The Green House as Classroom

When the actors Alysia Reiner and David Alan Basche embarked on a renovation of their four-story, 5,000-square-foot row house in Harlem two years ago, they did not intend for it to become a show house. But a chance meeting with Michela O’Connor Abrams, the president and publisher of Dwell Magazine, led to a Web chronicle of the job on dwell.com, and turned the renovation into a marketing vehicle for manufacturers of environmentally conscious products and a chance for the couple to evangelize on green building.

In Web videos seen by some 268,000 viewers, according to Dwell, Mr. Basche, who played Todd Beamer in the film “United 93,” installs radiant floor heating to save money, as Ms. Reiner recaps how she picked through metal, wood and Sheetrock refuse from the demolition — which Mr. Basche did himself — to recycle it. During an open house sponsored by Dwell last May, 700 people toured the home, learning about its native plant garden and walls coated in plaster made from recycled marble dust and pulverized seashells.

“The building of our home became an opportunity to teach,” said Ms. Reiner. “When you build a house, you learn so much that you never get to use again.”

In letting their home function as both a laboratory and a marketing device, Ms. Reiner and Mr. Basche, it turns out, are not unique. Green show houses, sponsored by magazines, nonprofit groups and developers, are appearing across the country, spreading a message about environmentally conscious building to designers, builders and home buyers, and helping to sell building products.

Environmentalism may turn out to be the biggest thing to hit the construction industry since aluminum siding (which happens to be recyclable). By 2012, green building could be a $20 billion business, up from blossom from a roughly $2 billion, according to a National Association of Home Builders’/McGraw Hill market forecast. But some builders are unfamiliar with the new materials and how to use them. And buyers may not know enough about them to request them.

more from the NY Times

Lessons From an Interglacial Past

When the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its latest report on global warming last summer, one of its most dramatic predictions was that sea levels would rise as much as 0.58 meters during the next century--enough to threaten coastal cities in Southeast Asia and North America. That's nothing, however, compared to what happened about 124,000 years ago. At a certain point during the warm "interglacial" between the last two ice ages, scientist have calculated, sea levels rose almost three times as fast. Given that the IPCC report predicts surface temperatures will reach similar levels during the next 100 years, the panel's dire forecast may not be dire enough.

Locked in ice or flowing freely, the world's amount of water remains relatively constant. But sea levels can undulate 100 meters up or down over several millennia, depending on the ratio of water to ice. That's about how much seas dropped, for example, during the last ice age, which ended about 15,000 years ago--enough to allow the ancestors of Native Americans to walk from Siberia to Alaska courtesy of a land bridge that surfaced across the Bering Strait.

Now an international research team has discovered that during the warm period following the next-to-last ice age, when global temperatures reached at least 2°C above the current average, the seas rose by as much as 6 meters over just a few hundred years. The team reached this conclusion by analyzing microfossil-containing sediments from the floor of the Red Sea. Those sediments preserve the ratio of certain oxygen isotopes that provide strong signals about the strength of currents and other factors. By tracking the ratio over the time the sediments span, the researchers have been able to compute the rate of flow into the Red Sea from the Indian Ocean, which indicates the level of the water. Their analysis, reported online this week in Nature Geoscience, shows that as global warming was in the process of melting the continental glaciers about 124,000 years ago, sea levels began rising at the relatively blistering rate of about 1.6 meters per century. Some of the evidence also shows downswings and upswings in sea level, presumably related to swings in global temperature during the interglacial period.

The rapid rate in ancient times remains relevant, says geoscientist and lead author Eelco Rohling of the University of Southampton's National Oceanography Centre in the U.K. It "offers a warning" to climatologists that sea-level changes can depend strongly on factors that influence ice formation and melting--factors that he says current IPCC climate models understate. The per-century rate of 0.6 meters that the models are predicting for the near future is 1.0 meter less than the findings of Rohling's team. That difference, he says, "clearly identifies" the need to improve the climate models to reflect the impact of glaciation and melting.

Other experts aren't so sure. Geologist William Thompson of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts says that although the IPCC estimates indeed "may be too conservative" and the Red Sea research provides an "important contribution to our understanding of past sea-level changes," there are "significant uncertainties" in the method used by the team, and other studies haven't shown "such high rates of sea-level change."

from Science

With Regrets, New Orleans Is Left Behind

With resignation, anger or stoicism, thousands of former New Orleanians forced out by Hurricane Katrina are settling in across the Gulf Coast, breaking their ties with the damaged city for which they still yearn.

They now cast their votes in small Louisiana towns and in big cities of neighboring states. They have found new jobs and bought new houses. They have forsaken their favorite foods and cherished pastors. But they do not for a moment miss the crime, the chaos and the bad memories they left behind in New Orleans.

This vast diaspora — largely black, often poor, sometimes struggling — stretches across the country but is concentrated in cities near the coast, like this one, or Atlanta or Baton Rouge or Houston, places where the newcomers are still reaching for accommodation.

The break came fairly recently. Sometime between the New Orleans mayor’s race in spring 2006, when thousands of displaced citizens voted absentee or drove in to cast a ballot, and the city election this fall, when thousands did not — resulting in a sharply diminished electorate and a white-majority City Council — the decision was made: there was no going back. Life in New Orleans was over.

Now, they are adjusting to places where the pace is slower, restaurants are fewer, existence is centered on the home, and streets are lonely and deserted after 5 p.m., as in this city in southwest Louisiana. These exiles, still in semi-limbo and barely established in a routine, describe their new lives less in terms of what it now consists of than of what they left behind.

More from the New York Times

Seas could rise twice as high as predicted

The world's sea levels could rise twice as high this century as UN climate scientists have predicted, according to researchers who looked at what happened more than 100,000 years ago, the last time Earth got this hot.

Experts working on the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have suggested a maximum 21st century sea level rise -- a key effect of global climate change -- of about 80 centimetres.

But researchers said in a study appearing today in the journal Nature Geoscience that the maximum could be twice that, or 1.6 metres.

They made the estimate by looking at the so-called interglacial period, 124,000 to 119,000 years ago, when Earth's climate was warmer than it is now due to a different configuration of the planet's orbit around the sun.

That was the last time sea levels reached up to six metres above where they are now, fueled by the melting of the ice sheets that cover Greenland and Antarctica.

The researchers say their study is the first robust documentation of how quickly sea levels rose to that level.

"Until now, there has been no data that sufficiently constrains the full rate of past sea level rises above the present level," lead author Eelco Rohling of Britain's National Oceanography Centre said in a statement.

Rohling and his colleagues found an average sea level rise of 1.6 metres each century during the interglacial period.

Back then, Greenland was three to five degrees Celsius warmer than now -- which is similar to the warming period expected in the next 50 to 100 years, Rohling said.

Current models of ice sheet activity do not predict rates of change this large, but they do not include many of the dynamic processes already being observed by glaciologists, the statement said.

from Reuters

Warming could worsen many problems along coast

Louisiana's coastal parishes and other Gulf communities from Houston to Mobile should build higher and more resilient roads, bridges and other infrastructure to withstand more intense hurricanes and rainstorms, sea level rise and higher temperatures caused by global warming during the next 50 to 100 years, according to a draft report prepared by the federal Department of Transportation and the U.S. Geological Survey. But Louisiana, largely in response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, may be ahead of other states. Transportation and hurricane-protection planners in Baton Rouge are already responding to concerns raised in the report, forging ahead with heat-resistant pavements and higher bridges and levees.

Elsewhere along the coast, transportation planners are only now considering the effects of climate change in the next 100 years, which could include as much as a 4-foot rise in sea level, a 10 percent increase in the intensity of hurricanes, a dramatic increase in the number of days with temperatures of 90 and 100 degrees or higher, and more periods of intense rainfall.

At risk are thousands of miles of roads, hundreds of bridges and dozens of airports that will be flooded more often or could be damaged by periods of high heat or more frequent hurricanes, or whose operations could otherwise be affected by climate changes, according to the report.

The report concludes that the combination of more intense hurricanes and higher sea levels also will expand the area facing potential storm damage, a concern because existing roadway capacity is not designed for large-scale evacuations.

"This preliminary assessment raises clear cause for concern regarding the vulnerability of transportation infrastructure and services in the central Gulf Coast due to climate and coastal changes," the report concludes.

More from The Times Picayune

Late Reversal by U.S. Yields Climate Plan

In a tumultuous final session at international climate talks in which the United States delegates were booed and hissed, the world’s nations committed Saturday to negotiating a new accord by 2009 that, in theory, would set the world on a course toward halving emissions of heat-trapping gases by 2050.

The dramatic finish to the negotiations came after a last-minute standoff during a day of see-saw emotions, with the co-organizer of the conference, Yvo de Boer, fleeing the podium at one point as he held back tears and the representative from Papua New Guinea telling the American delegation to lead, follow or “please get out of the way.”

The standoff started when developing countries demanded the United States agree that the eventual pact not only measure poorer countries’ steps, but also the effectiveness of financial aid and technological assistance from wealthier ones.

The United States did capitulate in that open session, which many observers and delegates said included more public acrimony and emotion than any of the treaty conferences since 1992, when countries drafted the ailing original climate pact, the Framework Convention on Climate Change.

In a broader sense, the closing session of the two-week negotiation here was the culmination of a profound shift over the course of months by the Bush administration from insisting that the 1992 treaty, signed by President Bush’s father, was sufficient on its own to avoid dangerous human interference with the climate.

In 2005 talks in Montreal, for example, the American negotiating team walked out of one session, rejecting any talk of formal negotiations over new steps to improve on that pact.

But since then, the science, and politics, of climate have shifted dramatically.

This year, a set of four reports emerged from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, each cementing more clearly than ever that humans were warming the world, and that unabated emissions would lead to centuries of disrupted climate patterns, rising seas and ecological and social harm.

Along with the science came the Oscar-winning film “An Inconvenient Truth;” Hurricane Katrina, which while not linked to global warming in itself, was a vivid and effective icon; and spiking oil prices, adding urgency to calls for moving away from fossil fuels. Finally, the Supreme Court rejected the Bush administration’s contention that carbon dioxide was not a pollutant under the purview of the Environmental Protection Agency.

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Demolition delayed in Big Easy

Demolition of three public housing complexes, scheduled to start this weekend, was halted yesterday amid complaints about the scarcity of housing for the poor after Hurricane Katrina.

The Housing Authority of New Orleans, which is run by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, agreed to postpone the start of demolition pending a hearing Thursday before City Council. Opponents of the demolition plan had filed a lawsuit contending that the city charter required council's consent.

Work crews had been expected to start demolition today under the housing authority's plan to replace about 4,500 federally administered public housing units with mixed-income, mixed-use development. Demolition at a fourth complex, B.W. Cooper, can continue because the City Council approved demolishing 14 buildings there four years ago, lawyers said.

Rachel Wisdom, a lawyer for the housing authority, said that because the city ordinance was vague, the agency agreed that the City Council should take up the matter before any demolition.The council backs redevelopment, but with caveats. On Nov. 1, the City Council passed a resolution to support a congressional bill that calls for phased redevelopment and one-for-one replacement of public housing units. By comparison, the HUD plan envisioned quicker redevelopment and a reduction in the number of public housing units.

The proposal has sparked lawsuits and street demonstrations in a city where housing for the poor has been scarce and homelessness has soared since Hurricane Katrina. Rental prices have risen sharply.

Advocates for public housing residents say the redevelopment plan won't create enough housing to allow thousands of exiled residents to return. HUD says about 3,000 families who once lived in New Orleans public housing remain scattered, and social workers say the number of homeless in the area has doubled to about 12,000.

More from The Philadelphia Inquirer

Air testing in FEMA trailers begins next week

Hundreds of families displaced by Hurricane Katrina will get some unexpected holiday guests starting next week as the federal government begins testing the air quality in trailers it issued in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Numerous trailer residents have complained of health problems linked to high levels of formaldehyde, a common preservative and suspected carcinogen released by many construction materials.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will test 500 randomly selected travel trailers and mobile homes for the toxin starting Dec. 21, the agency announced Thursday in a news conference with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Testing had been postponed until this month because "we wanted to make sure we had a test that was scientifically based, that we had a credible agency that really understood formaldehyde to come in and do this," said FEMA Administrator David Paulison.

About 46,700 families who lost their homes to Hurricane Katrina live in government-issued trailers throughout the Gulf Coast region. Roughly 33,000 of those families are in Louisiana and about 13,000 are in Mississippi.

More from USA Today

Cities cultivate 2 types of green

Squatting on the roof of a row house with a panoramic view of the sewage plants and warehouses that surround the South Bronx, James Wells sounds like a tree-hugger.

He photographs the progress of seedlings he planted on the roof, one of his first "green roof" installations, and explains how roofs covered by soil and plants, more trees on the ground and cleaner parks are key to fighting the pollution that overwhelms the neighborhood. As he speaks, a pungent rotting smell emanates from a sewage plant.

"Imagine living under these types of conditions," says Wells, 29. "It's one of the reasons asthma rates are so high in the Bronx."

Two years ago, Wells made an improbable conversion from convict to environmentalist. He was just out of prison after serving 10 years for armed robbery and couldn't find a job that would pay enough to make the rent.

Then he found Sustainable South Bronx, and he found a calling.

Since 2003, the environmental group has trained 70 former drug addicts, welfare recipients and convicts for jobs in landscaping, ecological restoration, green roof installation and hazardous waste cleanup.

The Bronx group is at the forefront of a movement to put low-income and low-skilled workers in "green collar" jobs: manual work in fields that help the environment.

Cities trying to strengthen the local economy and go green see the solution in green-collar jobs. Jobs in the $341-billion-a-year green industry have the potential to move people out of poverty, says Trenton, N.J., Mayor Douglas Palmer.

"This is a frontier that's going to open for the whole country, but especially for us in the Midwest and Northeast, where we need to grow our economy," says Palmer, president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. A conference report out next month will advise mayors on how to set up green job programs.Cities are creating green-collar jobs by partnering with employers and social service and job placement agencies.

"There is only so much you can do replacing fancy light bulbs and only so many bicycles you can buy before you're done," says Van Jones, who founded the group. "You need to look at what else you can do. … This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to connect low-skilled people with dignified, promising career opportunities."

Advocates of green-collar job programs say concerns about the environment have been focused on hybrid cars, polar bears and the melting ice cap. They want more attention on improving conditions in poor communities, which studies show bear the brunt of environmental hazards because they have more power plants, industrial warehouses and waste facilities.

"We want to use the green-collar movement to move people out of poverty," says Majora Carter, head of Sustainable South Bronx. "Little green fairies do not come out of the sky and install solar panels. Someone has to do the work."

More from USA Today

Gore Urges Bold Moves in Nobel Speech

He has said it again and again, with increasing urgency, to anyone who will listen. And on Monday, former Vice President Al Gore used the occasion of his 2007 Nobel Peace Prize lecture here to tell the world in powerful, stark language: Climate change is a “real, rising, imminent and universal” threat to the future of the Earth.

Saying that “our world is spinning out of kilter” and that “the very web of life on which we depend is being ripped and frayed,” Mr. Gore warned that “we, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency — a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential even as we gather here.” But, he added, “there is hopeful news as well: we have the ability to solve this crisis and avoid the worst — not all — of its consequences, if we act boldly, decisively and quickly.”

The ceremony marking the 2007 prize, given to Mr. Gore and to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, comes as representatives of the world’s governments are meeting on the Indonesian island of Bali to negotiate a new international agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The new treaty would replace the Kyoto protocol, which expires in 2012.

At the ceremony in the city hall in Oslo, Mr. Gore called on the negotiators to establish a universal global cap on emissions and to ratify and enact a new treaty by the beginning of 2010, two years early. And he singled out the United States and China — the world’s largest emitters of carbon dioxide — for failing to meet their obligations in mitigating emissions. They should “stop using each other’s behavior as an excuse for stalemate,” he said.

In an interview before his speech, Mr. Gore said that the Bush administration was “the principal stumbling block to progress in Bali right now” but that he foresaw a change in American policy, regardless of which party won the 2008 election.

“I think that they do not accurately represent the wishes of the American people,” he said of the United States government. “We are in the midst of a process of massive change. The world is coming to grips with this crisis, but we are in a race against time. The United States of America, the natural leader of the world community, should lead instead of obstructing.”

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Long Desired, Streetcar Returns to New Orleans

Progress comes slowly to New Orleans, but come it does. And one of the latest signs of that progress — more than two years after Hurricane Katrina — is the return of the beloved St. Charles Avenue Streetcar to Uptown New Orleans.

Its sound had been sorely missed along the grandest avenue of New Orleans.

To hear that old rumble of steel wheels come grumbling up behind you, to turn and see those green streetcars back on the tracks again is like seeing an old friend who's been away a while. And that means something around here.Johnny Avie has been a New Orleans streetcar driver for 25 years.

"I was just thinking about how much hasn't changed," he says. "Like today, the weather is changing. It's getting from being cold to warm and the tracks actually sweats, like a person does, because of the temperature."

And sweaty tracks mean slippery tracks. So, on mornings like this one, Avie has to click a button on the floor that drops sand on the tracks as the car goes along. There's no modern technology at play — no little wipers out in front to mop up the tracks.

The St. Charles Streetcar line has eschewed modernization and uses the same streetcars the city bought in 1923. That means riders do without heat and air conditioning.

Hot or cold, riders "love their streetcar," Avie says.

Winter's really not too bad and in the summer, there's nothing quite like putting all the windows down and catching a breeze as you roll under the canopy of giant, old oaks, passing the fabulous mansions of the Garden District.

More from NPR

Many Children Struggling After ’05 Storms

At least 46,600 children along the Gulf Coast are still struggling with mental health problems and other serious aftereffects of 2005 hurricanes, according to a new study by the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and the Children’s Health Fund.

Many of these children are performing poorly in school and have limited access to medical care, according to the study, which combines government statistics with data collected by a group of researchers that has been closely following about 1,250 families displaced by the storm.

The children most at risk are those who have returned to their home states of Louisiana and Mississippi but lack stable living situations, the study says.

They are children like Nicole D. Riley’s daughter Isis, who is about to turn 4. Her family left New Orleans the day before Hurricane Katrina and moved five times over a short period before ending up in the large government-operated trailer park in Baker, La. All those moves “really didn’t sit well with her,” Ms. Riley said of her daughter. “When we got out here to the park, she was out of control, out of hand. She was not like that before the storm.”

Although the uncontrollable temper tantrums have stopped, Ms. Riley said in a telephone interview, Isis remains worrisomely moody, and all three of her children have been suffering from rashes. And they are going to have to move again. The government plans to close the trailer park next spring, and Ms. Riley and her fiancé are already looking for a new place to live.

Doctors treating Isis and other children “have been reporting just tremendous problems, especially the mental health providers,” said Dr. Irwin Redlener, president of the Children’s Health Fund and director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia. “We are alarmed at the continuing downward trend, the longer the state of limbo continues.”

more from the NY Times

Mangroves help Indonesia fend off climate change

Dark, foul-smelling mangrove swamps can help Indonesia's coastal communities fend off rising seas and stronger tropical storms caused by climate change, experts say.

As 190 nations meet for Dec. 3-14 U.N. climate talks on the resort island of Bali, looking for ways to broaden a pact to slow down global warming, experts say mangroves are not getting the attention they deserve as a protective coastal barrier.

"Mangroves are a natural way to lessen the severity of the impact (of climate change) to coastal communities," said urban planning and climate change expert Enda Atmawidjaja.

"They are natural sea barriers, and they are also much cheaper then building sea walls made of concrete."

Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago of 17,000 islands, is extremely vulnerable to a rise in sea levels, storm surges or more intense tropical storms linked to global warming.

The U.N. climate panel says seas could rise by 18 to 59 cms (7-23 inches) by 2100. More than 40 million of Indonesia's 220 million population live less than 10 meters above sea level.

Mangroves are trees and shrubs that grow along a saline strip along the coast, now and then swamped by tides. The thin roots provide a habitat for shrimps and small fish, break up waves and hold back silt and soil from that damage coral reefs.

Mangroves can keep rising seas at bay to a certain extent, giving communities more time to adjust. The trees can help people cope with heatwaves and help break up waves in the event of a tropical storm.

more from Reuters

I-5 still closed; Wash. flood damage could top $1 billion

For evacuees returning to homes still swamped by several feet of brown water, the personal toll from this week's floods was obvious, devastating and in some cases complete.

But the full extent of the losses remains an open question as state officials scramble to quantify and respond to the misery.

The devastation is so widespread that emergency management officials are unable to provide even rough estimates of how much damage has taken place.

"We are talking an unfathomable amount," said Kyle Herman, a spokesman for the state Emergency Management Division, which is collecting data from local officials throughout the flooded areas. "We won't know until the end of the week at the earliest."

With extensive damage in King, Lewis, Pacific, Mason, Kitsap, Thurston, Grays Harbor and Wahkiakum counties, Herman said the number of homes and businesses that have been destroyed or damaged will likely be measured in thousands rather than hundreds.

In terms of dollar value, Gov. Chris Gregoire would only hint at the magnitude of the problems.

"I can't imagine it's something short of $1 billion based on what I saw," Gregoire said. "Search and rescue -- the largest in a decade. The flooding down in Lewis County is as bad and worse than it was in 1996, which is the last known and worst that anybody can think of.

"But we are a little reticent to really quantify it until we get a better handle on things."

The state Department of Transportation says Interstate 5 at Chehalis will remain closed until this weekend and perhaps longer.

The closure has interrupted traffic on the main highway corridor between Seattle and Portland. The interstate carries about 54,000 vehicles a day through the area.

Gregoire was preparing a damage estimate for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and said she had pledges of support from top officials.

She expected a presidential emergency declaration that could speed delivery of food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies.

In Grays Harbor County, as many as 25,000 remained without electricity Wednesday evening. Power was gradually returning to the county, including downtown Aberdeen, where about half the city flood pumps were working.

The garden of the future?

Imagine a garden that needs no weeding, watering, digging or feeding and can be left to look after itself for weeks, even months, on end. Go further: it's organic, wildlife-friendly, disease resistant, reduces your weekly food bill and brings fashionable foraging to your doorstep.

It might sound too good to be true, but this garden can be a reality for anyone with some outdoor space, whether it's the backyard of an inner-city terrace or the grounds of a country vicarage.


Just over a year ago Jennifer Lauruol's modest garden at her home on a new housing estate in Lancaster amounted to little more than a lawn that the previous owner's dog had been peeing on for the past four years. Others may have seen stained grass, but Lauruol's vision was to mimic a system of planting that goes back to the Aztecs but was reinterpreted by the late Robert Hart, a visionary gardener who brought the idea to Britain in the 1960s and named it "forest gardening".

Studying the woodlands and forest around his Wenlock Edge home on the Shropshire/Wales border, Hart realised that they were both productive and self-maintaining. He set about rearranging his own garden on forest principles with edible layers of self-sustaining perennials that would provide food, fuel and medicines, as well as support wildlife. His philosophy was recorded in two books, The Forest Garden and Beyond the Forest Garden (Green Books), both published shortly before he died in 2000.

more from the Guardian (UK)

In Alaska’s Far North, Two Cultures Collide

Each summer and fall, the Inupiat, natives of Alaska’s arid north coast, take their sealskin boats and gun-fired harpoons and go whale hunting. Kills are celebrated throughout villages as whaling captains share their catch with relatives and neighbors. Muktuk, or raw whale skin and blubber, is a prized delicacy.

But now, that traditional way of life is coming into conflict with one of the modern world’s most urgent priorities: finding more oil.

Royal Dutch Shell is determined to exploit vast reserves believed to lie off Alaska’s coast. The Bush administration backs the idea and has issued offshore leases in recent years totaling an area nearly the size of Maryland.

Those leases have received far less attention than failed efforts to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but they may prove to be far more important. By some estimates, the oil under the Alaskan seabed could exceed the reserves remaining in the rest of the United States, though how much might ultimately be recoverable is uncertain.

Shell is eager to find out. It tried to make headway this summer, only to be stopped by an unusual alliance of Inupiat whalers and environmental groups who filed a suit in federal court.

They argue that noisy drilling off the Alaska coast could disrupt migration routes for the bowhead whales, making it impossible for the Inupiat to capture their allotted share of about 60 animals per year. A court hearing is scheduled for today to consider whether the company can move forward, though a ruling is not expected for months.

Native communities are not unalterably opposed to oil production — on the contrary, many rely on oil for their livelihoods. The North Slope Borough, a countylike governmental unit the size of Minnesota where most of Alaska’s 10,000 Inupiat live, gets the bulk of its $98 million budget each year from taxing onshore oil operations.

Native corporations also derive a large part of their business from serving the oil industry in Prudhoe Bay. Community leaders are caught between a desire to preserve traditional whaling and the economic necessity of permitting the oil industry to move into new areas.

“It’s a hell of a dilemma,” said Edward S. Itta, the mayor of the North Slope Borough, who is opposed to Shell’s drilling plans. “Without a doubt, America’s energy needs are way up, and something’s going to happen up there. It’s a way of life against an opposing value. This way of life has value; nobody can put it in dollars and cents.”

More from The New York Times

Flood risk faces 150 mln in cities by 2070 - OECD

As many as 150 million people in the world's big coastal cities are likely to be at risk from flooding by the 2070s, more than three times as many as now, according to a report released on Tuesday.

Climate change, population growth and urban development will mean the number at risk will rise from the current 40 million while total property and infrastructure exposure is forecast to rise to $35 trillion -- 9 percent of projected global GDP.

The report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, put together by disaster modelling firm Risk Management Solutions and leading scientists, is the first part of the largest ever study on urban coastal flood exposure.

The report analysed the vulnerability now and in the future of 130 port cities to a major flood, on a scale likely to occur once in 100 years.

Miami in Florida will remain the city with the highest value of property and infrastructure assets exposed to coastal flooding caused by storm surge and damage from high winds, the report said.

The city has exposed assets of $400 billion today. Those are projected to rise in value to over $3.5 trillion by 2070.

But with rapid economic development in Asia, Guangzhou in China will be the second most exposed city in terms of assets in 2070, followed by New York, Kolkata, Shanghai, Mumbai, Tianjin, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Bangkok, the report said.

more from Reuters

Mood Problems Prevalent After Katrina, Survey Finds

The first study to rigorously assess the mental health fallout from Hurricane Katrina has confirmed what many researchers and Gulf Coast residents predicted: that mood problems after the storm occurred about as often as in any natural disaster ever studied, and that the delayed government response almost certainly made the problem worse.

The analysis, a continuing survey of more than 1,000 residents of New Orleans and surrounding areas, found that 17 percent of people in the city reported signs of serious mental illness in the month after the disaster, compared with 10 percent in surrounding areas. The estimated prevalence of such problems in the general population is 1 to 3 percent in any month.

Post-traumatic stress symptoms — which include flashbacks, nightmares, a hair-trigger temper — were by far the most common type of mental problem and were often associated with incidents that happened in the storm’s wake, like property losses, robberies and assaults.

Nearly half of New Orleans residents in the survey reported some significant symptoms of anxiety in that first month after the storm, about as high as can be expected in a community hit by a natural disaster, according to the study, being published today in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Women, young adults and lower-income residents were hardest hit, just as studies of previous disasters have found.

more from the NY Times

Despite promises, dead zone growing

A decade ago, a team of government experts and environmental researchers banded together to tackle an alarming -- and growing -- disturbance in the Gulf of Mexico.

A lifeless, oxygen-depleted band of ocean water stretching from the mouth of the Mississippi River to the Texas border had grown to more than 6,000 square miles that summer, larger than the state of Connecticut.

Four years later, their research on the Gulf "dead zone" led to an agreement among nine states, numerous federal agencies and two American Indian tribes to significantly reduce the size by 2015.

Solving the problem is a vast undertaking. Fertilizer runoff and wastewater from farms and towns upstream in the nation's heartland pour billions of pounds of excess nutrients into the Mississippi, and eventually the Gulf, each year, sparking unnatural algae blooms that choke off the oxygen supply vital for marine life.

With diffuse streams and rivulets of the Mississippi draining more than 40 percent of the continental United States, pinpointing and halting the source of the dead zone has eluded policymakers over the years. And targeted federal financing to address the problem has never materialized.

Now at the halfway mark for the 2015 goal, the dead zone is still growing -- reaching nearly 8,000 square miles this year -- one of the largest recorded. The federal and state task force recently released an update to the reduction plan, calling for states along the Mississippi River to enact strict water quality standards and encouraging farmers to limit fertilizers on land near streams.

But the new action plan states the 2015 goal is unlikely to be met, and record high corn prices from the ethanol boom are bringing more farmland on line. Without more political will from all states, including Louisiana, many researchers say the dead zone problem will persist long into the future, at the peril of the Gulf's ecosystem.

"These are things we all were well aware of in 2000 and 2001. There's nothing particularly new in what they're proposing," said Don Scavia, a professor of natural resources and environment at the University of Michigan who led one of the first federal studies of the dead zone in 2000. "We're now starting to find impacts on the shrimp catch. . . . We're at the point where it may be hard to recover, because the ecosystem has changed so much."

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A Broken City. A Tree. Evening.

“IN an instant all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness.”

When the actor Wendell Pierce spoke these words in performances of “Waiting for Godot” here last month, he really was in the middle of nothingness, or what looked a lot like it.

The performances, by the Classical Theater of Harlem, took place outdoors in parts of the city particularly hard hit by Hurricane Katrina and slow to recover. In the Gentilly section, a gutted, storm-ruined house was used as a set. In the Lower Ninth Ward, where one of the largest black neighborhoods in a mostly black city was all but erased by roof-high water surging through a levee, the intersection of two once-busy streets was the stage.

The streets are empty now, lined with bare lots. A few trees and houses stand far off. Reclamation work by returning homeowners and volunteers is under way. But some residents live in cramped trailers supplied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, here widely despised for its inefficiency. Under the circumstances, Beckett’s words sounded less like an existentialist cri de coeur than like a terse topographic description.

The “Godot” performances were not isolated theatrical events. They were part of a larger project conceived by the New York artist Paul Chan, 34, who is well known to the international art world for his video animations of paradises embattled and lost, and to law enforcement officials for his activist politics.

In person quiet, good-humored and self-contained, he is an unlikely firebrand. He is also an unusual model for an artist, being one for whom creating objects in the studio and dynamic situations outside it are equally important, and for whom reading, teaching, talking and writing are all part of a larger something called art.

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