One night last November, my friend Mark started explaining how his brother-in-law basically builds robots to mop up mistakes at nuclear weapons plants. Turns out he was onto something.

Matt Cole, in the lab (Photo: Leon Chew/Wired)

After I met Matt Cole I became pretty fascinated with his robotics work and his motivation to design robotics that scooch and roll through radioactive spaces to clean up old nuclear sites or help repair snafus at operating power plants.

Wired Magazine published my short profile of Cole and his work in May 2010. It was my first piece in Wired, and it just touches on the work that Cole and his company, S.A. Technology, do. The larger issue is how technology like this plays into the debate over nuclear energy and new nuke plants, since it eliminates some human risk but doesn’t directly address the problems over how to actually dispose of radioactive waste.

Oil Alert

Digital Tool Helps Oil-Spill Responders Protect Alaska’s Coast

A snapshot of Sitka Shore, via Alaska ShoreZone (Photo: NOAA Fisheries)

In January 2009, fierce winds in southeastern Alaska tore loose a 181-foot ferry from a pier. The ferry ran aground on a small island, and the Coast Guard and volunteers headed to the scene to limit damage from a possible fuel spill. Before they arrived, the responders knew which sensitive tidelands and critical fisheries habitats were threatened, thanks to a set of new high-tech digital maps that provide a bird’s-eye view of Alaska’s coast.

The mapping project, Alaska ShoreZone, currently covers 17,000 miles of the state’s roughly 47,000-mile coastline, including areas such as Bristol Bay and Prince William Sound—the site of the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989. More than 30 organizations, including The Nature Conservancy, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and state and tribal agencies, have worked together on the program since 2001, sharing $5.5 million in funds and plenty of expertise.

To get the images for ShoreZone, a helicopter buzzes the coast during low tide. A biologist and geologist hang out the open door, shooting photos and video, and recording audio commentaries on the coastline features below. The high-definition images and the narratives are digitized and made publicly available online.

“It’s fantastic to see the whole coastline,” says John Harper, a geomorphologist who has worked on ShoreZone programs in Washington state, British Columbia and now Alaska. “It really provides a different perspective,” he says.

Scientists have used the digital maps to identify important fishery habitats, such as underwater kelp forests and eelgrass beds. ShoreZone has played a critical role in explaining some of the interactions between estuaries—where rivers meet the ocean—and upland areas, says Laura Baker, a marine project manager with the Conservancy in Alaska.

“Our primary goal is to have the first inventory of coastal habitats in southeastern Alaska,” Baker says. By using ShoreZone information, the Conservancy is identifying areas of key conservation significance and fine-tuning strategies for protecting salmon runs, tidelands and coastal forests.

Crews responding to oil spills can use the data to prioritize areas where they need to act quickly. If a Valdez-like spill occurred now, responders could use ShoreZone to develop containment plans to protect sensitive wildlife habitat. Additionally, the program is feeding computer models to help manage commercial fisheries and control invasive species.

Says Baker: “It’s a tool to help us pick which areas to focus on.”

— Joshua Zaffos

The sun shines on solar-panel installers (image via Swords to Ploughshares)

In northern Colorado, community colleges and major universities are reaching out to potential students and tailoring programs to train for a range of green jobs, from smart-grid engineers to hybrid-vehicle manufacturing to solar-panel installation and maintenance. In the April 9, 2010 issue of the Northern Colorado Business Report, my column, “School’s in session for green job seekers,” covers the cresting wave of new programs, including an initiative at Colorado State University meant to attract returning military veterans to green jobs.

Two local community colleges are launching degrees that integrate some existing courses with directed concentrations for green careers.

From the article:

At the Larimer campus of Front Range Community College, a new Clean Energy Technology program is training students in operations and technical skills. Program director Glenn Wilson said an advisory board of local renewable-energy company leaders, who already acknowledge a lag in capable employees, helped develop program curriculum.

“It’s pretty new and unique,” Wilson said.

Students take a broad yet directed array of courses meant to prepare them for a range of responsibilities – tech development, manufacturing, facilities operations, maintenance – within renewable-energy industries.

“We think there’s going to be a lot of change and movement,” Wilson said, referring to the ongoing jockeying between solar, wind and other alt-energy businesses. “We’re teaching to the needs. I haven’t seen anything that offers this flexibility.”

Both local college programs are starting small (in terms of class size), but interest has been high so far, and it will be interesting to see how they grow and where their graduates land.

A February 11 article in The Telluride Watch covers some local environmentalists’ concerns about the plans of the milling company, Energy Fuels Resources Corp., which has applied for a permit, and the potential impacts to the Dolores River and its flows should the project receive approval.

Mills process uranium once it is removed from the ground in order to make it usable for nuclear power plants, but the operation involves using lots of water and leaving behind tailings that can contaminate air and water. Western towns, including Cañon City, Colorado and Moab, Utah, are both still cleaning up from older mills and dealing with the toxic results; a 2006 U.S. Nuclear Regulatory fact sheet details the cleanups and regulations surrounding mill tailings.

I wrote a feature article (“CWCB’s Instream Flow Program matures”) about the Dolores and the ongoing process to protect streamflows within the river for biological, recreational and agricultural needs in the Fall 2009 issue of Headwaters Magazine, put out by the nonprofit Colorado Foundation for Water Education. The story covers the progress of the state board in charge of protecting these instream flows in rivers across the state, using the Dolores as a key example of Colorado’s evolution in considering river health.

Federal regulators will review the uranium mill application, but a decision is likely a ways off and highly dependent on other factors, namely the development of the domestic nuclear power industry. And regardless of regulators’ decision, it will undoubtedly face legal challenges.

Bivalve Blues

Report Reveals Global Risks for Oyster Reefs

Exposed oyster reef in the Chesapeake Bay, Virginia (NOAA)

Baymen harvest an average of roughly 99,000 tons of oysters each year from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. But that kind of bounty is now uncommon: Around the world, 85 percent of shellfish reefs have been lost to overfishing and habitat destruction, according to a new Nature Conservancy report, Shellfish Reefs at Risk.

“Shellfish reefs are the single most impacted marine habitat globally,” says Mike Beck, a Conservancy marine scientist and lead author of the report. Beck and his team of scientists compiled status reports from more than 144 estuaries and found that reefs were in significant decline worldwide.

While records show that even the ancient Romans exploited shellfish reefs, the pressure on oysters, mussels and clams today is unprecedented. Overharvesting has led to the functional extinction of many oyster reefs throughout Europe, North America and other continents. In fact, most of the oysters we eat now come from aquaculture.

Global condition of oyster reefs (via The Nature Conservancy report)

Other major threats include disease and parasite outbreaks; the introduction of non-native species; pollution from the filling and dredging of coastal areas; and runoff from urban development, industry and agriculture.

Most countries tend to manage oyster reefs as harvesting fields and not much more, Beck says. We underappreciate and undervalue the “ecosystem services” that shellfish reefs provide, he says, such as filtering and purifying water, controlling erosion and supporting scores of other marine species.

While providing a global assessment of the threats facing shellfish, the report also outlines steps to help protect and restore threatened reefs. The scientists recommend that governments protect some of the best remaining reefs in places like the Gulf of Mexico and Georges Bay in Australia.

Beck also calls for new and existing funding to focus on the long-term restoring of reefs, not just on oyster harvesting; many restoration projects now allow harvesting only a year or two after oysters have been replanted. “We should allow reefs to rebuild themselves. And then we should allow harvesting of just the interest, not the principal,” says Beck. “We need to see the reefs return, not just the oysters.”

-Joshua Zaffos

I wrote an article, “Mining for Reform,” on what Congress is looking at to reform the 1872 law in the Fall 2009 issue of Forest Magazine. The issue brought together several articles looking at the consequences of abandoned mines on Western public lands, under the title of “Hardrock Headache.”The mining industry has opposed regulations stricter than those within the 1872 law that would increase costs or liabilities for existing and future mine owners. But environmentalists and other public-interest groups have long argued that mining laws don’t reflect the advent of environmental regulation, so the rules should include production royalties (paid by miners who use public lands, like national forests), a cleanup fund for the abandoned sites, and a list of sensitive areas where mining is prohibited.

The abandoned Leviathan Mine in California is among the sites that could be restored through a cleanup fund (US EPA)

Here’s a rundown, from my Forest article, on the 1872 law and the somewhat surprising stance of the National Mining Association:

A sweet plum for industry, the law enables companies or individuals to mine for hardrock minerals, including gold, copper and uranium, without paying any royalties to the government. The law also allows mining corporations to pull up stakes without cleaning up the mess they leave behind. For more than a century the law allowed anyone—individual or corporation—to buy, or patent, public lands for mining for as little as $2.50 per acre. Congress approved a moratorium on new patents in 1994 and has reapproved it every year since, but existing claims can still be mined.

Provisions for site reclamation have evolved slightly over the decades, but the absence of strict remediation requirements on public lands has left thousands of abandoned mines oozing toxic metals into adjacent landscapes and streams. Taxpayers ultimately foot the bill for these cleanups, and the total tab to remediate all abandoned hardrock mines on public lands is at least $50 billion, according to Earthworks, a mining-reform advocacy group.

“Nobody can say with a straight face that this law from 1872 shouldn’t be changed,” says Velma Smith of the Pew Campaign for Responsible Mining.

Luke Popovich, spokesman for the National Mining Association, agrees. “The law needs to be updated,” he says.

The change in attitude from the industry is encouraging, as it has long claimed the law’s provisions are necessary to support the domestic minerals market. But Popovich’s ideas of mining reform differ significantly from those put forth by congressional leaders and supported by environmentalists.

A more recent Associated Press story from January 3 covers the different bills that are getting consideration from Congress right now. Environmentalists, miners and Congress remain hopeful that a bill can move forward, but the larger questions is whether reform will be a giant leap, a baby step, or something still off in the distance. Passage could mean that old, toxic mine sites across the West — like this one (profiled in Forest) and this one (from a Nov. 30, 2009 story from the Colorado Independent) — could finally be restored.

Growing populations and the altering climate and weather patterns are placing more people in risky situations, and making more individuals vulnerable to natural disasters. After attending a talk by Lori Peek, a sociology professor at Colorado State University, about the lag in research on how traumatic events affect families, I started pursuing this story to understand what we know — and what we have dispelled — when it comes to protecting and meeting the long-term needs of disaster victims and refugees.

My article, “After the Aftermath,” appears in the Jan/Feb 2010 issue of Miller-McCune magazine. I spoke with university researchers and nonprofit officials who have worked with and studied the impacts of the Sichuan earthquake, the Indian Ocean tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, and several other major tragedies and disasters. One of the key pieces that has researchers’ attention is the lack of understanding toward helping children through such events:

Hurricane Katrina didn’t flatten hundreds of schools, as happened last year in China, but the 2005 storm and subsequent flooding displaced 163,000 children 19 years old or younger. The hurricane flung kids across the country during the haphazard evacuation; 5,100 juveniles were reported missing in the weeks that followed, and it would take seven months to reunite them with their families.

Children are a particularly understudied population in terms of disaster research, and while some people believe kids can prove exceptionally resilient, the harsh consequences of Katrina suggest less promising outcomes. “We have very little good research on mass displacement and natural disasters,” says Lori Peek, a sociology professor at Colorado State University. “But I think we’re going to see a lot more of it, so I think we need to learn more about what went wrong.”

Peek has conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with adults and children who landed in Colorado after Katrina. She’s also spoken to individuals who have returned to the Gulf region. Field studies of displaced children by a dozen researchers, including Peek, reveal magnified risks of emotional and social suffering, not to mention increased mental health problems.

Children displaced by Katrina face overcrowding at new schools and discrimination from new peers. They are tuned in to their families’ financial instability and crave the friends and relatives who once formed their social network. “In Colorado, people want to know, ‘Are they better off?’ That’s really difficult [to say] because what does ‘better off’ mean?” Peek says.

“The Legacy of Katrina’s Children,” a paper authored by David Abramson and colleagues at Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness, found that children affected by the storm were more likely to exhibit reduced academic performance, to lose access to health care and to develop clinical mental health problems and behavioral disorders than other children.

“We think [disasters and displacement] have an enormous impact on kids,” Abramson says.

Congress has heeded warnings from researchers like Abramson and Peek, creating a National Commission on Children and Disasters that first met in October 2008. During an August 2009 Senate hearing, the commission chair, Mark Shriver, an official with Save the Children, told policymakers, “We’ve spent more time, energy and money on pets than we have on kids.”

And the panel isn’t even set to make policy recommendations until late 2010. (The commission did share some initial recommendations in a October 2009 draft report for the president and Congress.)

Government intervention on reservations across the country dates back more than a century, when policies unwittingly entangled many families’ land ownership so that the default and simplest form of management is through federal leasing programs. The short-sighted decisions of the time contributed to initiation of a landmark class-action lawsuit, Cobell v. Salazar, that accussed the federal government of mismanaging billions of dollars in royalties and other leases. First filed in 1996 and passed on by both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, President Obama and Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar announced a settlement this week. The government has agreed to pay $3.4 billion to Native Americans, although officials don’t know how many individuals qualify for the payout because lease records are in a state of disarray.

On Pine Ridge, some families are trying to sort through their relatives’ fractionated land claims (divided among heirs of the original owner) and remove land from the government program that leases the parcels for cattle grazing. Instead of getting a few hundred dollars to allow a non-Indian to raise cows, these families are returning bison to the land, taking part in a buffalo meat co-operative and, more importantly, reestablishing a major component of their traditional culture.

As part of my reporting, I was fortunate enough to visit with a family raising a small herd of bison and to witness a family ceremony based around a buffalo kill. As part of the prayers of thanks to the animal for giving its life, each member of the family dipped a finger into a cup of blood collected from the dying buffalo’s throat. It didn’t taste much different than a scrape on my knee, although it lingered on my tongue for hours.

My story, “A new land grab,” appeared in the August 31 issue of High Country News, and it was recently liberated from behind the paper’s subscribers-only firewall. I also recorded an audio interview with associate editor Marty Durlin, talking about my reporting experiences.

In the article, I give a quick review of the history of land tenure on reservations:

Under the Dawes Act of 1887, the federal government doled out 160 acres of land to the head of each Indian family at Pine Ridge and other reservations. Congress could sell off any un-allotted lands, while the Bureau of Indian Affairs would maintain a tribal trust fund of revenues from mineral, oil, timber and grazing leases. (That trust fund is the subject of the ongoing lawsuit brought by Blackfeet tribal member Elouise Cobell in 1996.)

Then, in 1906, Congress passed the Burke Act, which allowed the BIA to measure Native Americans’ “competence” to handle their homestead lands, based on ancestry, cultural assimilation — even the length of a person’s hair. The assessments at Pine Ridge underscored official prejudice: By 1915, government agents had classified 56 percent of the Oglala Lakota living on the reservation as “incompetent,” and 700,000 additional acres were sold off before the practice ceased in 1934. Other parcels allotted to “incompetent” Indians were shifted into the leasing system, which has served mostly non-Native ranchers. But “competent” Indians didn’t make out much better, since they were forced to pay taxes on their allotments. Ninety-five percent of these lands were eventually sold to non-Natives for a fraction of their real value.

And the allotment system had lasting cultural impact: By chopping up the land base, it effectively ended communal hunting practices. As the original allottees died and their children inherited the land, parcels were fractionated among dozens — sometimes hundreds — of heirs.

People who have followed the Cobell lawsuit consider the settlement a major step forward in relationships between the federal government and tribes, which have been characterized by distrust for centuries. The settlement includes provisions to create a $1.4 billion Accounting/Trust Administration Fund and a $2 billion Trust Land Consolidation Fund, both of which should help alleviate some administrative shortcomings. But the problems over Indian land tenure remain a massive headache that needs to be treated with solutions that increase Indians’ control of their own lands.

For instance, the land-consolidation fund intends to eliminate fractionated land claims through government acquisition. The program could reduce some family’s problems, but it will reduce the land base owned by tribe members and not do anything to address land tenure and use concerns.

Following the recent release of  U.S. Department of Agriculture data on farming on reservations, the nonprofit group Village Earth, based in Fort Collins and active on these issues at Pine Ridge,  crunched the numbers to reveal an alarming disparity:

According to Village Earth’s study of the USDA data, in total numbers, Native Americans represent only 1.6% of the farmers and ranchers operating on Reservation lands. Today, for most Native American Reservations in the United States, more than two-thirds of the farms and ranches are controlled by non-natives. As might be expected, this disparity in land use has had a dramatic impact on the ability of Native Americans to fully benefit from their natural resources. Statistics on income reveal that the total value of agricultural commodities produced on Native American Reservations in 2007 totaled over $2.1 Billion dollars, yet, only 16% of that income went to Native American farmers and ranchers.

The new funds could move the government beyond its standard practices. But based on the past, the tribes and officials will have to remain wary that the money isn’t just churned into the bureaucratic boondoggle that led to the present situation.