fieldnotes

• Restoration
• Law Enforcement
• Preserve
• Diversity
• Granddaddy's Babies
• Zoo Doo Clears the Air
• Answering the Call
• Flaming French Roast
• Happy Flushing

Restoration
A River Reborn

When Barry Dana, Chief of Maine's Penobscot Indian Nation, was a boy, his grandfather spoke of fishing Maine streams in the early 1900s so thick with Atlantic salmon that you could “walk across the stream on their backs without getting your ankles wet.” But as dams were built to supply power to budding towns and paper mills along the Penobscot River, salmon dwindled. Now a plan aims to restore Atlantic salmon to more than 500 miles of river habitat and nurse the struggling species back to health. The project would be one of the largest ecosystem-recovery efforts north of the Everglades. It also offers “probably the last best chance to restore Atlantic salmon in the United States,” says John Burrows, Maine coordinator for the Atlantic Salmon Federation.

To return salmon to their historic spawning grounds, the Penobscot Nation and five conservation groups, including Maine Audubon, have joined forces to form Penobscot Partners. The group has agreed to buy three hydroelectric dams on the Penobscot River for $25 million from PPL Corporation, the dams' owner. By 2008 the coalition will dismantle the two dams farthest downstream and create a state-of-the-art fish ladder at the third. In exchange, the utility will step up power generation at the six other dams it owns in the Penobscot watershed to maintain 90 percent of their power-generating capacity, and conservationists will drop their decades-long legal campaign to remove other dams. “It's a historic and innovative agreement,” exults Elizabeth Maclin, the director of dam removal for the conservation group American Rivers. “To be able to open that much habitat is incredible.”

The deal could boost salmon runs to as high as 12,000 fish per year, more than 10 times their current levels, says Laura Rose Day, project director and spokeswoman for Penobscot Partners. In 2000 Atlantic salmon populations on eight Maine rivers were declared federally endangered. But the fish hung on in the lower Penobscot, whose salmon make up more than 80 percent of the returning Atlantic salmon in the country.

Other wildlife will also benefit. Large seagoing fish, including American shad and striped bass, will enjoy more prime habitat. Millions of alewives and blueback herring will swim far upstream, in the process dispersing the larvae of struggling freshwater mussel species like the alewife floater. These fish and mussels will, in turn, provide meals for shad, ospreys, bald eagles, mink, and otters, notes Sally Stockwell, conservation director for Maine Audubon. Shallow wetlands will once again form along the riverbanks, where they will function as nurseries and food sources for insects, amphibians, turtles, and fish.

Some environmentalists think the Maine partnership could serve as a model for other dam removals out West. But Day remains cautious, because conservation groups may lack the wherewithal to buy and dismantle bigger hydroelectric dams, and power companies might be less willing to sell. Still, Chief Dana says, “other tribes who have salmon issues are watching” and asking how they might make their own conservation deals. “They can look at our model and see that you can have your fish and eat it, too.

—Dan Ferber

Law Enforcement
Policing the High Seas

As the cargo ship Cygnus plowed through the mid-Pacific in April 2002, en route from Japan to Portland, Oregon, the engine-room crew dumped hundreds of gallons of oil into the ocean through a hose, bypassing discharge monitors. Under the authority of Duk Jo Jeong, the ship's first assistant engineer, crew members hid the hose and repainted the overboard discharge valve to conceal the fact that the hose had been used. Later the Cygnus's chief engineer, Pyeong Gab Jung, wrote in the oil record book that the oil sludge had been burned in onboard incinerators.

Illegal pollution from ships is widespread throughout the maritime industry, according to Thomas Sansonetti, assistant attorney general of the U.S. Department of Justice's Environment and Natural Resources Division.

A 2003 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report, Oil in the Sea III, estimates that each year 65 million gallons of engine-room sludge are dumped worldwide. Some investigators think the amount is actually two or three times greater.

“Assessing environmental damage caused by illegal dumping is difficult,” says Norm Davis of Washington State's Department of Ecology, Spill Prevention Program. However, the NAS report found “increasing evidence that chronic, low-level exposure to hydrocarbons in the sea can have a significant effect on the survival and reproductive performance of seabirds and some marine mammals. Sublethal effects of oil on seabirds include reduced reproductive success and physiological impairment, including increased vulnerability to stress.”

Detecting evidence of illegal dumping is also difficult. Sometimes a telltale oily pipe, used to bypass the discharge monitoring system, is found hidden onboard. Occasionally, a crew member tips off the Coast Guard or state inspectors. Other times the oil record book includes entries that don't make sense. Or when ship inspectors disassemble a ship's valves or overboard discharge pipes, they find traces of oil where there shouldn't be any.

Nonetheless, during the past two years, in the Northwest and in Alaska, the feds have obtained convictions and prison terms for ship captains and engineers, plus millions of dollars in fines. The conviction of the engineers aboard the Cygnus also led to the conviction of a corporate director connected with a fleet of ships that, for seven years, had routinely dumped engine-room oil sludge at sea. According to Timothy M. Burgess, U.S. attorney for the District of Alaska, “The aggressive investigation and prosecution of ships' officers, onshore managers, and international corporations sends a strong message to those who seek to profit from polluting the world's oceans.”

—Sam Curtis

Preserve
Nature's Olive Branch

To many Koreans their country is Keum Su Gang San—the “Land of Embroidered Rivers and Mountains.” But years of war and recent economic growth have taken their toll on this once-idyllic landscape. Now an international coalition of scientists and conservation groups is aiming to preserve a narrow thread of green that separates North and South Korea—the ghostly strip also known as the demilitarized zone (DMZ). “This would preserve an area that will always be of historic and ecological importance to the Korean people and to the world,” says Edward O. Wilson, the renowned biologist at Harvard University and an adviser to the coalition, known as the DMZ Forum. “It would be a combination of Gettysburg and Yosemite.”

The DMZ is a ribbon of land 155 miles long and of 2.5 miles wide that has been almost entirely off-limits to people since it was established in 1953. As a result, it has been largely unaffected by explosive economic growth in the south and rampant deforestation in the north.

Ke Chung Kim, founder of the Center for Biodiversity Research at Pennsylvania State University and founder of the DMZ Forum, first realized the area's ecological importance in the late 1990s while studying the Korean peninsula. He found that 60 percent of the region's indigenous reptiles, 30 percent of its mammals, and 25 percent of its birds had vanished.

Kim also concluded that the DMZ was either a migratory stopover or home habitat for a wide variety of threatened or endangered species—including the Japanese crane, the Asiatic black bear, and the Amur leopard—many of which were thought to have been exterminated on the peninsula. He hopes the DMZ will one day serve as a biodiversity bank, which biologists can tap to reintroduce indigenous species throughout the region.

But beyond the area's biological importance, Kim also believes that opportunities to develop an ecotourism industry in the DMZ may have much broader political consequences for all of Asia. “The DMZ could be the means to getting long-term economic and conservation issues tied together,” says Kim. “That could subdue tensions between the two sides.” Some conservationists and scientists, including Wilson, even think that the proposed park could one day help knit the two Koreas together.

—Ken Kostel

Diversity
The Culture of Conservation

Researchers have uncovered an intriguing correlation between cultural and biological richness: Nations with the highest numbers of endemic languages tend to also have the highest levels of biodiversity.

Conservationist David Harmon, author of In Light of Our Differences: How Diversity in Nature and Culture Makes Us Human (Smithsonian Institution Press), studies this link. He has found that linguistic and biological diversity were concentrated in countries that possessed a variety of terrains, climates, and ecosystems, such as Mexico, Brazil, and India. Similarly, island territories cleaved by mountains and rivers (think Indonesia, Australia, and New Guinea) have been havens for both unique languages and locally adapted species.

“If you've got a society that has lived in the same place for hundreds or thousands of years, they'll be changing the species composition by selective hunting and use of plants,” Harmon says. Because humans modify their environment as they adapt to it and then transmit their knowledge through language, ecosystems and languages co-evolve. In turn, Harmon adds, “when indigenous languages die out, there's a self-reinforcing downward cycle: The language is not spoken, and people are not as intimately involved with the local biodiversity. So they are not going to take care of it and value it the way they did, and it will be more vulnerable to development.”

In an effort to better understand the links between biological, cultural, and linguistic diversity, Harmon cofounded Terralingua, an organization devoted to preserving what is now being referred to as “biocultural” diversity. To learn more, log on to www.terralingua.org.

—Jen Uscher