and surrounding ocean. The names are bothfamous and linked with disaster.Amundsen calculated and conquered.Mawson gained insight and survived.Scott miscalculated and paid. Shackletonendured. Cushman-Murphy narrated.

Yet despite the rough edges and natural inhospitality of Antarctica, humanindustry has had an unprecedentedimpact on its environment. During the20th century, commercial whaling ventureskilled more than 2 million baleen whales(blue, fin, sei, humpback, minke) asquickly and as thoughtlessly as possible.And over the past 50 years, aided byhuman-induced climate changes, theAntarctic Peninsula has been warming atas fast a rate as anywhere on the planet.

The effects of these two extraordinaryperturbations cannot be underestimated.

There is no baseline for how this

ecosystem functioned before thesechanges. Rather, we are measuring anddocumenting things amidst the changes,making comparisons to ’normal’ nearlyimpossible.

Take South Georgia Island for example. For the first quarter of the 20thcentury shore-based whaling stations here processed hundreds of thousands ofbaleen whales. Today, finding more than ahandful of whales in the surroundingwaters is unheard of.

In contrast, there are seabird and penguins by the millions, fur and elephantseals by the tens of thousands. All ofthese animals are fed by a conveyor beltthat transports krill from the AntarcticPeninsula and deposits them around theisland. But in some years, there are fewerkrill and the reproductive success of thepenguins and seals drops precipitously.

What is happening upstream to causethese changes? Where do the whales fitinto all of this?

In the time since large-scale commercialwhaling, the common belief has held thatother predators took advantage of the krillleft by the once numerous whales.

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Perhaps then, there aremore seals and penguins now than beforethe system was thrown into flux? Giventime, however, whale populations arebeginning to show signs of recovery.Whales are not tied to land to give birthand are thus free to range far and wide tofeed. And given their large size, they likelyrequire prey in larger and more densequantities than smaller animals. The makings of an ecological conundrum arein the works.

Do whales directly compete with thepenguins and seals? Is there enough foodfor all of the predators? Where will thewhales go to feed?

By coming to land frequently, sealsand penguins provide scientists with greatopportunities to be weighed, measured, or outfitted with devices to track theirmovements and behaviors at sea. Weknow generally where they go, how deepthey dive, what size krill they favor, andwhat they require. We know next to nothing about the behaviors and needs of whales in this system.

Our mission is to study how humpbackwhales feed and begin to understand theirrelationship to Antarctic krill.• Doug Nowacek was our Chief Scientist,

in charge of organizing and facilitatingall of our work. His ability to juggle and find a path forward and conductcutting-edge science in a difficult environment is reminiscent of a greatsymphony conductor.

• Our first task generally is to survey anarea visually and determine the numberof whales in the region. Dave Johnstonand Andy Read coordinated our visualsurveys to locate and measure their

distribution and abundance. Itturned into an extraordinary effortto manage our team and compre-hensively collect one of the mostfascinating and valuable datasets on the density of whales our community has known.• Reny Tyson and LindseyPeavey were championobservers, working tirelesslywith honed vision.• We then use echosounders to

measure how much prey is availableto them at a broad scale. Elliott Hazenused his savvy and technological expertiseto shine a light in the darkness and illuminate the patches and layers of krillupon which the whales feed.

• To collect data on individual whales, weplace suction-cup tags with sensors tocontinuously measure underwater move-ment and behavioral patterns for about24 hours on the whale’s back. By linking their movements with real-timeacoustic measurements of their prey, wecan assess whale behavior in relation to the distribution, abundance, andbehavior of their prey, Antarctic krill. My role was to get the tags on thewhales and analyze these data once theywere full of information and retrieved.

• With new analytical technology we canvisualize in unique ways the underwaterpath of the whales and determine when,where, and how humpback whales feed, and how these behaviors relate to the density, patch size, and other

characteristics of their prey. Colleaguesfrom the University of New Hampshireare building new and creative ways forus to do this. Likewise, Pat Halpin usedhis wizard-like skills to integrate our manydata streams and project them in waysthat will allow us to comprehensivelyanalyze the relationships between predators and prey. Our home for the past two months was

the 220-ft long R/V Laurence M. Gould.During the day, we fanned out in a smallarmada of inflatable boats to tag and follow the whales, and map the preyaround them.

With the visual survey team poisedoutside around the ship’s bridge, we zigand zag, push and churn through ice floes and bergy bits. Our office is beyondcompare.

We spent our time probing and survey-ing three of the large bays and fiords on the western side of the AntarcticPeninsula. These natural harbors are buf-feted by a formidable coastal mountainrange. Glaciers and ice sheets fill in theopen spaces between jagged peaks andend abruptly at the water’s edge as sheercliffs reaching 100 feet or more.

The skin of the water was sprinkledwith fields of sea ice floes that are blownabout by the winds. Sometimes it was animpenetrable single mass, and on otherdays the ice was spread thin enough forus to pass through without incident.

Pictures and words can’t fully capturebeing in Antarctica. There are sensations

statisticallySPEAKING

OUR FOOD SUPPLY BY THE NUMBERS:

*(Note: You get extra credit if you guessed which fourcrops these are: Wheat, rice, maize and potatoes.)

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that surge through your body with thecombination of sight and sound and cold that continually bombards you.

Personally, this voyage south was special for many reasons. This was myfirst opportunity to work with so manyclose friends and colleagues from Dukewith whom I have grown and from whom I have been mentored.

On my first trip south I remember adear friend telling me that one of hisgreatest thrills was watching someone see their first iceberg in Antarctica. Iremember mine as if it were yesterday and how overwhelmed I felt by its sizeand beauty. This trip gave me the opportunity to have the same experienceseveral times over.

Antarctica often seems like a distantfantasy-land that is too foreign and different to comprehend. In so many ways it is beyond human approach, yet itsvulnerability is painfully obvious and clear.Between commercial whaling and human-augmented climate warming, the AntarcticPeninsula is under an assault it cannotrepel.

This place and the animals here aremore than important to me. Our team has the desire and ability to do somethingspecial, and make a difference here.Understanding the foraging behavior of the whales is the first of many stepstoward determining how different krillpredators satisfy their needs, and howeach of them impacts or is impacted by changes in krill and the environmentaround them.

I struggle to rationalize how the historyof humans in the Antarctic can be soinspiring and yet so nauseating. We areracing against an ambiguous clock tolearn as much as we can about thisecosystem and the relationships betweenpredators and prey so that we can betterunderstand the impacts of a warming climate.

Those who came before us are glorified by their writings, but to me thewounds of a short-sighted and gluttonousindustry remain open.

Statistics courtesy of: Dean Bill Chameides’ blog, The Green Grok, thegreengrok.com

Approximate number of plants that are edible: 30,000Of those, how many have people consumedthroughout history: 10,000Of those, how many make up the basis of our diets today: 150Of those, how many provide 80 percent of the world’s food: 12Of those, how many provide 60 percent of theworld’s food: 4*

Percent of genetic diversity lost in agriculturalcrops over the last century:75 percent

Because we’re rarely far from a well-stocked supermarketor convenient drive-thru, many Americans aren’t awareof the worrisome trend toward monoculture in our agricultural ecosystems. But the loss of diversity in theplants we eat should give us all food for thought.

dukenvironment 12

Received the Duke LEAF Award • April 2008

PHOTO GALLERY

new online video & photosnicholas.duke.edu/leaf

< >

Virlis L. Fischer Award—Goes to the graduating professional degree student with the highest academicachievement. Given by Bernice Fisher in memory of her husband.

Drew McConville of Tolland, Conn.MEM, Environmental Economics and Policy; Activities at Duke: Climate ChangePolicy Partnership (research assistant),Farmhand, intramural dodge ball, andactivities related to Doris Duke Fellows(co-organized workshops and an MEM volunteer day, for example); Awards/Honors: Doris Duke ConservationFellow, University Scholar, PresidentialManagement Fellow; Post-graduation destination: Washington,D.C.;Future goals: “To live a balanced life

and work for clean air, clean water, and open spaces.”

Sara LaBoskey Award—Given in recognition of personalintegrity and academic excellence.

Carina Barnett-Loro of Durham, N.C.Environmental Sciences and Policy,BA, Latin American StudiesActivities at Duke: EnvironmentalAlliance, Project WILD (WildernessInitiatives for Leadership at Duke),LEAPS (Learning through Experience,Action, Partnership, and Service),Students for Sustainable Living, Duke Community Garden;Awards/Honors: Benjamin N. DukeScholar, Student EnvironmentalLeadership Award, Betsy AldenService-Learning Award, Graduationwith Distinction*;Post-graduation destination: Green Corps

Fellowship for Environmental Organizing;Future goals: “Potentially environmental law, but certainlyworking within the environmental movement in some capacity!”

Naomi Schwartz of Morristown, N.J. Environmental Science and Policy, BA Activities at Duke: Peace or PiecesCoalition (group dedicated to creatingdialogue between Jewish, Israeli, Arab,and Muslim Students). On Tap studenttap dance group. Durham NoiseNetwork Radio show (audio documentary/talk show on WXDU);Awards/Honors: Graduation withDistinction*, Magna Cum Laude,Fulbright scholarship;Post-graduation destination: “I’m headingto Cambodia on a FulbrightScholarship to study communityresilience to environmental change

around the Tonle Sap, a seasonally flooded lake that provides up to 70 percent of Cambodia’s protein”;Future goals: “I would like to pursue a PhD in either environmental science or policy and hopefully have a career in research and teaching.”

Thomas V. Laska Memorial Award—Given by the Earthand Ocean Sciences faculty to the most outstandingsenior major.

Nicholas Lowman of Kernersville, N.C.Earth and Ocean Sciences, BS, and MathematicsActivities at Duke: Army ROTC, ClubBaseball, Intramural Athletics, GothicBookshop student employee (namedStudent Manager), Peer Tutor inCalculus, Math Department grader;Awards/Honors: Magna Cum Laude,Dean’s List, Distinguished MilitaryGraduate, ranked 33rd in the countryof all Army ROTC cadets (about4,500), Army Airborne School and Air Assault School graduate, namedtop cadet Army ROTC Program threeconsecutive years;

Post-graduation destination: “Serving a 4-year commitment on Active Duty as 2nd Lieutenant with U.S. Army, MilitaryIntelligence Branch. After basic officer training in September,my permanent duty station will be in Italy;”Future goals: Graduate school in the earth/atmospheric sciences

*Graduation with Distinction—Accords special recognition for academic excellence to students who successfully complete a significant independent research project on the environment or earth sciences.

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Special Awards

Public Trust Doctrine Could Aid Management of U.S. Oceans

Dean Bill Chameides presented the second annual Dean’s Awardfor Outstanding Graduate Student Manuscript to Wyatt H.Hartman at the Nicholas School’s recognition ceremony in May.

Hartman, a PhD student, was honored for a landmark studyof wetland soil bacterial populations he wrote with his advisor,Curtis J. Richardson, professor of resource ecology and directorof the Duke University Wetland Center.

Their study was published in The Proceedings of the NationalAcademy of Sciences in October 2008. It reported the novelfinding that restoring degraded wetlands—especially those thathad been converted into farm fields—actually decreases their soilbacterial diversity.

“It sounds counter-intuitive, but our study shows that inrestored wetlands, decreased soil bacterial diversity represents areturn to biological health,” Hartman says. That’s the opposite ofthe response seen in terrestrial ecosystems, where restoration

improves conditions froma more barren, degraded state, he notes.

The Dean’s Award is an initiative developed by Chameides torecognize outstanding student scholarship. It is awarded eachyear to a student enrolled in the Nicholas School PhD programswho has a manuscript accepted or published by a peer-reviewedjournal. Manuscripts are judged on disciplinary rigor, originalityand likely depth of contribution to the advancement of their field.

Award recipients receive a $3,000 prize and their name isplaced on the plaque hung in Hug Commons.

In his winning paper, Hartman found that one of the simplestand most promising indicators of restoration success was theratio of Proteobacteria, which have the highest affinity for nutrient-rich environments, to Acidobacteria, which have thehighest tolerance for poor conditions.

While more than half of original wetland acreage in the

Wyatt Hartman Receives Dean’s Award for Outstanding Graduate Student Paper

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Since Congress lifted a moratorium onoffshore drilling last year, federal law-makers have grappled with the issue ofhow best to regulate U.S. ocean watersto allow oil, wave and wind energydevelopment, while sustainably managingcritical fisheries and marine animalhabitats.

A new policy paper, published in Science last spring by a team ofDuke University experts, argues thatestablishing a public trust doctrine forfederal waters could be an effectiveand ethical solution to this and similarconflicts.

“The public trust doctrine couldprovide a practical legal framework forrestructuring the way we regulate andmanage our oceans. It would supportocean-based commerce while protectingmarine species and habitats,” says leadauthor Mary Turnipseed, a PhD studentat the Nicholas School.

The public trust doctrine is “a simple but powerful legal concept,”Turnipseed says, that obliges govern-

ments to manage certain naturalresources in the best interests of theircitizens, without sacrificing the needsof future generations.

The doctrine already is well estab-lished in the United States at the statelevel, where natural resource agenciesare legally bound to seek legal actionagainst private parties who are infringingon the public trust.

Extending the public trust doctrineto U.S. ocean waters would help federalagencies better manage conflictingdemands such as conservation, off-shore energy development, fisheriesand shipping in the 3.6 million nauticalsquare miles of water included in thenation’s territorial sea and ExclusiveEconomic Zone (EEZ), Turnipseed says.Currently, more than 20 different federalagencies, operating under dozens oflaws, regulate species and activities inthese waters, without any mandated,systematic effort to coordinate theiractions for the public good.

“In the Gulf of Maine, as an example,

a wide range of different activities—including shipping lanes, ferry routes,U.S. Navy operations, fisheries andproposed wind farms—overlap criticalhabitat of the endangered right whale,”she says. “Most of these are regulatedby separate agencies, with only piece-meal coordination. A public trust doctrine would identify these agenciesas trustees of the U.S. ocean publictrust, unifying them for the first timeunder a common mandate to managethe gulf’s resources sustainably.”

Stephen Roady, senior lecturing fellow at Duke’s School of Law and anenvironmental lawyer at Earthjustice,Larry B. Crowder, Stephen TothProfessor of Marine Biology at theNicholas School and director of Duke’sCenter for Marine Conservation, andRaphael Sagarin, former associatedirector for coastal and ocean policy at Duke’s Nicholas Institute forEnvironmental Policy Solutions, alsocontributed to the paper.

Geoengineering techniques aim to slow global warmingthrough the use of human-made changes to the Earth’s land,seas or atmosphere. But new research shows that the use ofgeoengineering to do environmental good may cause otherenvironmental harm. In a symposium at theEcological Society of America’s annual meetingin Albuquerque, N.M., ecologists discussedthe viability of geoengineering, concludingthat it is potentially dangerous at theglobal scale, where the risks outweighthe benefits.

“The bigger the scale of theapproach, the riskier it is for the environment,” said session organizerRobert Jackson, director of DukeUniversity’s Center on Global Change.Global alterations of Earth’s naturalcycles have too many uncertainties to beviable with our current level of understanding,said Jackson, who is Nicholas Professor of GlobalEnvironmental Change at the Nicholas School.

One global-scale geoengineering method, termed atmos-pheric seeding, would cool the climate by releasing light-colored sulfur particles or other aerosols into the atmosphereto reflect the sun’s rays back into space. This approachmimics what happens naturally when volcanoes erupt; in1991, for instance, an eruption of Mount Pinatubo in thePhilippines cooled the Earth by 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit.

But Simone Tilmes of the National Center for AtmosphericResearch argued that despite its potential to create overallcooling, atmospheric seeding could cause significantchanges in localized temperature and precipitation. Her

simulations predict that sulfur seeding could destroy atmospheric ozone, leading to increased ultraviolet radiationreaching the Earth’s surface.

Another large-scale geoengineering scheme is fertilizingthe oceans with iron to increase carbon uptake from

the atmosphere. Charles Miller of Oregon StateUniversity said that ocean fertilization could

create a rise in iron-limited phytoplanktonpopulations, which by dying and sinkingwould use enough oxygen to createextensive dead zones in the oceans. In addition, he said, the maximum possible rate of ocean iron fertilizationcould only offset a small fraction of the current rate of carbon burning

by humans.Ocean fertilization also does not

alleviate the increasing problem of oceanacidification, caused by carbon dioxide from the

increasingly carbon-rich atmosphere dissolving intoseawater. In fact, Miller said, ocean fertilization schemeswill likely exacerbate this problem.

Despite its apparent hazards at the global scale, Jacksonsaid he thought that research should continue on safer ways to use geoengineering at a smaller scale. But on theplanetary scale, most ecologists are skeptical of climateengineering.

“Playing with the Earth’s climate is a dangerous gamewith unclear rules,” said Jackson. “We need more directways to tackle global warming, including energy efficiency,reduced consumption, and investment in renewable energy sources.”

Assessing the of Geoengineering to Fight Climate Change Pros and Cons

United States has been destroyed or degraded, tens of thousands of hectares have been restored in recent decades as a result of the federal government’s “no net loss” policy.

“Re-establishment of microbial communities indicates arestoration of the biological functions of soils. This studyacross a wide range of wetlands is the first to establish thatshifts in soil bacteria populations may be a key marker ofrestoration success,” Richardson says

Rytas Vilgalys, professor of biology at Duke, and Gregory L.Bruland, assistant professor of soil and water conservation atthe University of Hawaii at Manoa, were co-authors on thepaper. The study was funded by a Duke University WetlandCenter Case Studies Endowment and a National ScienceFoundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

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Forty faculty members, research associates and students from the Nicholas School presented findings from newresearch at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society ofAmerica (ESA), the year’s most important ecological scienceconference in August in Albuquerque, N.M.

ESA is the world’s largest organization of ecologists, withmore than 9,000 members.

“Having a major presence at the ESA conference, and in ESA’s leadership, is a measure of the Nicholas School’sinternational leadership in forging a sustainable future throughstrategic, multidisciplinary research, teaching and outreach,”says William L. Chameides, dean of the Nicholas School. Faculty, staff or students associated with the school were lead authors or co-authors on 28 presentations.

40 Nicholas SchoolFaculty and StudentsPresented Research at 2009 ESA Meeting

For the complete list of presentations go to nicholas.duke.edu/??????

dukenvironment 16

A new study of storm-related deaths from a super cyclonethat hit the eastern coast of India in 1999 finds that villages shielded from the storm surge by mangrove forestsexperienced significantly fewer deaths than ones that wereless protected.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University ofDelhi and Duke University, analyzed deaths in 409 villages inthe poor, mostly rural Kendrapada District of the Indian stateof Orissa, just north of the cyclone’s landfall.

“Our analysis shows a clear inverse relationship betweenthe number of deaths per village and the width of the mangroves located between those villages and the coast,”said Jeffrey R. Vincent, Clarence F. Korstian Professor ofForest Economics and Management in the Nicholas School.

“Taking other environmental and socioeconomic factorsinto account, villages with wider mangroves suffered significantly fewer deaths than ones with narrower or no mangroves,” Vincent said. “We believe this is the first robustevidence that mangroves can protect coastal villages againstcertain types of natural disasters.”

Vincent conducted the analysis with Saudamini Das of the University of Delhi’s Swami Shradanand College. Theirfindings appeared in a paper in the online early edition ofThe Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences thispast spring.

Mangroves are dense forests of trees and shrubs that growin brackish, low-lying coastal swamps in the tropics and subtropics. In 1944, mangroves covered nearly 31,000hectares of land in Kendrapada District and the average village had 5.1 kilometers of mangroves between it and fromthe coast. Since then, nearly half the area has been cleared,mostly for rice production.

Today, the average width of mangroves between the villages and the coast has shrunk to 1.2 kilometers.

The 1999 storm, which made landfall on Oct. 29, killednearly 10,000 people, more than 70 percent of whomdrowned in its surge.

Using statistical models, Das and Vincent predicted therewould have been 1.72 additional deaths per village within 10 kilometers of the coast if the mangrove width had beenreduced to zero.

“This is a measure of the life-saving impact of the mangroves that remained in 1999,” Vincent said. “It impliesthat they cut the death toll by about two-thirds.”

Das and Vincent’s study was supported by the SouthAsian Network for Development and EnvironmentalEconomics (SANDEE), with research facilities provided by the Institute of Economic Growth in Delhi, India.

Mangroves Save Lives in Storms, Study of 1999 Super Cyclone Finds

dukenvironment 16

The American Clean Energy and SecurityAct, recently passed by the U.S. Houseof Representatives, contains multipleprovisions designed to improve residential energy efficiency.

A new policy brief from Duke University’snonpartisan Climate Change PolicyPartnership (CCPP) describes these provisions, provides an overview of thenumerous barriers they will have to overcome, and presents options forimplementing them if they are passedinto law.

The brief, at www.nicholas.duke.edu/ccpp/ publica tions.html, also presentsfurther policy options federal policymakerscould consider to improve residentialefficiency.

CCPP is an interdisciplinary partnershipof Duke’s Nicholas Institute forEnvironmental Policy Solutions,Nicholas School of the Environment and Center on Global Change.

“There is enormous potential for energyefficiency improvement in the residentialsector, but there are significant market,policy and legacy barriers which must beovercome,” says CCPP research analystDavid Hoppock. “The Waxman-Markeybill includes multiple programs and allocates emissions allowance resourcesto address these barriers. If enacted, thebill would improve residential efficiency,but would not overcome all barriersbecause some barriers, such as transac-tion costs, are dispersed and difficult to overcome.”

In his brief, Hoppock’s examines fourkey provisions in the American CleanEnergy and Security Act (H.R. 2454)designed to overcome these barriers.They are: • A national building energy code

program that sets a goal of improvingnew building efficiency by 30 percentafter the bill is enacted and by 50percent after 2013.

• A building retrofit program that provides states, local governments and regulated utilities with funds toconduct efficiency retrofits, along with

direct incentives to building owners of up to 50 percent of the total retrofitcost.

• An energy performance labeling programfor new buildings, designed to providethe residential building market withbetter information about individualbuilding energy efficiency.

• Lighting and appliance efficiencystandards that establish a reward program for retailers and manufacturerswho sell and manufacture best-in-class efficient products.

The 30-page brief presents additionalenergy policy options that federal policy-makers could consider. These are:

• Including existing buildings in theenergy labeling program;

• Providing incentives to states thatencourage or require home energyaudits at the time of sale;

• Conducting information campaigns tomake consumers aware of the Retrofitfor Energy and EnvironmentalPerformance (REEP) program and other federal energy efficiencyprograms;

• Allowing regulated utilities, local governments, and states to issue tax-exempt bonds to finance propertytax—and utility bill-financed energyefficiency programs;

• Incorporating energy efficiency intofederal foreclosure avoidance andforeclosed home resale programs; and

• Incorporating efficiency into federallow-income housing programs.

Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutionsbreaking down barriers to environmental progress

New Policy Brief Reviews Options for Improving U.S. Residential Energy Efficiency

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dukenvironment 18

Using an Armada of Specially

Designed Floats, Scientists Get a

New Look at the ’Great Ocean

Conveyor” with Major Implications

for Global Climate Change Research

by Tim Lucas

Uncharted Interior Ocean Pathways

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CHprofile

If you Google the phrase “GreatOcean Conveyor,” one of the firstimages that will likely pop up on yourcomputer screen is a map of the NorthAtlantic Ocean withcolor-coded arrowsshowing a loop-ing, conveyorbelt-like paththat deepocean cur-rents followas they flownorth fromthe equatorand south fromthe polar seas.

It’s a modelthat’s been used formore than 20 years to explainhow the oceans distribute heat andinfluence our climate, and—morerecently—to shape scientists’ hypothesesabout the amount and fate of carbondioxide that oceans sequester from our atmosphere.

In the conveyor belt paradigm, currents warmed by the Gulf Streammove northward and release their heatinto the atmosphere, leaving the watersthemselves colder and denser. At theirnorthern terminus, the dense, coldwaters sink beneath the polar seas andflow back southward along a discrete,well-defined path called the DeepWestern Boundary Current that hugsthe continental shelf between Canadaand the equator. To replace thissinking water, warm surfacewaters from the tropics arepulled northward again,creating a continuous loopof climate-moderating currents.

It’s a nice, neat, tidysystem.

Oceanographers, however,have long known that this para-digm for describing deep ocean circula-tion is an oversimplification—a usefulenough depiction of the general principle,but missing key pieces of the puzzle.

“We’ve hypothesized, based onstudies using indirect evidence likeocean salinities and temperatures, thatthere are re-circulations, which causealternative pathways for these deep

waters,” says Susan Lozier, professorof physical oceanography and chair of the Division of Earth and OceanSciences at the Nicholas School.

“If this hypothesis were true,” sheexplains, “it would significantly

affect how scientists measureclimate signals in the deep

ocean. But the hitch was,we lacked the direct evidence to prove it.”

Now, a major studyled by Lozier and long-time research collaborator

Amy Bower, a senior scientist in the Department

of Physical Oceanography at Woods Hole Oceanographic

Institution (WHOI), has providedthat critical evidence.

The study, published in the May 14issue of the journal Nature, useddata from computer modelsand an armada of sophisti-cated Range and Fixingof Sound (RAFOS)floats, deployed duringresearch cruises in theNorth Atlantic over thecourse of three years, toshow that most of thesouthward flow of coldwater from the Labrador Seamoved not along the Deep WesternBoundary Current, but instead followed previously uncharted

“interior pathways” in thedeep ocean. Groups of

six RAFOS floats werereleased into theLabrador Sea everythree months from2003 through 2005and were left in thewater to collect data

for two years.Only 8 percent of

the floats followed the conveyor belt of the Deep Western

Boundary Current, Lozier and Bower’sstudy found. About 75 percent of themescaped that pathway and drifted intothe open ocean before reaching theGrand Banks.

“Eight percent is a remarkably lownumber in light of expectations thatthe Deep Western Boundary Current is

the dominant pathway for LabradorSea water,” Lozier says. “This showsthat the concept of the deep flow operating like a conveyor belt doesn’thold anymore. The pathways are morediffuse. They spread out much fartherinto the eddy-filled deep ocean, so it’sgoing to be more difficult for scientiststo measure climate change signals.”

Lozier and Bower first conceived oftheir ambitious project eight years ago,in response to earlier studies, includinga widely cited paper Lozier and colleagues published in Science in 1997 that strongly suggested unknowninterior pathways played an importantrole in deep circulation of the NorthAtlantic. A study of floats in theLabrador Sea in the late 1990s by scientists at the Scripps Institute ofOceanography and Woods Hole seem-

ingly confirmed Lozier’s hypothesis,but results from this study

were not convincing, inpart because the sub-mersible floats used tocollect the data had toreturn repeatedly to thesurface to report their

positions and observationsto satellite receivers. This

meant the floats’ data couldhave been biased by upper ocean

currents during the floats periodicascents.

“The challenge for Amy and me,”Lozier recalls, “was finding a way tocollect direct evidence, free of possiblebias, that would test our hypothesisand either prove or disprove it.”

With funding from the NationalScience Foundation and technical support from the staff at Woods Hole,Lozier and Bower devised an elaborateplan they hoped would surmount thatchallenge.

Bower and her colleagues built 76 specially designed RAFOS floatsconfigured to submerge to a depth of700 to 1,500 meters below the ocean’ssurface—within the layer of waterwhere a major portion of the cold,south-flowing current of Labrador Seawater flows.

A RAFOS float weighs about 22pounds (10 kilograms) and can bedropped over the side of a small boat

20dukenvironment

by one person, although they are mostcommonly deployed from largeoceanographic research vessels. Thefloat’s electronics are housed in a thin,six-and-a-half foot (two meter) glasstube that vaguely resembles a giantglass thermometer or overheadfluorescent strip light.

Once deployed, thefloats drifted underwaterwith the currents for twoyears, recording locationinformation as well as temperature and pressuremeasurements once a day. Aftertwo years, they returned to the surface and transmitted their treasuretrove of stored data to scientists backin the lab through the ARGOS satellite-based data retrieval system.

To communicate with the floatsand to track their positions while theywere still submerged, the researchersdeployed anchored low-amplitudesound beacons in the general area ofthe experiment. The beacons were setto “ping” automatically every day,enabling the scientists to determine the distance between the floats andbeacons, based on the time delaybetween when the ping went off andwhen it was detected by the RAFOSfloats’ onboard hydrophones.

The ambitious program would havebeen prohibitively expensive, Loziernotes, had it not been for a collaborationwith Eugene Colbourne of theNorthwest Atlantic Fisheries Center in St. Johns, Newfoundland.Colbourne regularly conducts hydro-graphic surveys around the GrandBanks and agreed to deploy theresearchers’ floats during his cruises.

Since the RAFOS float paths onlycould be tracked for two years, Lozierworked with Nicholas School PhD student Stefan Gary and Germanoceanographer Claus Böning of theLeibniz Institute of Marine Sciences—both listed as co-authors on the Naturepaper—to run computer models thatsimulated the launch and dispersal ofmore than 7,000 “e-floats” from thesame starting point.

Subjecting the e-floats to the sameunderwater dynamics as the real ones,

Lozier, Gary and Böning traced theirpathways and found that the spread ofthe e-floats was “very similar” to thatof the actual RAFOS float trajectoriesafter two years.

The combined observations fromthe real and simulated experi-

ments provided clear evidencethat southward interiorpathways in the deep oceanare more important thanpreviously shown for thetransport of Labrador Sea

water to the subtropics, saysPeter B. Rhines, professor of

oceanography and atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington.

“Drs. Bower and Lozier have broughtthe remarkable technology of neutrallybuoyant deep, drifting buoys to bear ona matter of great importance to globalclimate. The global ocean circulationwhich ventilates the great depths of theseas is often portrayed as a ’conveyorbelt.’ While this is a useful analogy,their work establishes conclusively thatocean eddies—swirling water masses,much like the rotating storms of theatmosphere—stir the deep ocean. In doing so, the eddies spread the‘conveyor’ over a vast region of theNorth Atlantic,” Rhines says.

Since the southward flow of coldLabrador Sea water is a major com-ponent of the waters that flow towardthe equator as part of the global over-turning circulation, this finding will significantly change how oceanographersobserve and monitor the deep ocean

“We will need to make more measurements in the deep ocean interior,not just close to the coast where wepreviously thought the cold water was confined,” Bower says.

The Labrador Sea is an area of special focus for climatologists, sheexplains, because the effects of climatechange are magnified at higher altitudes.Surface waters there absorb heat-trap-ping carbon dioxide from the atmos-phere, and much of that CO2 is taken to depth within the sinking waters in this region, where it is no longer available to warm Earth’s climate.

“We know that a good fraction of the human-caused carbon dioxide

released since the Industrial Revolutionis stored in the ocean,” says Lozier.“The question is, how much is storedat depth? And for how long?

“To answer these questions, weneed to learn more about where thesedeep, cold currents flow, how they actas sinks for heat and carbon dioxide,and their ultimate fate in the ocean,”she explains.

Toward this end, Bower and Lozierplan to expand their research in coming years to study the southwardflow of cold water originating even farther north in the remote waters ofthe Greenland Sea.

Additionally, Lozier hopes to makeuse of a new generation of high-techunderwater submersibles to speed andsmooth the data-collection process. In the past five years, she explains,researchers have developed program-mable, unmanned battery-operatedunits that can glide through the deepocean, collect real-time data at pre-setdepths and then surface and transmitthe data back to scientists in the labvia satellite, avoiding the long timedelays associated with RAFOS floatsor the potential data bias of the profiling floats used in the 1990s.

“The idea of being able to programgliders to go where you want, collectwhat you need, transmit it back to you in real time, and then follow newinstructions about where to collectdata next—it’s an oceanographer’sdream,” she says.

“I sometimes envy those scientistswho can collect a sample in the morningand then go into their lab to do theresearch that afternoon,” she laughs.“Observational oceanography is manythings: fascinating, important andrewarding. But no one ever said it was simple.”

Tim Lucas is the Nicholas School’snational media relations and marketingspecialist.

Monte Basgall, senior science writer atDuke News and Communications, andcommunications officers at Woods HoleOceanographic Institution contributedto this article.

The fall approaches; a new academic year begins and with it a new class of bright and talented students arrived at theNicholas School. This year’s class is especially noteworthy, notonly for its stellar qualifications and size—one of the best andlargest we have ever seen—but also because this is the firstclass entering Nicholas since the great economic meltdown of 2008-09.

Despite the sobering events of the past year, this year’sgroup seems as idealistic and energetic as any. They are readyto roll up their sleeves and make the world a better place, andperhaps more so than in previous years, confident that they willhelp make the world a better place. Perhaps having witnessedand survived the meltdown, they feel empowered. Perhaps having witnessed the meltdown, these young men and womensee more clearly than before the unsustainable flaws in the system that caused the crash and what needs to be done tomake a more sustainable system. Whatever the reason, beingawash in the energy and optimism of our new students is atonic that we in the academic world can look forward to eachyear, and this year’s did not disappoint.

I am especially thankful for the energy and optimism of our students at Nicholas, because I fear that we are leavingthem with an impending crisis, a train wreck in the makingthat could make the great economic meltdown of 2008-09look like small potatoes.

We already know that as a society we are depleting theresources of our planet. Some 60 percent of the world’s ecosys-tems, that provide us with clean water, timber, fisheries, food,and fiber, have been degraded by human activities. Because of our dependence on fossil fuels we are adding carbon dioxideto the atmosphere at a rate that far outstrips the atmosphere’sability to process it. As a result, atmospheric carbon dioxideconcentrations are rising, causing a disruption in climate that is unprecedented in modern times. The critical and very realneed for more and more food has necessitated the use of hugeamounts of fertilizers, which in turn foul our rivers and streamsand cause giant ocean dead zones. Pressures to increase foodproduction also are causing the conversion of enormous swaths

of natural habitat to agricultural land at the expense of thegenetic treasures of a biodiverse world.

A reasonable response, indeed the only response to theproblem of depleting resources, is to adopt a more sustainableapproach: use less, conserve more, be more efficient, recycle.

Converting our current unsustainable practices to more sustainable ones would be hard enough under normal circum-stances. But these are hardly normal circumstances. Todayplanet Earth is populated by some 6.8 billion people; a little lessthan half of these live on less than $2.50 per day accordingthe World Bank. Sometime near the middle of this century,demographers tell us there will be about 9 billion of us—giveor take a billion. Demographers also tell us that much of these9 billion will be urban, with aspirations similar for the high-consumption lifestyles of people now living in the developedeconomies of the world. Meeting these aspirations would seemto require more not less of the Earth’s dwindling resources.

And this is the train wreck the next generation of environ-mental managers is going to have to find a way to avert. Theyare going to have to figure out a way to sustain a population of 9 billion Earthlings while at the same time sustaining planetEarth. Fail to do the later and you can’t do the former. But failto do the former, and I fear that many of the institutions thatsustain us a society will fail.

How can this be done? I have some ideas, but I have toconfess I don’t really know. And I suspect that most of my contemporaries at Duke and elsewhere don’t for sure either.What we can do is impart all the wisdom and knowledge andskills that we know on this new class of students and hope and pray that they will be smart enough to avert the train wreckalready in motion. Am I optimistic? Given the optimism of ournew class of Nicholas Students, it is hard not to be.

Can They Stop the Impending Train Wreck? by William L. Chameides

With the Dean

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William L. Chameides is dean of the Nicholas School and professor of the environment.

A corner of the Duke Forest has gonerustic high-tech as researchers assemblean array of aluminum-framed translucentplastic cubicles, devoted to warmingup baby trees and the soil they’regrowing in.

Clear plastic ducts twine throughthe roofless, boxy walkthroughs, blackcables jut into the soil in places, andinelegantly perched propane tanksprovide fuel for humming heaters and associated radiators. The floor of each structure is crisscrossed bygrids of string.

This encampment is a $2 millionU.S. Department of Energy-fundedproject to assess how today’s foresttrees will adjust when global warmingis predicted to elevate temperaturesnear the ground between 2 and 8degrees Celsius over the 21st Century.

“We’re taking species that occur at three different geographic latitudes(Georgia, North Carolina, andMassachusetts) and planting them at all three sites,” said lead scientistJames Clark. “When we warm them at Duke Forest it will be interesting to see, for example, whether plantsand species from further south will do better than local ones in their new environments.”

Sensors will track temperature, soil moisture, air humidity and lightlevels as each treelet competes to growwithin its assigned–and–recorded 10-foot by 16-foot grid.

Crucially, the ducts convey warmair from the heaters and radiators toelevate temperatures around the closelymonitored plants by either 3 or 6degrees Celsius above normal. The jutting cables house 220-volt electricallines that warm the soil by the sameamount.

The study aims at refining forecastingmaps of how forests will adjust to

changing climates. In the past, thesemaps have been built by locating thedistributions of each of today’s speciesand logging the summer and wintertemperatures and precipitation levels

where those now thrive. They thenpredict where the optimal conditionsare likely to shift with climate change.

“Maps showing which species willlikely make it in a given place are pretty much based on that kind oflogic,” said Clark, the H.L. BlomquistProfessor of the Environment atDuke’s Nicholas School.

“The problem is that where a givenspecies will be found on a future mapdepends not only on climate but alsoon the other species it’s competingwith,” he added.

“For instance, if you plant a sprucetree in your yard in this part of NorthCarolina chances are it will do just fine,”Clark said. “But it won’t reproducehere. That’s because it just can’t compete with Southern species at these higher temperatures outside itsnatural range.”

As rival trees grow rapidly toshade it out, the struggling babyspruce will be left buried in their shadows and starving for the sunlightit needs to photosynthesize, heexplained. Spruce can reproduce naturally only in the wilds of Dixie’shighest and coldest elevations—if even there.

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Anticipating HowTrees Will ’Duke it Out’with Global Warmingby Monte Basgall

In other words, plants not onlyhave to adapt to the climate. Theyalso have to slug it out with theirneighbors as temperatures, humidityand precipitation levels change.Nature provides no free lunch. Andwith global warming, caused in partby growing amounts of human-pro-duced carbon dioxide (CO2), outcomesshould be even more complex.

That’s why Clark is overseeingcoordinated warming experiments at a Duke Forest plot near Hillsborough,N.C., plus another at Harvard Forestin Massachusetts and a third near theUniversity of Georgia at Athens.

In late May scientists, students andtechnicians from all three locationsand universities began busily pruningunwanted vegetation at Duke Forestand planting seeds of about a dozendifferent kinds of trees in grid spacesmarked with plastic swizzle sticks. Insome cases, pre-existing treelets wereallowed to continue growing andmarked with encircling plastic strips of various colors.

Some seeds were hand-collected in the forest while others came fromsupply houses. Seeds from Georgiaand Massachusetts were planted inDuke Forest, and vice versa.

Increases in surface temperaturesbrought on by global warming areexpected to alter germination, growthand mortality of trees.

Depending on availability, theoverall species list might include red,black, white and chestnut oaks; sugarand red maples; loblolly and whitepines; and tulip poplar, sweet birchand southern magnolia.

Species like sugar maple, sweetbirch and chestnut oak already arenear their southern limits in NorthCarolina, while black oaks, white oaksand tulip poplar are near their north-ern limits in Massachusetts. The studywants to determine if species near the‘warm’ end of their range will declinein abundance during the coming 100years or whether trees near the ’cool’end of their ranges might extend their range.

The protocols of the three experi-mental sites are designed to addressNature’s inherent messiness andunpredictability.

“Every year there’s a different climate, with different temperaturesand different patterns of rainfall,”Clark said. “And it’s difficult to knowwhat’s affecting different species in aparticular year unless we manipulateconditions.”

Consequently, some plants will be warmed more than others, and stillothers will not be heated at all. Sometrees also will receive more water than they would get naturally, whileothers won’t.

“So if, for example, we have plots

where we don’t warm we can comparethose directly to plots we do warm togauge response to the treatments,”Clark explained.

To compare how light levels affecttree growth, some chambers will besituated out in the open and others indense shade. A third group will be insun-dappled semi-shade beneath thetallest mature trees.

Meticulous computerized recordscollected for analysis will includetracking nitrogen use (vital for thephotosynthesis process) and measuringmovements of carbon and sugars asthe young trees prepare for winter and spring.

This is not the first EnergyDepartment-funded global warmingstudy in Duke Forest.

The most famous one—called the Duke Free Air Carbon DioxideEnrichment (FACE) study—has beenstudying how plots in growing loblollypine stands respond to the kind of elevated CO2 levels expected world-wide by 2050.

Monte Basgall is senior writer in Duke’s Office of News andCommunications.

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Left to right: Chuck Abolt T’11 and Cassie Hoffman MEM’09 help plant crops at Coon Rock Fardukenvironment 24

in the Local Fisheries MarketNicholas School Students Make a Splash

Walking Fish has sold

400 shares! To find out

more about them visit

walking-fish.org

by Robyn Walker, MEM ’10

Think of the last bit of seafood you ate.That nice, juicy shrimp lying on yourplate, perfectly seasoned and grilled toperfection, brought to you fresh from the oceans of…Thailand?

Americans consume close to 5 billionpounds of seafood each year, 84 percentof which is imported from other countries.Chances are, the last fishy meal you ate traveled a farther distance to get to your table than some people travel ina lifetime.

This is a problem that 10 NicholasSchool students are setting out to solvewith their fledgling project, WalkingFish: A Community-Supported FisheriesInitiative.

Community-supported fisheries linkconsumers directly with producers intheir area. Customers buy shares in theprogram and receive weekly or biweeklysupplies of fresh, local, seasonal seafoodin exchange. The goal is to increase consumption of locally harvested fish,decrease imports, and let consumersknow where and how their seafood was caught. Buying direct from localsources brings in more income for localproducers and helps promote more sustainable fishing practices.

“The United States is the secondlargest importer and fourth largestexporter of seafood, and a lot of theseafood that we import isn’t necessarilyfrom sustainable or well-managed stocks or fisheries,” says Joshua Stoll, a second-year student in the CoastalEnvironmental Management (CEM) program and creator of the Walking Fishproject. “Basically we thought that if wecan support local seafood, then wecan help local economies andbuild partnerships betweenrural and urban communities,while promoting sustainablepractices and getting somereal-life experience.”

Stoll got the idea forWalking Fish after talking toSusan Andreatta, associateprofessor of anthropologyat the University of NorthCarolina in Greensboro

and project coordinator of ProjectGreenleaf, an organization devoted topromoting a local agro-food system inNorth Carolina. Along with community-supported agriculture projects, Andreattahas explored the challenges that small-scale fishermen face in marketing theirseafood to local communities, and howcommunity-supported fisheries mighthelp overcome those challenges.

After talking with her, Stoll says allthe pieces just seemed to fall together. He brought the idea of a community-supported fisheries project to Duke Fish,the Duke University chapter of theAmerican Fisheries Society, with the goalof trying to move some of the CarteretCounty catch inland to the Durham area.Other members immediately jumped onboard and started trying to figure outhow to make it happen.

In March 2009, Walking Fish pre-sented their ideas to Carteret Catch, a marketing group and branding organi-zation in Carteret County that aims tosustain the county’s fishing industrythrough marketing and education.

Carteret County is located along thecentral North Carolina coast, a three-hour drive east of the Raleigh-Durhammetropolitan market. The county ishome to many popular beach resorts,small towns and fishing ports, includingthe village of Beaufort, where the DukeUniversity Marine Lab is located.

“We went in to this meeting with the message that our project was anopportunity where consumers and fisher-men alike could benefit. We had accessto the market, resources and funding, but no knowledge of the fisheries orcommunity members that need to be

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k Farm; Kellyn Shoecraft MEM’10 carries seedlings to plant at Coon Rock Farm.

dukenvironment 26

involved,which is where Carteret

Catch would come in,” says Stoll. “It turns out they’re asking the same questions: How do we market ourseafood? How do we sustain local communities? There’s real overlapbetween our mission and their mission,and I think this partnership has realpotential.”

Barry Nash, a Carteret Catch advisoryboard member and a seafood technologyand marketing specialist at the Center for Marine Sciences and Technology innearby Morehead City, agrees.

“The Walking Fish project is a goodmatch for us, because it provides anopportunity to get a toe in the door inthe Triangle area,” he says. “Basicallywe’ll be working with them to set uplogistics and make sure they have asteady supply of seafood to the participants who buy shares.”

With Carteret Catch on board, and armed with funding from both Duke Fish and the Duke UniversitySustainability Office, the organizers ofWalking Fish jumped in with both feet.They began working out the logistics of the project, discussing details, andplanning a Web site to promote WalkingFish and provide information about localfisheries. In April, they held a HappyHour event in Durham to introduce theiridea to the public and local restaurantowners, and held focus groups in July todetermine what potential consumers and

participants might want.“Everyone in the focus group seemed

really excited about Walking Fish,” saysDuke Fish member and second-yearCEM Jennifer Bruce. “What it boilsdown to is that people want to get highquality, fresh local seafood from WalkingFish, but at the same time they’re reallyexcited that their purchases will affectthe local economy, that their money willmean more to the community than ifthey just bought a piece of fish in thegrocery store.”

But the members of Walking Fish saythis project is not just about stimulatingthe local economy.

“There’s an increasing demand forsustainable seafood, and if we can showthat the consumer wants well-managedand sustainable stocks of fish, thenmaybe we can influence the fisheries andpromote more sustainable processes,”says Stoll. “A major component of thiseffort is economic development, but inthe long run this also is about workingto ensure that the integrity of our coastalenvironments are maintained.”

However as Bruce points out, the term‘sustainable’ is not always easy to define.

“The issue and complexity of theterm ‘sustainability’ poses a challengebecause it’s so abstract and has so manylayers,” she says. “It’s a big stumblingblock. Consumers need to understandthat every fish you give them is not goingto be the perfect sustainable fish, andwhat we’re trying to do is provide thebest product we can while respecting sustainability issues and balancing theneeds of the fishermen and the consumers.”

And while the focus groups helpeddetermine what the consumers are lookingfor, the members of Walking Fish are stillworking on developing partnerships withlocal fishermen to better understand theirneeds. To do this, some members havetagged along on local shrimp and

trawling boats throughout the summer,forging partnerships and seeing firsthandwhat the local fishermen do.

“We want to get a better understandingof what was meant exactly by ‘small-scale fisherman’ in North Carolina,” saysStoll. “The experiences have been reallyinteresting, and different than I imagined.We’ve learned a lot about what it meansto fish, and I think there could be somereally good things to come from relation-ships with these fishermen. It’s all aboutbuilding trust and gaining credibility.”

Walking Fish planned to have theirpilot program up and running this fall,offering weekly or bi-weekly seafoodshares with fresh local seafood deliveredfor a period of 12 to 14 weeks. Theintention is for each share to have a variety of different species in it, whichwill change as the fishing seasons progress.At first, shares will be marketed mainlyto members of the Duke community, butStoll hopes to expand the project in thefuture to include the wider Triangle Areaand maybe even other counties.

“The idea is that we start herebecause it’s easier to access, but then we could potentially go to other countiesand tap into the species that they havetoo,” says Stoll. “Sustainable fishingseems like a big global and nationalissue, and it’s a big local issue right now,so this project is something that peoplealways will be interested in. As long asthere are people willing to work for it,then the enthusiasm for it is not going to go away.”

For more information on Walking Fishand community sustained fisheries projects, visit www.walking-fish.org.

Robyn Walker MEM’10 is a NicholasSchool blogger and was the 2008-09Nicholas School student communicationsassistant.

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Policy and GeographyShape Tropical Parks’Success in StemmingDeforestation, New Paper Finds

Tropical moist forests are home to a majority of the Earth’sterrestrial species, yet human activities such as logging, roadbuilding and agriculture destroy between one and two millionsquare kilometers of these vital habitats every decade.

But a new paper by a trio of Duke University researchers,published in The Proceedings of the National Academy ofSciences this spring, offers cause for cautious optimism—witha major caveat.

While protected areas seem to be working, there are toofew of them and many, especially those in at-risk forests, are small, says lead author Lucas Joppa, a PhD student in conservation ecology at the Nicholas School.

Using satellite imagery and data sets from four large tropicalregions, Joppa and his co-authors found that the success ofnational parks and other protected areas to stem deforestationhinges on both their legal designation and their inaccessibilityto development. The researchers compiled satellite-derivedmaps of deforestation inside, or within 30 kilometers of,

protected areas across four regions—the Amazon, the Congo,the South American Atlantic coast and West Africa—whichonce constituted about half of the world’s tropical moist forests.

By overlaying the maps of deforestation onto maps showing the boundaries of national parks, state parks, wilderness areas and other protected areas, they were able to compare patterns of deforestation and fragmentation in the four regions.

“What is exciting is that while remote protected areas seemto be protected quite well simply because they are inaccessible,protected areas located in areas of high human pressure also seem to be maintaining their legal boundaries,” says Scott Loarie, a recent PhD graduate in conservation ecology at the Nicholas School who co-authored the paper.

Joppa and Loarie wrote their paper with their faculty advisor,Stuart Pimm, Doris Duke Professor of Conservation Ecology.

dukenvironment 28

As senior policy advisor to AgricultureSecretary Tom Vilsack, Bonnie would beworking on land and water issues andaddressing the Obama administration’sbroader goals, including the big one:passing climate legislation. TracingBonnie’s path to the government backfurther, perhaps surprisingly, finds awoodpecker near the journey’s start. Theendangered red-cockaded woodpecker(picoides borealis), to be exact.

For his Duke masters project in 1994,Bonnie teamed up with Michael J. Bean,

then head of the Environmental DefenseFund’s (EDF) wildlife team. The aim ofthe project was to protect and restorehabitat for the red-cockaded woodpecker;the team’s fresh approach was designed toaddress an inherent flaw in the otherwiserobust Endangered Species Act.

Dangling a Carrot When the Hammer Misses the MarkDespite its tour de force as one of theworld’s most effective wildlife protectionlaws, the Endangered Species Act (ESA)has some wrinkles.

Consider the landowner worriedabout the prospect of red-cockadedwoodpeckers taking up residence in hisforests. What to do? Because the ESAprohibits the killing of a listed speciesand the harming of its habitat, thelandowner might take drastic measureslike destroying an old-growth pine standbefore it attracts the endangered bird. No harm no foul … except for the lossof habitat critical to the red-cockadedwoodpecker.

So not only does the law hamstringwhat private landowners can do on andwith their lands; it also provides no netbenefit for the endangered bird and couldpossibly make things worse through the lawof unintended consequences. How to fix?

Enter Bonnie and Bean and theirteam, which included EDF’s MelindaTaylor, as well as participants from theU.S. Army’s Fort Bragg military base and North Carolina State University.Thinking the carrot might be just the tool to take the bite out of ESA’s stick,the group saw an opportunity to useincentives to restore red-cockaded wood-peckers and create a win-win situation.What if, they reasoned, landowners wererewarded when they managed their landsin ways that would benefit endangeredanimals?

So Bonnie, Bean, and company developed a program, dubbed SafeHarbor, that would effectively lift regula-tory restrictions for landowners who voluntarily agreed to protect and managehabitat for a “baseline” population ofendangered woodpeckers; the landownerwould also commit to specific habitat

As Policy Advisor,

ROBERT BONNIEWields the Carrot Not the Stick

by Erica Rowell

On April 29, Robert Bonnie MEM/MF’94settled into his new office at the U.S.Department of Agriculture (USDA). Ofcourse, the view out the window differedfrom the sights out his old office window a few blocks away at the EnvironmentalDefense Fund, but the focus of his newposition was familiar.

improvements, such as prescribed burning, planting and maintaining longleaf pine, and developing artificialcavities, to further enhance the habitat.

The program slowly took off inNorth Carolina’s Sandhills region before being adopted by the U.S. Fish &Wildlife Service. Today, more than threemillion acres of land have been enrolledin Safe Harbor Agreements, benefiting avariety of endangered and threatenedspecies. And as for the red-cockadedwoodpecker? In just 10 years, reports the Fish & Wildlife Service, thanks inpart to the Safe Harbor Program, theirnumbers have increased nearly 30 percent to about 6,000 groups.

And so began Bonnie’s occupationwith carrots.

“The work I did at the NicholasSchool was all around incentives, bothfinancial and market incentives,” saysBonnie, adding, with “a strong emphasison economics.”

Using His Expertise in Incentives asUSDA Policy AdvisorMarkets and incentives are two key areas of expertise that Bonnie brings tohis portfolio of forests, water, climate and offsets.

And despite the recent global financialturmoil, as long as they’re structuredproperly, says Bonnie, markets remain a powerful environmental policy tool.

“Markets can spur innovation andlow-cost solutions but they have to bewell designed,” explains Bonnie. “Thelegislative process is important to thatbecause, in the case of climate, it is goingto provide a broad outline of how themarkets will work. But the specific rulesand regulations written to implementthat legislation are going to be veryimportant.”

This is where Bonnie and his USDAteam come in—working with others inthe administration to create a viable regulatory framework for entities thatfall outside a cap on carbon. Landownersare a prime example. The agriculturedepartment can play a role in makingmarkets accessible to landowners, whorepresent a critical piece of the climate

change fix since global lands account for one fifth of global greenhouse gasemissions.

“If you take land off the table, itbecomes a lot harder to meet our climategoals,” says Bonnie, who goes on toexplain the importance of offsets, or different ways emitters can buy pollutionreductions that someone else makes.

Offsets fund projects that reducegreenhouse gas emissions. They includeactivities such as installing methane-cap-turing systems over animal wastelagoons, planting trees, sequestering soil,and improving forest management practices.

“Domestically,” says Bonnie, “if we can bring offsets with environmentalintegrity into the game, we can meet ourclimate goals more cheaply and we alsocan advance land stewardship.”

It is here on the subject of offsets that Bonnie points to the lingering debateamong environmentalists and others who recognize the need to act on climatechange: a tax versus cap-and-trade system.

A carbon tax, says Bonnie, likelywouldn’t allow “farmers, ranchers andforest owners access [to] a market thatwill pay them to protect the climate. A market taps into this potential.”

But a cap and trade provides accessthrough offsets.

Critics doubt that all offset projectswould be verifiable and enforceable, inpart because offsets are entirely voluntaryand rely solely on the carrot. There also is the spectra of leakage—the termused to describe a carbon-cutting activityin one place that is canceled out (inadver-tently, directly or indirectly) by a relatedactivity somewhere else. (Imagine a tract of forest slated for clearing that isprotected as an offset project, but then a nearby forest is cleared. There’s noguarantee of any carbon reduction insuch leakage scenarios.)

Bonnie counters such opposition by stressing that the bottom line with offsets is integrity: “If there’s an offsetmarket, it must do two things at once: 1) lower greenhouse gas emissions (that’s the environmental integrity), and2) must be designed in such a way that

landowners can broadly participate.The job of Bonnie and his colleagues

is to ensure that the offsets markets arestructured in such a way that landownersare only rewarded if they provide realenvironmental benefits. And so he isworking on a solution that even criticscan accept.

These days, Bonnie is more apt to bebending the ear of Secretary Vilsack than scouting for red-cockaded wood-peckers. But environmental protection is still the focus. And he’s still looking for the right carrots to produce results.

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Erica Rowell is managing editor of Dean Chameides’ blog, TheGreenGrok.com. She is based in New York City.

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by Laura Ertel

Bill Ulfelder received the 2009 RalstonDistinguished Alumni Award, the highest honor given by the NicholasSchool’s Alumni Association. It is presented to alumni who have distin-guished themselves through contribu-tions made in their own fields of work,in service to the Nicholas School ortoward the betterment of humanity.

Ulfelder, who has worked with TheNature Conservancy since graduatingfrom Duke in 1994 with a joint Masterof Environment Management andMaster of Forestry, is a leader in theconservation movement nationally and internationally. He began his careeras a Population and EnvironmentalFellow working with The NatureConservancy in Ecuador and Perubefore officially joining the Conservancytwo years later. In 1997, he was namedPeru country director, where he helpednegotiate a $10.5 million debt-for-nature swap.

“That deal broke new ground,because it was the first time that TheNature Conservancy, ConservationInternational and the World WildlifeFund all worked together on a debtswap deal, where the U.S. governmentforgave debt in return for the Peruvian

government making long-term commit-ments to its protected areas,” heexplains.

In 2003, Ulfelder returned to theStates to become the Conservancy’sNorthern Arizona director. Then, recognizing that the next big pushwould be in conservation of grasslands,and wanting to be in the thick ofthings, he left the coniferous forests of northern Arizona to become EasternColorado director, where he oversawgrasslands conservation of the WesternHigh Plains and led partnership effortswith the private and public sectors,including the US Army, the state andlocal ranching groups.

“In one deal, by partnering withthe Colorado State Land Board, wewere able to buy a 25,000-acre ranch,merge it with an existing 25,000-acreranch owned by the state, and put that still-productive cattle ranch intoconservation management of 50,000acres so it wouldn’t lose its biodiversityvalues. That was a great example ofhow we can bridge the divide betweenconservation and ranching, and wasreflective of my belief that long-termconservation success is predicated notonly on more traditional partnershipsamong conservation organizations, but also innovative partnerships with

unusual bedfellows in industry andother sectors.”

Ulfelder, who last year was the Conservancy’s Acting CentralCaribbean director overseeing work in the Dominican Republic, Cuba,Haiti and Puerto Rico, led theConservancy in the launch of two of the largest projects in the program’shistory. One project promotes sustainabletourism in the protected areas of theDominican Republic and the other will help ensure conservation and environmental protection within thecontext of the Central American &Dominican Republic Free TradeAgreement with the United States.Ulfelder had no intention of leavingColorado, but a new opportunity toserve as New York State director wastoo good to pass up, and this year his

careermattersLast spring I stopped by Career Services after I gave a talk to a class at the NicholasSchool. Assistant Dean Karen Kirchof asked if I’d be interested in a two-week intensive workshop for mid-career professionals that taught the use of markets inconservation? That was my first introduction to PERC (Property and EnvironmentResearch Center) in Bozeman, Mont.

The idea that an environmental professional could make a profit while enhancingthe protection of natural resources was novel to me, until I recently participated inPERC’s Enviropreneur Institute. PERC has been training environmental entrepreneursfor almost a decade now and the real-world lessons learned by these alumni are thecenterpiece of the annual two-week, paid, Enviropreneur Institute each summer.

Environmental entrepreneurs from past years have shaped the curriculum and domuch of the teaching. Their real-world experience and passion for innovation is contagious. The program combines in-depth sessions on topics such as venture capitaland fundraising, collaboration, business plan development and economic analysis.

Fresh Markets for Environmental Entrepreneurshipby Lucy Roberts Henry MEM ’08

International Conservation Leader, Sustainable Energy Advocate Receive Top Nicholas School Alumni Awards

family headed to the Big Apple.“Many people don’t realize that

New York State is incredibly importantfrom an ecological perspective. LongIsland has 1,500 miles of coastline,there’s the Great Lakes region, and the Adirondacks park is larger thanYosemite, Yellowstone, Glacier andGrand Canyon combined. In addition,New York is linked to the global workof The Nature Conservancy, so itallows me to draw on my internationalexperience in support of our work in34 countries.”

After 15 years on the Conservancy’steam, Ulfelder looks forward to seeingwhat new challenges await. “It hasbeen enormously rewarding to me tohave the chance to not just make a difference in the United States but alsooverseas, and move between those

worlds. There are few careers that giveyou that kind of opportunity. I have alot of doctor and lawyer friends whosay they wish they had my job!”

Ivan Urlaub, who earned joint master’sdegrees in Forestry and Public Policy at Duke in 2004, received the 2009Rising Star Alumni Award, which recognizes exceptional achievement byyoung alumni who have distinguishedthemselves through contributions intheir own fields of work, in service to the Nicholas School or toward the betterment of humanity.

Urlaub, the executive director ofthe North Carolina Sustainable EnergyAssociation (NCSEA), is a pioneer inthe state’s sustainable energy advocacyand policy making arena. Over the lastthree years, he has been instrumental in securing passage of 40 energy billsby the State Legislature. In 2007, heprovided critical leadership in the passage of the Renewable Energy andEnergy Efficiency Portfolio Standard,the first such standard in the Southeast.Last year, the NCSEA also helped create a survey of green jobs in theUnited States-only the third such survey ever taken.

“I enjoy being able to see tangiblechange occur on the ground, as a result of our organization’s work andmy leadership,” Urlaub says. “It feelsgood to remove regulatory and societalbarriers that have prevented peoplefrom getting closer to the root causes

of problems like global climate change,where they can implement solutionsthat put our society on a clearer pathto a sustainable energy economy.”

While at the Nicholas School,Urlaub co-founded the Duke UniversityGreening Initiative (DUGI). ThroughDUGI, he helped to create a campussustainability officer position andurged the university to adopt a comprehensive green building policy.He also was involved in the creation of the new MEM program for Energy& Environment.

Urlaub continues to aid theNicholas School through his commitmentto provide internships and to hire graduates. Currently, three MEM graduates work at NCSEA. He hasemployed 13 MEM interns through the Stanback Program, including fourthis summer.

“Environmental management is askill that the Nicholas School helpedme craft out of my environmental principles and experience. Receivingthe Rising Star Award has inspired meto recharge and recommit to creating a more sustainable energy future. I am touched by the recognition of myfriends and colleagues and grateful for the moment of reflection thisaward has given me.”

Laura Ertel is a freelance writer basedin Durham, N.C.

During the training, each fellow develops their entrepre-neurial project idea that is further refined through mentoringsessions with the alumni entrepreneurs, PERC staff and invitedexperts. The fellows come from all sectors, including govern-ment, nonprofit, and private. This results in a diverse array of project ideas, from government-run conservation incentiveprograms to private sector start-up businesses.

The Enviropreneur Institute offers an opportunity to take a fresh look at solving natural resource challenges and to collaborate with other environmental professionals on devisinginnovative solutions. The Institute awakened my entrepreneurialideas and I think it can do the same for you.

In these economic times it is less likely that mid-careerprofessionals are thinking of changing jobs, but now is a very

good time to add new skills or experiences to their employ-ment brand, says Kirchof. Mid-career professionals shouldconsider participating in PERC or seek other programs such as NEPA training (offered by the Nicholas School’s DukeEnvironmental Leadership Program), or the KinshipConservation Environmental Leadership Program.

Interested in learning more about PERC? E-mail Lucy Henryat lucy.robertshenry@gmail.com or go to www.perc.org. Tolearn about other programs, contact Kirchof at kgki@duke.eduor 919-613-8016.

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The Nicholas School responded tothe challenges of a weak economyduring fiscal year 2008-09 by balancing its budget, while continuingto aggressively pursue its mission-critical activities. Expense reductionswere made in most administrativefunctions, enabling strategic invest-ments to continue in direct supportof teaching and research allowing us to hire new faculty and recruit arecord 2011 class. Contributions to the annual fund and earnings on established endowments wereessential components of our revenuestream, allowing us to achieve thesegoals.

Many people don’t realize thattuition supports a little more thanone quarter of the Nicholas School’sannual budget of about $49 million.The largest source of revenue derivesfrom research grants. Indirect cost

recovery on those grants suppliesabout 7 percent of the total revenue.

Just as research grants bring significant funding on the NicholasSchool, they also are an equivalentsource of expenditures-to get thework done. Expenses for educationalprograms account for about one-thirdof total expenses, dominated by faculty salaries and financial aid forour students.

Each year the budget is affectedby changes in our success in obtainingresearch grants and by changes intuition revenue derived from studentenrollment. Other categories of revenue and expense are more constant and difficult to change inresponse to changing conditions.Nevertheless, the school is in goodfinancial shape thanks to the contributions of our faculty, our students and our loyal supporters.

uses of funds figure 2

funded research

39%

MEM tuition

13%undergrad tuition

8%

annual fund 1%

endowmentincome-general

15%

endowmentincome-NSOE

11%

indirect costrecovery

7%

funded research

40%

instructional

expenses

22%

student services 2%space

costs 7%

school administration 7%

school’s portionof univ.

administration13%

financial aid 9%

sources of funds figure 1

July 1, 2008-June 30, 2009

other tuition

6%

dukenvironment 32

annualreport update

external affairs blurb

dukenvironment is printed on Utopia 2XG paper; this paper is manu-

factured with electricity in the form of renewable energy (wind,

hydro, and biogas), virgin pulp from certified sources, and a minimum

of 30% post-consumer recovered fiber. Please recycle this magazine.

Mark your calendar for the following dates and monitor our

Web site at nicholas.duke.edu for additional events.

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save the date

a greener magazine

november 12Duke Forest Annual Gathering 5:30-7:30 p.m.New Hope Improvement Association Center4012 Whitfield Road Chapel Hill, NC Registration not required, but encouragedContact: Beverly Burgess919-613-8013 or beverly.burgess@duke.edu

march 26-27Admitted Students Visitation WeekendDuke Campus, Levine Science Research CenterContact: Erika Lovelace919-613-7459 oradmissions@nicholas.duke.edu

january 15Prospective Students Visitation Day8 a.m.-3 p.m.Bryan CenterContact: Erika Lovelace919-613-7459 oradmissions@nicholas.duke.edu

april 1-2 (Tentative)

Masters Project SymposiumMEM and MF candidates masters projectpresentationsVon Canon Rooms, Bryan CenterContact: Erika Lovelace919-613-7459 oradmissions@nicholas.duke.edu

february 5

april 10Spring Banquet and Silent Auction(Tentative)Nasher Museum of ArtDuke UniversityContact: Nancy Kelly919-613-8090 or nkelly@duke.edu

february 26Stanback Conservation InternshipInterview DayBryan Center, Von Canon Rooms, DukeCampusContact: Glenda S. Lee919-613-8079 or gslee@duke.edu

fpo

april 16-18Duke LEAF, Nicholas School Board ofVisitors and Alumni Council MeetingsDuke Campus and The Siena Hotel of Chapel Hill Contact: Celeste Brogdon919-613-8035 orceleste.brogdon@duke.edu

15th Annual Duke/Yale EnvironmentalRecruiting FairGallaudet UniversityWashington, D.C.Contact: Thelma Jernigan919-613-8102 or tejernig@duke.edu

Duke/Yale Environmental Recruiting Fair ReceptionWashington, D.C.Contact: Michelle Meagher919-613-8003 ormichelle.meagher@duke.edu

fall 2009

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dukenvironmentNICHOLAS SCHOOL OF THE ENVIRONMENT • FALL 2009

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