“The best novel ever written about running,” screams the blurb on the cover, attributed to no less an authority than Runner’s World. Impressive. That is, until you start to think about the running-novel genre, fail to come up with another title, and begin to wonder if this isn’t damning by faint praise. It’s not. Parker’s tale, about a collegiate miler named Quenton Cassidy whose Olympic ambitions are derailed by the controversial campus politics of the sixties, treads over ground that is both inspiring and endearingly familiar to anyone who’s ever laced up a pair of track shoes. The cultural references can seem dated—Parker name-checks Peter Snell (an Olympian; I Googled him) and Adidas Gazelles (as workout devices, not trendy footwear)—and the training techniques will sound antiquated to runners steeped in lactate-threshold data crunching. These are forgivable sins when you consider that Parker, a former collegiate miler, self-published Once a Runner in 1978. Since then, the book has gained a hand-me-down following among the waffle-sole crowd, but until Scribner rewarded its cult status this year with a 25,500 first run, it was nearly impossible to find a copy. And in this narrative, the battered publishing industry might have planted the seed for a new business paradigm. Discard giant advances; instead, reward artists who develop their audiences organically. Will it work? Who knows. Read Once a Runner because it’s a great story told greatly; buy it because you’ll be giving this publishing model a shot.

Once a Runner

Ìý

Summer World: A Season of Bounty

By Bernd Heinrich (Ecco, $27)

Summer World: A Season of Bounty

Ìý

What is summer for? You may imagine bare elbows, apricots, and river running. In other words, sex, food, and adventure. It’s the same agenda throughout the animal king­dom, as described by biologist Bernd Heinrich. A follow-up to his cold-weather-survival tome Winter World, this volume is about the riotous living that gets condensed into a few months. In order to get the story, Heinrich nerds out in the woods near his New England home, relocating wasp nests, dismantling anthills, and digging up a turkey carcass. (At this, he declares, “Down in the soil I discovered a gem—a beautiful, iridescent shiny purple dung beetle that I had never seen before.”) Heinrich’s enthusiasm for decomposition is matched only by his cerebral forays into the meaning of it all, as when he turns his lens on us.
Homo sapiens, he speculates, not Neanderthals, came to rule because we evolved in Africa’s summer grass. There, we became uniquely hairless among primates and figured out how to wear clothes, allowing us to outflank our furrier cousins. Summer made us human. With Heinrich as our guide, even the creepy parts of the season are fun.

Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, an American Town

By Warren St. John (Spiegel & Grau, $27)

Outcasts United

Ìý

So what if David Beckham is moving to Italy? In Outcasts United, a scrappy Jordan-born coach named Luma Mufleh organizes the Fugees—three youth soccer teams rostered from war-ripped countries across the globe—in the unfriendly confines of Clarkston, Georgia. Lee Swaney, Clarkston’s grandfatherly mayor, doesn’t want his town’s fields used for soccer; they’re for playing baseball. Swaney draws a line in the sand and the Fugees find themselves at the Battle of Milam Park, a literal turf war. St. John, a New York Times reporter and author of the college-football-addiction confessional Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer, follows these Benetton Bad News Bears from practices on a gravel-and-glass pitch to putting the hurt on white kids in $300 cleats. St. John narrates in polite newspapery fashion, but the characters are spirited (a 15-year-old former Li­berian rebel quits in protest over Mufleh’s draconian short-hair rule), and the squad carries the story. You’ve already guessed that the Fugees go on to rule their league, but the book is about displaced souls struggling and finding a home in an improbable land. It’s the feel-good story of the year—in a good way. While no one becomes a “slumdog millionaire,” according to the epilogue, a sizable donation to the team has been written into the already-optioned movie rights.

Ìý

Ìý

Ìý

Ìý

Ìý

Ìý

The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How.

By Daniel Coyle

The Talent Code

Ìý

Natural-born ability is taking a hit these days, and A-Rod is only partly to blame. In his bestselling Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell argues that success stems more from opportunity and upbringing than from innate gifts. Now, contributing editor Coyle suggests that super-achievement boils down to something called myelin, the fatty white stuff wrapping the brain’s nerve circuits. And here’s the good part: We can actually grow more of this neural insulator by training harder and smarter. Coyle lays out the myelin theory through visits with top neuroscientists and travels to the world’s most rarefied breeding grounds—the soccer fields, music schools, and tennis courts that consistently churn out superstars. “They have entered a zone of accelerated learning that, while it can’t quite be bottled, can be accessed by those who know how,” Coyle writes. Athletes at Moscow’s Spartak Tennis Club swing a racket for hours, no ball in sight, while a weathered coach barks orders: slow down, fine-tune, repeat. At a music school in upstate New York, violin students screech through individual measures, out of order and off rhythm. As Coyle explains it, this sort of “deep practice” not only pushes us just past the limits of our abilities but also tells our brains to produce myelin. It’s an intriguing explanation for the old “practice makes perfect” idea, and Coyle presents it in a way that’s always entertaining and often inspiring. And if the theory is correct, we have no one to blame but our lazy selves if we’re not tearing up the courts at Wimbledon.

Wanting

By Richard Flanagan

Wanting

Ìý

There’s a curious meeting at the heart of this novel. In 1854, Lady Jane Franklin, widow of the explorer Sir John Franklin, invited Charles Dickens over for tea. At the time, London was atwitter with the news that a lesser explorer, John Rae, had discovered evidence of cannibalism among the remains of the members of Franklin’s expedition to the Northwest Passage, which had gone missing nine years earlier. Lady Jane begged Dickens to refute the accusation. Dickens agreed. The charge pierced the idea at the heart of the British Empire: that colonialism was civilization’s triumph over savagery. “We all have appetites,” says Flanagan’s fictionalized Dickens. “But only the savage agrees to sate them.” Flanagan, the Tasmanian-born author of the brilliant Gould’s Book of Fish, turns those bones of history into a beautifully realized rumination on love, desire, and the tortured history of his native land. It’s a tricky thing to pull off—the author cuts between Dickens’s life in 1850s London and Sir Franklin’s stint as Tasmania’s governor, in the 1830s—but Flanagan does it with grace. As we watch a young Lady Jane’s motherly love for an orphaned Aboriginal child bloom and wither under the colonial strictures of the time, Dickens’s own frozen passions are thawed by a beautiful actress. Though the great writer fiercely defends Franklin against the (probably true) charges of cannibalism, he finds happiness by giving in to his own savage appetites. And, lo, the empire does not fall.

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

By Christopher McDougall (Knopf, $25)

Born to Run

Ìý

In Mexico’s Copper Canyon, where Pancho Villa once eluded George S. Patton and cartels now tend their crops, there lives a tribe who eat mice, inhale corn beer, and run distances that would leave Dean Karnazes whimpering in a support vehicle. Ever since seven cape-and-sandal-clad Tarahumara Indians obliterated a field of PowerBar eaters at the 1994 Leadville Trail 100 ultramarathon, the running world has been obsessed with the athletes, who responded to the attention by disappearing. In this book, which is equal parts quest, physiology treatise, and running history, McDougall, an enthusiastic but oft-injured jogger, seeks to learn the secrets of the Tarahumara the old-fashioned way: He tracks them down. His guide is a gringo expat named Caballo Blanco (“White Horse”), who dreams of arranging a showdown between the Tarahumara and America’s top ultra-runners. Improbably, this happens—the White Horse lures six endu­rance stars, including Scott Jurek, to race the Tara­humara on their home turf. Spoiling the ending would be criminal, but I’ll say that the climactic race reads like a sprint, which is remarkable, since the author spends all 50 miles wheezing at the back of the pack. When McDougall writes of the Tarahumara, “They remembered that running was man­kind’s first fine art, our original act of inspired creation,” it doesn’t feel overwrought. It simply makes you want to run.

The post Once a Runner appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

THE WORLD HAS a problem, writes Thomas L. Friedman in Hot, Flat, and Crowded (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28), the none-too-cheery follow-up to his 2005 globalization primer, The World Is Flat. Temperatures are rising, countries like China and India are modernizing (read: “consuming more like the U.S.”), and population growth is off the charts. In short, the planet is ready to implode, and we have mostly ourselves to blame. But if we’re smart, he insists, America can work its way out of the crisis—and even return to our status as a super­power. “Either we are going to rise to the level of leadership, innovation, and collaboration that is required, or everybody is going to lose—big.”

Hot, Flat, and Crowded

by Thomas Friedman

Friedman spends the first half of his roughly 450 pages detailing how we got into this mess, with a special shout-out to political leaders. “The prevailing attitude on so many key issues in Washington today is ‘We’ll get to it when we feel like getting to it and it will never catch up to us, because we’re America,’ ” he writes. In the second half, he presents a smart, comprehensive but dauntingly ambitious plan for moving forward. The basics:?We need to build an ultra-efficient grid, or “Energy Internet”; increase demand for existing clean-energy technologies; and, most important, “spur the massive, no-holds-barred-everybody-in-their-garage-or-laboratory innovation we need [to find] new sources of clean electrons.” Those first two will require big-time tax incentives and regulations, he says. But his conservative fans won’t be disappointed: “The only thing that can stimulate this much innovation in new technologies,” he stresses,”is the free market.”

Most of these ideas aren’t new, of course; we’ve heard them from people like Al Gore and Arnold Schwarzenegger, both of whom are quoted here—along with dozens of otherpolitical, environmental, and corporate leaders. But Friedman’s knack for simplifying complex political and economic issues, combined with his chatty, if sometimes patronizing, style, make it one of the most accessible books yet on climate change and the energy debacle. We need a revolution, he stresses, not another marketing campaign. “A green brand, some green buzz, a green concert, and we’re on our way to solving the problem,” he writes. “Nota chance.”

The post Earth in a Vise Grip appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

Survival School
MOJO HD, THURSDAYS, 9 P.M. EASTERN, PREMIERES OCTOBER 2
In 2007, 47 airmen began the U.S. Air Force’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program, which teaches them to stay alive if shot down over mountains, desert, or Arctic terrain. It’s so tough that only half the men make it through. This “docu–reality” series lets us watch them suffer.

Into the Unknown with Josh Bernstein
DISCOVERY CHANNEL, MONDAYS, 10 P.M. EASTERN, PREMIERES
AUGUST 18
New threads, new network, same compelling schtick: A hat–free Bernstein travels the world, investigating age–old mysteries (Noah? ark?) and cultural curiosities (mummification in Papua New Guinea).

Whale Wars
ANIMAL PLANET, PREMIERES IN NOVEMBER
Sea Shepherd founder and eco–vigilante Paul Watson let Animal Planet film crews aboard the Steve Irwin last winter as the ship, loaded with water cannons and sailors trained in ship–ramming techniques, hunted for Japanese whalers in icy Antarctic waters.

Eleventh Hour
CBS, THURSDAYS, 10 P.M. EASTERN, PREMIERES OCTOBER 9
From hit–making producer Jerry Bruckheimer (Pirates of the Caribbean), this high–tech drama follows fictional biophysicist Jacob Hood as he swoops in, again and again, to save the world from extreme–science–based disasters (think out–of–control cloning and killer viruses).

The post Deja View appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

THE OPEN ROAD: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama,
by Pico Iyer (KNOPF, $24)
Veteran travel writer Pico Iyer has been hanging out with the Dalai Lama for more than 30 years, visiting the Tibetan Buddhist leader’s home-in-exile, in Dharmsala, India, and following him around the world as he shares his spiritual and political message. A reflective mix of biography and travelogue, The Open Road paints the Dalai Lama as a wise and tireless philosopher in the unprecedented position of carrying “an entire culture on his shoulders” as the Chinese government continues to occupy his native Tibet. “I can’t say, after 20 years of covering wars and revolutions as a journalist, that any one man is likely to have all the answers (and the Dalai Lama, I know, would not say that either),” Iyer writes. “It’s the questions he puts into play that invigorate.”

THE SNAKE CHARMER: A Life and Death in Pursuit of Knowledge,
by Jamie James (HYPERION, $25)
Joe Slowinski knew more about Asian snakes than almost anyone; the California Academy of Sciences herpetologist discovered dozens of new species in more than two decades as a field biologist. So on September 11, 2001, when he was bitten by a poisonous many-banded krait, deep in the jungles of Myanmar, he knew what to expect. He lay down in his tent, called in his expedition teammates, and, as the American embassy frantically tried to orchestrate a rescue, calmly prepared to die. ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø covered Slowinski’s death in April 2002 (see “Bit,” by Mark W. Moffett). In this frequently gripping narrative, journalist James fills out his life story, from his reptile-chasing childhood to his chilling final moments.

The post Far From Home appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

“We’re putting too much into the ocean and taking too much out,” says Wallace J. Nichols, skipping the mind-numbing stats a guy with his credentials—he’s an Ocean Conservancy senior scientist and a top sea turtle expert—could recite in his sleep. “Putting too much in? Go a week without creating plastic waste. Taking too much out? Check out .” The site, started by Nichols in 2007, urges consumers to stop eating the country’s most popular seafood, which is typically caught using turtle- and dolphin-killing nets. It’s one of many issues Santa Cruz, California–based Nichols has tackled while juggling research (he was the first to discover that Pacific loggerheads migrate almost 7,500 miles to the coast of Japan) and working with more than a dozen conservation groups. This year, among other projects, he’ll help Mexican villagers develop profitable turtle-watching tours and lead the Ocean Conservancy’s first SEE Turtles trip, which puts travelers face to face with the creatures. “Sea turtles are sentinels for the ocean,” he

Wallace J. Nichols

Wallace J. Nichols photographed with Diego, a black turtle, at the California Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco

says. “They’re my portal into everything.”

Edward Norton

Actor, 38

“I don’t believe in stepping out front on matters that you’re just getting educated on,” says Edward Norton. “I gravitate toward topics on which I have something to contribute.” For Norton, a lifelong environmentalist whose father, Edward Sr., was the senior adviser for the Nature Conservancy’s China program, that’s meant throwing his weight behind a litany of issues, like the greening of affordable housing. While growing up in Chesapeake, Maryland, Norton volunteered at the Enterprise Foundation, a nonprofit started by his grandfather, the philanthropist James Rouse, that provides housing for low-income communities. Norton, who sits on the board of trustees, convinced Enterprise to start the Green Communities Initiative, a $550 million commitment to make affordable housing more sustainable nationwide. In 2003, Enterprise partnered with the energy company BP Solar to launch its Solar Neighbors program, which donates a full solar setup to a low-income Los Angeles family for every solar system a celebrity buys.

At home, the Manhattan-based Norton is a founding board member of Friends of the High Line, an advocacy group working to establish a public park on an abandoned train line on the city’s West Side. “Creating a green space in Manhattan isn’t a high-crisis issue,” says Norton, who doesn’t own a car and takes public transportation. “But you have to tune in to what’s relevant in your community.” Next up: Hollywood. While filming The Incredible Hulk: Part 1 in Toronto this fall, Norton (who bulks up in a digitally engineered green suit for the role) attempted to reduce the film’s footprint by cutting back on paper waste, eliminating idling vehicles on set, and exploring the development of a film-production carbon calculator. “I wouldn’t say we’ve achieved any meaningful success yet,” he says. “But sometimes you just have to put one foot in front of the other and start.”

Heidi Cullen

Climatologist, 37

Heidi Cullen

Heidi Cullen photographed at Tishman Speyer Park, in Atlanta

In 2003, when Heidi Cullen started as the first-ever mainstream-media reporter to cover climate change, she didn’t set out to politicize the way the world views weather. She didn’t have time. The Weather Channel gave her 90 seconds a few times a week to try to make long-term climate issues relevant. For many viewers, and even a few meteorologists she worked with, that was 90 seconds too many. “They’d say, ‘We can barely get a weeklong forecast right, so how can you predict what will happen 50 years from now?'” says the plain-talking scientist, who has a Ph.D. from Columbia University in climatology and ocean-atmosphere dynamics. “But that’s bullshit! We know that there are nearly 6.7 billion people on the planet that spill out 7.2 gigatons of carbon dioxide. If we continue to spew at the same rate, the climate is going to get a hell of a lot warmer and a hell of a lot more expensive to deal with.” Meanwhile, the Weather Channel’s 87 million viewers started paying attention. In October 2006, the channel launched Cullen’s show Forecast Earth, the first weekly television program dedicated to climate change. In January, the show was expanded to an hour. Now that she’s getting some airtime, Cullen’s goal is pretty basic: “I’m reaching out to people who watch and say, ‘This is freaking me out; I don’t understand the weather anymore.'”

Eric Larsen

Polar Explorer, 36

Eric Larsen

Eric Larsen photographed in Minnesota at Lake Superior

“I love winter,” explains explorer and global-warming advocate Eric Larsen when asked what a dog-musher with limited mountaineering experience is doing planning an Everest expedition. “I’m trying to tell the story of the last great frozen places on earth, and the reality is that those places are disappearing.” The other reality is that the polar-exploration race seems to have shifted focus—from who can go farthest or get there first to who can craft the most compelling podcasts about what we’ve got before it’s gone. In the battle for storyline, the Grand Marais, Minnesota–based Larsen, who has been to Canada’s Hudson Bay and to the North Pole, among other expeditions, has come up with a winner: His 2009 Save the Poles project () is a quixotic quest to reach the North and South poles and the summit of Everest (the “third pole”) within 365 days. He’s been planning the trip while touring the country giving climate-change lectures and working on a book about his 2006 summer expedition to the North Pole. “It was definitely an eye-opening experience,” says Larsen of that journey, during which he contended with thinning ice and a confused polar bear well outside its usual domain. “I became focused on being more responsible in my personal life.” On the Save the Poles trip, Larsen plans to post regular blog updates and collect scientific material for the National Snow and Ice Data Center for a documentary about his yearlong journey. “I’m an optimist,” he says. “People have an amazing ability to affect their environment for positive or negative. But we need to do things right now.”

Van Jones

Human Rights Activist, 39

Van Jones

Van Jones photographed at the People's Grocery Community Garden, in Oakland, California

“We can no longer have a racially segregated, class-indifferent environmental movement,” says Jones, a Yale-educated lawyer who cofounded the Oakland, California–based Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. “We need ordinary working folks who aren’t worrying about how they’re going to put solar panels on their second home.” Jones thinks saving the environment isn’t possible without saving our inner cities, an issue he’s been striving to address for more than a decade. His approach? Help both simultaneously. In June 2007, the charismatic activist created Green for All, an initiative that trains inner-city youth in eco-friendly work. If we trade blue-collar jobs for green-collar ones, Jones says, we’ll keep kids out of prisons by teaching them skills—like installing solar panels on homes—that can’t be outsourced. Congress passed the initiative as the Green Jobs Act of 2007, which will authorize $125 million to train 35,000 people each year. “Right now, the icon of our environmental movement is someone wearing Birkenstocks, doing yoga, and eating tofu,” says Jones. “We need a new icon: the hard-hat-wearing, lunch-bucket-carrying, sleeves-rolled-up man or woman that’s fixing America.”

Chris Jordan

Photographer, 44

In 2003, Chris Jordan realized he was on to something after photographing a pile of trash that he found strangely alluring. “When I made a big print of that and put it on the wall of my studio,” the Seattle-based photographer says, “people would come over and look at it and they would start talking about consumerism.” Jordan’s garbage photo became the basis for a series called Intolerable Beauty and put him on the map as a commentator on our culture of disposability. “I started using beauty as a seduction,” he says of his photos, which feature stacks of oil drums, junked cars, or massive piles of bottles and cans. Before turning seriously to art, Jordan spent a decade as a corporate lawyer trapped in what he calls the “consumer trance.” “Whatever seemed cool, I would buy it,” he says. As Jordan began to take his photography more seriously, he says, “I wanted my work to be relevant, but not ugly.” His most recent series, Running the Numbers, includes “Cans Seurat,” which from afar looks like a copy of a famous Seurat painting but actually, upon closer inspection, depicts 106,000 individual aluminum cans—representing 30 seconds of American consumption, according to Jordan. Still, somewhere behind the message of wastefulness, there is a cautious optimism to his work. “I have tremendous fear and sadness about where we are right now,” says Jordan, whose prints have been seen everywhere from the Nobel Peace Center, in Oslo, to The Colbert Report, on Comedy Central. “But with something like a photograph, there’s a chance we might feel enough to care enough about it to change our behavior.”

Juan Pablo Orrego

Photographer, 44

Juan Pablo Orrego

Juan Pablo Orrego photographed at the Berkeley Pier, in California

Juan Pablo Orrego has a score to settle. During the nineties, the Santiago, Chile–based activist squared off with Endesa, a multi-billion-dollar Spanish energy company that proposed damming Chile’s pristine Bío-Bío river. For his efforts, Orrego won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 1997—and Endesa built two enormous dams on the Bío-Bío anyway. Now, as coordinator of the Chilean NGO Ecosistemas, Orrego is battling Endesa over the crown jewel of the adventure-sports world: Chilean Patagonia. Endesa Chile, a European-owned company, has partnered with the Chilean company Colbún and is proposing to clear the way for five dams on the Pascua and Baker rivers, free-flowing waterways that originate near two Patagonian icefields and run into the Pacific Ocean. The 106-mile Baker, known for glacier-fed turquoise water and rainbow trout that can exceed seven pounds, flows alongside the site of the proposed Patagonia National Park.

“They already destroyed the upper Bío-Bío, and now they want to degrade the most magnificent rivers in Patagonia,” says Orrego. This is a matchup that makes David and Goliath look like a fair fight. The dam project, which would cost an estimated $4 billion, is backed by one of Chile’s most powerful families, the Mattes, who are ranked 137th on Forbes‘s 2007 list of the world’s richest billionaires. Orrego, a former professional bass guitar player who studied with shamans in Mexico, coordinates the resistance from a three-room office in Santiago. But by amassing an international legal team and allying with organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council, International Rivers, and Spanish Greenpeace, Orrego has mounted a formidable defense. “What happened on the Bío-Bío can never happen again,” he says. His solution: tapping local alternative energy like wind, solar, geothermal, and tidal power and ramping up adventure tourism. “When done right, tourism is the industry without chimneys, and it lasts forever,” says Orrego. “Unlike dams.”

Jeremy Jones

Big-Mountain Snowboarder, 32

Jeremy Jones

Jeremy Jones photographed in Truckee, California

“All skiers and boarders are polluters,” says Jeremy Jones, snowboarding pioneer and star of 12 Teton Gravity Research movies. “But we pollute a lot less than we did five years ago.” With his new Truckee, California–based nonprofit, Protect Our Winters (POW), Jones represents the ski-bum contingency in sounding the climate-change alarm. “A couple of years ago a friend suggested I start a climate-change foundation,” says Jones. “I thought, I don’t lead the perfect carbon-neutral life, so who am I to take the lead?” But after receiving his first few thousand dollars in grant money from his sponsor Rossignol, Jones officially launched POW last September. The organization is primarily educational, running no risk of pushing the limits of climate science—the home page, , offers tips on how skiers can reduce their carbon footprints (carpool to the mountain; walk and bike whenever possible). But in December, POW gave its first grant, a $4,000 donation to a solar-power program in a Wyoming school district, and will provide two more $25,000 grants this year. The grassroots approach is working—the 700-strong POW pulls in five new members per day, and, at press time, a European launch of the organization was slated for January. “Donations are coming from mountain-town locals,” says Jones, who lived out of his car at the beginning of his pro career. “Climate change is no longer just being talked about by Sierra Club members and hybrid owners. Everybody wants colder winters.”

Q’orianka Kilcher

Actress, 18

Q’orianka Kilcher

Q'orianka Kilcher photographed in Malibu, California

“I started acting to give voice to the voiceless,” says the half-Peruvian, half-Swiss Q’orianka Kilcher, best known for playing Pocahontas opposite Colin Farrell in 2005’s The New World. At that film’s Peruvian premiere, she used the red carpet to draw attention to the plight of the forests of the Amazon basin. “People who read In Touch magazine might never know about these issues,” she says, “but it’s really those people you need to reach.” The Santa Monica, California–based Kilcher took a yearlong sabbatical from acting in 2006 and traveled back to the Peruvian Amazon to film indigenous leaders, who showed her the way oil companies have degraded and poisoned their rivers and forests. In 2007, she won a prestigious Brower Youth Award. In 2008, she’s planning a film project in an Alaskan wildlife refuge, and hopes to use her lead role in a biopic of Princess Kaiulani, the last princess of Hawaii, filming this spring, to draw attention to indigenous peoples. One last project she’d like to squeeze in: summiting Alaska’s Mount McKinley in honor of her grandfather—Ray “Pirate” Genet, a legendary Denali guide. “I want to climb it before it melts,” she says. She’s kidding, sort of.

The post Al Needs Some Copilots appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

OUTSIDE: First, the obvious. Why did you write an environmental book?

A Contract with the Earth, Newt Gingrich

GINGRICH: Discussions had degenerated into a choice between big government, big regulation, and high taxes, and claiming that as environmentalism, or saying, “We’re not even going to talk about the environment.” That gave the country far too limited a range of choices. And it missed the real opportunity: to combine market-oriented, entrepreneurial incentives that work in America with the science and technology that have made us the most successful country in history.

How different is your philosophy from that of the Bush administration?

I think we’re more willing to set strict standards. We have a deeper interest in incentivizing alternative-fuel development. We also take the idea of a national energy strategy more seriously. We need a strategy that’s good for the environment, good for the economy, and good for national security. Unless you can meet those three tests, you don’t have an adequate energy strategy.

Isn’t that exactly what Al Gore would say?

I’m sure Gore is very sincere in his concern for the environment, but I think in a lot of ways that concern is an excuse for higher taxes and more bureaucracy.

So what’s your solution?

The left focuses on punishing people, and we need a strategy that rewards people. Terry and I believe that we are on the edge of a huge scientific revolution. We believe that markets work, and have historically created more choices, of higher quality, lower cost, and greater convenience. The great breakthroughs in human history have occurred when people—like Thomas Edison or Jonas Salk or Bill Gates—came along and suddenly created something new and different.

You talk about “sound science” in the book. What does that mean?

We mean fact-based hypotheses, verified by experimentation and data-driven. It’s very dangerous to create a culture in which it’s impossible to dissent without being described as a heretic. If you read the language of the left, anybody who raises reasonable doubts [about global warming] is immediately attacked and isolated. That strikes me as bad science.

So where do you stand on global warming? In a climate-change debate with Senator John Kerry last April, you agreed that it’s real—and that human activities have contributed to it.
What I said was, there is a sufficient preponderance of evidence that it is reasonable—without reaching an authoritative conclusion—to be prudent. Conservatism ought to mean prudence. As a prudent matter, lowering the total carbon loading of the atmosphere, I think, is useful.

You write about your lifelong love of the outdoors. Any favorite places?

Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp is one of my all-time favorites. It’s complex, with such a wide range of animal life—it’s almost primeval. When I taught environmental studies at West Georgia University [in the 1970s], I’d take my classes there for a week at a time, with canoes, so students could understand the rhythm of the natural world and their own limitations and patterns in it.

That’s an excellent lesson.

I was very touched by the writing of [French scientist] René Dubos, and the whole notion that we are here to tend the garden, and we have to live within nature. In the end, you can’t live above it, because you are inherently part of the natural experience.

The post Red Goes Green appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

H₂O is what connects us—it’s the alpha liquid that supports natural wonderlands and lets us live, play, and explore. You’d think we’d be taking better care of this critical resource, and yet waste and pollution are rampant and more than 1.1 billion people lack access to clean water. The good news? Our special report introduces you to the water heroes who are reversing the worst woes and showing us how to keep the planet afloat.

Troubled Waters I

The globe's six biggest water crises—and what's being done to conquer them

Water Shortage

1. Access Denied
STATUS: For a huge percentage of earth's population, turning on a faucet would be as miraculous as turning water into wine. That's because 1.1 billion people don't have access to clean water, and two-fifths of the world's inhabitants—2.6 billion people—lack access to sanitation facilities, resulting in regular exposure to human waste, particularly in local water sources. The deadly result: As many as five million people a year—most of them children—die from waterborne maladies like cholera, typhoid, dysentery, hepatitis, and diarrhea, which by itself is estimated to kill one child every 15 seconds.

According to some studies, 80 percent of the developing world's health problems are related to contaminated water. “It's not a supply or technology issue—there's clean water all over the world,” says Ted Kuepper, executive director of Global Water, a California-based nonprofit. “It's a matter of getting it to people.”

SOLUTION: Simple gravity-fed spring-catchment systems, $10,000 to $20,000 each, can transport clean water to villages within a few miles of natural springs; these work well in places like Central America. In drier climes, wells are often the only source of clean water, though rainwater-collection systems can also be used. Simply providing villages with communal taps and latrines can reduce disease by more than 75 percent.

And they're hot causes, too. Hip-hop mogul Jay-Z recently filmed an MTV documentary on water issues, and while shooting a movie in the Sahara last year, actor Matt Damon created the H₂O Africa Foundation, to bring water access to the filming locations in Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Libya, and Egypt. But the United Nations has the most ambitious mission: One of its Millennium Development Goals is to cut in half by 2015 the number of people without access to clean water and basic sanitation, a goal the World Health Organization says could cost $11.3 billion per year.

2. Oceans in Peril
STATUS: Big blue is in deep trouble. Fish populations are tanking due to overfishing (a recent study in Science estimates that by 2048 there will be no commercially harvestable seafood left), and pollution has created about 200 deoxygenated areas in places like the Gulf of Mexico, where there's a New Jersey-size dead zone in summer. Meanwhile, bottom trawling, in which nets are dragged along the seafloor, is destroying fragile ecosystems like coral gardens, and longlines are snagging animals like turtles and albatrosses, decimating their populations. Overdevelopment is imperiling coastlines, and CO₂ emissions, which concentrate carbon in the water and wreak havoc with pH balances, are causing ocean acidification, which could destroy a vast spectrum of sea life—from diatoms to oysters to coral reefs.

SOLUTION: For ecologist Carl Safina, founder of the Blue Ocean Institute and a MacArthur fellow, the global priority right now is restoring marine wildlife, making fish populations as healthy as possible. In this regard, the U.S. has a good track record: From the 1996 Sustainable Fisheries Act to the creation of no-fishing-allowed reserves—such as last June's establishment of the 137,792-square-mile North-western Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument—the nation is giving fish a fighting chance. “The U.S. has a whole suite of recovering species—striped bass, king mackerel, summer flounder, and swordfish,” says Safina. Worldwide, there are some similar moves to create reserves, such as the 71,000-square-mile Phoenix Islands Protected Area, near Kiribati. But the vast majority of coastal waters still have few or no protections.

The silver lining? “Oftentimes it takes a sense of crisis to get countries and individuals mobilized,” says Josh Reichert, director of the environmental division of the Pew Charitable Trusts, whose focus includes ocean health. “And we are now faced with a crisis.”

3. Mass Pollution
STATUS: Toxic sludge. Raw sewage. Animal excrement. Deadly farm chemicals. All of these ingredients find their way into the world's water supply. In developing nations, as much as 90 percent of sewage and 70 percent of industrial waste pour into local waters without any treatment whatsoever. Even in the U.S., sewage pollution is problematic. “Most treatment plants are old and inefficient, and their technology is from 1916,” says Nancy Stoner, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. If fixes aren't made, she warns, “by 2025 we can expect to have as much sewage pollution as we had in 1968, before the Clean Water Act.”

But agriculture is the crisis at our doorstep. Irrigation runoff and massive amounts of animal waste from factory farms—the nation's top water-pollution sources—have fouled more than 173,000 miles of waterways.According to Worldwatch Institute, once contaminants reach groundwater, they are “essentially permanent,” since onaverage they remain there for 1,400 years.

SOLUTION: “Primary and secondary treatment of waste is the most inexpensive thing we can do,” says Paul Faeth, former managing director of the World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank with a focus on water. That means building water-treatment plants and cleaning up industrial waste around the world, an effort led by groups like the Global Water Partnership, an international network of water agencies that connects developing nations to technical expertise. In the U.S., Maryland and other states around the Chesapeake Bay have reached a comprehensive agreement to clean up the bay and have already restored more than 3,000 miles of natural streamside buffer zones to filter toxins and fertilizers that would otherwise seep into the Chesapeake. Bad practices on factory farms—which hold animal waste in lagoons or spray liquefied manure on crops—have been successfully fought on the state and county levels, and a 2003 lawsuit brought by the Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, and Waterkeeper Alliance against the Environmental Protection Agency has forced the federal office to put some teeth into its factory-farm rules. The EPA is now hashing out new permit requirements that will likely go into effectthis summer.

Troubled Waters II

The globe's six biggest water crises—and what's being done to conquer them

Water Shortage

SOURCE: USGS

4. Climate Change
STATUS: You've heard all about the earth's water cycle: It rains, rivers flow to the sea, water evaporates and forms cloud vapor, and then it rains again. It always sounded so predictable. Well, hold on to those galoshes, because that stable system is likely to go bonkers, according to climate forecasters. If, as expected, the earth's temperature rises between about three and seven degrees Fahrenheit in this century, the result will be more evaporation and more water vapor, which itself acts as a potent greenhouse gas, accelerating global warming. Essentially, the whole hydrologic cycle may act like it's on speed, sparking fiercer and more frequent storms and flooding, melting snowpack and glaciers, and threatening the water supply of one-sixth of the world's population. Sea levels could rise up to two feet by 2100, drowning cities, wetlands, estuaries, mangroves, and other ecosystems, not to mention a few of your favorite tropical atolls. In turn, the destroyed wetlands would no longer absorb greenhouse gases, feeding an ever more vicious cycle.

SOLUTION: Reduce global emissions of greenhouse gases as soon as possible. “The longer we wait, the graver the risks and the cost of averting them,” says Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. Groups like Pew are building worldwide coalitions to support treaties and policies like emissions cap-and-trade programs, which set a limit on the amount of CO2 allowed to enter the atmosphere. Such market-based approaches, perhaps combined with a tax on emissions, would provide cash incentives for industries and individuals to adapt more quickly to a low-carbon reality. In January, a coalition of environmental groups and industrial giants like DuPont and Alcoa proposed reducing emissions by 10 to 30 percent over 15 years. And energy guru Amory Lovins insists that clean alternatives, like hybrid cars and low-carbon fuels, are already available or in the pipeline. “Existing efficiency technologies, systematically applied, can save half of our oil and gas, and three-fourths of our electricity,” he says. “This by itself would solve nearly half the climate problem.”

5. Excess Dams
STATUS: The Tinkertoy lovers among us may admire their engineering, but dams are the most perilous threat to river systems worldwide. Consider the numbers: 47,655 large dams exist today in 140 countries; they're present on 60 percent of the world's major rivers; and the weight of their water is so immense, it's believed to have altered the speed of the earth's rotation. Dams also supply one-fifth of the world's electricity and help irrigate about one-sixth of the world's food, but the benefits come at a huge cost.

As many as 80 million people have been displaced by dams worldwide, including nearly two million Chinese living above the new Three Gorges Dam, on the Yangtze. Dams prevent fish migration, causing local extinctions; they alter river flows and water temperatures, killing plants and aquatic species; and they destroy habitats and recreational areas. (Paddlers, take note: Not even 2 percent of U.S. rivers today are free-flowing.) Big dams are also a wasteful way to store water—huge reservoirs suffer so much evaporation that they can lose up to 10 percent of their volume each year.

SOLUTION: World leaders and enlightened governments are putting proposed dams—and even existing ones—to the test: Are they worth it? While small hydro projects can be a green boon, since they provide clean, renewable power, most large dams are not. “In many cases, it's clear that the negative impacts of dams outweigh the benefits,” says Patrick McCully, director of the International Rivers Network and member of the UN's Dams and Development Project. That new vision is especially noticeable in the U.S., where experts say the era of big-dam building is over. More than 212 dams have been torn down in recent years, with glowing results: When the Edwards Dam came down on Maine's Kennebec River in 1999, schools of migratory alewives returned by the hundreds of thousands. Where knockdowns are not an option, dams can often be better managed—for example, dam operators can release more water during dry seasons, to help fish and downstream wildlife. The Nature Conservancy has partnered with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to tweak water releases through 27 dams in nine river basins so far, with more agreements on the way.

6. Lost Habitats
STATUS: As humans pave paradise, expand cities and farms, and suck up more water—and pollute what's left—we leave individual species and entire ecosystems at risk. Topping the endangered list: freshwater ponds, lakes, streams, rivers, and marshes. Already, about half the world's mangrove ecosystems (critical for spawning fish, sheltering birds, and recycling nutrients) and half of its freshwater wetlands—home today to an estimated 40 percent of the earth's species—have been lost to development. Some 75 percent of the globe's fish stocks have been nearly or totally depleted, and more than 20 percent of freshwater fish species have become extinct, endangered, or threatened in recent decades.

Statistics aside, nearly every terrestrial species is in some way dependent on freshwater ecosystems for their survival—humans included. Wetlands and bogs filter and cleanse water, regulate water flows, absorb storm surges, and protect us from hurricanes. These natural services, provided free of charge, can offer more of an economic boon to communities than developing the wetlands would. “We need to recognize that freshwater ecosystems have economic value, and we need to set some boundaries,” says Sandra Postel, director of the Global Water Policy Project.

SOLUTION: Rivers and wet-lands can be forgiving: Many will bounce back if you simply keep enough water flowing in them. And U.S. courts are increasingly ruling that “in-stream flows”—water that in the past was often sucked out of rivers for irrigation or urban use—must be protected for the health of fish and other fauna. Conservation groups and citizens' coalitions are also working to take back aquatic zones. Ducks Unlimited is helping preserve wet-lands on two million acres, stretching from Canada and Montana to Minnesota and lowa, by plugging old drainage ditches and letting ponds and marshes refill. In Brazil's Pantanal, the earth's largest wet-land, activists are successfully fighting a massiveshipping waterway. And worldwide, members of the Waterkeeper Alliance, a grassroots group with more than 150 chapters, use patrol boats to monitor polluters, then take the worst of them to court.

Ìý

Ìý

Ìý

Jean-Michel Cousteau

Jean-Michel Cousteau

Carrie Vonderhaar/Ocean Futures Society

Podcast: Listen to an interview with Jean-Michel Cousteau

The new patriarch of the first family of the sea, Jean-Michel, 68-year-old son of the legendary Jacques Cousteau, is founder and president of the Ocean Futures Society, a nonprofit dedicated to ocean conservation and education. And he’s making waves. Last year, an episode of his PBS series Jean-Michel Cousteau: Ocean ºÚÁϳԹÏÍøs influenced President Bush to create the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument, the largest protected marine area on earth. Next, he’s off to the Amazon to document the region’s global importance.

“Since my father pushed me overboard with a tank on my back at the age of seven, I’ve been completely engulfed in the aquatic environment. The quality of our lives is directly linked to the quality of water: no water, no life. We’ve been very lucky because nature has been doing a fabulous job of cleaning itself. But there’s a point when nature says, ‘Too much is too much.’ We reached that point quite some time ago. Now we need a major wake-up call—information, solutions need to be shared with the public. Then we communicate with decision makers, both in the political system and in industry. The message remains the same: Protect the ocean and you protect yourself.”

Greg MacGillivray

Greg MacGillivray

Shaun MacGillivray/MacGillivray Freeman Films

Podcast: Listen to an interview with Greg MacGillivray

Greg MacGillivray, 61-year-old cofounder of Laguna Beach, California–based MacGillivray Freeman Films and director of the 1998 Imax hit Everest, is as passionate about water conservation as he is about filmmaking. Next up is Grand Canyon ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø 3D, a film made in partnership with Teva and the Waterkeeper Alliance, set to debut in March 2008. It’s a rollicking Colorado River raft trip and stunning plea for action that stars water activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., kayaker Nikki Kelly, and anthropologist Wade Davis.

“I love the ocean; growing up around Laguna Beach, I spent my summers surfing, diving, and snorkeling. But over the past few decades, I’ve noticed a remarkable change in California’s aquatic environment. So I’ve been using the power of the Imax medium, with its gigantic screens and supervivid pictures, to get people to fall in love with the ocean. Now the world is moving toward a water crisis. What’s happening on the Colorado River is happening all over the world. The water is overused, overdammed, and it’s polluted in some places. My goal is that after seeing Grand Canyon, every person in the audience will go home knowing they have to conserve water—even something as simple as installing a low-flow toilet or showerhead, or turning off the faucet while they’re brushing their teeth. We go through life so wastefully now; if we can just alter our behavior a tiny bit, it would make a tremendous difference.

Aqua Man

Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is always on the H₂O front lines

It’s no surprise that RFK Jr. cares passionately about water—he’s been sailing,fishing, and paddling since childhood. But what he’s accomplished with that passion is astonishing. Simply put, the iconic Kennedy—master falconer, avid kayaker, and son of the late senator Robert F. Kennedy—is one of the leading environmental advocates of our time. He’s the chief prosecuting attorney for Riverkeeper, a nonprofit group devoted to protecting New York’s Hudson River watershed, and president of Waterkeeper Alliance, an international network of water defenders. He’s also the senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council and co-author—with acclaimed New York water warrior John Cronin—of The Riverkeepers. Along the way, Kennedy, 53,has helped command one of America’s brightest eco-successes: the cleanup of the Hudson, whose now swimmable waters were once largely a liquid garbage bin. But his most recent book, Crimes Against Nature—a takedown of the Bush administration’s environmental record—perhaps best highlights his core belief: that our obligation to nature is a moral one, the shunning of which harms not only the future but the very fabric of society. Senior editor AMY LINN spoke with him about his crusade.

OUTSIDE: What made water issues such a calling?

KENNEDY: I spent most of my early life wandering the creeks around my home in Virginia and spending summers on the Cape, fishing almost every day. On vacations my father would take us to the whitewater rivers. We ran the Salmon, the Snake, and the Colorado, the Yampa, the Green, and the upper Hudson. And I always understood that water wasn’t just an environmental issue; it was a civil-rights issue—a human-rights issue. The best way of measuring the success of a democracy is how it distributes the goods of the land—the commons.

Did you see threats long ago?

I couldn’t swim in the Hudson or the Charles or the Potomac when I was growing up. I was shocked, when I ran the upper Hudson, when the guides told us it was poisonous to drink. And I always recognized that as an act of theft—that pollution was a theft. It was the act of a big shot with political clout stealing from the rest of us—stealing publicly owned resources from the public.

What’s at stake?

The relationship with nature is so critical to our culture. We’re not protecting nature for the sake of fishes and birds. We’re protecting nature for our culture, for our prosperity, for our quality of life.

And if we want to meet our obligation as a generation, as a nation, as a civilization—which is to create communities for our children that provide them with the same opportunities for dignity and enrichment and good health as the communities that our parents gave us—then we’ve got to start by protecting our environmental infrastructure. We’ve got to protect the air we breathe, the water we drink, the wildlife, the public lands, the waterways that enrich us, that connect us to our past, that provide context to our communities—and that are the source, ultimately, of our values and virtues and character as a people.

How does a Waterkeeper help?

Every Waterkeeper has a patrol boat on the water. We also take the public out, and take journalists out. We do this to constantly remind the public that this is their property. The polluters want to make the public think the waterways belong to them—that they’re just a waste conveyance.

Is there a way to bring the message close to home?

If General Electric pulled a truck up to your lawn and dumped PCBs into your yard, you would fight them until they removed the last molecule. So why don’t we react the same way when they dump PCBs into our river?

What’s the most important thing people can do?

They have to be willing to fight—that’s all. You have to be willing to fight.

For more on water, visit or .

Peter Gleick

Peter Gleick

MacArthur fellow Peter Gleick, 50, is a leading water expert and president of the Pacific Institute, in Oakland, California, and edits The World’s Water: The Biennial Report on Freshwater Resources.

“The fact that this is the 21st century and we’ve failed to meet basic human needs for water is the most appalling problem facing us. It’s our most egregious failure. We’re not living in a world where our demand for resources has to go up inexorably. Clean water is finite, but it’s renewable if we’re careful. The problem is that we don’t use it properly and don’t plan our systems properly. If we did, there would be enough to meet everyone’s needs. We give it inadequate attention, inadequate funding, and—all too often—incompetent governance. It’s a problem of will and commitment. I originally came to the subject through an interest in energy issues, but I’m drawn to water now because it’s so critical to everything we care about: the environment, prosperity, family life. If any other environmental problem is more connected to all aspects of our lives, it would be hard to imagine what that is.”

Dean Kamen

His mind-boggling purifier could save millions of lives

Dean Kamen

Dean Kamen, 55, is probably best known for inventing the two-wheeled Segway people mover. But his latest creation promises to move mountains. The device, dubbed the Slingshot, can transform the filthiest water into pure, drinkable H2O. The 300-pound, electric-powered, dishwasher-size prototype purifies both freshwater and saltwater, basically by vaporizing, compressing, and condensing the liquid. At Deka Research & Development, his Manchester, New Hampshire–based company, Kamen’s standing challenge is this: Bring him the vilest goo and he’ll run it through the Slingshot, knock it back, and ask for more.

ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø: How much faith do you have in this machine?

KAMEN: Last summer we took one into Tiananmen Square, in China, and fed it local river water. It was not only brown and disgusting; it was gelatinous. It had stuff bobbing around in it that would almost defy description. And out came the cleanest, purest water you’ve ever had. We were standing around handing it out to people in paper cups.

How did you get interested in water in the first place?

We at Deka were designing home-based dialysis systems—which require water clean enough to inject—so we were very interested in how to purify local water. Even in the developed world, tap water can have arsenic, cryptosporidium, lead, and other contaminants, so we spent millions trying to figure out everything that could possibly go wrong with water and how to fix it. Eventually I said, hey, we could help a few hundred thousand people—or we could expand this technology to serve a billion people around the world.

Did everybody immediately say, “Great idea!”?

Everybody said “You’re nuts!” But I thought, If we can manufacture a machine that has no need for chemicals or activated charcoal or membranes—and if we can create something small and rugged enough to carry into remote areas and have it run for years with no maintenance—we’d solve the problem.

You recently tested a prototype in Honduras, where people were getting sick from drinking dirty river water. How did it go?

From day one we were making a thousand liters a day. People loved it. Now we’re ready to go with more prototypes in other villages next year. In a few years we hope to have them widely available. In very high volume, they’d be under a few thousand bucks apiece.

The post Tapped appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

HOWARD HALL HAS FILMED in the waters off dozens of countries and documented several new marine species in his 25-year career. But since May 2000, the 53-year-old Californian has focused on what may be his most ambitious project to date. As director of photography for Coral Reef ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø, the $10 million IMAX film that debuts this month in North American theaters, Hall and his nine-man crew spent more than 400 hours in the Pacific, diving below 300 feet 21 times to document never-before-seen seascapes near Fiji and French Polynesia. Did working at depths of more than 300 feet make for a rough shoot?
It was challenging enough to film while wearing mixed-gas rebreathers, which we needed to go down that far. It’s even harder when you’re dealing with huge amounts of equipment. We had strobe lights implode; pieces of gear flooded. Even half-knot currents are significant when you’re carrying a 250-pound camera that’s bigger than you are.


What’s the coolest thing you saw down there?
Off Fiji, we saw a rare school of hammerheads—a swirling mass of three or four hundred sharks hanging off a reef wall. It looked like a living tornado.


Did you get it on film?
Nope. The camera failed on about 50 percent of our deep dives—including that one.


We hear your wife underwent some deep-sea dental work.
Michele, who’s the film’s production manager, had her teeth cleaned by three-inch-long cleaner shrimp—which feed off algae and debris in fish mouths—in Fiji. Opening her mouth really wide signaled the shrimp to come in and do their thing. You could see their pincers plucking at the taste buds on her tongue.


You’ve made thousands of dives. What keeps you going?
It’s still great to go into the ocean wilderness and see new things. Below 300 feet it’s all unexplored. There aren’t many places left on the planet you can say that about.

The post Going Deep appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

DIRIGIBLES HAVEN’T BEEN hot since the Hindenburg blew up in 1937. But if scientists at WetZone Technologies have their way, blimps will be back in the limelight, this time as workhorses in the battle against wildfires. Launched by an entrepreneurial band of nine physicists and engineers who cut their teeth in aerospace, the Carlsbad, California, startup has patented designs for giant airships—up to 1,000 feet long and 300 feet high—that could shower hundreds of acres of flaming forest with 20,000 gallons of water per hour. Each craft would be kept aloft by a bellyful of nonflammable helium, enabling it to float as low as 75 feet above a blaze without endangering its eight-person crew, and its 250,000-gallon water tank could be refilled in the air, allowing it to keep working round the clock.

Water balloon: Wetzone’s Fire Blimp

That’s a lot of juice—current air tankers hold just 3,000 gallons—but will anybody go for this? “We have several manufacturers that can build our airships,” says Thomas Gagliano, 30, WetZone’s CEO and chief scientist. “Now we need to get politicians excited about the need for this technology.” He also has to come up with $2.25 million to get the idea, currently hovering in computer-model limbo, off the ground. Gagliano hopes to have two prototypes floating above the California-Nevada state line by 2006. If the Forest Service buys the concept, he envisions a fleet of 50 fire zeppelins throughout the country.


Who knows? With more than six million acres of forest lost to fire last summer, it might not hurt to send up a trial balloon.

The post Wet Zeppelin appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.