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Air pollution may be a new form of redlining

Noah Link — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 12:03:12 -0500

Metro Denver air pollutants hit minority areas hardest in a new form of redlining, study shows

by: Michael Booth

On overlay of metro Denver’s census tracts with the highest minority populations with air pollution data shows a modern form of redlining, a new study shows. (CU Boulder/CIRES)

Air pollutants from auto and industrial sources concentrate in metro Denver’s most Hispanic and Native American neighborhoods, in part because of historic redlining that denied minority housing in whiter communities, according to a new study from University of Colorado scientists.

While statewide policy efforts focus on air pollution from a wide geographic area, including oil and gas wells in Weld County and agricultural sources of methane and nitrogen, Denver’s more urban neighborhoods are heavily impacted by nitrogen dioxide and particulates from vehicles and highways, the study says.

Policymakers could focus air pollution cuts more precisely and have a greater impact on historically exposed neighborhoods, according to scientists from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, or CIRES. Policy changes could include redirecting heavy truck traffic, accelerating the switch to clean electric vehicles, or addressing pollution from single industrial sources having the most impact, they said. Suncor’s Commerce City refinery is one of the heavily polluting industrial complexes at the heart of the study’s most impacted areas.

“They shouldn’t have to breathe more pollution there, just because that’s where they’ve lived for generations,” said lead author Alex Bradley, a doctoral student in chemistry and environmental sciences.

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“Perhaps we should go beyond sort of the standard approach to address ozone pollution,” said co-author and CIRES/CU chemistry professor Joost de Gouw. “And think about these intra-city differences.”

The study, published Wednesday in the journal “Environmental Science and Technology,” used satellite-based images and models to focus on concentrations of nitrogen dioxide and PM2.5, an EPA-regulated category of microscopic particles toxic to the lungs. Variants of the nitrogen oxides come from fossil fuel vehicle exhaust and power generation by coal and natural gas. Particulate matter is created by a mix of vehicle exhaust, wildfires and cooking, causing millions of worldwide deaths annually, according to the study.

The researchers then overlaid those pollutant maps with historical records from housing finance agencies like the Federal Housing Administration, which for decades denied loans for homes given lower letter grades correlated with heavily minority populations.

“We find districts that were graded A in 1939 have lower air pollution than the districts that were graded D,” Bradley said. He also pointed to other historical sources of pollution in the most heavily impacted neighborhoods, including a series of metal smelters in the Globeville-Swansea area that laid down layers of toxins that later became a Superfund site.

The researchers applied the same layers to hundreds of other U.S. cities and found similar patterns in most of them.

“People of color fare worse today, while non-Hispanic whites fare better,” according to a CU release accompanying the study.

The study also added a layer looking specifically at transportation impacts, as the most heavily polluted neighborhoods show up on the map in triangles roughly surrounded by heavily-trafficked Interstate 70, Interstate 25, Interstate 76 and Interstate 270. That core also includes extensive warehousing, fueling and repair operations for industrial vehicles.

Fellow researchers tracking vehicle emissions by fuel used showed higher concentrations in the areas with more residents of color.

“It definitely won’t be surprising to the people who live in these communities,” Bradley said of the study. “They know the air that they breathe is of worse quality, and they know that they’re experiencing worse health effects because of it and they’re trying to do what they can to help mitigate that.”

The legislature is expected to take up soon a new package of air pollution bills, though Democrats have made similar attempts in recent years that have been watered down or rejected altogether under pressure from oil and gas trade groups and Polis administration officials who want time for other recent measures to take effect.

Norwegian scientists are feeding Arctic foxes to protect them for future generations

Noah Link — Sun, 07 Apr 2024 22:29:01 -0500

ENVIRONMENT

Hungry like the fox

Climate change is starving out the iconic Arctic foxes of Scandinavia, so Norway is giving them dog food – and facing dilemmas that will be increasingly common in a warming world

PHOTOGRAPHY BY LISI NIESNER

REPORTING BY GLORIA DICKIE AND LISI NIESNER

REUTERS

OPPDAL, NORWAY

PUBLISHED APRIL 7, 2024

One by one, the crate doors swing open and five Arctic foxes bound off into the snowy landscape.

But in the wilds of southern Norway, the newly freed foxes may struggle to find enough to eat, as the effects of climate change make the foxes’ traditional rodent prey more scarce.

In Hardangervidda National Park, where the foxes have been released, there hasn’t been a good lemming year since 2021, conservationists say.

That’s why scientists breeding the foxes in captivity are also maintaining more than 30 feeding stations across the alpine wilderness stocked with dog kibble – a rare and controversial step in conservation circles.

“If the food is not there for them, what do you do?” said conservation biologist Craig Jackson of the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, which is managing the fox program on behalf of the country’s environment agency.

Arctic foxes runs off into Hardangervidda National Park on Feb. 8. Conservation biologist Craig Jackson, far left, manages a program to breed the animals in captivity.

COURTESY OF CRAIG JACKSON VIA REUTERS

That question will become increasingly urgent as climate change and habitat loss push thousands of the world’s species to the edge of survival, disrupting food chains and leaving some animals to starve.

While some scientists say it’s inevitable that we’ll need more feeding programs to prevent extinctions, others question whether it makes sense to support animals in landscapes that can no longer sustain them.

As part of the state-sponsored program to restore Arctic foxes, Norway has been feeding the population for nearly 20 years, at an annual cost of around 3.1-million kroner ($391,000) and it has no plans to stop any time soon.

Since 2006, the program has helped to boost the fox population from as few as 40 in Norway, Finland, and Sweden, to around 550 across Scandinavia today.

With feeding programs, “the hope is that you can perhaps get a species over a critical threshold,” said wildlife biologist Andrew Derocher at the University of Alberta, who has worked in Arctic Norway but is not involved in the fox program. But with the foxes’ Arctic habitat now warming roughly four times faster than the rest of the world, he said: “I’m not sure we’re going to get to that point.”

Pups play in their enclosure and receive parasite medication at the research station near Oppdal last July, after the spring breeding season got off to a shaky start. Of the eight pairs of foxes at the station, only four females gave birth and two lost their litters.

Through the winter, the station’s staff feed the foxes frozen meat and leave caches of dried dog food in the wild. Normally, foxes would hunt lemmings in the colder months, but the rodents have been scarcer than usual recently.

Feeding animals to ensure a population survives – known as “supplementary feeding” – can be contentious. Most instances are temporary, providing food for a few years to help newly released or relocated animals adapt, such as the Iberian lynx in Spain during the 2000s. In other cases, governments might assist animals in acute peril, such as Florida’s decision to feed romaine lettuce to starving manatees from 2021 to 2023 after agrochemical pollution wiped out their supply of seagrass.

There are some exceptions. Mongolia’s government, for example, has been putting out pellets containing wheat, corn, turnip and carrots for critically endangered Gobi brown bears since 1985. But for predators living close to human communities, that can be risky. Bears are known to change their behaviour and can associate people with food, said Croatian biologist Djuro Huber, who has advised European governments on the feeding of large carnivores.

Feeding wild animals can also propagate diseases among the population, as animals cluster around feeding stations where pathogens can spread.

For each fox it releases into the wild, Norway has spent the equivalent of $50,000.

Bjorn Rangbru, a senior adviser on threatened species with the Norwegian Environment Agency, said the supplementary feeding – together with the breeding program – was crucial in raising the numbers of Arctic foxes in the wild. “Without these conservation measures, the Arctic fox would surely have become extinct in Norway.”

The government has so far spent 180-million kroner ($23-million) on the program, or about $50,000 for every released fox. Some of those foxes have crossed the Swedish border. After Norwegian scientists released 37 foxes near the Finnish border from 2021 to 2022, Finland saw its first Arctic fox litter born in the wild since 1996.

But the program is not even halfway to the goal of around 2,000 wild foxes across Scandinavia, which scientists say is the population size needed to be able to withstand low rodent years naturally.

A diagram helps the station keep track of the mating pairs. Arctic foxes reach sexual maturity when they are nine to 10 months old, and can live up to three or four years in the wild.

This fox is being shipped 500 kilometres south to be set free. Two other pups will remain at the station for breeding purposes. The scientists say they have far to go before the foxes can be considered saved.

To eagle-proof the enclosure, Mr. Jackson and colleague Kristine Ulvund set up a network of bamboo sticks and ropes. Like the foxes they prey on, golden eagles were once badly depopulated by hunting, but bounced back after Norway made them legally protected in 1968.

Arctic foxes are not the only species in trouble in the Far North. Polar bears are fast losing their hunting habitat as Arctic sea ice melts away. Migrating caribou sometimes arrive in summer pastures only to find that they missed the plant green-up because of a warmer-than-usual spring.

The foxes had been driven to near extinction across Scandinavia by hunters seeking their winter-white fur, before they gained some reprieve in hunting bans and protections introduced in the 1920s and 1930s.

The Arctic fox has since emerged as a symbol of the Far North. It is featured in the logos for both the Arctic Council and Swedish outdoor brand Fjallraven.

In Finnish Lapland, the Northern Lights are called revontulet, which means “fox fires.” Legend says the lights were ignited by the great fox spirit sweeping its tail against the snow and spraying it up into the night sky.

But as rodent populations have fallen away, Arctic foxes have struggled to recover on their own. And it’s been a particularly tough year for the captive breeding program. Normally, Mr. Jackson and fellow project leader Kristine Ulvund would have had about 20 pups to release. But of the eight breeding pairs in captivity, only four females gave birth last spring – two of which then lost their entire litters.

Nine pups were ultimately raised in the outdoor fenced enclosure near Oppdal, a remote site some 400 kilometres north of Oslo. Two pups were kept to be part of future breeding efforts. Then, golden eagles snatched another two just weeks before their Feb. 8 release, leaving only five.

For the foxes let loose in Hardangervidda National Park, the challenge is to find food for winter and avoid any predators in the process.

Surviving in the wilderness can be tough. While the wild population now stands at around 300 in Norway, the scientists have bred and released nearly 470 foxes since the program’s start. Foxes only live three to four years in the wild.

Aside from dodging predators, the foxes need to hunt enough lemmings to make it through the long winters.

Climate change is making this tough, as warming temperatures cause precipitation to fall more often as rain instead of snow. When that rain freezes, it can block the lemmings from burrowing into dens for their own warmth and reproduction.

The rodents’ once-reliable population cycles – which saw numbers of the rodents swell and fall in regular three- to five-year intervals – have become unpredictable and population peaks are lower.

The foxes seem to prefer to hunt for themselves. “We’ll see them passing the feeding stations with mouths full of rodents,” Ms. Ulvund said – the rodents presumably being juicier and tastier than dry dog kibble.

'We need to get the populations up to a sustainable level before we stop feeding them,' Ms. Ulvund says of the fox breeding program.

The scientists said the foxes still only breed really well when there is a peak in the rodent population. But a 2020 study in the Journal of Wildlife Management found that foxes in dens located near the feeding stations were more likely to successfully breed than those located farther away.

“We need to get the populations up to a sustainable level before we stop feeding them,” said Ms. Ulvund.

At the current growth rate, scientists said it could take another 25 years to reach the program’s goal of 2,000 Arctic foxes running free through Scandinavia – provided the foxes’ bellies are kept full.

“We’ve come a long way,” said Ms. Ulvund. “But I still think we have some way to go before we can say that we’ve really saved the species.”

A carbon tax might be coming to the shipping industry

Noah Link — Sun, 31 Mar 2024 14:00:17 -0500

A First Step Toward a

Global Price on Carbon

A tax on ship emissions could have an impact on almost everything we buy

March 28, 2024

It didn’t make many headlines, but last week, at a meeting of the International Maritime Organization, something potentially world-changing happened.

The United Nations agency, which regulates the shipping industry, essentially committed to creating the world’s first global carbon price.

“I’m very confident that there is going to be an economic pricing mechanism by this time next year,” Arsenio Dominguez, the Secretary General of the maritime organization, said. “What form it is going to have and what the name is going to be, I don’t know.”

The proposal would require shipping companies to pay a fee for every ton of carbon they emit by burning fuel. In other words, it’s a tax.

That could raise a significant amount of money and lead to sweeping changes in the shipping industry. It would also be a first step toward the lofty goal of a tax not limited to a particular country, but a global one. (Some 70 countries and states around the world have put a price on carbon, either through taxes or trading mechanisms.) Many activists and economists have argued that putting a price on carbon is crucial to addressing the collective threat of climate change, because it can both deter pollution and fund a cleaner, more resilient economy.

A big pot of money

The world’s attention turned to the shipping industry this week when the Dali, a massive container ship, lost power and crashed into the Key Bridge in Baltimore. But there are at least 50,000 cargo ships like the Dali, constantly on the move, transporting the vast majority of the world’s goods.

Shipping accounts for roughly 3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, slightly more than aviation. Taxing its carbon emissions would very likely raise tens of billions of dollars a year for climate policy.

By comparison, developed nations have donated $9 billion to the Green Climate Fund, a U.N. program meant to help developing countries tackle climate change, but activist groups say this is far less than what is needed.

“We are talking about something that can really improve the landscape of climate finance,” said Dominik Englert, an economist who researches green shipping at the World Bank. “Given the volumes that we see and given the needs that we see, we think that it can go beyond shipping.”

There is still a lot to work out. But moving forward may be easier than with global climate negotiations that require unanimous support. Decisions at the I.M.O. are made by a simple majority of the member countries.

What countries agreed to do

The maritime organization said it was simply living up to its pledge, made last year, to decarbonize the entire shipping industry by 2050. Its member countries have agreed that they need to start charging the shipping industry for emissions of heat-trapping gases in 2027.

Last week, in a consensus vote, I.M.O. member nations detailed the decisions that still need to be made about pricing carbon. How would a price be calculated? Would it be a flat fee or part of a trading mechanism between companies? Who would collect the money and distribute it? And which fuels are considered low-carbon?

Countries are looking at seven different proposals, in which prices range from $20 to $250 per ton of carbon emissions, according to the maritime organization. They hope to decide on all that by next year.

“It’s been an extremely hard process to get where we are now,” said Albon Ishoda, the Marshall Islands’ negotiator, who has proposed a tax of $150 per ton of carbon emitted.

What the impact could be

How would the carbon tax proceeds be distributed? Englert and his colleagues from the World Bank suggested in a study that countries should use the money to decarbonize the shipping industry, invest in efficiency measures that could reduce shipping costs for poorer countries and deployed for broader climate action.

Charging for ships’ carbon emissions could have an impact on basically everything we buy. Coffee from Colombia, T-shirts from Vietnam and mobile phones from China all get to consumers across the world by ship.

Roel Hoenders, the I.M.O.’s head of climate action, warned that small countries could end up paying steeper prices for basic goods. Countries that built their economies around shipping commodities could lose significant revenue, because shipping accounts for such a large share of the price of their exports.

Assessing the impact each measure would have “is quite an important part of the work, particularly for developing countries,” he said. “An increase in carbon price may have an impact on their competitiveness at a global scale.”

Lessons for the rest of the world

Some of the shipping industry’s biggest players have come around to the need for cleaner fuels and are looking for ways to develop them more quickly. Maersk, the second-largest container shipping company, has already invested billions in its decarbonization efforts.

“Surprisingly for me, the industry has been perhaps more progressive in trying to put forward a target,” Ishoda said. “Many in the industry know that fossil fuels are finite. We have seen a lot more — I wouldn’t say progress, I wouldn’t call it that — but an openness to the idea of ways to raise revenues to decarbonize the shipping sector.”

Many of the world’s biggest shipping companies are pushing for a more ambitious carbon price, because that would mean they wouldn’t need to pay for the same tax in Europe. Companies ideally want to avoid paying carbon taxes in multiple jurisdictions, which would result in a lot of complex and expensive accounting.

There are a lot of difficult compromises ahead. Still, Englert said he hoped the shipping industry’s experience with pricing carbon would send a signal to the world about how powerful such a policy can be.

When done right, carbon pricing “is the most cost effective and the most straightforward policy that provides the widest range of flexibility to all economic stakeholders,” he said. “You can basically help the planet, help the climate and at the same time use the revenue to foster development.”

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is expected to visit China for the second time in the coming weeks.Carlos Barria/Reuters

The tension between America’s climate goals and its rift with China

The Biden administration is trying to walk a delicate tightrope: Encourage the green energy transition while also protecting U.S. companies from heavily subsidized Chinese competitors.

U.S. officials plan to tell their counterparts in Beijing they think that artificially cheap Chinese solar panels, electric vehicles and lithium-ion batteries are distorting global markets, my colleague Alan Rappeport reports.

“China’s overcapacity distorts global prices and production patterns and hurts American firms and workers, as well as firms and workers around the world,” Janet Yellen, the U.S. Treasury secretary, said in a speech yesterday.

Yellen is expected to make her second trip to China in the coming weeks. The South China Morning Post reported that she will visit Guangzhou and Beijing in early April.

Subsidies can cut both ways. Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act included hundreds of billions in tax credits and subsidies for low-emission forms of energy production. Electric vehicles and other technologies that contain certain components made in China — and also Russia, North Korea and Iran — are not eligible for U.S. tax credits.

China isn’t standing idly by. It filed a complaint in the World Trade Organization against U.S. subsidies for electric vehicles.

Meanwhile, Tesla, which has done more than almost any other country to drive the transition to electric cars, is experiencing its own headwinds in China.

Elon Musk, the company’s chief executive, initially seemed to have the upper hand in his relationship with Beijing. But Tesla is now increasingly losing its edge over Chinese competitors in the very market it helped to create, my colleagues Mara Hvistendahl, Jack Ewing and John Liu reported.

In January, Musk issued a warning: unless the Chinese auto brands were blocked by trade barriers, they would “pretty much demolish most other car companies in the world.” — Manuela Andreoni

Max Bearak is a Times reporter who writes about global energy and climate policies and new approaches to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. More about Max Bearak

Regenerative Agriculture is being embraced by some big corporations

Noah Link — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 22:23:04 -0500

Sustainable Agriculture

Gets a Push From Big

Corporations

Farming accounts for a significant chunk of CO2 emissions. Some big businesses are offering farmers incentives to take up regenerative ag to lessen their carbon footprint and enhance biodiversity—and profits.

By Rochelle Toplensky

March 22, 2024 at 10:34 am ETWSJ Pro

Walter Furlong, a third-generation Irish farmer, and Grainne Wafer, global director at Diageo. Furlong uses regenerative techniques on his farm in County Wexford, which supplies barley to Diageo to make Guinness. Photo: Diageo

For decades, agriculture has been the climate elephant in the room. Now, some governments and a handful of major corporations are making inroads in turning farming toward more earth-healthy practices.

Forestry, agriculture and land use are responsible for around a third of global emissions—nearly 10 times the damage done by aviation. Farming also has a significant negative impact on biodiversity, freshwater resources and deforestation.

But unlike aviation, there are currently research-backed, cost-competitive ways to farm more sustainably. Regenerative or climate-smart agricultural methods could capture significant carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as well as improve soil health, biodiversity, resilience and farm economics.

Recent farmer protests drive home why politicians have shied from decarbonizing agriculture: Farmers are frustrated with increased regulations, lower-cost imports and squeezed livelihoods, while they can also be hit by extreme weather, biodiversity loss and environmental degradation.

Regenerative agriculture isn’t one-size-fits-all, but rather a location-specific choice from practices including growing cover crops, reducing tillage, crop rotation and agroforestry. After an initial three- to five-year transition period, these methods increased farmers’ long-term income by up to 120%, according to a study from Boston Consulting Group. Tom Crowther, professor at Swiss university ETH Zurich, said experts estimate the soil can capture around 100 to 120 gigatons of CO₂ from the atmosphere.

Furlong grows barley to make Guinness beer using regenerative techniques. Photo: Diageo

Third-generation farmer Walter Furlongsaid regenerative methods have improved the profitability and resilience to extreme weather of his farm in southeast Ireland while also making it more environmentally friendly. He sells his barley to drinks company Diageo to make Guinness. Furlong has used some regenerative methods for more than 20 years, but added new ones as part of a Guinness pilot.

“We’re measuring more on the farm in terms of emissions…[and] finding that from four or five simple changes, we’re able to make some big impact in terms of reducing carbon,” he said.

Diageo’s three-year Guinness pilot was launched in 2022 and recruited 44 farmers. In addition, the global drinks company has others covering the agave and barley used in tequila and scotch respectively, and aims to develop pilots in five key sourcing landscapes. “We are moving towards a tipping point,” said Andy Griffiths, the head of sustainable procurement at Diageo, who ran similar programs in his previous job at Nestlé.

Despite the benefits to farmers, farms and the planet, adoption of regenerative agriculture has stalled globally, according to Barry Parkin, chief procurement and sustainability officer at pet food and candy-maker Mars. Regenerative ag methods have “been adopted across about 12% of farmland and…it’s rolling out at less than 1% a year,” Parkin said. “Clearly we don’t have 50 years or more for this to roll out,” he added.

Mars has 27 initiatives under way that cover more than a million acres of farmland across more than 10 countries and more than 10 different crops including rice, wheat, barley, corn, soy, almonds, cocoa, Parkin said. The climate-smart programs are part of its detailed action plan to reach net zero by 2050 across its value chain.

An irrigation pivot sprays recycled water on crops at McCarty Family Farms in northwest Kansas. Photo: McCarty Family Farms

Governments are trying to accelerate the shift—159 countries are signed up to the COP28 U.A.E. Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems and Climate Action. In the U.S., the Inflation Reduction Act earmarked $19.5 billion for climate-smart agriculture and the Agriculture Department has its $3.1 billion Partnerships for Climate Smart Commodities program.

“Those partnerships are great. They’re just now getting on the ground, and that’s understandable, remember, we work in biological systems—you have to allow time,” says Kristin Duncanson, who has worked her family’s row crop and hog farm in Minnesota for 38 crop years, or the period from one year’s harvest to the next.

“We shouldn’t think that farmers aren’t willing, it’s just a little slower than I think that some of the companies would like and maybe the American public, too,” said Duncanson. She added that it was great that companies offers farmers a choice of regenerative farming methods but said more technical assistance was needed in making those choices.

Some companies are trying to accelerate the change. A few years ago Canadian frozen-food multinational McCain Foods—which says it supplies a quarter of the world’s french fries, including to McDonald’s in some markets—analyzed the risks of more frequent and extreme weather events on its potato harvest.

“What we found was alarming, to say the least,” said Charlie Angelakos, McCain’s vice president of global external affairs and sustainability.

So alarming in fact, that McCain committed to rolling out regenerative agriculture across all its potato acreage globally by the end of 2030, Angelakos said.

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But McCain is an outlier. Fifty out of 79 global food and retail giants mentioned regenerative agriculture in their public disclosures, though only 18 have formal quantitative targets in place, according to FAIRR Initiative, an investor network. The Sustainable Markets Initiative, a private-sector group launched in 2020, set up its Agribusiness Task Force to accelerate regenerative agriculture adoption and includes senior leaders from Mars, McDonald’s, PepsiCo, Bayer, McCain, Mondelez and others.

The task force’s 2022 report concluded the main hurdle to adopting regenerative practices was that farmers’ short-term economics don’t add up, but it also found there was a knowledge gap and not everyone in the value-chain was aligned. Follow-up work concluded that farmers need financial incentives and derisking mechanisms as well as technical and peer-to-peer support. Also important were agreeing environmental outcome metrics and creating supportive policy and payments for so-called ecosystem services such as rebuilding biodiversity and water quality.

“Ethiopia…. has got an amazing payment for ecosystem service program,” said Prof. Crowther. Thousands of farmers are moving toward agroforestry and more regenerative practices, he said.

Despite generating a third of global emissions, agrifoods got only 4% of climate investment according to a 2023 study by the Climate Policy Initiative, a private research think tank and advisory organization. Some options are loans or grants for new equipment, preferential insurance rates reflecting increased crop resilience or multiyear purchase contracts.

Another complication for adoption is the more than $635 billion in explicit agricultural subsidies paid annually in 84 countries, nearly two-thirds of which are distorting and harmful to the environment, according to the World Bank. Redirecting these subsidies to foster regenerative methods is a political challenge.

Fourth-generation dairy farmer Ken McCarty uses regenerative practices in partnership with yogurt maker Danone on his family’s farm in Kansas. Photo: McCarty Family Farms

It is vital to reduce the risk to farmers. Fourth-generation dairyman Ken McCartyand his three brothers run three farms in northwest Kansas and a partnership dairy farm in west central Ohio. He uses regenerative practices on his farms in partnership with yogurt maker Danone.

“If I’m the generation that’s willing to or being asked to make the big bet, that makes me the generation that could potentially ruin the family business, right?” McCarty said, pointing to a general undercurrent of anxiety.

This is so even when some regenerative methods, like cover crops, are a return to the ways of generations past. “We laugh because my dad will go, ‘Well, I don’t really know why you’re worried about doing that—we did that in the 50s’,” McCarty said.

Other methods are quite new. McCarty’s farm reduces water consumption by using soil-moisture probes and smart cow-cooling technologies and ups energy efficiency with electric tractors, LED lighting and variable speed motors. The longer-term, direct supply relationship with Danone has really changed the trajectory of his family’s farm, he said.

New smart technologies can also provide site-specific data to help farmers be more precise in irrigating, fertilizing and other steps in the agricultural cycle.

Duncanson appreciates that companies offer a choice of regenerative farming methods but said farmers need more technical assistance.

Jim Andrew, chief sustainability officer of PepsiCo, visits a corn farm in Nebraska. Photo: PepsiCo

Farming culture itself has also been a barrier to adoption. One Iowa farmer who had been using regenerative ag techniques for decades told Jim Andrew, chief sustainability officer for PepsiCo, that “the hardest thing is when I go to church on Sunday, and everybody looks—I know they’re whispering, ‘He’s not a good farmer because his field is dirty’.” Regenerative farming can involve leaving crop residues on the soil rather than tilling it under for a tidier looking field.

Shifting that culture takes time. PepsiCo’s demonstration farm programs often include field days to bring farmers together in the hope that if they see the benefits of regenerative agriculture on land similar to theirs it can help overcome barriers to adoption.

Ashley McKeon, director of regenerative agriculture at global food company Cargill, has seen a big change in mindset in the past five years and said the engagement of major farming institutions like the American Farm Bureau Federation is the foundation you need to get to a tipping point.

Cargill continues to use field days to bring farmers together: “The biggest thing is really just getting some to do it and then bringing their neighbors by to see it…like, ‘Hey, did you know Bob did this on his front 40 [acres]? You might want to take a look.’ And that kind of starts it,” she said.

Rochelle Toplensky is a former bureau chief of WSJ Pro Sustainable Business. She is currently co-chief executive at Connected Impact, a sustainability data insights company.

An increased demand in electricity is threatening climate progress in the United States

Noah Link — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 21:40:25 -0500

A New Surge in Power Use Is Threatening U.S. Climate Goals

A boom in data centers and factories is straining electric grids and propping up fossil fuels.

March 14, 2024

Something unusual is happening in America. Demand for electricity, which has stayed largely flat for two decades, has begun to surge.

Over the past year, electric utilities have nearly doubled their forecasts of how much additional power they’ll need by 2028 as they confront an unexpected explosion in the number of data centers, an abrupt resurgence in manufacturing driven by new federal laws, and millions of electric vehicles being plugged in.

Many power companies were already struggling to keep the lights on, especially during extreme weather, and say the strain on grids will only increase. Peak demand in the summer is projected to grow by 38,000 megawatts nationwide in the next five years, according to an analysis by the consulting firm Grid Strategies, which is like adding another California to the grid.

“The numbers we’re seeing are pretty crazy,” said Daniel Brooks, vice president of integrated grid and energy systems at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit organization.

In an ironic twist, the swelling appetite for more electricity, driven not only by electric cars but also by battery and solar factories and other aspects of the clean-energy transition, could also jeopardize the country’s plans to fight climate change.

At least 75 data centers have opened in Virginia since 2019.

In California, electric vehicles could soon account for 10 percent of peak power demand.

Lauren Justice for The New York Times

To meet spiking demand, utilities in states like Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia are proposing to build dozens of power plants over the next 15 years that would burn natural gas. In Kansas, one utility has postponed the retirement of a coal plant to help power a giant electric-car battery factory.

Burning more gas and coal runs counter to President Biden’s pledge to halve the nation’s planet-warming greenhouse gases and to generate all of America’s electricity from pollution-free sources such as wind, solar and nuclear by 2035.

“I can’t recall the last time I was so alarmed about the country’s energy trajectory,” said Tyler H. Norris, a former solar developer and expert in power systems who is now pursuing a doctorate at Duke University. If a wave of new gas-fired plants gets approved by state regulators, he said, “it is game over for the Biden administration’s 2035 decarbonization goal.”

Some utilities say they need additional fossil fuel capacity because cleaner alternatives like wind or solar power aren’t growing fast enough and can be bogged down by delayed permits and snarled supply chains. While a data center can be built in just one year, it can take five years or longer to connect renewable energy projects to the grid and a decade to build some of the long-distance power lines they require. Utilities also note that data centers and factories need power 24 hours a day, something wind and solar can’t do alone.

Yet many regulated utilities also have financial incentives to build new gas plants, since they can recover their costs to build plants, wires and other equipment from ratepayers and pocket an additional percentage as profit. As a result, critics say, utilities often overlook, or even block, ways to make existing power systems more efficient or to integrate more renewable energy into the grid.

“It is entirely feasible to meet growing electricity demand without so much gas, but it requires regulators to challenge the utilities and push for less-traditional solutions,” Mr. Norris said.

The stakes are high. If more power isn’t brought online relatively soon, large portions of the country could risk blackouts, according to a recent report by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which monitors the health of the nation’s electric grids.

“Right now everyone’s getting caught flat-footed” by rising demand for electricity, said John Wilson, a vice president at Grid Strategies.

Why Electricity Demand Is Spiking

In Virginia, power-hungry data centers are being approved at breakneck pace.

Existing data centers

Proposed data centers

For much of the 20th century, America’s electricity use increased steadily and utilities built plenty of coal, gas and nuclear plants in response. But starting in the mid-2000s, demand flattened. The economy and population kept expanding, but factories, lightbulbs and even refrigerators became much more energy efficient.

Now demand is rising again, for several reasons.

The growth of remote work, video streaming and online shopping has led to a frenzied expansion of data centers across the nation. The rise of artificial intelligence is poised to accelerate that trend: By 2030, electricity demand at U.S. data centers could triple, using as much power as 40 million homes, according to Boston Consulting Group.

In Northern Virginia, one of the nation’s largest data center hubs, at least 75 facilities have opened since 2019 and Dominion Energy, the local utility, says data center capacity could double in just five years.

In Georgia, large new manufacturing hubs are looking to hook into the grid.

Existing E.V. and solar factories

Announced E.V. and solar factories

At the same time, investment in American manufacturing is hitting a 50-year high, fueled by new federal tax breaks to lift microchip and clean-tech production. Since 2021, companies have announced plans to spend at least $525 billion on factories for semiconductors, batteries, solar panels and more.

In Georgia, where dozens of electric vehicle companies and suppliers are setting up shop, the state’s largest utility now expects 16 times as much growth in electricity demand this decade as it did two years ago.

Millions of Americans are also buying plug-in vehicles and electric heat pumps for their homes, spurred by recent federal incentives. In California, one-fifth of new cars sold are electric, and officials estimate that E.V.s could account for 10 percent of power use during peak hours by 2035.

On top of that, record heat fueled by global warming is spurring people to crank up air-conditioning, causing summer demand in Arizona and Texas to rise faster than forecast.

Many worry the grid won’t keep up.

PJM Interconnection, which oversees the nation’s largest regional grid, stretching from Illinois to New Jersey, is now expecting an additional 10,000 megawatts of demand by 2030 that wasn’t forecast last year. That’s akin to adding another New York City to the system.

“To see that come on all of the sudden, even for a system as big as ours, that’s significant,” said Ken Seiler, who leads system planning for PJM.

Finding enough power could be a challenge, since PJM’s process for connecting renewable energy projects to the grid has been afflicted by delays. Utilities in PJM have been preparing to retire roughly 40,000 megawatts of mostly coal, gas and oil-burning power plants this decade as states seek to transition away from fossil fuels. PJM has already approved an additional 40,000 megawatts of mostly wind, solar and batteries as partial replacements. But many of those projects have been stalled by local opposition or trouble getting vital equipment like transformers.

“We have a huge concern about that,” Mr. Seiler said. “Folks aren’t building.”

Nationwide, just 251 miles of high-voltage transmission lines were completed last year, a number that has been declining for a decade.

So far, one state that has kept pace with explosive demand is Texas, where electricity use has risen 29 percent over the past decade, partly driven by things like bitcoin mining, liquefied natural gas terminals and the electrification of oil fields. Texas’s streamlined permitting process allows wind, solar and battery projects to get built and connected faster than almost anywhere else, and the state zoomed past California last year to lead the nation in large-scale solar power.

“Texas still has problems, but there’s a lot to learn from how the state makes it easier to build clean energy,” said Devin Hartman, director of energy and environmental policy at the R Street Institute.

A Challenge for Cutting Emissions

A power substation near a CloudHQ data center in Ashburn, Va.

Nathan Howard for The New York Times

Soaring demand has provoked major fights over the future of natural gas.

In North Carolina, regulators had ordered Duke Energy, the state’s biggest utility, to slash its planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions by 70 percent by 2030.

But in January, Duke warned it could miss that target by at least five years under a new plan to build up to five large gas-burning power plants and five smaller versions by 2033, more than previously proposed. Even though Duke is planning a major expansion of solar and offshore wind power, the company says it needs additional gas plants because demand from industrial customers is rising faster than expected.

“The growth we’re seeing is historic in scale and speed,” said Kendal Bowman, president of Duke Energy’s operations in North Carolina. “But it’s also going to be a challenge, particularly in the near term, to see carbon reduction at the same time we’ve got this unprecedented growth.”

Similar revisions are occurring elsewhere. In Virginia, Dominion Energy has proposed to meet rising demand for data centers with a mix of renewables and gas generation in a plan that could increase its overall emissions. Georgia Power has asked permission to build three new gas- and oil-burning turbines and is evaluating whether to postpone the planned retirement of two older coal plants.

“It’s completely at odds with what we need to do to” to fight climate change, said Greg Buppert, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, which has identified at least 33,000 megawatts worth of gas projects being proposed by utilities across the Southeast, plants that could stick around burning fossil fuels for decades.

A solar panel plant in Dalton, Ga.

REUTERS/Megan Varner

Work in progress at the Dalton plant.

AP Photo/Mike Stewart

In interviews, utility executives say gas is needed to back up wind and solar power, which don’t run all the time. Gas plants can sometimes be easier to build than renewables, since they may not require new long-distance transmission lines. Eventually, alternative sources of clean power may emerge (both Duke and Dominion want to build smaller nuclear reactors) but those are years away.

“We need to meet our customers’ needs at all times, even when renewable resources might not be providing energy,” said Aaron Mitchell, vice president of planning and pricing at Georgia Power. “It’s going to take a diversified fleet.”

Mr. Mitchell noted that Georgia Power was planning a large build-out of solar power and batteries over the next decade and would offer incentives to companies to use less power during times of grid stress. But, he added, “gas has to be a near-term part of our fleet.”

Critics say that regulated utilities often default to building gas plants because it’s a familiar technology and because, in many states, they earn a guaranteed profit from capital projects. They don’t always have the same incentive to adopt energy-efficiency programs that reduce sales or to plan transmission lines that can import cheaper wind power from elsewhere.

“The big utilities are typically most comfortable with one way of doing things: building those big, conventional power plants,” said Heather O’Neill, president of Advanced Energy United, a trade group representing low-carbon technology companies.

There are other ways to meet rising demand that require burning fewer fossil fuels, some experts say. Utilities could get more creative about helping customers use less electricity during peak hours or make better use of batteries, reducing strains on the grid. Advanced sensors and other technologies could push more renewable energy through existing transmission lines. Some utilities are pursuing these options, but many are not.

Over the coming months, environmentalists and other groups aim to challenge utility plans at state regulatory proceedings. In some cases, they’ll argue that the utility has overestimated future demand growth or neglected alternatives to gas. While these debates can get technical, they could have a significant impact on the nation’s energy future.

The tech companies and manufacturers that are driving up electricity demand could also play a big role. Many firms have pledged to use clean electricity for their operations, and it remains to be seen how hard they actually push power companies to provide it.

“A big question,” said Brian Janous, a former vice president of energy at Microsoft who now focuses on ways to clean up the grid, “is how much outside pressure utilities and state regulators will face to do things differently.”

Sources and notes

Top chart: Data via the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. The data reflects annual net energy for load for the United States only, but select years include small portions of Mexico and Canada.

Virginia map: Data center locations were collected by The Piedmont Environmental Council, based on publicly available documents and news articles. Locations are approximate. The map shows existing data centers and new projects that have been approved, are actively being marketed or are seeking approval for development as data center space. The map does not include proposed expansions.

Georgia map: Data courtesy of Georgia Power, with additional research by The New York Times. Projects include factories that manufacture solar panels, electric vehicles and batteries, as well as parts suppliers for those industries and recyclers.

Upper Basin tribes in Colorado strengthen their voice in water discussions through a historic agreement

Noah Link — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 18:05:21 -0500

by: Shannon Mullane

Tribal nations in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming are one step closer to having a seat at the table in Colorado River discussions thanks to a historic interstate agreement.

Native American tribes have over the past century been left out of key agreements that manage the river. The Upper Colorado River Commission, an agency at the nexus of many Colorado River discussions in the Upper Basin, voted Monday to back a new proposed agreement that would, for the first time in the group’s 76-year-history, make regular meetings with tribes mandatory.

“This is a big deal. It is the start, not the finish line. It is the beginning of doing better,” Colorado commissioner Becky Mitchell said during Monday’s Upper Colorado River Commission meeting.

Six Upper Basin tribes must also approve the agreement for it to be finalized. Representatives of five tribes spoke in support of the agreement during the meeting. Members from one tribe were unable to attend.

This Fresh Water News story is a collaboration between The Colorado Sun and Water Education Colorado. It also appears at wateredco.org/fresh-water-news.

The Upper Colorado River Commission, created in 1948, has permanent seats for a federal representative and commissioners for the four Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. Upper Basin tribes have long asked for a seat at that table and in other forums where Colorado River decisions are made.

“The tribes have always been a little frustrated that they just don’t automatically have a seat on the UCRC,” said Peter Ortego, general counsel of the Ute Mountain Ute Indian Tribe. “When the UCRC was created … I think, for the most part, people didn’t recognize the importance of having the tribes involved.”

Congress and states formed the river commission to make sure the Colorado River’s water is properly allocated according to agreements like the 1922 Colorado River Compact, which governs how the water is split between the upper and lower basin states.

The 30 tribal nations in the Colorado River Basin, which are sovereign entities that have rights to about 26% of the river’s average flow, were excluded from those compact negotiations.

The river commission operates in the Upper Basin. It has no authority in the Lower Basin — Arizona, California, Nevada and more than 20 tribal nations — which does not have a similar, centralized commission.

In recent years, Upper Colorado River commissioners’ discussions have focused on key issues, like how to spend federal dollars, navigate interstate negotiations about the river’s management, and respond to a prolonged drought that is threatening the future water security of 40 million people across the West.

As recently as 2007 and 2019, state and federal partners developed new rules for managing the river in response to that prolonged drought, but again, tribes were not included.

Since mid-2023, Upper Basin tribal nations and the river commission have been working together to develop an agreement to formalize dialogue with the tribes.

Under the agreement, tribal representatives would not be voting members or have permanent seats on the commission, which would require Congressional approval, Ortego said.

Instead, the commission would meet with tribes every two months to talk about interstate Colorado River issues. Meetings would be open to Upper Basin tribes, consisting of the Jicarilla Apache Nation, Southern Ute Indian Tribe, Ute Mountain Ute Indian Tribe, Ute Indian Tribe, Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah and Navajo Nation, according to the Upper Colorado River Commission.

The proposal is modeled on collaboration that is already taking place, New Mexico commissioner Estevan Lopez said.

“The importance of it is that it institutionalizes what we’ve begun. Right now we’ve got folks in these seats that all feel this is important, but we think institutionalizing it will assure that it continues.

With meetings permanently on the schedule, tribal representatives would have opportunities to work out conflicts, coordinate their efforts and operate in a more unified way, Ortego said.

Working together more closely has helped build trust and relationships, said Vanessa Torres, a member of the Southern Ute Tribal Council, during Monday’s meeting.

“Southern Ute, along with many other tribes, have been asking for greater inclusion in the Colorado River discussions and decision makings,” Torres said. “The UCRC responded to the request.”

Boiling water might mitigate microplastics

Noah Link — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 22:43:51 -0500

Concerned About Microplastics in Your Water?

Consider Boiling It First

Boiling tap water traps nano- and microplastic particles inside limescale deposits, a new study has found.

Worried about microplastic particles in your tap water? Just boil it.

At least, that’s the suggestion put forward by researchers at Guangzhou Medical University and Jinan University, China.

In a new study, published in Environmental Science & Technology Letters, the team tested whether boiling your water might have any effect on the tiny nanoplastics and microplastics that are sometimes present in tap water. They found that boiling water effectively traps the plastic particles inside the limescale deposits that build up on a kettle’s inner surfaces.

Could boiling your drinking water reduce exposure to microplastics?

Numerous studies have found evidence of microplastics in real-world tap water samples, but the health effects of ingesting microplastics from drinking water are still unclear. Early studies suggest these microplastics can accumulate in the body and affect the gut microbiome.

Despite the best efforts of water treatment plants, microplastics and nanoplastics remain tricky to remove from water using standard treatment methods. While there are some advanced water treatment technologies that can tackle this problem, they can be prohibitively expensive for less developed areas.

But what if a common household water treatment technique could already be slashing your exposure to microplastics?

“Drinking boiled water, an ancient tradition in some Asian countries, is supposedly beneficial for human health, as boiling can remove some chemicals and most biological substances,” the researchers wrote. “However, it remains unclear whether boiling is effective in removing NMPs [nano- and microplastics] in tap water.”

In their new study, the researchers used fluorescent particles of polystyrene plastic and examined how they behaved as they were heated in different types of water.

Boiling and filtering slashes microparticle levels by 90%

Tap water can either be considered “hard” or “soft”, depending on how rich it is in calcium and magnesium minerals. These minerals are also responsible for the formation of limescale inside kettles, which is why kettles need to be treated with descaler more frequently in areas with hard water.

The researchers found that when microplastic-containing water was brought closer to boiling temperatures, the added polystyrene NMPs began to co-precipitate out of the water alongside the minerals, becoming trapped in the crusty limescale deposits formed.

Boiling was able to remove 84% of the NMPs added to hard water samples containing around 180 milligrams of calcium carbonate (CaCO3). This rose to 90% for very hard water samples, containing around 300 mg/L of the mineral.

The boiling practice was also able to remove up to 25% of the NMPs when done on soft water samples (containing less than 60 mg/L CaCO3), suggesting this simple practice may be more broadly applicable.

“Because the occurrence of NMPs and water quality are uneven globally, the efficacy of boiling water in reducing NMPs may vary from region to region,” wrote the researchers. “Nonetheless, our results have ratified a highly feasible strategy to reduce human NMP exposure and established the foundation for further investigations with a much larger number of samples.”

Reference: Yu Z, Wang JJ, Liu LY, Li Z, Zeng EY. Drinking boiled tap water reduces human intake of nanoplastics and microplastics. Environ Sci Technol Lett. 2024. doi: 10.1021/acs.estlett.4c00081

This article is a rework of a press release issued by the American Chemical Society. Material has been edited for length and content.

Published: February 28, 2024

Meet the Author:

Alexander Beadle

Alexander Beadle is a science writer and editor for Technology Networks. Prior to this, he worked as a freelance science writer. Alexander holds an MChem in materials chemistry from the University of St Andrews, where he won a Chemistry Purdie Scholarship and conducted research into zeolite crystal growth mechanisms and the action of single-molecule transistors.

The inchoate movement to 'rewild' former golf courses

Noah Link — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 12:06:48 -0500

There was scraggly grass in one sand trap and wooden blocks and a toy castle in another, evidence of children at play. People were walking their dogs on the fairway, which was looking rather ragged and unkempt. This was only to be expected.

Nowadays, these grounds are mowed just twice a year, and haven’t been doused with pesticides or rodenticides since 2018, which was when this 157-acre stretch of land stopped being the San Geronimo Golf Course, and began a journey toward becoming wild, or at least wilder, once again.

A small number of shuttered golf courses around the country have been bought by land trusts, municipalities and nonprofit groups and transformed into nature preserves, parks and wetlands. Among them are sites in Detroit, Pennsylvania, Colorado, the Finger Lakes of upstate New York, and at least four in California.

“We quickly recognized the high restoration value, the conservation value, and the public access recreational value,” said Guillermo Rodriguez, California state director with the nonprofit Trust for Public Land, which bought the San Geronimo course, in Marin County, for $8.9 million in 2018 and renamed it San Geronimo Commons.

During a recent tour of the land, which sits low in San Geronimo Valley, less than an hour’s drive north of San Francisco, Mr. Rodriguez motioned to rolling hills that serve as habitat for wildlife, including hawks that were wheeling overhead. “On either side, you have public lands,” he said. “This was the missing link.”

The restoration of the San Geronimo land is still underway. Floodplains will be reconnected, and a fish barrier has been removed, allowing access to more robust migratory and breeding grounds for endangered coho salmon and threatened steelhead trout. Trails are planned that would skirt sensitive habitat, making the land a publicly accessible ecological life raft, starkly different from its time as a golf course.

“It’s a great place, and it’s beautiful,” said Charles Esposito, 76, a retiree who was enjoying a recent stroll. “I love it.”

In recent years, the golf industry has taken steps to lighten its environmental toll in places by using less water, sowing pollinator-friendly plants and decreasing pesticide and fertilizer use.

Yet the resources and chemicals needed for pristine emerald turf have made the sport an environmentalists’ bête noire. America’s roughly 16,000 golf courses use 1.5 billion gallons of water a day, according to the United States Golf Association, and are collectively treated with 100,000 tons of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium a year.

The United States has more golf courses than McDonald’s locations and also has more than any other country, accounting for about 42 percent of all courses worldwide, according to the National Golf Foundation.

That oversupply, coupled with development pressures, has led more golf courses to close than to open since 2006. A return to nature, or a version of it, is still relatively rarity for former golf courses, most of which end up in the hands of commercial or residential developers, according to the National Golf Foundation. One recent example was a former 36-hole golf facility in New Hampshire that Target bought for nearly $122 million in 2023 to build a new distribution center.

For a golf course to be turned into a public green space, an unlikely set of stars need to align. There has to be a willing seller, and, crucially, a conservation-minded buyer who can afford to not just purchase the land but to restore it. According to Eric Bosman, an urban planner with the design and planning firm Kimley-Horne, 28 former courses were transformed into public green spaces between 2010 and October 2022.

But the number appears to be slowly growing. In 2023, the former Cedar View Golf course, on the eastern shore of Cayuga Lake in upstate New York, was bought by the Finger Lakes Land Trust. Another nonprofit, the West Lake Art Conservation Center, plans to transform some 230 acres of the shuttered Lakeview Golf & Country Club in Owasco into a nature preserve.

Though rewilding a golf course may disappoint players, it can bring big benefits to animals, plants and people.

A few hundred miles south of San Geronimo, on a stretch of land owned by the University of California, Santa Barbara, the 64-acre spread that once housed the Ocean Meadows Golf Course is now an estuary surrounded by grasslands, salt marsh and islands of coastal sage scrub.

The previous owner had envisioned selling the course to a housing developer, but was thwarted by the 2008 recession, according to Lisa Stratton, director of ecosystem management for the university’s Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration, which manages the land. People at the school enlisted help from the Trust for Public Land, which bought the property for $7 million in 2013 and donated it to the university.

The extensive restoration of the Santa Barbara site took years and was funded through $16 million in local, state and federal grants. It included relocating 350,000 cubic yards of soil that the golf course developers had taken from nearby mesas and pushed atop wetlands to create the course decades ago. The rehabilitated wetlands now reduce flooding risks and guard against sea-level rise, Dr. Stratton said. The change also meant that nearby homes were no longer in a federal flood zone. Without golf balls whizzing overhead, the land has become habitat for migratory shorebirds, among them black-necked stilts, greater yellowlegs and sandpipers, and has even drawn the secretive American bittern. Newly installed underground rock structures provide habitat for rabbits, ground squirrels, mice and burrowing owls.

Two federally endangered plants, the Ventura marsh milkvetch and salt marsh birds beak, have also been established on the site, part of an effort to move some plants north as their natural habitats grow too warm. Students from the university have been involved with the restoration work and have tracked hundreds of animal species.

The public has embraced the property, too. This past October, members of the Chumash tribe performed a cultural burn on part of the grassland, and the site draws birders and kids on bikes, who use its pathways to get to school.

“What we’ve learned is how important these areas are for people; that emotionally and psychologically they need them,” said Dr. Stratton.

In Palm Springs, Calif., the Mesquite Golf & Country Club was converted into the Prescott Preserve in the last few years.Credit...Ariana Drehsler for The New York Times

But the transformations are not always seamless. After the Trust for Public Land bought the San Geronimo site, it planned to sell it to Marin County. But a group of local golf advocates successfully sued to block the county’s purchase, saying that an environmental analysis wasn’t completed. They also advanced a ballot measure to limit what the county could do with the land. It was defeated, with some 70 percent of voters in San Geronimo opting for the rewilding to proceed.

Though restoration was delayed, conservation easements were secured for the bulk of the site, preventing future development, and a new plan was developed for Marin County to acquire the land. The county intends to pay the Trust for Public Land $4.9 million for a parcel where the clubhouse stands, and build a firehouse there, according to Dennis Rodoni, the county supervisor. The Trust for Public Land then plans to transfer ownership of the remaining 130-odd open acres to the county.

In Palm Springs, some neighbors of the former Mesquite Golf & Country Club resisted plans to restore that land to a natural state, saying they preferred the vista provided by a manicured 18-hole championship course.

“We once had a very nice view that looked out on the golf course to the mountains,” said Don Olness, who serves on the board of the homeowner’s association of an adjoining condo development. But since the Oswit Land Trust bought the golf course for $9 million in 2022, the area has filled with weeds, dead trees and fallen branches, he said. “It’s basically an unkempt area,” Mr. Olness said.

Citing a lease agreement with the golf course owners, the homeowners’ association has sued to temporarily stop any changes made by the land trust, which bought the course with a donation from Brad Prescott, a philanthropist, and renamed it the Prescott Preserve.

Jane Garrison, the land trust’s founder and executive director, said the pending lawsuit is preventing the trust from accessing a multimillion dollar grant needed to properly restore the land. But of the trust’s five properties, the Prescott Preserve has quickly become the most popular.

The trust removed poison from the course’s maintenance shed, along with poison and gopher traps throughout the site, Ms. Garrison said. She and colleagues came across dead rabbits and owls and an exam confirmed that one ground squirrel had died after consuming rodenticide, which makes predators such as coyotes and bobcats susceptible to mange.

“When you remove all the poison and stop that cycle, you give those species a chance to recover,” Ms. Garrison said.

Though the restoration is just beginning, wildflowers and plants have already reappeared, she said. About 100 native trees, including desert willows, ironwoods and mesquite, were donated by a local nursery and planted. The trust decided to maintain on-site ponds with recycled water because climate change has made it difficult for wildlife to find water.

The group hopes to acquire more golf courses in Palm Springs, which, despite being in a desert, is home to many courses. “When the land is gone, it’s gone forever, once they build condos,” Ms. Garrison. “But when you save it, it’s saved forever. You can’t put a price tag on that.”

Combatting coastal erosion with a 'Sand Motor'

Noah Link — Sun, 11 Feb 2024 15:09:54 -0500

By: Jake Bittle

When governments find themselves fighting the threat of coastal erosion, their default response tends to be pretty simple: If sand is disappearing from a beach, they pump in more sand to replace it. This strategy, known as “beach nourishment,” has become a cornerstone of coastal defenses around the world, complementing hard structures like sea walls. North Carolina, for instance, has dumped more than 100 million tons of sand onto its beaches over the past 30 years, at a cost of more than $1 billion.

The problem with beach nourishment is obvious. If you dump sand on an eroding beach, it’s only a matter of time before that new sand erodes. Then you have to do it all over again.

Beach nourishment projects are supposed to last for around five years, but they often disappear faster than expected. Moreover, a big coastal storm can wipe them out in a single night. And the costs are staggering: Dragging in new sand requires leasing and operating huge diesel dredge boats. Only the wealthiest areas can afford to do it year after year.

Now, after decades of reliance on repeated beach nourishment, a new strategy for managing erosion is showing up on coastlines around the world. It’s called the “sand motor,” and it comes from the Netherlands, a low-lying nation with centuries of experience in coastal protection.

A “sand motor” isn’t an actual motor — it’s a sculpted landscape that works with nature rather than against it. Instead of rebuilding a beach with an even line of new sand, engineers extend one section of the shoreline out into the sea at an angle.. Over time, the natural wave action of the ocean acts as a “motor” that pushes the sand from this protruding landmass out along the rest of the natural shoreline, spreading it down the coastline for miles.

While sand motors require much more upfront investment than normal beach nourishment — and many times more sand — they also protect more land and last much longer. Developed countries such as the Netherlands and the United Kingdom are turning to these megaprojects as an alternative to repeated nourishment, and the World Bank is financing a sand motor in West Africa as part of a billion-dollar adaptation program meant to fight sea-level rise. But these massive projects only work in areas where erosion is not yet at a critical stage. That means they’re unlikely to show up in the United States, where many coastal areas are already on the point of disappearing altogether.

The idea for the project came from a Dutch professor named Marcel Stive, who had watched with frustration as his country’s government spent billions to nourish the same coastal areas over and over again as sea levels kept rising. Stive presented the idea to the government, which hired a large dredging company called Boskalis to build a prototype on the shoreline south of The Hague.

Even this experimental project, which the Dutch call “de Zandmotor,” was an unprecedented undertaking. Boskalis dredged up around 28 million cubic yards of sand from the ocean floor — more than the Netherlands uses on nourishment projects nationwide in a given year. Engineers then sculpted the sand into a hook that curved eastward along the shore, ensuring that waves would push the sand northeast toward beaches near The Hague. They also created a lagoon in the middle of the sand structure so that locals wouldn’t have to walk for almost a mile to get to the water. In the years since Boskalis finished construction on the $50 million project, the hook of sand has flattened out, almost the way a wave breaks as it reaches the shore.

“By mobilizing your dredging equipment only once, it’s cheaper to do one large nourishment rather than to return every two to three years,” said Mark Klein, a senior morphology engineer at Boskalis who has worked on sand motor projects. “It saves mobilization costs if you make one big nourishment.”

The upfront costs of the South Holland sand motor were considerable — most normal beach nourishment projects clock in at under a million cubic yards — but the sand and the money will go much farther than they would if they’d been used for ordinary nourishment. The sand motor was designed to last for 20 years, but Klein says it will likely last even longer than expected — an unheard-of outcome for an erosion control project.

Despite the project’s success, only a few countries have attempted to copy the Dutch model. Nigeria created a sculpted sandbar in a suburb of Lagos in 2018, and the United Kingdom built a shifting sand barrier to protect a natural gas terminal in the coastal town of Bacton the following year. Both were far smaller than the South Holland project; the Bacton sand scaping project, for instance, used only 2 million cubic yards of sand.

But around the time these projects were completed the concept got a boost from the World Bank, which is the world’s largest source of funding for climate adaptation projects in developing nations. As part of an almost $500 million adaptation packagemeant to protect coastal areas in West Africa, the bank funded the construction of a large sand motor in the small nation of Benin, another country that faces an extreme erosion threat.

The coastline of West Africa’s Gulf of Guinea is eroding faster than almost any other place in the world, with severe consequences for a population that is clustered by the water. According to a recent study, almost two-thirds of the region’s coastal settlements face severe economic and health disruptions from sea-level rise — most notably in the Nigerian megacity of Lagos, which sits on a marshland just a few feet above sea level. The World Bank estimates that the impacts of erosion could wipe out as much as 5 percent of the region’s gross domestic product.

Benin is in particularly dire shape: Parts of the country’s shoreline are eroding by as much as 45 feet every year, and miles of beach have vanished since the turn of the century. The erosion has washed out roads, disrupted the livelihoods for local fishermen, and carved up beaches that are major tourist attractions. The national government’s previous efforts to control land loss with concrete sea walls and rock structures didn’t do much to slow down the rate of erosion.

So when the World Bank gave the Beninese government $60 million in 2018 to pursue a raft of erosion solutions, its leaders opted to build a sand motor in a popular beachfront area where erosion has disrupted fishing and tourism. The dredging firm Boskalis built the project last May, vacuuming up more than 8 million cubic yards of sand to build a motor about one-third the size of the original one in the Netherlands.

An aerial shot shows the shape of a ‘sand motor’ project in Benin. The project was built by the dredging firm Boskalis with funding from the World Bank. Courtesy of Boskalis

Because sand motors require so much money, sand, and dredging expertise, most countries can’t pursue them without international help, said Peter Kristensen, an environmental economist at the World Bank who is leading the West Africa erosion initiative. Instead they settle for concrete barriers, rock walls, and smaller nourishment projects, all of which have short lifespans. Sea walls can even speed up erosion in nearby areas by redirecting wave energy toward neighboring sand stretches that don’t have fortifications.

“In the U.S. and other countries, they can afford to replenish often,” said Kristensen. “It’s harder for the African countries to afford that kind of replenishment on a regular basis.”

West African countries have also used money from the World Bank to build rock groins, mangrove forests, and traditional nourishment projects. The bank hopes to monitor all these projects over the coming years to see which are most effective at combating erosion, then scale those solutions for the entire region. If the new sand motor in Benin survives for as long as the Dutch version has, the bank may try to replicate its success with more mega-nourishment projects in other parts of the world.

But this intervention will only work if countries like Benin also try to shift their development away from the water’s edge, according to Rob Young, a professor of geology at Western Carolina University and a leading expert on shoreline erosion.

“The Dutch made two choices,” he said. “One was, ‘We’re going to protect as much of the country from storm surge as we can.’ Number two was, ‘We’re going to get infrastructure out of the lowest lying areas, and we’re not going to build new stuff in stupid places.’”

Kristensen says that moving back from the shoreline might be difficult in the region of Benin with the new sand motor. Homes and beach hotels in the area sit clustered on a narrow strip of land with a river flowing behind it, so it’s not possible to shift development backward.

“It’s not always the case that when you want to do a managed retreat that you have a place to put everything and all the people that you want to move,” he said. But he also said that the World Bank would be willing to fund so-called “managed retreat” policies in other areas of West Africa if national governments wanted to pursue them.

By the same token, Young said, it’s unlikely that the sand motor would be much help in the United States. There are millions of beach homes and high-rise condominium buildings lining the shorelines of states like Florida, and moving this development back from the water would raise a host of political and logistical challenges, not the least being that no one who lives there wants to move.

Furthermore, the beach in places like Miami has eroded so far that only a thin strip of sand protects people from the encroaching ocean, which makes nourishment far more urgent. Beach communities in Florida can’t wait years for the sand from a sand motor to drift toward their beaches — they need constant infusions of sand, year after year, or the water will wipe them out altogether. Plus, the process of erosion is so far advanced in places like South Florida that there may not be enough sand to build a motor: Previous dredging efforts have drained offshore deposits of high-quality sand, leaving only low-quality material that won’t work to replenish beaches.

Young says that all these factors mean that the sand motor will only be useful for countries that can also shift development inland as part of a more comprehensive climate adaptation plan, as the Dutch did.

“In the U.S. we have lots of coastal resort communities where the houses are on the edge of the sea, right now, and we’re scrambling to keep sand in front of them,” he said. “If you look at what is down drift of the sand motor on the coast of Holland, they don’t have buildings teetering on the edge.”

Modern day slavery: the US Penal System and food

Noah Link — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 18:09:33 -0500

BY ROBIN MCDOWELL AND MARGIE MASON

Updated 6:03 AM MST, January 29, 2024

ANGOLA, La. (AP) — A hidden path to America’s dinner tables begins here, at an unlikely source – a former Southern slave plantation that is now the country’s largest maximum-security prison.

Unmarked trucks packed with prison-raised cattle roll out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where men are sentenced to hard labor and forced to work, for pennies an hour or sometimes nothing at all. After rumbling down a country road to an auction house, the cows are bought by a local rancher and then followed by The Associated Press another 600 miles to a Texas slaughterhouse that feeds into the supply chains of giants like McDonald’s, Walmart and Cargill.

Intricate, invisible webs, just like this one, link some of the world’s largest food companies and most popular brands to jobs performed by U.S. prisoners nationwide, according to a sweeping two-year AP investigation into prison labor that tied hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of agricultural products to goods sold on the open market.

They are among America’s most vulnerable laborers. If they refuse to work, some can jeopardize their chances of parole or face punishment like being sent to solitary confinement. They also are often excluded from protections guaranteed to almost all other full-time workers, even when they are seriously injured or killed on the job.

Prisoners harvest turnips at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, April 15, 2014, in Angola, La. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File)

The goods these prisoners produce wind up in the supply chains of a dizzying array of products found in most American kitchens, from Frosted Flakes cereal and Ball Park hot dogs to Gold Medal flour, Coca-Cola and Riceland rice. They are on the shelves of virtually every supermarket in the country, including Kroger, Target, Aldi and Whole Foods. And some goods are exported, including to countries that have had products blocked from entering the U.S. for using forced or prison labor.

Many of the companies buying directly from prisons are violating their own policies against the use of such labor. But it’s completely legal, dating back largely to the need for labor to help rebuild the South’s shattered economy after the Civil War. Enshrined in the Constitution by the 13th Amendment, slavery and involuntary servitude are banned – except as punishment for a crime.

That clause is currently being challenged on the federal level, and efforts to remove similar language from state constitutions are expected to reach the ballot in about a dozen states this year.

Some prisoners work on the same plantation soil where slaves harvested cotton, tobacco and sugarcane more than 150 years ago, with some present-day images looking eerily similar to the past. In Louisiana, which has one of the country’s highest incarceration rates, men working on the “farm line” still stoop over crops stretching far into the distance.

Willie Ingram talks about his time spent as a prisoner at Angola during an interview, Monday, Oct. 1, 2023 in New Orleans, La. (Chandra McCormick via AP)

Willie Ingram picked everything from cotton to okra during his 51 years in the state penitentiary, better known as Angola.

During his time in the fields, he was overseen by armed guards on horseback and recalled seeing men, working with little or no water, passing out in triple-digit heat. Some days, he said, workers would throw their tools in the air to protest, despite knowing the potential consequences.

“They’d come, maybe four in the truck, shields over their face, billy clubs, and they’d beat you right there in the field. They beat you, handcuff you and beat you again,” said Ingram, who received a life sentence after pleading guilty to a crime he said he didn’t commit. He was told he would serve 10 ½ years and avoid a possible death penalty, but it wasn’t until 2021 that a sympathetic judge finally released him. He was 73.

The number of people behind bars in the United States started to soar in the 1970s just as Ingram entered the system, disproportionately hitting people of color. Now, with about 2 million people locked up, U.S. prison labor from all sectors has morphed into a multibillion-dollar empire, extending far beyond the classic images of prisoners stamping license plates, working on road crews or battling wildfires.

Though almost every state has some kind of farming program, agriculture represents only a small fraction of the overall prison workforce. Still, an analysis of data amassed by the AP from correctional facilities nationwide traced nearly $200 million worth of sales of farmed goods and livestock to businesses over the past six years – a conservative figure that does not include tens of millions more in sales to state and government entities. Much of the data provided was incomplete, though it was clear that the biggest revenues came from sprawling operations in the South and leasing out prisoners to companies.

Corrections officials and other proponents note that not all work is forced and that prison jobs save taxpayers money. For example, in some cases, the food produced is served in prison kitchens or donated to those in need outside. They also say workers are learning skills that can be used when they’re released and given a sense of purpose, which could help ward off repeat offenses. In some places, it allows prisoners to also shave time off their sentences. And the jobs provide a way to repay a debt to society, they say.

While most critics don’t believe all jobs should be eliminated, they say incarcerated people should be paid fairly, treated humanely and that all work should be voluntary. Some note that even when people get specialized training, like firefighting, their criminal records can make it almost impossible to get hired on the outside.

“They are largely uncompensated, they are being forced to work, and it’s unsafe. They also aren’t learning skills that will help them when they are released,” said law professor Andrea Armstrong, an expert on prison labor at Loyola University New Orleans. “It raises the question of why we are still forcing people to work in the fields.”

Prisoners serving time at the Arizona State Prison Complex – Perryville arrive at the gates of a Hickman’s Family Farms egg ranch, Wednesday, April 19, 2023, in Arlington, Arizona. (AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills)

A SHADOW WORKFORCE WITH FEW PROTECTIONS

In addition to tapping a cheap, reliable workforce, companies sometimes get tax credits and other financial incentives. Incarcerated workers also typically aren’t covered by the most basic protections, including workers’ compensation and federal safety standards. In many cases, they cannot file official complaints about poor working conditions.

These prisoners often work in industries with severe labor shortages, doing some of the country’s dirtiest and most dangerous jobs.

The AP sifted through thousands of pages of documents and spoke to more than 80 current or formerly incarcerated people, including men and women convicted of crimes that ranged from murder to shoplifting, writing bad checks, theft or other illegal acts linked to drug use. Some were given long sentences for nonviolent offenses because they had previous convictions, while others were released after proving their innocence.

Reporters found people who were hurt or maimed on the job, and also interviewed women who were sexually harassed or abused, sometimes by their civilian supervisors or the correctional officers overseeing them. While it’s often nearly impossible for those involved in workplace accidents to sue, the AP examined dozens of cases that managed to make their way into the court system. Reporters also spoke to family members of prisoners who were killed.

One of those was Frank Dwayne Ellington, who was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after stealing a man’s wallet at gunpoint – a result of Alabama’s habitual offenders act. In 2017, Ellington, 33, was cleaning a machine near the chicken “kill line” in Ashland at Koch Foods – one of the country’s biggest poultry-processing companies – when its whirling teeth caught his arm and sucked him inside, crushing his skull. He died instantly.

This undated photo shows Frank Dwayne Ellington who was killed in 2017 at Koch Foods in Ashland, Ala. (Alabama Department of Corrections via AP)

During a yearslong legal battle, Koch Foods at first argued Ellington wasn’t technically an employee, and later said his family should be barred from filing for wrongful death because the company had paid his funeral expenses. The case eventually was settled under undisclosed terms. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined the company $19,500, saying workers had not been given proper training and that its machines had inadequate safety guards.

“It’s somebody’s child, it’s somebody’s dad, it’s somebody’s uncle, it’s somebody’s family,” said Ellington’s mother, Alishia Powell-Clark. “Yes, they did wrong, but they are paying for it.”

The AP found that U.S. prison labor is in the supply chains of goods being shipped all over the world via multinational companies, including to countries that have been slapped with import bans by Washington in recent years. For instance, the U.S. has blocked shipments of cotton coming from China, a top manufacturer of popular clothing brands, because it was produced by forced or prison labor. But crops harvested by U.S. prisoners have entered the supply chains of companies that export to China.

While prison labor seeps into the supply chains of some companies through third-party suppliers without them knowing, others buy direct. Mammoth commodity traders that are essential to feeding the globe like Cargill, Bunge, Louis Dreyfus, Archer Daniels Midland and Consolidated Grain and Barge – which together post annual revenues of more than $400 billion – have in recent years scooped up millions of dollars’ worth of soy, corn and wheat straight from prisons, which compete with local farmers.

The AP reached out for comment to the companies it identified as having connections to prison labor, but most did not respond.

Cargill acknowledged buying goods from prison farms in Tennessee, Arkansas and Ohio, saying they constituted only a small fraction of the company’s overall volume. It added that “we are now in the process of determining the appropriate remedial action.”

The AP tied prison labor to the supply chains of some of the world’s biggest companies

McDonald’s said it would investigate links to any such labor, while Archer Daniels Midland and General Mills, which produces Gold Medal flour, pointed to their policies in place restricting suppliers from using forced labor. Whole Foods responded flatly: “Whole Foods Market does not allow the use of prison labor in products sold at our stores.”

Bunge said it sold all facilities that were sourcing from correction departments in 2021, so they are “no longer part of Bunge’s footprint.”

Dairy Farmers of America, a cooperative that bills itself as the top supplier of raw milk worldwide, said that while it has been buying from correctional facilities, it now only has one “member dairy” at a prison, with most of that milk used inside.

To understand the business of prison labor and the complex movement of agricultural goods, the AP collected information from all 50 states, through public records requests and inquiries to corrections departments. Reporters also crisscrossed the country, following trucks transporting crops and livestock linked to prison work, and tailed transport vans from prisons and work-release sites heading to places such as poultry plants, egg farms and fast-food restaurants. A lack of transparency and, at times, baffling losses exposed in audits, added to the challenges of fully tracking the money.

Big-ticket items like row crops and livestock are sold on the open market, with profits fed back into agriculture programs. For instance, about a dozen state prison farms, including operations in Texas, Virginia, Kentucky and Montana, have sold more than $60 million worth of cattle since 2018.

As with other sales, the custody of cows can take a serpentine route. Because they often are sold online at auction houses or to stockyards, it can be almost impossible to determine where the beef eventually ends up.

Sometimes there’s only one way to know for sure.

In Louisiana, an AP reporter watched as three long trailers loaded with more than 80 cattle left the state penitentiary. The cows raised by prisoners traveled for about an hour before being unloaded for sale at Dominique’s Livestock Market in Baton Rouge.

As they were shoved through a gate into a viewing pen, the auctioneer jokingly warned buyers “Watch out!” The cows, he said, had just broken out of prison.

Within minutes, the Angola lot was snapped up by a local livestock dealer, who then sold the cattle to a Texas beef processor that also buys cows directly from prisons in that state. Meat from the slaughterhouse winds up in the supply chains of some of the country’s biggest fast-food chains, supermarkets and meat exporters, including Burger King, Sam’s Club and Tyson Foods.

“It’s a real slap in the face, to hear where all those cattle are going,” said Jermaine Hudson, who served 22 years at Angola on a robbery conviction before he was exonerated.

He said it’s especially galling because the food served in prison tasted like slop.

“Those were some of the most disrespectful meals,” Hudson said, “that I ever, in my life, had to endure.”

In this aerial photo, the Louisiana State Penitentiary lies along the bending Mississippi River, Friday, July 21, 2023, in Angola, La. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

THE RISE OF PRISON LABOR

Angola is imposing in its sheer scale. The so-called “Alcatraz of the South” is tucked far away, surrounded by alligator-infested swamps in a bend of the Mississippi River. It spans 18,000 acres – an area bigger than the island of Manhattan – and has its own ZIP code.

The former 19th-century antebellum plantation once was owned by one of the largest slave traders in the U.S. Today, it houses some 3,800 men behind its razor-wire walls, about 65 percent of them Black. Within days of arrival, they typically head to the fields, sometimes using hoes and shovels or picking crops by hand. They initially work for free, but then can earn between 2 cents and 40 cents an hour.

Calvin Thomas, who spent more than 17 years at Angola, said anyone who refused to work, didn’t produce enough or just stepped outside the long straight rows knew there would be consequences.

“If he shoots the gun in the air because you done passed that line, that means you’re going to get locked up and you’re going to have to pay for that bullet that he shot,” said Thomas, adding that some days were so blistering hot the guards’ horses would collapse.

You can’t call it anything else. It’s just slavery.”

- Calvin Thomas

Louisiana corrections spokesman Ken Pastorick called that description “absurd.” He said the phrase “sentenced with hard labor” is a legal term referring to a prisoner with a felony conviction.

Pastorick said the department has transformed Angola from “the bloodiest prison in America” over the past several decades with “large-scale criminal justice reforms and reinvestment into the creation of rehabilitation, vocational and educational programs designed to help individuals better themselves and successfully return to communities.” He noted that pay rates are set by state statute.

Current and former prisoners in both Louisiana and Alabama have filed class-action lawsuits in the past four months saying they have been forced to provide cheap – or free – labor to those states and outside companies, a practice they also described as slavery.

Prisoners have been made to work since before emancipation, when slaves were at times imprisoned and then leased out by local authorities.

But after the Civil War, the 13th Amendment’s exception clause that allows for prison labor provided legal cover to round up thousands of mostly young Black men. Many were jailed for petty offenses like loitering and vagrancy. They then were leased out by states to plantations like Angola and some of the country’s biggest companies, including coal mines and railroads. They were routinely whipped for not meeting quotas while doing brutal and often deadly work.

The convict-leasing period, which officially ended in 1928, helped chart the path to America’s modern-day prison-industrial complex.

Incarceration was used not just for punishment or rehabilitation but for profit. A law passed a few years later made it illegal to knowingly transport or sell goods made by incarcerated workers across state lines, though an exception was made for agricultural products. Today, after years of efforts by lawmakers and businesses, corporations are setting up joint ventures with corrections agencies, enabling them to sell almost anything nationwide.

To learn more about the history of prison labor, listen to this Reveal podcast as AP reporters take you back more than 150 years to explore how a brutal system known as convict leasing helped build American business empires.

Civilian workers are guaranteed basic rights and protections by OSHA and laws like the Fair Labor Standards Act, but prisoners, who are often not legally considered employees, are denied many of those entitlements and cannot protest or form unions.

“They may be doing the exact same work as people who are not incarcerated, but they don’t have the training, they don’t have the experience, they don’t have the protective equipment,” said Jennifer Turner, lead author of a 2022 American Civil Liberties Union report on prison labor.

Almost all of the country’s state and federal adult prisons have some sort of work program, employing around 800,000 people, the report said. It noted the vast majority of those jobs are connected to tasks like maintaining prisons, laundry or kitchen work, which typically pay a few cents an hour if anything at all. And the few who land the highest-paying state industry jobs may earn only a dollar an hour.

Altogether, labor tied specifically to goods and services produced through state prison industries brought in more than $2 billion in 2021, the ACLU report said. That includes everything from making mattresses to solar panels, but does not account for work-release and other programs run through local jails, detention and immigration centers and even drug and alcohol rehabilitation facilities.

Some incarcerated workers with just a few months or years left on their sentences have been employed everywhere from popular restaurant chains like Burger King to major retail stores and meat-processing plants. Unlike work crews picking up litter in orange jumpsuits, they go largely unnoticed, often wearing the same uniforms as their civilian counterparts.

David Farabough, director of the agricultural division for the Arkansas Department of Corrections, holds rice at the Cummins Unit, Friday, Aug. 18, 2023, in Gould, Ark. (AP Photo/John Locher)

Prisoner Christopher Terrell stands near a tractor at the Cummins Unit of Arkansas' Department of Corrections Friday, Aug. 18, 2023, in Gould, Ark. The biggest operations remain in the South, and crops are still harvested on a number of former slave plantations, including in Arkansas. Most larger farms have mechanized, using commercial-size tractors and trucks for corn, rice and other row crops, but prisoners in some places continue to do work by hand. (AP Photo/John Locher)

Outside jobs can be coveted because they typically pay more and some states deposit a small percentage earned into a savings account for prisoners’ eventual release. Though many companies pay minimum wage, some states garnish more than half their salaries for items such as room and board and court fees.

It’s a different story for those on prison farms. The biggest operations remain in the South and crops are still harvested on a number of former slave plantations, including in Arkansas, Texas and at Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Farm. Those states, along with Florida, Alabama, South Carolina and Georgia, pay nothing for most types of work.

Most big farms, including Angola, have largely mechanized many of their operations, using commercial-size tractors, trucks and combines for corn, soy, rice and other row crops. But prisoners in some places continue to do other work by hand, including clearing brush with swing blades.

“I was in a field with a hoe in my hand with maybe like a hundred other women. We were standing in a line very closely together, and we had to raise our hoes up at the exact same time and count ‘One, two, three, chop!’” said Faye Jacobs, who worked on prison farms in Arkansas.

Jacobs, who was released in 2018 after more than 26 years, said the only pay she received was two rolls of toilet paper a week, toothpaste and a few menstrual pads each month.

Faye Jacobs holds a hoe as she recalls her time working on an Arkansas prison farm, Monday, Sept. 18, 2023, in Kansas City, Mo. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

She recounted being made to carry rocks from one end of a field to the other and back again for hours, and said she also endured taunting from guards saying “Come on, hos, it’s hoe squad!” She said she later was sent back to the fields at another prison after women there complained of sexual harassment by staff inside the facility.

“We were like ‘Is this a punishment?’” she said. “‘We’re telling y’all that we’re being sexually harassed, and you come back and the first thing you want to do is just put us all on hoe squad.’”

David Farabough, who oversees the state’s 20,000 acres of prison farms, said Arkansas’ operations can help build character.

“A lot of these guys come from homes where they’ve never understood work and they’ve never understood the feeling at the end of the day for a job well-done,” he said. “We’re giving them purpose. … And then at the end of the day, they get the return by having better food in the kitchens.”

In addition to giant farms, at least 650 correctional facilities nationwide have prisoners doing jobs like landscaping, tending greenhouses and gardens, raising livestock, beekeeping and even fish farming, said Joshua Sbicca, director of the Prison Agriculture Lab at Colorado State University. He noted that corrections officials exert power by deciding who deserves trade-building jobs like welding, for example, and who works in the fields.

In several states, along with raising chickens, cows and hogs, corrections departments have their own processing plants, dairies and canneries. But many states also hire out prisoners to do that same work at big private companies.

The AP met women in Mississippi locked up at restitution centers, the equivalent of debtors’ prisons, to pay off court-mandated expenses. They worked at Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen and other fast-food chains and also have been hired out to individuals for work like lawn mowing or home repairs.

“There is nothing innovative or interesting about this system of forced labor as punishment for what in so many instances is an issue of poverty or substance abuse,” said Cliff Johnson, director of the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Mississippi.

In Alabama, where prisoners are leased out by companies, AP reporters followed inmate transport vans to poultry plants run by Tyson Foods, which owns brands such as Hillshire Farms, Jimmy Dean and Sara Lee, along with a company that supplies beef, chicken and fish to McDonald’s. The vans also stopped at a chicken processor that’s part of a joint-venture with Cargill, which is America’s largest private company. It brought in a record $177 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2023 and supplies conglomerates like PepsiCo.

Though Tyson did not respond to questions about direct links to prison farms, it said that its work-release programs are voluntary and that incarcerated workers receive the same pay as their civilian colleagues.

Some people arrested in Alabama are put to work even before they’ve been convicted. An unusual work-release program accepts pre-trial defendants, allowing them to avoid jail while earning bond money. But with multiple fees deducted from their salaries, that can take time.

Members of Brevard County’s chain gang, prisoners convicted of non-violent misdemeanors, wear chains around their ankles as they pick up trash along a roadside, Thursday, Sept. 14, 2023, in Titusville, Fla. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

The AP went out on a work detail with a Florida chain gang wearing black-and-white striped uniforms and ankle shackles, created after Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey took office in 2012. He said the unpaid work is voluntary and so popular that it has a waitlist.

“It’s a win-win,” he said. “The inmate that’s doing that is learning a skill set. … They are making time go by at a faster pace. The other side of the win-win is, it’s generally saving the taxpayers money.”

Ivey noted it’s one of the only remaining places in the country where a chain gang still operates.

I don’t feel like they should get paid. They’re paying back their debt to society for violating the law.”

- Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey

Elsewhere, several former prisoners spoke positively about their work experiences, even if they sometimes felt exploited.

“I didn’t really think about it until I got out, and I was like, ‘Wow, you know, I actually took something from there and applied it out here,’” said William “Buck” Saunders, adding he got certified to operate a forklift at his job stacking animal feed at Cargill while incarcerated in Arizona.

Companies that hire prisoners get a reliable, plentiful workforce even during unprecedented labor shortages stemming from immigration crackdowns and, more recently, the coronavirus pandemic.

Bunkbeds, used by prison workers who were relocated to Hickman’s Family Farms during the COVID-19 pandemic, sit in close rows inside a metal hangar-like warehouse at the farm in Arlington, Ariz. (Arizona Correctional Industries via AP)

In March 2020, though all other outside company jobs were halted, the Arizona corrections department announced about 140 women were being abruptly moved from their prison to a metal hangar-like warehouse on property owned by Hickman’s Family Farms, which pitches itself as the Southwest’s largest egg producer.

Hickman’s has employed prisoners for nearly 30 years and supplies many grocery stores, including Costco and Kroger, marketing brands such as Eggland’s Best and Land O’ Lakes. It is the state corrections department’s largest labor contractor, bringing in nearly $35 million in revenue over the past six fiscal years.

“The only reason they had us out there was because they didn’t want to lose that contract because the prison makes so much money off of it,” said Brooke Counts, who lived at Hickman’s desert site, which operated for 14 months. She was serving a drug-related sentence and said she feared losing privileges or being transferred to a more secure prison yard if she refused to work.

Counts said she knew prisoners who were seriously hurt, including one woman who was impaled in the groin and required a helicopter flight to the hospital and another who lost part of a finger.

Hickman’s, which has faced a number of lawsuits stemming from inmate injuries, did not respond to emailed questions or phone messages seeking a response. Corrections department officials would not comment on why the women were moved off-site, saying it happened during a previous administration. But a statement at the time said the move was made to “ensure a stable food supply while also protecting public health and the health of those in our custody.”

Some women employed by Hickman’s earned less than $3 an hour after deductions, including 30 percent taken by the state for room and board, even though they were living in the makeshift dormitory.

“While we were out there, we were still paying the prison rent,” Counts said. “What for?”

FOLLOWING THE MONEY

The business of prison labor is so vast and convoluted that tracing the money can be challenging. Some agricultural programs regularly go into the red, raising questions in state audits and prompting investigations into potential corruption, mismanagement or general inefficiency.

Nearly half the agricultural goods produced in Texas between 2014 and 2018 lost money, for example, and a similar report in Louisiana uncovered losses of around $3.8 million between fiscal years 2016 and 2018. A separate federal investigation into graft at the for-profit arm of Louisiana’s correctional department led to the jailing of two employees.

Correctional officials say steep farming expenditures and unpredictable variables like weather can eat into profits. And while some goods may do poorly, they note, others do well.

Prisons at times have generated revenue by tapping into niche markets or to their states’ signature foods.

During the six-year period the AP examined, surplus raw milk from a Wisconsin prison dairy went to BelGioioso Cheese, which makes Polly-O string cheese and other products that land in grocery stores nationwide like Whole Foods. A California prison provided almonds to Minturn Nut Company, a major producer and exporter. And until 2022, Colorado was raising water buffalo for milk that was sold to giant mozzarella cheesemaker Leprino Foods, which supplies major pizza companies like Domino’s, Pizza Hut and Papa John’s.

But for many states, it’s the work-release programs that have become the biggest cash generators, largely because of the low overhead. In Alabama, for instance, the state brought in more than $32 million in the past five fiscal years after garnishing 40 percent of prisoners’ wages.

Aerial video shows Cargill’s barge terminal and headquarters near Minneapolis, Minnesota. Cargill and other commodity traders have in recent years scooped up millions of dollars’ worth of soy, corn and wheat straight from prisons. (AP video Mark Vancleave)

In some states, work-release programs are run on the local level, with sheriffs frequently responsible for handling the books and awarding contracts. Even though the programs are widely praised – by the state, employers and often prisoners themselves – reports of abuse exist.

In Louisiana, where more than 1,200 companies hire prisoners through work release, sheriffs get anywhere from about $10 to $20 a day for each state prisoner they house in local jails to help ease overcrowding. And they can deduct more than half of the wages earned by those contracted out to companies – a huge revenue stream for small counties.

Jack Strain, a former longtime sheriff in the state’s St. Tammany Parish, pleaded guilty in 2021 in a scheme involving the privatization of a work-release program in which nearly $1.4 million was taken in and steered to Strain, close associates and family members. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, which came on top of four consecutive life sentences for a broader sex scandal linked to that same program.

Incarcerated people also have been contracted to companies that partner with prisons. In Idaho, they’ve sorted and packed the state’s famous potatoes, which are exported and sold to companies nationwide. In Kansas, they’ve been employed at Russell Stover chocolates and Cal-Maine Foods, the country’s largest egg producer. Though the company has since stopped using them, in recent years they were hired in Arizona by Taylor Farms, which sells salad kits in many major grocery stores nationwide and supplies popular fast-food chains and restaurants like Chipotle Mexican Grill.

Some states would not provide the names of companies taking part in transitional prison work programs, citing security concerns. So AP reporters confirmed some prisoners’ private employers with officials running operations on the ground and also followed inmate transport vehicles as they zigzagged through cities and drove down country roads. The vans stopped everywhere from giant meat-processing plants to a chicken and daiquiri restaurant.

Spanish moss hangs from trees lining a courtyard at The Myrtles, a former antebellum home slave plantation turned wedding venue and tourist site, Tuesday, Nov. 16, 2021, in St. Francisville, La. (AP Photo Margie Mason)

One pulled into the manicured grounds of a former slave plantation that has been transformed into a popular tourist site and hotel in St. Francisville, Louisiana, where visitors pose for wedding photos under old live oaks draped with Spanish moss.

As a reporter watched, a West Feliciana Parish van emblazoned with “Sheriff Transitional Work Program” pulled up. Two Black men hopped out and quickly walked through the restaurant’s back door. One said he was there to wash dishes before his boss called him back inside.

Former Angola prisoner, Curtis Davis, talks about his time at the Louisiana State Penitentiary during a 2021 interview near a former antebellum slave plantation near Angola, La. (AP Photo/ Serginho Roosblad)

The Myrtles, as the antebellum home is known, sits just 20 miles away from where men toil in the fields of Angola.

“Slavery has not been abolished,” said Curtis Davis, who spent more than 25 years at the penitentiary and is now fighting to change state laws that allow for forced labor in prisons.

“It is still operating in present tense,” he said. “Nothing has changed.”