The Hardness of Steel

Steel is a mystery. Essential to our psyche and civilization, it is perhaps our most useful invention, as well as the third largest industrial cause of climate change. Its myriad properties which enable that usefulness are due to its endless formulations, which have evolved with us.
Molybdenum is one of the minerals which give steel its hardness, but the quantities used are so small that the demand is limited, causing an oscillating demand, which has prompted the mining industry to mine it only periodically.
One such mine in my list of interests, is on Copper Mountain, southwest of Denver.
Also on my list to shoot are two power plants that are among the 100 largest CO2 and mercury emitters in the USA. This group of attractions, in combination with an exhibit in Denver and lecture invitation, suggested a photo flight.


Lighthawk is a group of pilots that fly for the environment, and are frequent partners in my work. Their pilot Stephanie Wells agreed to the mission, and I laid out a flight plan, which Stephanie modified with her local knowledge and experience of high altitude flying, an exacting experience set combing science, local knowledge, skill, aerodynamics, and the knowledge of her aircraft. The steel would have to wait.


We agreed to go west to the power plant at Craig, CO, the 51th largest CO2 emitter in the USA, which is also near several coal mines, one deep below ground, the other on the surface.

Trees affected by bark beetle in Colorado Rockies

Much of the success of  these projects comes from predicting and praying for the right weather, and we had luck on our appointed day. For a coast native that studies those regions, the mountains held a novel fascination- what Stephanie saw as normal was unique and beautiful to me as we crossed the “Front Range” as the mountains closest to Denver are called.



The first environmentally interesting site, a deep coal mine, had not been on my plan, but with an abiding curiosity to see these things and how they work, we circled, before moving on the the power plant at Craig. So as not to seem like a sinister character, cautious pilots limit the number of circles they will make around a power plant. We agreed to pan around it once, circle the nearby mine, and pass by again on the way back to the nearby airfield for fuel, (Stephanie had flown with a minimum for the mountain crossing) and then pass the plant again on our way to the open-pit mine. Power plants are often rather ugly affairs, and this one is no exception, being all stacks, boilers, and turbines enclosed in a utilitarian building.

Coal-fired power plant. 51th largest CO2 emitter in the USA

Open-pit mines use drill rigs to make holes which are “charged” with ammonium nitrate to blast away the dirt (overburden) covering the object of the mine (in this case coal). The overburden is scooped and dumped to the side by a giant walking “dragline”.
After one pass around the mine, Stephanie expressed nervousness about our fuel level, so we went back to tank up from a charismatic old Coloradan gentleman at the tiny air strip (sadly, I left the cameras in the plane). As we took off again, a giant cloud filled the distant sky, and we reasoned it was a blast at the mine, probably executed after everyone left for lunch, due to the danger of flying rock. Still, it was a sight I was disappointed to miss.

Compressor trucks, well-heads and chemical tanks at fracking site

Hydro-fracking has been a controversial gas extraction technique around the world, and Colorado is no exception. Between the close proximity to houses and schools, and the regional scarcity of water, a resource mightily depleted by this process, local people were organizing in opposition to the industry near their homes, and I was asked to get the bird’s eye view. So we came down from the mountains and out to the plains around Boulder to find the sites, and they proved to be a textbook series of illustrative examples of the process. Hydro-fracking is also a rather ugly business, visually as well as its side-effects. A giant drill makes a deep and meandering hole, then leaves to make room for a group of large, powerful compressors which pump that bore full of water and chemicals at excruciating pressure, endeavoring to fracture the gas-bearing layer of rock below.

Factory farm for cattle

I have many topics of abiding interest, and never know when opportunity might arise to further those stories, and I was quite pleased to see large factory farms of beef cattle just on the other side of the fracking sites. Beef is the most climate-change intensive of foods– and, one hamburger requires upwards of 8,000 gallons of water to produce, this in a water-challenged region.


The day really seems a smashing success, even if we did not make it to see the steel, and both pilot and artist were glad to get back on the ground and run to the head.

The Hidden Costs

Much contemporary art is so esoteric as to leave the incognoscenti out in the cold. Much of what is au courant in the world of “art” photography currently is far less remarkable than the story behind the picture - which is often the story of the artist’s travails.

This narcissist tendency is perhaps natural in a time when real issues are so murky and insoluble, but the classical concept of art being about the world seems suddenly relevant and necessary. Art should move people, not just be a cascade of insider references. The development of the techniques of manipulating emotions comprises most of the history of art, till the time “art” became precisely the rejection of such techniques.

My work is about creating a sense of irony by utilizing these techniques to make compelling images that have layers of meaning based on contemporary issues.

But narratives are what we crave, the balm for awareness, the explanation of the unknown. As a story-teller, one wants to relate those stories, and this current exhibit at the UmweltBundesAmt (The German Environmental Agency) is just that. For the first time, we assemble maps and satellite views, detailed explanations of the pictures in German and English, and a set of graphic icons that represent the various impacts of the processes.

Assembling all of the components, an old desire, has been several years in the making. The exhibit was born at Natur Museum Südtirol in Bolzano, Italy, but the creation of this extensive appendix was beyond time or budget.
Ideally, the appendix would be web-based, so viewers could browse at any time. One even imagines using QR codes with each image to link directly as the viewer is experiencing the picture. But ushering smart devices into an exhibit is a gift from Pandora, and it’s nice to make it physical, and to separate information from image so viewers must first contemplate. Also nice is to credit the many people who make an exhibit happen, especially one so complex, from pilots to curators and translators.

View of "The Hidden Costs" exhibition at Umweltbundesamt

Heroes

One has many heroes throughout life which seem to increase in complexity with our edge.

My heroes now are those that risk life and comfort in the service of others. And since the environment is my life mission, my heroes tend to be those that have worked in that realm. The Russian photographer that knowingly sacrificed himself to document Chernobyl, Anatoly Rasskazov, Edward Snowden, who gave up a comfortable life to expose a grave wrong by his country, Bradley Manning who exposed an even greater wrong, and suffered even more.

In my work as an artist, working on the environment I have been lucky enough to photograph many of my personal heroes, and will launch a tribute to them with a series of social media posts.

Most of them have guided me on missions in the flesh or direction, and all of them have clarified my understanding with their knowledge and experience. In the interminable battle to save our life support systems from parties that would profit by disrupting them, these individuals stand very large. #HeroOfTheDay

Larry Gibson, mountain top removal activist

 

Larry's death a few years back is still being felt throughout the MTR activist community and beyond. He was a leader in the movement to end MTR and a good friend. He is deeply missed.

Spui

Being from a big city, and traveling to others, creates a set of behaviors and cautions that usually come from a few painful experiences. It also creates a self-confidence, which enables the smooth transition from one chaotic city to the next. And we adjust our behavior in relation to the perceived inherent danger level of the locale. A deep phone conversation at the end of a busy day in Amsterdam, a city in which I feel quite at home, paused me on a bench in a lovely park, where I placed my backpack next to me. In the space of seconds, I sensed it simply disappear. Panicked, phone in the pocket, I turned to the three men sitting at the next bench and asked if they had seen someone take my bag.

In spite of the lack of a visible perpetrator, I raced breathlessly down the street they indicated, and asked a waiter on the sidewalk who had not seen someone running away with a blue/orange backpack. I raced back to the scene of the crime, queried the witnesses again, and, becoming suspicious at their vague responses and their rather suspicious demeanor, offered them 500Eur to get my backpack returned; to which one of the men responded that if I gave him the 500, he would call the perp.
All the while, my brain was reviewing the incident, and marveling at the speed and quiet with which it transpired, and settling on the fact that there were no running feet. Suddenly it was clear, my bag was still there and a cursory search of the environs turned it up under a pile of bicycles. My antagonist promptly changed his tune, assuring me that he had been watching my back, and that I should reward him. My declaration that he was lucky I was not looking for the police met with a meager attempt to look and sound menacing. Needless to say, my relief at finding laptop, passport, money, and whatever else therein which loss would be catastrophic, and desire to continue my evening trumped my drive for a justice I knew could never be obtained, and waving him away like so many pests in the city, I continued on my way.

Amsterdam is a place where the social contract somehow, miraculously, seems to work. Somehow many different with their distinct histories and motivations go about their business in relative harmony.
These men that tried to take my bag were black. As someone coming from the USA, where the policemen look like robocops, and to be a man of color means a certainty of harassment in life, this smooth functioning of society seems unusual. When two clean-cut Dutch policemen rode by me some time later, I stopped them, related the incident, and directed them toward the perpetrators. In the USA, I probably would not have, from a combination of my own bad experiences with police, concern for police mistreatment of minorities, and a sense of futility about the efficacy of action.
Conversely, in a place where the “social contract” is working, one feels obliged to participate, even though the possibility of “justice” is equally slim. But at least they know someone is watching.

A Day in the Life of A Photographer

One of the things I love about my job is that I never have to do the same thing two days in a row. On any given day it can alternate from satisfying and frustrating to terrifying, and the next day will surely be different. This is not to complain, rather to confess that if I don't keep changing it up, I get bored with myself, then self-destructive.
And I have been very lucky to have two branches of my art for which I am so passionate: making portraits of some of the greatest artists and thinkers of our day, and then being feted for my own body of "artistic work" about a subject for which I care so deeply.

It's a real honor to be able to make portraits of these women and men who are the best in the world at what they do. What I want to show is that mixture of intelligence, ability, curiosity, tenacity, and luck that makes them unique.
I make pictures of environmental issues because I care so much and believe I can, with luck, tenacity, curiosity, and ability, bring a unique viewpoint to their urgency and ubiquity.
So I pursue these two branches of my craft with equal passion, which inform and enhance each other. The essence of photography is the capturing of the precise moment in time when subject, composition and lighting come together to make a magic picture, and then I just count myself lucky to be there with a working camera.

The World's Great Composers

as featured on the cover of Gramophone Magazine

Albany Terminal

How quickly we change from a world in which extracting a barrel of oil from some cold distant place and shipping it via a tenuous supply chain across a continent seemed like a great deal – until the price of oil dropped below $50 a barrel, far below the cost of getting that oil from the frozen North.
So who, in these giddy days of easy oil, wants to hear any grousing about old train cars carrying precarious amounts of oil through fragile regions of the USA?

Railroad tank cars at terminal for off-loading oil onto barges

America's new-found oil prosperity has a number of causes, one of the most productive being the Bakken shale formation in the remotest part of North Dakota, near the border with Canada which has pushed the USA up to the lead of world oil producers. So much oil is being pumped there, in fact, that they don't know what to do with it. There is no infrastructure to get it out of this remote location, to the point that drillers are burning off the natural gas found with the oil just to get to the oil. The only transportation infrastructure in the region is the railroad which had been used to haul grain. Now the grain rots at the terminal because the trains are hauling oil, to the tune of 50 trains a week, and that is just on one of the many train routes out of the Bakken. This oil is unusually volatile, and these trains are fully loaded and heavy. This, and the poor state of America's rail lines combine to produce a series of accidents waiting to happen. In summer 2013, a Canadian town, Lac-Megantic, was literally blown off the map by one of these "Bomb Trains." A ludicrous number of these trains have exploded, spilled, and crashed damaging lives, property, and the environment.

Long train of tank cars on Canadian Pacific train line

There are two main rail freight routes across North America, Canadian Pacific (the old Delaware and Hudson Line) which goes north of the great lakes, through Canada, winding down a precipitous cliff above Lake Champlain as it comes back into the USA, and CSX (the old New York Central line) comes through Chicago, and on the south side of the Great Lakes, both terminating in Albany, where it is off-loaded onto barges and shipped to refineries up and down the east coast.
Between the poor maintenance of the infrastructure, the laughable safety record of the industry, the volume of product being moved, and the fragility of the ecosystems through which the network passes, the only question is when will be the next disaster, not if. But perhaps we should wait until one of these trains filled with oil derails and plunges into Lake Champlain before we protest this nonsense, or another small town gets blown off the map (who cares if a few more Canadians die anyway), or perhaps we wait until one of those barges capsizes and spills its contents into the Hudson?

Children on playground next to railroad tank cars

This discussion is about the safety and reliability of the transportation infrastructure, and leaves aside the larger question of our overall reliance on petroleum. As a society, we are ignoring both questions. As New Yorkers, we should address this question of the reckless movement of a toxic, volatile material through our neighborhoods. The geopolitical anomaly of cheap oil is temporary, and soon those trains will once again be running down the Great Lakes.

InterCity

You arrive at New York's Penn Station fifteen minutes ahead of the train's scheduled departure, uncharacteristic of you, but your morning meeting in DC is important, and out of nervousness, you left the apartment a little early. While you stand on the platform, you shake your head thinking of the old days in which you would be biting your fingernails in the taxi crawling through traffic to the airport, and suffer the indignities of the security line for a flight, the door to door time being four hours. You never cease to marvel at the sleek white bullet trains as this one pulls into the station, or at the ease of the 2 hours door to door that your journey will take today.

High speed train in Hamburg Station











Though this may seem like a fantasy, it is the reality today in Europe. Germany, especially, has made tremendous investments in its high-speed rail system, and is reaping the rewards. The world marvels at the German miracle, but it is no miracle, it is the result of smart investment. The Deutsche Bahn connects Europe, creates a very efficient place for people to work and live, and, not coincidentally, binds the continent together. Germany is also making major investments in renewable energy, investments that will pay off many times in the future, as have the investments in high-speed trains.

Evening storm clouds over wind mills in Baltic Sea










In America while our politicians debate the reality of climate change, scientists, unless they are under the pay of climate deniers, unanimously stress the urgency for action to reduce carbon release. Investments are never easy when they are made, but they pay off. As the world changes, the conditions will favor new industries, and the old interests will resist that change. It has always been so: carriage makers undoubtedly fought the dominance of the automobile. The world will change, and carbon energy will be obsolete. Those that have invested in alternatives will come out ahead, those economies that have been dominated and directed by obsolete industries will stumble.

Humans are not good at reacting to threats that they cannot see. When there are opposing information sources, one saying to worry, change will happen, the other saying not to worry, one wants to believe the voice of inertia. But the time has come to act, and get that fast train to DC.

Images from the Bakken

I can always count on myself to do the wrong thing.
Often I act even knowing that it is the wrong thing, but usually it's just a reflex.

As a visual artist in the digital age, one struggles with the questions of reproduction, rights, usage, and of course money.
Reflexively one wants to limit access to images, and thus make every use more dear, yes? Isn't that the basic model of supply and demand? And we have all watched the media giants struggle with that question, losing their shirts more often than not.

Then there are the respective policies of the web giants with whom we entrust our oeuvre, all of whom claim unlimited usage of our property.
All these factors have caused me to limit the exposure of pictures on the internet.

But there are stories to tell, and social media provides a great platform for so doing.
And, these stories won't be told if the pictures stay interred on hard drives.

Letting go and resignation are often inevitable aspects of contemporary life, a two-step that we seem to do automatically in this world. Because who can question every issue, read every notification, check the ingredients of every product?

One story that burns to be told over and over is the source of the petroleum we use so heedlessly. As we have exhausted the easy access resources, we must now exploit the remote, and they are generally located in more challenging topographies and at greater distance from help.

One of the fruitful new exploits in the USA is the Bakken Shale Formation in the bread basket of North Dakota, from which we are extracting a goodly amount of oil using unimaginable volumes of fresh water, while, like a junkie that prefers the drug to even food, we allow grain to rot for want of transport to market. The trains are all busy carrying the oil to refineries.
Meanwhile the farms that once fed the nation are left with piles of radioactive drilling waste and contaminated water.

One wonders how to tell this complex story with a visual narrative, whether to create a story board and illustrate the process step by step, or perhaps lay out my method and timetable, thus my slice, and then show the pictures as they were taken.

Given the arbitrary schedule of social media viewers, we have opted for a more random presentation, and will post these pictures more or less as they were shot, hoping that anyone who is interested will go back, look at the totality, and formulate their own impression of the process.

The Real Reward

Among my working artist friends runs a common joke about the hardships of a career that forces one to sleep late, while away most of the morning drinking coffee and complaining about galleries, then spend a few hours attending to the mundane business of life, only to reconvene over some libations and resume the discussions. But in actual fact, the life of the artist is a burden: one works long hours for minimal remuneration in pursuit of some nebulous vision. Most of the time is spent alone, testing that definition of insanity which says the sane would not repeatedly try the same thing and expect a different result. And there is the humiliation of constantly needing to sell yourself. The only reason to be an artist is if you can't do something else.
Some few are lucky enough to get their reward monetarily, but for most the recompense comes from seeing others enjoy the fruits of the artist's frustrations.

An artist works with a chosen medium to express his or her vision, a process that usually involves a struggle between imperfect materials and over-exacting specification. And that is when the variables are within reach and controllable to some degree. To arrange an exhibit in a remote location, collaborating with an unfamiliar team, using unknown materials, can be an arduous process. In this situation, one can only pray to be lucky enough that the new team comprises exacting professionals, and the standardization of processes in the modern world will lead to an unexpected good result.

Such was the case with a recent exhibit in Bolzano Italy, and it was a great pleasure to finally travel there, meet the team, and see the result.

But the greatest reward was to see visitors, especially children, enjoying, and really contemplating the work. One of the most interesting aspects of the visual arts, perhaps more than any other form, is the Rorschach Effect: each visitor will take away something different. These pictures are about pollution, and straddle a line between abstract and literal, and even with captions that identify the subject, every viewer brings different preconceptions and opinions that will shape his or her impression. Thus children are the most interesting audience for me, and it was a great reward to see so many and that they were so captivated by the work.

The other great reward was meeting the team that produced and assembled the exhibit at the Museum Südtirol. So many thanks to Massimo and Vito for the great work.

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Please check out my current exhibit: Abstraction of Consumption: A Dream of Plenty

North Dakota Landscape

I'm sitting on a rise in North Dakota (it's pretty flat out here) and admiring the rolling farmland that has supplied our country with grain for so long. After the beauty of the landscape, so different from where I was raised, in the Deep South, what strikes me first is the constancy of the wind. In the three days I have been here, it is always there. From my perch, I would expect windmills as far as the eye could see. After all, who could argue with free electricity? Instead, I'm surrounded by drill rigs, each a tremendous industrial zone on its own "pad" cut out of the farmland. The traffic on this small dirt farming road is constant, most of it being tanker trucks hauling fresh water to the sites and contaminated water away, the process of "hydro-fracking" being such a thirsty one.

Discussions with local people orient mostly around the jobs the industry has brought to the community, and everyone wants prosperity for themselves and their neighbors. Then they might wistfully speak about how the town has changed from a place where no one ever locked their doors to a Wild West boom town with crime and infrastructure overload. There is a tremendous influx of people who have come here for work, from the oil field workers to the waitresses. At a point in history when our country has actively exported so many of its manufacturing jobs overseas, and gutted the middle class, leaving your family to come to ND for a well paying job seems like a good opportunity.

And we are told this is the way it must be. "Progress has its costs." But it's only this way because the people that are making the real money from these extraction industries are preventing any change. The senators who give impassioned speeches about climate change being a hoax, and decrying the conspiracy of the scientists who would impose world government on us are not stupid. They are venal.

Our economy will change. Will it happen at our behest, and evolve into an economy of sustainability, or will it happen in reaction to multiple catastrophic weather events that destroy coastal infrastructure and completely disrupt agriculture, and rising sea levels which force us away from the coasts?

Like all economic booms based on extractive industries, this one will end. The irony is that this could be a boom based on implementing a new paradigm, and that boom would not end. Windmills need constant maintenance, but they don't need water, and they don't cause climate change.

Red Tide

As summer is finally upon us, I can't help but think about an issue I encountered in a big way while shooting along the Jersey Shore last fall.

Red tide is a (usually) toxic to humans and animals algal bloom caused by a combination of warm water, sunlight, and nutrient overloading (from fertilizer and sewerage). It can cause rashes and other manifestations in people coming in contact with it, the most severe being death for those who eat infected seafood.
Since bivalves and crustaceans continuously strain water, they accumulate large amounts of the algae, which, being toxic, is a real problem for shellfish consumption, both those who consume it, and the economy that provides it.

Red tide is also catastrophic to marine fauna because, when it dies, the bacteria that consume it absorb all the oxygen in the water, thus suffocating the other marine organisms. There have been red tides throughout history, the difference being that now we know the causes and how to decrease the occurrences.

So it was with some astonishment that, while doing a photo flight to look at Post-Sandy construction on the Jersey Shore, I saw a giant red tide in New York Harbor.
Given the health and environmental hazards, I would assume that such a thing would have been newsworthy. Did I miss something, or is it just not "news"?

Algal blooms are one more sign of a natural system in distress, and those come so many and so often these days that such a seemingly insignificant one is hardly noticeable. In fact, we seem intent, as a society, on ignoring them. Facebook posts about nice breakfasts, cute animals, or smiling children garner tremendous response, while those warning about clear and present danger, either to our life support systems or the transparency of our government attract the attention of only the like-minded concerned audience. And certainly many of these issues are complex, seemingly intractable, and come with the erroneous impression that the individual can do nothing about them.

The runoff from excess fertilization causes a surfeit of nutrients in the water, which is the starting factor in the chain of events leading to an algal bloom. The New York Harbor bloom actually posed a serious local hazard to anyone consuming shellfish. But New York Harbor is the least of the problem. The Great Lakes are dying and the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico covered nearly 7,000 sq miles in 2011, and grows larger every year.

Reducing that nutrient loading is a vital but complex issue involving regulation and education. Farmers and homeowners must decrease their fertilizer use, an outcome that will only evolve with a mixture of persuasion and coercion. Success in that goal will require that all the stakeholders realize their contribution to the problem and their gain from the solution.

The True Costs of Coal, with Interest

It seems the day hardly passes without some new industrial disaster popping on to the headlines and disappearing just as quickly, all the while the media derides the environmentalists' anxiety. Often these accidents involve toxins leaking into water supplies, and those who pay attention heave a sigh that it happened in some poor place of little importance. The current disaster is a coal ash spill into the Dan River in North Carolina from the coal ash waste impoundments at a retired power plant owned by Duke Energy, the largest energy producer in the nation. The USA produces about forty percent of its electricity from coal, burning about a billion tons of the mineral per year. Aside from being the largest single cause of climate change, the largest source of uranium, mercury and a host of other toxins released into the environment, coal combustion produces about 100 billion tons of ash waste per year, a toxic mess that comprises the largest waste stream in the country. Ironically, as regulations have forced cleaner emissions into the air, the ash has become even more toxic, as the toxins are mixed in with the solid wastes. There are about 600 ash waste dumps that we know of in the country, and many unknown.

High hazard coal ash waste storage ponds.
Ashville, NC
When the Clean Air and Water Acts were written, certain categories of waste were exempted from regulation, largely because the volumes involved were so great that proper treatment would have been prohibitively expensive. Thus, as a gift to the industries concerned, these "true costs" were effectively shifted to the public, specifically to future generations that would be handed these time bombs and forced to live with the consequences and pay to clean them up. One of those time bombs exploded 10 days ago when a rotting drainage pipe collapsed, releasing tremendous volumes of this minimally regulated toxic waste into a river in North Carolina, which happens to be the drinking water source for people downstream.
Power plants use tremendous amounts of fresh water for steam to spin turbines and for cooling; consequently, they are often built on rivers. Of the coal fired power plants in the USA, the median year of construction is 1966, and of the North Carolina plants for which data is available, the average produces 1,618,795 tons of ash a year. You can do the math, but that adds up to a lot of toxic sludge, and since it is even less regulated than your household garbage, utilities have just built tremendous unlined impoundments next to the power plants (and next to the river) and ignored the problem.

Houses under high hazard coal ash storage ponds
Belmont, NC
These lakes of sludge tend to collapse with distressing regularity, and five years ago, near Knoxville, TN, a major one burst, essentially filling the Emory River with 1.1 billion gallons of coal combustion waste, causing a cleanup bill of $1.1 billion dollars (who do you think will pay it?)

Coal combustion waste from power plant
Terrell, NC
The Kingston disaster focused national attention on the issue, prompting a nationwide evaluation, highlighting the fact that North Carolina is one of the states with the largest number of hazardous coal ash impoundments (31). So this is a known issue. Last year, environmental groups started three separate Clean Water Act lawsuits against Duke Energy to force them to clean up these ticking time bombs, but at the last second, the state stepped in and interceded on behalf of Duke, saving them a fortune in fines, and much embarrassment, and excused them from actually cleaning up the problem. Did we forget to mention that the NC governor, Pat McCrory, worked for Duke Energy for 30 years and also received over a million dollars in "campaign contributions" from Duke Energy? We expect this kind of corruption in the third world, and, one assumes, in North Carolina.

Coal combustion waste from power plant
Walnut Cove, NC
Of course we all know that mercury, lead, uranium, and arsenic, all of which are concentrated in coal ash, are things we don't want to drink, but there is another, possibly even more insidious toxin therein that poisons our drinking water. Hexavalent chromium, which is very soluble in water, first came to public attention thanks to the efforts of Erin Brockovich, and in the last years it has been found in 31 of 35 municipal water supplies sampled in the country. It's one of those elements which proves more toxic with each new study. California has recently lowered its recommended safe limit to 0.02 parts per billion, while the current national limit of 100 ppb has been shown to cause cancer in 1.4 of 1000 people. Note that even before the spill, the Dan River Power Plant was known to be contaminating the groundwater with hexavalent chromium.

Dan River power plant with ash containment ponds
Eden, NC
With the help of Southwings and NRDC, we documented many of the high hazard coal ash sites in the state in 2010.

Meanwhile the EPA, which has been trying to regulate coal ash for years, has been stymied in its efforts by the friends of coal in government. Perhaps this is an ideal time for citizens to pick up the telephone and express their feelings to their elected representatives about keeping coal ash out of our water.

Dan River power plant with ash containment ponds
Eden, NC

Erie and Ontario

One of my current projects is photographing the coasts of the USA.
As climate change impacts become more severe, the coasts will be increasingly affected, from heavy storm damage with tremendous economic impacts, to large-scale amelioration projects which will change the look of littoral areas. We could even witness a societal decision to retreat from the coasts and let them resume their buffering function.

The Great Lakes are a vital part of our coastal perimeter, and conditions are in flux there like everywhere.
While climate change is expected to cause increased storms and rising ocean waters, the effects on The Great Lakes is less well known, though increasing and increasingly erratic storm activity is a universal reality for any region in this age.

Paradoxically, while oceans elevate due to climate change, the lakes shrink due to reduced precipitation (especially snowfall) and increased evaporation. The Great Lakes fishing industry, valued at $7 billion per year, is under threat from numerous sources: invasive species, climate change induced water temperature change, and industry.

LightHawk pilot extraordinaire Bob Keller, with his usual skill, finesse, and insight, volunteered to fly this project. We documented extensive development on the coast, industries that are polluting the water, killing the fish, and contributing to climate change. Some of the highlights:

-The most problematic nuclear plant in the country, with numerous leaks and accidents.

-The most expensive nuclear plant in the country. So expensive, they stopped construction when they were nearly finished.

-A refinery taking tar sands oil, then selling their waste as fuel to the power plant next door, which is the largest killer of fish on the Great Lakes (an estimated value of $30 million worth of fish annually).

The Great Lakes are the seat of the "rust belt;" that stretch of industry that propelled the USA in the era when manufacturing was dominant in the country, and environmental regulation was weak or non-existent.

Much of this has disappeared, but much remains, perpetuating a legacy of pollution and climate change.
Among the points of interest:

-Seven coal-fired power plants emitting a total of: 43,000,000 tons of CO2, and over 2,300 pounds of mercury.
-The site of America's failed attempt at nuclear waste reprocessing, one of the most toxic sites in the country.
-Abandoned power plants, and paper mills.
-A train locomotive factory that is scaling back production due to reduced demand for coal, a result of hydro-fracking.
-A harbor with material transfer stations being dredged and dumping tremendous amounts of silt out into the lake.

The Great Lakes are a tremendous source of food and fresh water, two resources which are becoming increasingly rare in our day. We might do well to put efforts toward protecting them.