Go Green

By John Sutter

Yesterday, I saw an interesting presentation on the past legislative session and its impact on environmental issues in Oklahoma. Jimmy Givens, the state Department of Environmental Quality’s general counsel, gave the talk at a board meeting in Duncan.

According to Givens, the main environmental issues taken up last session by the legislature were water rights, recycling and greenhouse gases.

Here’s his breakdown of some of the bills that passed:

Senate Bill 1631. E-waste: Requires computer companies that sell more than 50 computers per year to take back their products once consumers are finished using them. Recycling of computers and other “e-waste” is a concern partly because electronics contain mercury, lead and other toxins. Much of the e-waste ends up on the shores of other continents, where people pick though it looking for parts to sell. The Oklahoma program applies only to personal computers. It is mandatory effective in January. Givens said it will be “very difficult” to implement the program.

Senate Bill 1410. Aquifers: Funds a study of aquifers in the state, to determine if too much water is being taken out. Environmental officials and advocates have said Oklahoma knows far too little about its groundwater resources — both in terms of how much is there, and what the water quality problems might be.

Senate Bill 498. Recycling: Sets a state goal for recycling: 10 percent of all solids, by the end of 2011. It doesn’t provide programs or a mechanism for that to happen, but rather indicates that recycling is a state priority. (Note that some states, like California, require up to half of all trash to be reused. Oklahoma has so much landfill space, that statewide recycling programs haven’t been much of a priority.)

Senate Bill 1451. Air Emissions: Gives grants for state vehicles to be retrofitted so that they use alternative fuels. Helps some industry maintain compliance with tightening air quality regulations. And, as sort of a tack-on, it requires gas stations to label pumps where ethanol-gas fuel blends are sold (usually they’re little yellow stickers, right on the pump.)

Senate Bill 1856: Copper wire: Bans metal dealers from purchasing burned copper wire. On one hand, that addresses theft issues, but it also prevents copper wire burning, Givens said, which prevents toxins from being released into the air.

Senate Bill 1765: Carbon dioxide storage: Gives a green light for CO2 to be stored underground in Oklahoma. The federal government recently passed a rule on this, which is designed to protect groundwater supplies from contamination because of carbon injections. Its unclear how those regulations will play out in Oklahoma, and which state agency or agencies will oversee the process.

Keep in mind that this is just one person’s take on these bills. Givens said he expects the next legislative session to focus on water — both in advance of the state’s comprehensive water plan, which seeks to evaluate Oklahoma’s water resources and create 50-year rules, and water disputes with Texas and southeast Oklahoma communities that want to sell water.

By John Sutter

A new green blogging community called Fresh Greens sprouted up last week. The site features 13 bloggers and is devoted to sustainability and environmental issues in the Oklahoma City area. Shauna Struby, president of Sustainable OKC, posted a blog this week on the challenges of finding local foods when you’re out on the road. (Burger King is ubiquitous, but local options are worth searching out, she writes.) You can find other blogs by Struby at Think Lady.

Twelve other bloggers will join her on the site, and it sounds like they come from a diverse and interesting backgrounds. One is a vice-president at Sonic who is new to the green movement. One is a new mom who will write about the challenges of going green with a newborn. Another is Jennifer Gooden (see video above), who was a co-founder of Sustainable OKC and works for the Homeless Alliance. Gooden said over lunch on Monday that she plans to write about social justice issues and how they intersect with environmentalism and energy efficiency. The blog hopes to have two new posts per week.

Struby said the goal of the Fresh Greens blog is to connect people in Oklahoma City who are interested in environmental issues. She sees the blog as a conversation — a forum for public debate. Too often, she said, people who are interested in environmental issues in Oklahoma operate in tight circles, not realizing that a bigger movement is afoot. For example, when Struby set up a Sustainable OKC booth at the recent Dave Matthews concert downtown, people kept stopping by and expressing great surprise that any environmental groups existed here, she said. She wants those people to get connected online.

What are your favorite blogs? Know of any other green blogs in Oklahoma? I’d like to know … considering a story for the paper about the topic. The most random I’ve seen, the Bulgar Bugle, is devoted entirely to getting more bulgar wheat into your diet … Hey, it is a local food, and who doesn’t like tabbouleh.

And if you haven’t seen the Blog Oklahoma network, it’s a cool place to find local bloggers on topics that interest you.

By John Sutter

If you’re lonely and live in Oklahoma, don’t join a dating service, buy a Smart Car.

There’s no better way to get noticed or make a friend than to drive one of these cutesy micro-cars through the herd of mammoth SUV’s in Oklahoma City, according to employees at Crafton Tull Sparks, an architecture and engineering firm that in November will give one of the cars away to an employee.

Some of the firm’s architects at a northwest Oklahoma City office have been trading turns driving the fuel-efficient car. One said he was followed home by a family in a Lexus who wanted to inquire about the car’s gas mileage. Another was approached in a store parking lot by a person who almost demanded to be given a chance to sit in the Smart Car.

“You pull up to a stoplight and you notice people are looking at you,” said Nate Baker, a vice president at the company.

Omar Khoury, another VP, said the car is so small “you could almost pick it up and put it in the trunk” of a sport utility vehicle.

“Your rear is almost on the back wall and your feet are almost on the front wheel,” Baker said.

Underlying all the attention is a sense that fuel-efficient and environmentally friendly cars seem out of place or awkward in Oklahoma, which is a state that’s thrived on an oil and gas economy. But the employees who’ve been given a chance to test out the Smart Car say things are changing. People are gawking, sure, but only because they’re interested, they say.

I took a quick ride in the car (to shoot the video above), and the only difference you notice between the tiny Smart Car and any other compact car is the fact that, if you look behind you, the road is right there. Such close quarters leads some people to consider the Smart Car unsafe, Baker said, but that opinion’s not based on testing. Crash tests indicate that the car’s cage-like design stands up well to impact, earing the car top crash scores, according to the National Safety Commission.

The Crafton Tull Sparks give-away is intended to promote the company’s focus on sustainability. The firm is working on more building projects that use “green” methods, Baker said, and will offer the car raffle only to employees who have passed a certification exam on green building techniques.

[Do you drive a Smart Car? Know someone who does? Have an opinion on them? Feel free to e-mail me at jsutter [at] oklahoman.com or post comments below.]

[Picher is a former mining town in northeast Oklahoma. It was the site of the May 10 EF-4 tornado that killed six people and leveled half the town. It’s also one of the oldest and biggest toxic waste sites in the country, with the contamination due to waste from the abandoned lead and zinc mines. Photo by Gary Crow]

By John Sutter

As I reported in today’s paper, Picher-Cardin schools opened again today, despite a spring tornado that almost leveled the town, and a government buyout that is sapping Picher of its remaining residents because of environmental and safety risks.

This is a nostalgic moment for many of the people who live in the area, or have moved away from the dangers of sink-holes and lead poisoning associated with Picher’s abandoned underground mines.

Sitting in Oklahoma City or Tulsa, that may be hard to understand. Whenever I talk to people here about Picher–which is the heart of the Tar Creek Superfund site–they invariably think it’s bizarre that residents would cling to a town that’s had so many problems. According to the school’s elementary principal, there are students who have been saving up all summer so that they can afford to drive back into town from their new homes outside the waste site. Other residents insist that they’re not leaving town, despite evidence they’re putting themselves in danger.

When asked why they cling to this place, time and again Picher residents give me one answer: it’s home.

Picher and its tough times and make-it-work attitude will live on in their minds. Some people are starting to accept that. Others simply don’t want to let go. There’s too much history, too many memories, too much emotion.

I must admit that I too get a bit nostalgic on days like today, when so much is uncertain about the future of the town. I know that Kim Pace, the elementary school principal, typically prays over each classroom in her school on the night before the first day of classes. She wants school to be normal for her students, but in a year in which all but one of the students in Kindergarten through 3rd grade have moved away because there houses were destroyed by a tornado, that’s hard to imagine, even for an eternal optimist like Pace.

This year is particularly hard because of the agonizing limbo the teachers and students have been in for three years–or decades, really, since environmental problems date back to the 80s. In 2006, Pace readied her classrooms for the first day of school thinking she’d never be doing it again, because the school and the town were expected to close. She was teary eyed on that day as she talked about anticipating the school’s final moments, and the day she would close down a campus where she was the high school homecoming queen, where she developed a passion for Picher and its residents.

Those feelings came back again in 2007, and they’re back again today.

In 2006, I attended the first day of Picher-Cardin classes with a senior student named Tracy Carder. As I wrote in a story for The Oklahoman, Carder sat in a science classroom alone. She tapped her old basketball coach’s door, knowing enrollment at the school was too low then to support the Gorilla team, on which she was a star 3-point shooter.  She cried over the fact that few of her friends were there. She stayed because she wanted to graduate from her hometown high school. She was sure she would be part of the last class.

This year, 47 students are expected to enroll at Picher-Cardin, and again, people are speculating this will be the school’s last year — maybe the last year for the town.

By John Sutter

I’d never read the term ‘upcycling’ before today, when I stumbled upon this news release about an upcoming art exhibition in Bartlesville that will explore consumer waste and our society’s impact on the environment.

Apparently the term refers to reusing something (which has its own buzzwords like “repurposing” and “recycling”) in a way to upgrades its value or usefulness. So, in this case, it’s taking a bunch of trashed cell phones and turning them into art.

The show is part of a “3-logy,” the news release says, so maybe this place is just way too into strange phrases. You be the judge about bringing “upcycle” into your vocab. There seems to be a whole new vocabulary coming into existence with the green/eco/e-generation movement. I wrote the word “sustainably” in a story yesterday and my editor said, “Is that a word. Spellcheck doesn’t pick it up.” Yet, you see that term tossed around all over the place in green media — so much so that it’s almost become trite, and lost its meaning, just like “green.”

Anyway, sorry for getting sidetracked. The exhibit, titled “Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things,” starts Aug. 22 at the Price Tower, which is a great Frank Lloyd Wright building in Bartlesville … that just happens to look really similar to the Classen Tower in Oklahoma City.

A tour with the Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture visits Sunrise Acres, an organic farm run by two retirees in Newcastle.

By John Sutter

There’s a movement passing across dinner tables in Oklahoma. Local foods appear to be coming back in a big way.

The number of farmers markets in the state has grown 75 percent — to 49 — in the past year. Sales at the online Oklahoma Food Cooperative are up 70 percent over those in 2007, with $65,000 worth of Oklahoma food sold each month to subscribers. (disclosure: my household has a membership to the coop)

The reason for the changes are many. Some people are concerned about health scares associated with industrially produced foods. Some worry about growth hormones and antibiotics fed to cattle and chickens, or the humaneness of feedlots and confined animal feeding operations. Still others are concerned about the greenhouse gases emitted when food is trucked across the country and flown around the world to the dinner table.

Behind those arguments, though, is an overwhelming sense that society lost something when people started buying food from fluorescent-lit shelves instead of from their neighbors. What’s missing is a connection with the land and with people who still work with it, advocates of local foods, or “locavores” say.

That connection inherently involves people — farmers who consumers trust with their food, their values and their health.

Plus, there are the kooky stories. Food that comes from someone you’ve met has a story. Oklahoma seems to have plenty of them.

To learn some of them, I went on a tour of six Oklahoma farms with the Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture. The non-profit group, which pushes for alternative and environmentally friendly farming methods, hosted the tour of part of an annual conference in Oklahoma.

On the bus with me were a number of types of people who were interested in local foods. There were would-be urban gardeners who just wanted tips for their tomatoes. There were traditional farmers interested in trying something new. There were farmers market coordinators and agriculture scientists. And there were a few local food pioneers — people like Cathie Greene, who requires that her customers visit her farm in far eastern Oklahoma (Wild Things Farm, in Pocola) so that they can see her methods and trust that she’s growing vegetables without chemicals and only sprays her strawberries sparsely with fungicide.

We started the morning at Oklahoma State University-Oklahoma City, where one of the city’s busiest farmers markets is held (find a full list of farmers markets in the state here).

Then we went on to meet an angry sailor who grows peaches, a goofy retiree who attacks shoulder-high weeds with a shovel, and a bison rancher who wears suspenders with t-shirts.

Meet these farmers and some others below, and be sure to check out their videos. (The one of the peach farmer is YouTube-worthy, even unedited.)

Old School Revolution

Robert Stelle and his wife Barbara have retired from their desk jobs — but don’t look for them to be resting any time soon.The couple spends many waking hours pulling weeds and picking crops from their small organic farm — Sunrise Acres — in Newcastle.Robert Stelle, with his conductor-style overalls and scraggly beard, exemplifies an interesting point about local food: it’s not new. While the “locavore” movement has caught on recent years, it’s really more of a throw-back to old times than a push for innovation.People on the tour marveled at Robert Stelle’s old-school farming tools, for example.The 61-year-old cut a triangle out of the tip of a shovel to attack the big weeds that grow in his vegetable gardens, since he doesn’t use chemicals to keep them down. And he constructed a rolling cart with a seat welded to the top so he could sit down while pulling weeds out of the ground by hand. He uses his feet to push himself back between rows of pepper and okra plants.

In a greenhouse, Stelle joked with the group about how he hasn’t had time to tidy up lately.

“It’s a rainy day job to clean this up, and it hasn’t rained in 40 days,” he said.

He said that the “canned generation,” which grew up eating food straight out of cans, is yearning for a connection with whole foods that have an origin you can explain.

Loud mouth peaches

In Blanchard, there’s a former sailor — covered in tattoos and has a mouth as filthy as Ludacris’ — who raises peaches on Sailor Orchard.Robert Mearkle, 63, yells at his peach trees like he would a Navy enlistee. He gets red in the face and flaps his hands around with limp wrists, as if mocking the plants that produce what he says are the best peaches in the state.Last year, it rained so much that his peaches were watery instead of sweet. That ticked off the irascible Mearkle so much that he took a chainsaw to 200 of his trees. There’s a big patch of mowed grass behind his house where an orchard used to be.

He teases customers relentlessly. Once he falsely told a group of older women that his watering system was actually controlled by a computer that kept all the bugs away.

They seem to come back for his juicy fruits again and again. He doesn’t put a sign out in front of his house, but people just seem to search him out, he said, mostly because the taste of fresh-picked fruit is so much different than the “cardboard” sold in grocery stores.

Mearkle seems mostly to be selling the flavor of his juicy fruit. That, and the entertainment he provides on even a short visit.

Buffalo with personality

The tour stopped for lunch at the Wichita Buffalo Company in Hinton. There, James Stepp, 56, and family served bison burgers, bison hot dogs and Oklahoma-grown watermelon, which was the sweetest I had ever tasted.

Over the lunch, he made a pitch for the other tour attendees to take up bison ranching. Mainly, he’s concerned with the healthiness of local food.

Bison meat is lean (it is a quarter of the fat of choice beef and a third of the fat of chicken, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture), and therefore is good for the overweight and the health conscious, he said.

Stepp, a short man who looks a bit like Alfred E. Neuman and was wearing a faded green t-shirt with suspenders with jeans, showed photos of his animals. He’s given them names — Pedro and Sally were the first bison he bought, in 1997 — and says he knows their personalities.

All of this plays into his marketing strategy in that it helps his customers feel connected to the animals they’re eating.

“It’s what we sell,” he said. “We sell that story and we tell it over and over and over again.”

No-hormone cheese

One of the final stops was at Christian Cheese, which is operated by George Christian in Kingfisher.

Christian doesn’t use hormones, preservatives or antibiotics in his cheeses, for those who worry about what effects those may have on people. All of the cheeses are made in a tin-roof building with doors you have to duck through and outside walls that are painted to look like a cow.

We stopped here for just a short while. Other tour members tasted the cheeses, I spend some time admiring just how many kinds he produces. Entire walls of a back room are lined with bricks and bricks of the stuff — all different colors and textures. (It also didn’t hurt that this “cold room” was a nice relief from a 100-degree day).

Check out their Web site for some family heirloom cheese recipes.

At the table

All of these stories come together on the dinner table.

According to local food proponents, eating a meal that’s grown and raised by people you know is a unique and reassuring experience.

“While the environmental benefits are important, I think the most important (benefits) are the personal satisfaction of just having a dinner table that represents a lot of friends and family and neighbors and farms,” said Doug Walton, community foods coordinator with the Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture, a non-profit advocacy group. “It totally changes the whole proposition of food … it’s not just for the body, it’s for the heart and soul.”

That sounds all well and good, but for the average person it may not be possible — at least not all of the time. Some critics say local foods are too expensive for the poor. Others contend that all the cooking and shopping and thinking that has to go into an all-local diet doesn’t jive with our fast-paces lives.

Walton told me he doesn’t think local and alternatively farmed foods should take over the market. They have a niche, and that niche is growing, he said.

This was particularly evident as I left the tour. Our bus pulled into a parking lot in downtown Oklahoma City, and as everyone got off, I heard two of the tour’s leaders (Chris Kirby, director of the Farm to School program for the state Department of Agriculture, and Steve Upson, an ag consultant at the Noble Foundation) talking about how they wanted to grab something to eat.

It was 8 o’clock in the evening.

They said they wanted something quick.

Maybe … fast food?

[I don’t point that out to be critical so much as I thought it was an interesting illustration of a challenge facing the current sustainable food system.]

By John Sutter

Some Oklahoma farmers are getting paid to fight global warming by sinking carbon into their fields. It’s a concept that’s based on simple science: plants are made of carbon, and they pull some of it out of the air and store it underground. If, instead of plowing up the land or using it for crops, farmers plant native grasses or trees, they’re essentially cleaning up some greenhouse gases that are emitted by power plants and cars.

In this week’s environment podcast, I talk with two conservationists who are interested in hooking Oklahoma farmers up with people or groups who will pay them for these efforts. Some countries — like Canada and the European Union — regulate carbon dioxide emissions in a way that allows polluters to pay other people (maybe farmers in Oklahoma) to remove carbon dioxide from the air.

The market here is small. But a group called the Oklahoma Carbon Initiative is going to put a Web site (address is yet to be decided) up next month to help educate Oklahomans about so-called “carbon credit” payments. The group will even buy carbon from individual farmers and then sell it in packages to markets.

Here’s some background from the EPA.

And a diagram of the carbon cycle. Basically, people are looking for ways to put carbon back in the ground, since we’ve burned so many carbon-based fossil fuels, thus putting an excess of carbon in the atmosphere.

(diagram above: groundwater interacts with the overall water cycle. it can be polluted and extracted. it also feeds into some rivers and streams — including spring creek, which was the subject of this recent feature story.)

By John Sutter 

Yes, there’s water underground. Not really rivers of it, but it is there, creeping through porous rocks much like oil does.

In this environment podcast, I talk with Mike Paque, executive director of the Ground Water Protection Council, a national group, which happens to be based in Oklahoma City, that is out to inform the public and the wonders and vulnerability of the water beneath our feet.

Groundwater is a precious resource, Paque argues, but it’s also one we know very little about–especially in Oklahoma. State regulators don’t have a firm grasp of how much groundwater sits under the state, or how polluted it may be.

Also, interestingly, groundwater is a property right in Oklahoma, so, if you own land, you also own rights to some of the water beneath you. That makes regulating its use tricky. In some parts of the state–particularly far western areas–more groundwater is taken out every year than rain can put back. Nationally, there’s been a 23 percent increase in the amount of water taken out of the ground since 1970, according to GWPC.

Why care? Well, if you live in western Oklahoma, you probably get your drinking water from beneath the ground. About half of all people in the U.S. get their drinking water from groundwater supplies, and groundwater makes up the vast majority of usable fresh water on earth. If you’re a farmer and you irrigate your crops, that water likely comes from down in the soil. Industry also uses groundwater to generate electricity. Thirty-nine percent of the water used in the U.S. goes toward making power.

But what do you think? How much to you know about groundwater? What else do you want to know? Do you care about this resource?  What rules should be in place to protect it? I’ll do my best to find answers or explanations for you.

Here’s a basic info sheet on groundwater from the GWPC.

Also, here’s the EPA’s explainer on the subject.

By John Sutter

The Boise City News today printed a monster headline announcing — kind of — the governor’s visit to the drought-stricken area of the Oklahoma Panhandle.

“He Finally Made It!?! July 16 2008 It’s G-Day,” the headline reads.

The paper still seems to question whether or not a drought that’s been compared to the 1930s Dust Bowl will be enough to get Gov. Brad Henry to visit. The governor allegedly has never visited distant Cimarron County, with a sparse population of 2,664.

According to C.F. David, the paper’s publisher, owner and editor, the lead story begins: “If Oklahoma Gov. Brad Henry shows up in Cimarron County today as he’s promised, it will have taken him 2011 days, or 5 years 6 months and three days to travel the 350 odd miles form the state capital to Boise City. But to make the trip the governor will have flown rather than driven. So he will still be in the dark about how much the entire Panhandle needs highway dollars. Maybe next time.”

By phone at about 11 a.m., an hour before the governor’s scheduled visit, David said he had written the governor two massive $50 checks — one for show, and one to answer a bounty he’s had out on Henry since 2006. In print, David has offered $50 up to anyone who could prove Henry has visited Cimarron County since he took office as governor.

When the meet this afternoon, David plans to hand over the check. Henry plans to donate the money to charity, according to the Associated Press.

At about 11 a.m., David said by phone that he still was delivering newspapers. Then he planned to go home, change into a t-shirt that promotes Cimarron County, and get ready to meet the governor.

The purpose of the visit is to talk about the drought, but David said he hopes the governor takes home a broader message.

“Even though there are less than 3,000 voters up here, we are part of Oklahoma and we need to be respected and heard,” he said.

He hopes that message resonates with future political candidates also, he said.

The heads of the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality and the Oklahoma Water Resources Board sent this letter to our editorial page. It is, in effect, a response to this front page story in The Oklahoman. The officials call statewide water pollution “troubling” and ask the state Legislature to double — to about $2 million — the money Oklahoma uses to test its waters. Most aren’t tested at all.

Let me know what you all think.

–John Sutter

Here’s the text of their letter:

A recent report submitted to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency by the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality detailing the pollution status of our rivers, streams and lakes has received much attention. Required of all states every two years, the report includes a detailed list of “impaired” waters, or those not meeting their desired uses, as prescribed by Oklahoma’s water quality standards, maintained by the Oklahoma Water Resources Board. The report indicates that some form of pollution afflicts about three out of every four water bodies in our state. ew

Although not uncommon for most states, the level of impaired streams in Oklahoma is indeed troubling. However, the list does provide an opportunity for state water agencies to develop plans to address the impairment. All state water agencies work in concert to evaluate resulting data, determine the current status of individual waters and establish protective measures, especially related to human health and the environment.

Maybe more troubling is the fact that many rivers, streams and lakes aren’t being monitored. Therefore, insufficient data exist for agencies to comprehensively determine where all impairments are occurring and develop plans to address those impairments.

The DEQ and OWRB have entered into an important partnership to survey the surface water resources of Oklahoma. Through the statewide Beneficial Use Monitoring Program (BUMP), OWRB staff collects water samples from hundreds of stream and lake sites each year. Those samples are analyzed for a variety of parameters in the field.

Officials at the DEQ and OWRB continually strive to leverage limited funds and resources to provide the maximum benefit to taxpayers. We prioritize sampling locations and lab analyses and we stretch supplies, all while attempting to maintain the overall integrity of our program. Due to budgetary limitations, our agencies regularly sample and assess only about 25 percent of Oklahoma’s surface water bodies, and there is no state program in place to monitor the overall quality of our groundwaters.

Rising program and fuel costs coupled with no new appropriations present even more challenges. Our appropriations remain stable, but the need for water-quality data and more informed decision-making only increases. We’re at the point where it’s not a question of how much water-quality information we need, but how much we are willing to invest in. Improving Oklahoma’s water quality has become a citizen priority and it must become a state priority as well.

Clearly, a balance has to be struck between the cost of water, its treatment and delivery, and the benefits of reducing impairments to Oklahoma’s water quality. This issue will be addressed when an interim legislative committee convenes later this year to study Oklahoma’s monitoring program. The OWRB and DEQ are making BUMP funding a co-agency priority during next year’s legislative session. The ongoing update of the Oklahoma Comprehensive Water Plan provides a separate opportunity to enhance our monitoring efforts. In the meantime, we want to reassure the public that its state agencies are working diligently together to improve the quality of our waters and the programs we use to manage them.

Smith is executive director of the Oklahoma Water Resources Board. Thompson is executive director of the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality.