Governments are taking action against single-use plastics. British Columbia has recently passed a law banning…
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At a conference in Seattle this summer, Coca-Cola set up shop in an exhibition hall to show off one of its most recent sustainability initiatives. A six-foot-tall interactive jukebox invited passersby to listen to “recycled records” — seven audio tracks that, according to Coca-Cola, represent the world’s first album made with recordings of the plastic recycling process.
The project, produced for Coca-Cola by the DJs Mark Ronson and Madlib, was meant to celebrate Coke’s decision to move from green to clear plastic bottles for three of its brands: Sprite, Fresca, and Seagram’s. Because clear plastic bottles are easier to recycle than green ones, Coca-Cola said they would advance a “closed-loop bottle-to-bottle economy” that uses materials more efficiently and creates less waste.
“Green plastic gets stuck in single-use ruts,” the company proclaims. “Clear plastic unlocks loops as sweet as donuts.”
It was just one of many creative displays at Circularity 23, an annual conference whose objective is to accelerate the “circular economy,” a term that generally refers to market systems that minimize raw resource extraction and waste. For two and a half days, 1,400 attendees — mostly from the world of corporate sustainability — wandered the halls of the Hyatt Regency hotel in Seattle, where companies like Coca-Cola were promoting their own ostensibly circular business practices. Many of these involved plastic: “reclaiming” it from rivers to create disposable mailing envelopes, melting it into its chemical building blocks so it can (theoretically) be used again, advertising its recyclability with QR codes on labels.
Circular messaging was everywhere — understandably, given the name of the conference. But what was harder to find was a succinct definition of the word: What exactly is circularity, and what makes a product or practice circular?
“I came away from the conference feeling like circularity has become synonymous with recycling, like we’ve lost the true definition,” said Sarah King, the head of Greenpeace Canada’s oceans and plastics campaign and one of a few environmental advocates who attended the event.
Her concerns reflect a broader uneasiness within the environmental community about the way corporations have rallied around circularity, aggressively embracing it in their communications but not necessarily living up to its standards in practice. Coca-Cola’s clear plastic bottles, for instance, are a form of disposable plastic — made out of oil and gas, designed for just a few minutes of use, unlikely to be recycled, and fundamentally toxic to people and the environment. It’s also worth noting that an environmental group’s audit has found Coca-Cola to be the world’s biggest contributor to plastic litter every year for the past five years. (Coca-Cola did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.)
Some groups like Just Zero, a nonprofit that advocates for waste reduction, have dropped the term “circular economy” altogether. “The phrase is now being used to serve the interests of the huge corporations that are damaging our climate and spewing toxics into our communities,” said Kevin Budris, Just Zero’s advocacy director.
“At this point,” he added, “any time I hear the phrase ‘circular economy’ I assume that it’s greenwashing.”
The idea of a circular economy has its roots in the environmental scholarship of the 1960s and ’70s. Writings like “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth,” published in 1966 by the American economist Kenneth Boulding, warned that ever-growing demand for resources could not be sustained on a finite planet. They advocated for a closed-loop system in which all resources are conserved.
These concepts resonated in a nascent environmental movement that sought to restore humans’ relationship with nature. In addition to the general environmental calamities of the 1960s through ’80s — oil spills in California, a polluted river that repeatedly caught on fire in Cleveland — the 1973 oil embargo by Middle Eastern states highlighted Western countries’ crippling dependence on nonrenewable resources. Though it’s unclear who first used the term “circular economy” — some say it was the British economists David Pearce and R. Kerry Turner in the ’80s — environmentalists were thinking critically about resource conservation and the limits to growth. (Incidentally, that was the title of a popular book published in 1972 by MIT researchers, which discussed the need to live within planetary boundaries by reaching an “equilibrium society.”)
Over the next several decades, however, the notion of a circular economy evolved into something more market-oriented. It came to prominence alongside increasingly popular ideas about “green growth” and “sustainable development,” which accepted the premise that resources must be used efficiently, but stopped short of renouncing growth. The circular economy was seen as a kind of compromise: Conserve resources, but don’t sacrifice profit.
This has made the concept extremely popular, both in the corporate world and on the international stage. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, or EMF — a nonprofit formed in 2010 to promote the circular economy — published a report in 2015 saying that a circular economy could “decouple global economic development from finite resource consumption.” That same year, the European Commission launched its first-ever “circular economy action plan,” which laid out dozens of actions that the European Union could take to promote “sustainable consumption and production patterns.” More recently, the World Economic Forum, the World Bank, the United Nations, the Biden administration, the Chinese government, and dozens — if not hundreds — of smaller state, regional, and city-level governments have also claimed to back some version of a circular economy.
However, precise definitions of the circular economy have been hard to nail down. EMF’s 2015 report said it could be “characterized, more than defined,” while broadly advocating for resource efficiency — whether by extending products’ lifetimes through maintenance and repair or by reusing materials through refurbishment. It described a hierarchy of ways to keep materials in circulation “at their highest utility and value,” with recycling as a last resort when other options had been exhausted.
“The circular economy is a new paradigm for our whole economic system, which makes it really hard to define in one sentence or paragraph,” said Sander Defruyt, who leads an EMF initiative on plastics.
Other explanations of circularity are similarly imprecise, with a tendency to say what a circular economy does or involves rather than what it is. At Circularity 23, for example, instead of defining the circular economy, most speakers gave examples that seemed to vaguely embody its ideals, like buying secondhand clothes or growing new green onions from the roots of those you buy at the store. In a keynote address, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell used it to talk about his parents’ frugal shopping habits. (“We wasted nothing in the Harrell house,” he told the crowd, because his father was always “tight with the money.”) In another speech, Washington state Governor Jay Inslee broadened things even further by insisting that the circular economy should apply not only to physical materials, but also to the “joules and ergs of energy” captured by renewables.
“Everyone is talking about the circular economy, but nobody seems to know what it means,” said Vito Bounsante, technical and policy adviser for the nonprofit International Pollutants Elimination Network. In Europe, where the EU has made billions of euros available for governments, businesses, organizations, and academics to advance its circular economy action plan, he described a cynical, opportunistic scramble to use the term for attention and cash. “Just put the words ‘circular economy’ in your funding proposal, and you’ll get the money,” he said.
In theory, the circular economy captures all three R’s of the simple waste-management hierarchy: reduce, reuse, recycle. But corporate visions of the concept tend to focus on the third R, and mostly for plastics. Indeed, there’s a feeling among environmental groups that the very term “circular economy” has become a kind of code for “more plastics recycling.”
This was apparent at Circularity 23, where speakers spent panel after panel wringing their hands over “hard-to-recycle” plastics: things like bags, wrappers, and films, which are typically not accepted by the facilities that sort and process materials for recycling. Environmental groups argue there’s a simple solution to this glut of stuff: “Stop using it,” according to Judith Enck, president of the advocacy group Beyond Plastics and a former regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency. Advocates say manufacturers should rethink product delivery systems so they don’t rely on packaging at all, or can work with an alternative that isn’t made from plastic. But those solutions were far from many conference-goers’ minds. Instead, they justified plastic packaging on social justice grounds (“It helps make products more accessible to developing economies,” as one chemical company executive put it) and heralded the promise of chemical recycling, a controversial technology that melts plastic into polymers that can theoretically be turned into new products.
“We are pushing chemical recycling because we see that there are materials that can’t be recycled without it,” one panelist said, citing her company’s “salty snacks” packaging as an example.
Defenders argue that chemical recycling could make plastics as circular as glass and aluminum, which are considered to be “infinitely recyclable.” (Unlike plastic, they can be recycled again and again into the same products without degrading.) Even the United Nations Environment Programme has endorsed chemical recycling, describing it in a report published this May as a key solution on the path toward “circularity in plastics.”
However, experts from outside the petrochemical industry say it doesn’t work. Independent investigations have repeatedly found that most chemical recycling projects over the past several decades have failed or never got off the ground due to technical and economic hurdles. Those in operation today mostly turn plastics into fuel to be burned for energy or industrial uses, a process that is not circular under any traditional definition of the word.
Not even mechanical recycling — the more conventional alternative to chemical recycling — seems capable of creating the “plastic circular economy” that many companies advertise. In the U.S., the plastics recycling rate is just 5 percent, and experts say it’s unlikely to improve: There’s simply too much plastic, in too many different varieties — most of which are too expensive or technologically difficult to turn back into new products. Meanwhile, plastics that do get recycled usually can’t be turned back into the same items more than a couple of times; soon, they have to be “downcycled” into something like a carpet or decking. Eventually, the plastic life cycle ends at a landfill or an incinerator, meaning more virgin plastic — made from fossil fuels — is required to make new products.
What’s more, recycled plastics may be contaminated with any number of 13,000 chemical additives, more than 70 percent of which are either known to have hazardous properties or have never been tested for toxicity. Plastics manufacturing, use, and disposal already exposes people to these chemicals — especially poor people and people of color — but mechanical recycling can keep them circulating through the economy for even longer. It can also shed thousands of tons of microplastics, tiny shards of plastic that poison the food chain and release greenhouse gases.
“There’s just no way to do plastics in a truly circular way,” said Budris, with Just Zero. Others have called the plastics circular economy “an oxymoron at its core.”
Instead of trying to “wedge” plastics into the circular economy, Budris said there’s an urgent need to reverse the plastic and petrochemical industries’ expansion. These industries are planning to triple plastic production by 2060 — in part to offset declining demand for fossil fuels used for electricity, heat, and transportation. According to the International Energy Agency, plastics are expected to drive almost half of oil demand by the middle of the century.
This issue has played prominently at negotiations for a global plastics treaty, where environmental groups have urged U.N. member states to “turn off the tap” and dramatically scale down plastic production. At the country level, they tend to support bills like the U.S.’s Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act of 2021, which never advanced out of committee but would have put a pause on new or expanded petrochemical facilities and banned several types of disposable plastic. Other countries’ efforts, like the groundbreaking anti-waste and circular economy law that France passed in 2020, limit single-use plastic alongside complementary initiatives to reduce food waste and increase the repairability of phones, computers, and other electronics.
The need to reduce plastics wasn’t completely lost at Circularity 23, either. At one panel, small business owners talked about their efforts to set up plastic-free reuse programs — one Vancouver, Canada-based company, for example, allows restaurants to serve takeout meals in stainless steel containers, which can later be returned at drop-off locations around the city. At another, Washington state representative Liz Berry spoke about her efforts to advance the WRAP Act, a far-reaching bill that would create a bottle deposit program, set mandatory quotas for reusable packaging, and hold companies financially responsible for dealing with the plastic they produce, among other things.
The most powerful rebuke of the plastics circular economy, however, came during a keynote Q&A on the second day of the conference, when Joy and Jo Banner — sisters who lead The Descendants Project, a nonprofit based in a swath of Louisiana studded with so many petrochemical facilities that it’s been dubbed “Cancer Alley” — were asked how the world should address the plastic pollution crisis. Jo responded directly to the audience by describing how her community evacuates during a hurricane: People abruptly stop what they’re doing, pile into their cars, and all drive in the same direction — away from the danger.
“That’s exactly what we need for plastics,” she said: “contraflow. We all need to move away from it, we need to stop making excuses for it, we need to stop trying to make the economy off of it. Stop giving fossil fuels a lifeline.”
The audience applauded and whooped at her remarks — in fact, the Banner sisters got a standing ovation. Then, Circularity 23 attendees went to the next event, a collection of roundtable lunch discussions hosted by Dow, Eastman, Arkema, and other chemical companies and organizations that claim to be “enabling a circular economy” throughplasticsrecycling.
Jon Smieja, the vice president of circularity for GreenBiz, the media and events organization that hosted Circularity 23, is not unaware of the controversy surrounding the circular economy. While he believes there is no one correct way to define circularity, he said he sees plenty of selectivity among corporations when it comes to describing their circular business practices.
Many companies choose the part of circularity that “aligns most with what they feel like they can do,” he said. Some promote a circular economy even as they participate in lobbying groups that advocate against circular policies like those contained in the WRAP Act.
Defruyt, with EMF, agreed. EMF maintains there can be a place for plastics in a circular economy — the organization even has a “new plastics economy” initiative for corporations and governments to sign onto, pledging to decrease virgin plastic use, incorporate more recycled content into their plastic packaging, and make all of their plastic recyclable, compostable, or reusable. But Defruyt said companies tend to ignore important principles like eliminating unnecessary materials use and allowing nature to regenerate.
Companies ask, “I want to put something plastic on the market, how do I make it circular?” Defruyt said, instead of choosing materials and business models that are best suited to the circular economy.
In some cases, businesses adopt one or more principles of circularity without actually being circular. One company promoting itself at the conference, for example, said it takes “ocean-bound plastics” out of rivers in Southeast Asia and turns them into new mailing sleeves — a business model that might eke one more use out of discarded waste, but is predicated on, and potentially contributes to, a continuous supply of plastic litter. (A spokesperson from the company told Grist the mailers are “by no means a perfectly circular product,” but noted that they would remove waste from the environment in places where there is insufficient waste-management infrastructure.)
Another company at the conference, r.Cup, provides transparent reusable cups for concerts, football games, and other large events. Though they’re a clear improvement over disposable cups, r.Cup’s reusable alternatives are made of polypropylene, a kind of rigid plastic that can only be used so many times before it reaches the end of its life. In general, polypropylene products are only turned into new items through downcycling, though they’re more likely to be sent to landfills or incinerated. R.Cup’s founder told Grist his company’s cups are never sent to landfills and are only “upcycled” into opaque plastic cups, guitar picks, Frisbees, or other items.
Smieja called these “stop-the-bleeding stopgap” solutions that can at least reduce plastics’ impacts while, in the case of the plastic cups, proving the viability of reuse.
More broadly, a spokesperson for GreenBiz defended plastics and plastics companies’ role — both in the circular economy and at Circularity 23. “For better or for worse, plastics have a role in our current society,” the company said. “Some companies are, paradoxically, both part of the problem and key to implementing solutions at scale.”
Still, Smieja and others agreed that they might call for more specific language than just “circular.”
“Maybe we don’t have to use the word ‘circular’ with the consumer,” Suzanne Shelton, CEO of a marketing communications agency called the Shelton Group and a speaker at Circularity 23, told Grist. Rather than claiming to be circular, she said, it’s more helpful when brands describe how their products support a circular economy. If they’re compostable, brands can just say that, she said. If their products are recyclable, then advertise that — but clarify how many times they can be recycled.
That’s similar to the approach of organizations like Just Zero and Beyond Plastics, which have abandoned circular terminology despite its deep entrenchment in business and policy spheres. Erica Cirino, communications manager for the nonprofit Plastic Pollution Coalition, said there’s a risk of any term being co-opted “in the blink of an eye,” but she and others prefer to use words like “reusable,” “refillable,” and “zero-waste,” which more precisely convey the concepts of material conservation and resource efficiency. King, with Greenpeace Canada, said she also tries to emphasize slowness, with reduced production and consumption throughout the economy.
Not all corporations, governments, and intergovernmental organizations, however, are likely to make those distinctions voluntarily. If the circular economy is going to remain in the corporate and policymaking vernacular — as it likely will — then environmental groups say it should be qualified with terms like “toxics-free” or “reuse-based.” Ideally, they’d like regulators to step in with clearer guardrails against greenwashing.
“I think the Federal Trade Commission should take it on,” said Enck, from Beyond Plastics. The FTC, which protects U.S. consumers from deceptive or unfair business practices, is already working on revisions to its Green Guides, a set of guidelines around companies’ sustainability advertising. The most anticipated revision is expected to offer a firmer definition of the term “recyclable,” but Enck said there’s no reason it couldn’t also define circularity, potentially with different criteria for different industries. (The Green Guides updates were expected by the end of last year but have been delayed. It’s unclear when they will be released.)
“The first pillar needs to be conservation of resources and efficient use of resources,” Enck said, calling for guidelines that prioritize the three R’s of the zero-waste movement: “reduce, reuse, refill.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How the ‘circular economy’ went from environmentalist dream to marketing buzzword on Aug 9, 2023.
Cruising by on a boat, it’s easy to miss Jake Patryn’s farm, which looks like nothing more than an unassuming row of red and white buoys floating just off the coast of Machias, Maine. The crop he and co-founder Morgan-Lea Fogg gather each spring lies just below the surface: long lines of slick brown sugar kelp. After growing nearly 10 feet during the winter — amassing vitamins, minerals, and fatty acids along the way — the kelp is primed for its moment in the sun. A quick taste test proves it true: Their crop is ready to harvest.
This marks Patryn’s sixth year as a seaweed farmer, but he’s been working on the water for much longer. Hailing from a commercial lobstering family in Maine, Patryn sees cultivating this marine crop as a lifeline for a community threatened by fishing’s uncertain future. While he still casts his traps on occasion, farming kelp by hand and selling it as snacks and seasonings has become his main focus.
It may seem quaint compared to the industrial operations that grow most of the world’s food, but outfits like Patryn’s Nautical Farms are poised to skyrocket in number over the next few years. Now seen as a “future-proof” material, seaweed is a hardy, fast-growing protein source useful for everything from biofuel to petroleum-free plastic to consumer goods like utensils, soap, clothing, and of course, food. The World Bank said raising this versatile crop in just 5 percent of U.S. territorial waters would produce as much protein as 2.3 trillion hamburgers and sequester the carbon emissions of 20 million cars.
Given all that, the market, which stood at $15 billion two years ago, is projected to hit $24.92 billion in 2028. There were 30 venture investments in seaweed startups throughout North America last year, with some $130 million raised. The Department of Energy is throwing $22 million toward exploring how growing 500 million tons of macroalgae per year could meet 10 percent of the nation’s demand for transportation fuel.
Although China, Indonesia, South Korea, and the Philippines still account for more than 95 percent of global production, farms in North America – particularly British Columbia, Alaska, and Maine – are cropping up to meet demand. But just like industrial agriculture on land, such operations can harm the environment – and given the role kelp forests play in sequestering carbon, the climate. Monocropping, the introduction of non-native species, and poor management have led the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration to declare “commercial kelp harvesting is potentially the greatest threat to long-term kelp stability nationwide.”
In response, cultivators are calling for more policies to govern their business and protect waterways and marine ecosystems. This climate work is no less critical than reducing the world’s demand for beef or easing its dependence on fossil fuels because this ubiquitous plant provides essential habitat for hundreds of marine species, offers protection from storms and coastal erosion, and draws millions of tons of carbon out of the atmosphere each year. Marine algae also provide around 50 percent of the planet’s oxygen. Seaweed is, in many ways, already saving the world. People like Patryn want to make sure their growing industry doesn’t do anything to mess that up.
“I don’t think it would be a good idea to have thousands of kelp farms all up and down the coast of Maine, peppered in every single bay,” he said. “Growing this industry overnight would be a good way to to tarnish it before it even gets off the ground.”
Thousands of species of seaweed fill the world’s oceans, but only a handful are cultivated for human consumption. In North America, kelps, which thrive in cold, shallow, nutrient-rich waters, are the most commonly farmed varieties.
In the wild, thick ribbons of the stuff stretch up to 200 feet long, sheltering a wide variety of sea life. Rumor has it that the sheer size of South American kelp forests led Charles Darwin to remark, “I can only compare these great aquatic forests with the terrestrial ones in the inter-tropical region. Yet if in any country a forest was destroyed, I do not believe nearly so many species of animals would perish as would here, from the destruction of the kelp.”
Growing the stuff is remarkably straightforward: Farmers cast seedlings out on ropes and submerge them until they’re ready to harvest a few months later. It’s also relatively cheap. Seaweed is a “zero-input crop,” meaning it doesn’t need any additional food, fertilizer, or freshwater to grow. Bren Smith, who started the regenerative ocean farming company GreenWave, writes in his book Eat Like a Fish that anyone with $20,000 and a boat has enough to start harvesting 10 tons of kelp per acre — and net as much as $120,000 per year doing it, given they find the right buyer.
When Patryn and Fogg started Nautical Farms back in 2017, they were lucky to grow a few hundred pounds in a season. Now, they’re managing a 5-acre sea farm in Englishman Bay and cultivating thousands of pounds of kelp in the process. They used to sell their harvest to a few buyers, but these days they have as many as half a dozen part-time employees helping them dry sugar kelp, skinny kelp, and alaria themselves to make nearly a dozen different snacks and other goods.
Most of the nation’s seaweed farming occurs in their home state of Maine, with its abundance of cold, clean water and working waterfronts, and in Alaska, which has those things and the nation’s longest coastline. The two states account for more than 85 percent of the U.S. supply of edible seaweed. The 27 operations within Atlantic Sea Farms in Maine, for example, harvested nearly 1 million pounds last year. A 100-acre Alaskan operation owned by Premium Aquatics, which sells its bounty under the brand Seagrove Kelp Co, has become the largest kelp farm in the U.S in the four years since its founding.
The nutrient-rich and biodiverse waters around Vancouver provide another thriving location for kelp cultivation. Cascadia Seaweed, also founded in 2019, operates eight farms covering 62 acres. It plans to have 1,235 acres under cultivation by 2025 (and that many more pending development) as it looks to expand more than tenfold in the next decade. Government funding has given the company a good head start: It has provided two grants worth $5.8 million to help build a new farm and processing facility.
Since most U.S. seaweed farms sit within a few miles of shore, they are governed by state laws, which can vary widely. Maine limits farm size from 400 square feet to 100 acres depending on the lease, for example, while Alaska strictly regulates where species may be grown. Still, there are no national regulations monitoring seaweed farming. Canada doesn’t have much in the way of rules, either. There are currently no policies around farm size or native seed collection in British Columbia.
While this piecemeal approach has worked out so far, industry insiders wonder how it will hold up as farms become larger and drift further from shore. Growing enough seaweed for the biofuel needed to meet the nation’s energy needs, for example, will require more than a few buoys in a bay.
Amanda Swinimer of Dakini Tidal Wilds, who has been wild-harvesting seaweed off the west coast of Vancouver Island since 2003, believes the seaweed industry has already started sneaking up on policy — with potentially costly results. “There was no need to have regulations around seaweed farming before because nobody was doing it before,” she said. “But now, if both the feds and the provincial government are throwing the kind of money at it that they are, policymakers should be doing primary research and putting some basic regulations in place.”
One question looming over the North American seaweed market is how big is too big. Large-scale monoculture outposts covering 100 acres or more could starve the surrounding ecosystem of nutrients, obstruct wildlife migration patterns, or prevent sunlight from reaching other flora and fauna. Massive seaweed operations in Asia offer a cautionary tale. In China, where farms can cover 15,000 acres, pests and bactia infections present a growing concern. Some diseases are triggered by abiotic factors: Unfavorable conditions like too much or too little light have provided the conditions they need to spread rapidly, ruining an estimated 25 to 30 percent of annual seaweed harvests and changing the microbial structure of nearby ecosystems.
“There’s always going to be a point where you get too much of a good thing,” Scott Lindell, a marine farming researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said. “And we don’t know where that breaking point is.”
The introduction of non-native species also could pose a risk. Seaweed farmers choose strains that are resilient, fast-growing, and tolerant to many conditions — precisely the traits, scientists warn, that could allow them to overwhelm their habitat and crowd out other species. Varieties that are new to an area also can carry dangerous “hitchhikers.”
“You can’t guarantee that you’re just importing the seaweed,” said marine biosecurity researcher Elizabeth Cottier-Cook. “There will be other things like microorganisms attached to that seaweed that could then cause disease and spread to wild native strains as well.”
Seaweed farms can also be vehicles for food-borne diseases when improperly managed, as seen with a Salmonella outbreak traced to a Hawaiian seaweed farm in 2016.
Rapid growth of an industry that gets ahead of market demand could lead to significant waste issues, too, said Anoushka Concepcion, who works in marine aquaculture for NOAA’s Sea Grant program in Connecticut. She points out that the reason government-funded farms in China or Korea can stay afloat is because they feed populations accustomed to eating seaweed many times a day. The average American palate doesn’t have the same taste for the sea veggie, so barring quick innovation on the biofuel and bioplastic fronts (still very much in their infancy), huge seaweed farms in the West could leave whole lot of product left to rot.
Finally, Swinimer, who makes her living harvesting wild seaweed, worries about the risk of farmed seaweed mixing with wild strains. Seaweed hybridization has already happened off Oslofjord, an inlet of Southeast Norway, to unknown consequence.
“There are fewer boundaries in the ocean than there are on land,” Swinimer said, introducing the threat of genetic intermingling. Given the essential role seaweed, particularly kelp forests (often called the sequoias of the sea), plays in sequestering carbon and providing oxygen, Swinimer is worried about the risks industrial-scale cultivation has on this invaluable organism.
“Seaweed is already saving the world from climate change,” she said. “If we mess with that, we are going to be in big, big trouble.”
When considering how to regulate the seaweed industry to mitigate potential climate pitfalls, Cottier-Cook points to a “restorative aquaculture” model that would incentivize ecologically beneficial farming. Governments could, for example, pay farmers for the carbon their crops capture; a new type of blue subsidy. Smith’s company GreenWave is testing this idea with its Kelp Climate Fund, which awards farmers up to $25,000 per season for the carbon and nitrogen capture and reef restoration they provide.
Encouraging the growth of hyper-native seaweeds will also make sense in some places. Alaska leads the way here, with state laws that require farmers to collect their kelp seeds from within 50 kilometers (about 31 miles) of their grow site each year to ensure their crops share their genetic makeup with local wild stocks. Laws that prohibit altering the marine ecosystem in any way, like Maine’s strict regulations that fine farmers for abandoned gear, could also help keep quell aquaculture’s environmental impact.
While the process to secure an seaweed farming lease is closely regulated by a state’s department of marine resources or environmental conservation, government involvement fades once the first lines are dropped in the water. While Concepcion notes that some states are talking about enforcing more rigorous inspections and penalties, it’s a slow process in a new industry that still has so many question marks. “Agencies are hesitant to establish a policy because they don’t know what to expect,” Concepcion said. “They don’t want to add additional requirements to farmers that make it harder to get involved. But at the same time, they want to be cautious because they don’t want an accident to happen. So right now it’s still a lot of vetting of information, and a lot of discussion.”
The most important decisions have not yet been made. The regulations policymakers pass in the next few years ultimately will determine not only how and where seaweed is grown, but whose hands (or if the techies get their way, robotic appendages) grow it. Will the farms of the future be owned by massive corporations, or by local cooperatives? Those in coastal communities whose livelihoods hinge on ocean health would argue for the latter.
“The people who I think should be in kelp farming are fishermen who already know how to work on the water, already have a boat, and already have another generation coming up underneath them to raise on the water,” said Patryn.
Dune Lankard, an Eyak Athabaskan Native of the Eagle Clan from Cordova, Alaska, also transitioned from fishing to kelp farming after watching local fisheries collapse. He started the non-profit Native Conservancy to help other Native peoples start kelp farms in order to maintain food sovereignty and cultivate a resource that has long been a part of their ways of life.
If passed, the federal Coastal Seaweed Farm Act of 2023 would help further this mission by establishing an Indigenous seaweed farming fund and publishing a report outlining how to responsibly scale seaweed in the U.S. with the help of Indigenous knowledge.
A spokesperson for U.S. Representative Mary Peltola of Alaska, who introduced the bill with Representative Jared Huffman of California in March, said it has received positive feedback and the lawmakers hope it will be included in this year’s farm bill.
As seaweed inhabits the liminal space between land and sea, it holds the opportunity to build a new food sector that is more equitable, efficient, and environmentally informed than those that came before it. By incentivizing restoration, prioritizing native planting, taking a precautionary approach to expansion, and centering coastal community knowledge, the industry can grow in a fast yet controlled and methodical way. In short, it can grow like seaweed itself.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The kelp business is booming. Can regulators keep up? on Aug 9, 2023.
President Joe Biden’s 2022 initiative America the Beautiful has a goal of conserving and restoring 30 percent of lands and waters in the United States by 2030.
A new contribution to that goal was announced by The White House today with the establishment of the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni – Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument in Arizona, a press release from The White House said.
The newly designated monument’s name is a reflection of the importance of the Grand Canyon area to many Tribal Nations. “Baaj nwaavjo” means “where Indigenous peoples roam” in the language of the Havasupai American Indian tribe, who have called the Grand Canyon home for at least 800 years. “I’tah kukveni” means “our ancestral footprints” in the Hopi language.
“The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to honoring and respecting Tribal sovereignty, protecting Tribal homelands, and incorporating Indigenous Knowledge and robust Tribal consultation into planning and decision-making. Today’s designation supports Tribally led conservation efforts and helps address injustices of the past, including when Tribes were forcibly removed from lands that later became Grand Canyon National Park,” the press release said.
Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni is the fifth national monument established by the Biden-Harris administration. Almost one million public lands acres that surround Grand Canyon National Park will be conserved by the new monument.
“It will help protect lands that many tribes referred to as their eternal home, a place of healing and a source of spiritual sustenance,” said U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, who is the first Native American Cabinet secretary, as NPR reported. “It will help ensure that indigenous peoples can continue to use these areas for religious ceremonies, hunting and gathering of plants, medicines and other materials, including some found nowhere else on earth. It will protect objects of historic and scientific importance for the benefit of tribes, the public and for future generations.”
The new monument will protect thousands of sites that are sacred to many Tribal Nations. The proclamation for the establishment of Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni will be signed by President Biden at Wii’i Gdwiisa — also known as Red Butte — a site sacred to the Havasupai people located above the southern part of the monument.
“The area includes many natural wonders, from sweeping plateaus and deep canyons to meandering creeks and streams that ultimately flow into the mighty Colorado River, providing water to millions of people across the Southwest. The unique interplay of geology and hydrology support some of the most biodiverse habitats in the region ranging from sagebrush to savanna, providing refuge for iconic wildlife including bighorn sheep, mule deer, bison, peregrine falcons, bald eagles, owls, and songbirds. The new monument contains over 3,000 known cultural and historic sites, including 12 properties listed on the National Register of Historic Places,” the press release said.
The new monument is made up of 917,618 acres managed by the U.S. Forest Service and the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, and is located to the northeast, northwest and south of Grand Canyon National Park. In the south, it is bordered by the Navajo Nation and the Havasupai Indian Reservation. The northeastern portion reaches from Marble Canyon to the border of the Kaibab Plateau.
New uranium mining claims will be permanently banned inside the monument, but existing claims will be honored, reported NPR.
A 20-year ban on new uranium mining claims in the area of the new monument was established in 2012, The New York Times reported.
Environmental groups and Native American Tribes have been lobbying for the area surrounding the Grand Canyon to be permanently protected from uranium mining, arguing that it would damage important cultural areas as well as the Colorado River watershed.
Livestock grazing authorized by existing permits will be allowed, as well as fishing and hunting access, according to the press release.
“Today’s designation preserves this vital landscape for outdoor recreation, including camping, hiking, biking, and other recreational activities, consistent with applicable law. Hunting and fishing will continue to be allowed throughout the monument, including in the Kanab Creek area,” the press release said.
The proclamation instructs the Departments of Agriculture and the Interior to engage with Tribal Nations through co-stewardship agreements, consultations, contracts, technical and financial assistance and other means in order to make sure that the monument’s management is a collaboration and “reflects the Indigenous Knowledge and special expertise Tribes have amassed over countless generations,” the press release said.
It also establishes the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni – Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon Commission, the purpose of which is to encourage co-stewardship.
“Today’s designation recognizes and is a step toward addressing the history of dispossession and exclusion of Tribal Nations and Indigenous peoples in the area, including that occurring when the federal government established the Grand Canyon Forest Reserve in 1893, Grand Canyon National Monument in 1908, and Grand Canyon National Park in 1919,” the press release said.
The post Biden Designates New National Monument Near Grand Canyon, With Permanent Ban on New Uranium Mining Claims appeared first on EcoWatch.
The International Whaling Commission (IWC) has issued its first ever Extinction Alert statement for the endangered vaquita porpoise, whose population is estimated to have shrunk to 10 individuals.
The IWC says that a 100 percent ban on gillnets is immediately necessary to stop the extinction of the world’s smallest marine mammal.
“Recent studies show there are now only about 10 surviving animals, but they are not yet doomed to extinction,” the IWC statement said. “The Scientific Committee of the IWC is making this statement because it believes that 100% enforcement of a ban on gillnets in their core habitat is needed to give the vaquita a chance of recovery.”
The vaquita porpoise is only found in the northern part of Mexico’s Gulf of California, also known as the Sea of Cortez. In 1997, the first survey of population numbers estimated that there were fewer than 567 vaquita. Another survey in 2015 estimated the population had decreased to 59 individuals, and by 2018, just nine or 10 were left. That’s an 83 percent decline in three years.
The only real threat to the shy, endangered porpoise with the dark rings around its eyes are gillnets. The nets are not set to target vaquita, but they can become entangled in them.
“Vaquita become entangled in all types of gillnets. Shrimp gillnets are a significant problem, but the overwhelming impact in the last 10 years is from nets set for totoaba. The totoaba is a fish similar in size to the vaquita. Its value has skyrocketed due to the black market demand for totoaba swim bladders in Hong Kong and continental China. The involvement of organised crime in the totoaba fishery makes it particularly difficult and dangerous to address,” the IWC statement said.
Fishing for totoaba — also an endangered species due to overfishing and the degradation of the habitat they share with the vaquita — in the Sea of Cortez has been illegal since 1975. Designation of protected areas for parts of the vaquita’s habitat has been attempted, but factors like inadequate enforcement have meant the continuation of illegal fishing practices in the area.
“The decline of the vaquita has continued despite a very clear understanding of both the cause (bycatch in gillnets) and the solution (replacement of gillnets with safe alternatives in the vaquita habitat),” the statement said. “Conservation strategies must consider the interests of the threatened species, the interests of the people who live alongside it, and their economic and social circumstances. Only when all three are maximised, so that human livelihoods too are maintained, can sustainable species conservation be achieved.”
The top priority right now, however, is that all gillnet fishing in vaquita habitat stops immediately.
The IWC’s Scientific Committee, a group of about 200 scientists, is leading the initiative after concluding that “a new mechanism is needed to voice extinction concerns for an increasing range of cetacean species and populations,” a press release from the IWC said.
“We wanted, with the extinction alert, to send the message to a wider audience and for everyone to understand how serious this is,” said Dr. Lindsay Porter, the vice-chair of the IWC’s scientific committee, as The Guardian reported.
Vaquita numbers have remained fairly consistent for the past five years, likely because of the removal of gillnets. A program to retrieve fishing nets from core vaquita habitat began in 2016, and by 2019, more than 1,000 had been removed, according to the IWC statement.
Last year, the Mexican Navy, along with other government agencies, installed 193 structures on the seabed to deter gillnets, and since then it seems gillnet fishers have been steering clear of the zero tolerance zone and its surrounding buffer zone.
“But this effort needs to be 100% effective to start reversing the decline and bringing the vaquita back from the brink of extinction,” the statement said.
A ray of hope, Porter pointed out, is that the vaquita are still breeding.
“There is at least one brand new baby vaquita,” Porter said, as reported by The Guardian. “If we can take away this one pressure, the population may recover. We can’t stop now.”
The IWC Extinction Alert statement added that, while the gillnet deterrence structures seem to be promising, long-term results need to be monitored and shared with public media and scientific journals.
“The vaquita’s plight exemplifies the challenges facing other dolphin and porpoise species living in coastal waters and struggling to survive alongside human activities, particularly fishing. Bycatch in fishing nets and entanglement in lines and other gear is estimated to kill more than 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises every year,” the IWC statement said. “This statement is issued today to encourage wider recognition of the warning signs of impending extinctions, and to generate support and encouragement at every level for the actions needed now to save the vaquita.”
The post First-Ever Extinction Alert Issued for Vaquita Porpoise appeared first on EcoWatch.
President Biden on Tuesday designated a new national monument on lands near the Grand Canyon, shielding the area from future uranium mining and protecting nearly a million acres of land sacred to more than a dozen tribes.
Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni, which translates to “where tribes roam” and “our footprints” in the Havasupai and Hopi languages, is the fifth national monument President Biden has designated during his time in office, and contains diverse ecology including federally protected species like California condors and a dozen plants found nowhere else on Earth. The region is also rich in uranium, where it has been mined since the 1950s when it was used primarily for developing nuclear weapons. Today, uranium from the Grand Canyon is used for nuclear energy plants and power reactors in submarines and naval ships.
“Over the years, hundreds of millions of people have traveled to the Grand Canyon, awed by its majesty. But few are aware of its full history,” said Biden. “From time immemorial, over a dozen tribal nations have lived, gathered, and prayed on these lands. But some one hundred years ago they were forced out. That very act of preserving the Grand Canyon as a national park was used to deny Indigenous people full access to their homelands.”
Indigenous nations and environmental groups have fought to protect the area from uranium mining since at least 1985, citing potential risks to sources of drinking water, including ongoing contamination of the sole source of water for the Havasupai reservation — one of the most isolated communities in the United States and reachable by an eight-mile hike from the rim of the Grand Canyon.
On Monday, Republican leaders in Arizona voted to formally oppose the monument’s designation, calling the move a federal land grab. More than 80 percent of land in Arizona is federally controlled, including 21 Indian reservations, and both state and local officials fear Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni will decrease the amount of land available for sale to private individuals.
“With global climate the way it is and with global politics the way it is, is it really the smartest thing to do — from a national security standpoint and an energy standpoint — to forever lock off the richest uranium mining deposits in the whole country,” said Travis Lingenfelter, Mohave County District 1 supervisor. The new monument will overlap with about 445,000 acres in Mohave County.
Representative Bruce Westerman, an Arkansas Republican and chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources, joined Lingenfelter in his opposition of the designation.
“This administration’s lack of reason knows no bounds, and their actions suggest that President Biden and his radical advisers won’t be satisfied until the entire federal estate is off limits and America is mired in dependency on our adversaries for our natural resources,” Westerman said in a statement, adding that Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni would leave the U.S. reliant on countries like Russia for uranium.
“I have a thousand-plus acres of private land included in this,” said Chris Heaton, a local landowner with claims to property that predate Arizona statehood in 1912. “This is a problem. They are coming after our private land and private water rights.”
According to the White House, the new monument will only include federal lands, and not state or private lands, and will not affect property rights.
In 2012, a 20-year ban on uranium mining was enacted by then-Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. However, the new designation will not have an impact on mining claims that predate that ban, and two operations within the monument’s boundaries, including one approved by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2022, will continue to operate.
The designation of the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukven National Monument comes during President Biden’s three-state tour to discuss his environmental agenda and successes, which include $370 billion in tax incentives for wind, solar, and other renewable energy sources that he signed into law last year.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Biden designates Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukven National Monument on Aug 8, 2023.
H
ey there, welcome to another issue of Record High. My name is Zoya Teirstein, and this week I’m taking you inside emergency rooms in Phoenix — a place that just endured 31 consecutive days at 110 degrees Fahrenheit or above. It was the hottest month, on average, in any U.S. city on record.
To understand how those temperatures are affecting residents in real time, I spoke to two physicians in Phoenix about what this summer of extremes looks like in their domain, the emergency room. As I reported this week, Kara Geren and Frank Lovecchio, two emergency medicine physicians in the metro of 1.6 million people, have been seeing patients show up with the same exact symptom: dehydration. No matter what the patient comes in for — whether it’s chest pain or a chronic health condition such as diabetes — they also likely need fluids. “What surprised us is even people that came in for completely unrelated things are dehydrated,” Geren said. “It’s just so hard to stay hydrated.”
The patients presenting with surprise dehydration add to the considerable number of people coming to the ER with symptoms consistent with heat-associated illness: heat rashes, cramps, vomiting, diarrhea — and the most severe form of heat sickness, heat stroke. But Geren and Lovecchio have also seen a number of patients with severe burns from hot pavement and scorching surfaces. On a 100-degree Fahrenheit day, asphalt in direct sunlight will heat up to 160 degrees — more than hot enough to give someone a third-degree burn. “Our burn unit is very, very busy,” Lovecchio said.
The Maricopa County Department of Public Health, covering metro-area Phoenix, has reported 39 deaths connected to heat since April; the medical examiner’s office suspects there have been 312 more deaths associated with heat in the county, which are currently under investigation. The elderly, the unhoused, and people who use opioids are especially at risk of developing severe heat sickness and dying.
Geren and Lovecchio have been cooling people down however they can — they immerse patients in large tubs of cold water or zip them into body bags filled with ice. They chill intravenous fluids and oxygen before administering them, and cool patients with industrial-strength fans. But both doctors worry about the future.
“A lot of people have that billion-dollar question: Is [Phoenix] going to become unlivable? I think it’s pretty close this summer.”
Frank Lovecchio, ER doctor in Phoenix
There are efforts underway at the federal level to fund solutions. Last week, Democratic lawmakers, including Arizona’s Ruben Gallego, reintroduced the Preventing HEAT Illness and Deaths Act, legislation aimed at mitigating deaths by reducing people’s exposure to extreme heat. That’s in addition to Gallego’s efforts to get FEMA to add extreme heat to its qualifying list of major disasters, as my colleague Jake Bittle reported in this newsletter last week.
But it’s unclear how far those bills will get. Many Republican lawmakers, improbable as it sounds, are moving in the opposite direction. In mid-July, House Republicans proposed deep cuts to the budgets of both the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Interior. The effort is unlikely to be successful, with Senate Democrats sure to block it. But the GOP’s spending bill, which proposes slashing EPA funding by nearly 40 percent, shows how the right is thinking about this summer of extremes.
Policy experts at the Environmental Defense Fund told Grist that one of the programs that could face the chopping block if Republicans get their way is the EPA’s Heat Island Reduction Program. The initiative seeks to decrease exposure to extreme heat in urban areas with little tree cover, particularly in low-income and minority communities that are disproportionately burdened by extreme heat.
Meanwhile, Geren is thinking ahead to next summer and even hotter summers to come. “If we’re keeping the way we are, I just don’t know how people can live here,” she said.
In Arizona, one of the states where heat-related deaths are most common, the number of fatalities in metro-area Phoenix have been rising in recent years. This year, officials have reported 39 deaths connected to heat so far, but that number will likely change as the summer continues and hundreds of other deaths are investigated.
Data Visualization by Clayton Aldern / Grist
The wacky world of heat insurance: You’ve heard of flood insurance and wildfire insurance, but what about heat insurance? A new suite of unconventional heat insurance products has emerged in a range of countries around the world. Can they help protect us? My colleague Jake Bittle reports.
How heat isolates: Americans are becoming increasingly isolated. Believe it or not, that can make extreme heat more fatal. My colleague Akielly Hu explains how isolation compounds the risks of heat exposure and how cities can reduce those risks.
Children threatened by extreme heat: A United Nations report shows 460 million children under the age of 18 in South Asia are already exposed to 83 or more days a year in which temperatures exceed 95 degrees. Three-quarters of children in the region are exposed, compared to one in three children globally.
South America is rewriting the climatic books: It’s supposed to be the middle of winter in Chile and Argentina, but temperatures in the region are abnormally high — upward of 100 degrees Fahrenheit in some areas. “Some places have even reached all-time maximums — surpassing summer temperatures, even though it is winter,” Ian Livingston wrote for the Washington Post.
Extreme heat is ‘boring’: Scoff at the headline, but give this essay on cabin fever, or “climate ennui,” in Arizona a chance. Caroline Tracey writes a blazingly good first-person account of being trapped indoors during the summer in Tucson for Zocalo Public Square.
Heat comes with a steep price tag: New research shows extreme heat is costing the U.S. economy big time — $100 billion in 2020 and a projected $500 billion annually by mid-century. “From meatpackers to home health aides, workers are struggling in sweltering temperatures and productivity is taking a hit,” Coral Davenport reports for the New York Times.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How doctors treat extreme heat on Aug 8, 2023.
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Jera Slaughter looks at her backyard with pride, pointing out every feature and explaining how it came to be. The landscaping committee in her apartment building takes such things seriously. But unlike homeowners who might discuss their prized plants or custom decking, Slaughter is describing a beach, one covered in large concrete blocks, gravel, and a small sliver of sandy shoreline that overlooks Lake Michigan. It’s a view worthy of a grand apartment building built on Chicago’s South Side in the 1920s and deemed a national historic landmark.
But repeated flooding has over the years radically remade the private beach. Slaughter has lived in the Windy City long enough to remember when it extended 300 feet. Now it barely reaches 50. Her neighborhood might not be the first place anyone would think of when it comes to climate-related flooding, but Slaughter and her neighbors have been witnesses to a rapid erosion of their beloved shoreline.
“Out there where that pillar is,” she said, pointing to a post about 500 feet away, “that was our sandy beach. The erosion has eaten it away and left us with this. We tried one year to re-sand it. We bought sand and flew it in. But by the end of the season, there was no sand left.”
Recent years have seen high lake levels flood parking garages and apartments, wash out beaches, and even cause massive sinkholes. It’s a growing hazard, one that Slaughter has been desperately fighting for years.
“All things considered, this is our home,” she said.
Lake Michigan has long tried to take back the land on its shores. But climate change has increased the amount of ground lost to increasingly variable lake levels and ever more intense storms. What was once a tedious but manageable issue is now a crisis. The problem became particularly acute in early 2020 when a storm wreaked havoc on the neighborhood, severely damaging homes, flooding streets, and spurring neighbors to demand that City Hall support a $5 million plan to hold back the water.
“We need to be prepared for higher lake levels,” said Charles Shabica, a geologist and professor emeritus at Northeastern Illinois University.
Though Shabica says the erosion in the Great Lakes region won’t be on par with what rising seas will bring to coastal regions, he still notes it’s an issue that Chicago must prepare for.
“We’ll see climate impacts, but I think we can accommodate them,” said Shabica.
Beyond flooding homes, that epic storm opened sinkholes and washed out certain beaches, leaving them eroded and largely unusable. But the people of South Shore refused to give in easily. In the wake of Lake Michigan’s encroaching water, residents have organized their neighbors and prompted solutions by creating a voice so loud that politicians, engineers, and bureaucrats took heed. In 2022, state Representative Curtis Tarver II helped secure $5 million from the state of Illinois to help solve the issue.
“For some odd reason, and I tend to believe it is the demographics of the individuals who live in that area, it has not been a priority, for the city, the state, or the [federal government],” Tarver said.
After years of tireless work, folks in this community have convinced the city to study the problem of lakeside erosion to see how bad this damage from climate change will be — and how fast they can fix it.
Slaughter founded the South Side Lakefront Erosion Task Force alongside Juliet Dervin and Sharon Louis in 2019 after a few particularly harsh fall storms caused heavy flooding in the area.
Chicagoans in the predominantly Black and middle-class South Shore had noticed the inequitable treatment of city shoreline restoration projects. Beaches in the overwhelmingly white and affluent North Side neighborhoods received more media coverage of the problem, faster fixes, and better upkeep, according to the group. This disparity occurred despite the fact that South Side beaches have no natural barriers to the lake’s waves and tides, placing them at greater risk of erosion.
“We were watching the news coverage [of] what was happening up north as if we weren’t getting hit with water on the south end of the city,” said Louis.
The threat is undeniable to Leroy Newsom, who has lived in his South Side apartment for 12 years. Despite the fact that another building stands between his home and the lake, he and his neighbors often experience flooding. The white paint in the lobby is mottled with spackle from earlier repairs. During particularly intense deluges, the entryway can become unnavigable. A large storm hit the city on the first weekend in July, inundating several parts of the city and suburbs.
“When we get a rainstorm like we did before, it floods,” he said.
Newsom lives on an upper floor and has not had to deal with the particulars of cleaning up after flooding, but he has noticed it is a persistent issue in the neighborhood.
Louis, Dervin, and Slaughter have spent countless hours tirelessly knocking on doors and even setting up shop near the local grocery store to teach their neighbors about lake-related flooding. They wanted to mobilize people so they could direct attention and money toward solving the issue. They also researched the slew of solutions available to stem the tide of the lake.
“People were making disaster plans, like, ‘What if something happens, this is what we’re gonna do’. And we were looking for mitigation plans, you know. Let’s get out in front of this,” said Louis.
Solutions can look different depending upon the area, but most on the South Side mirror the tools engineers have used for years to keep the lake at bay elsewhere. What makes these approaches a challenge is how exposed the community is to Lake Michigan in contrast to other neighborhoods.
“South Shore is uniquely vulnerable,” said Malcolm Mossman of the Delta Institute, a nonprofit focusing on environmental issues in the Midwest. “It’s had a lot of impacts over the last century, plus, certain sections of it have even been washed out.”
The shoreline throughout the city is dotted with concrete steps, or revetements, and piers that extend into the lake to prevent waves from slamming into beaches. It also has breakwaters, which run parallel to the shoreline and are considered one of the best defenses against an increasingly active Lake Michigan.
“The best solution that we’ve learned are the shore parallel breakwaters,” said Shabica. “And we make them out of rocks large enough that the waves can’t throw them around. And the really cool part is it makes wonderful fish habitat and wildlife habitat. So we’re really improving the ecosystem, as well as making the shoreline inland a lot less vulnerable.”
Shabica also mentions that this isn’t a new solution. The Museum Campus portion of the city, which extends into the lake and includes the Field Museum, the Shedd Aquarium, and the Adler Planetarium, used to be an island before engineers decided to connect it to the shoreline in 1938.
The main component of the plan to help reduce repeated flooding in the neighborhood is to install a breakwater around 73rd Street using the funding Tarver helped earmark for the issue, according to Task Force co-founder Juliet Dervin. This solution would help prevent the types of waves and flooding that damage streets, most notably South Shore Drive, which is the extension of DuSable Lake Shore Drive. Past damage to the streets has rerouted city buses that run along South Shore Drive and interrupted the flow of traffic.
One local resident installed a private breakwater at her own expense following the 2020 storm, just a few blocks from Slaughter’s house, and it has tempered some effects of intense storms and flooding. But since this breakwater is smaller, surrounding areas are still vulnerable. Breakwaters can range from a few hundred thousand dollars to millions of dollars, depending on size and other factors.
Despite funding now being allocated to fix the issue and government attention squarely focused on lakefront-related flooding there are still hurdles to overcome.
Both the Army Corps of Engineers and the Chicago Park District are in the middle of a three-year assessment of the shoreline to determine appropriate fixes for each area. The study will finish in 2025, decades after the last study of this kind was conducted in the early 1990s. This gives Slaughter pause.
“If I tell you this continuous erosion has been going on for such a long time, then you would have to know, they have looked into it and studied it from A to Z,” she said. “What do you mean, you don’t have enough statistics? We’ve done flyovers and all kinds of things. People who’ve been here filming it, when the water jumps up to the top of the building, they’ve seen it slam into things.”
For her, the damage has been clear but the prolonged period of inaction and lack of attention from outside groups means a shorter window to implement fixes. Slaughter sees this as a fundamental flaw in how we approach issues stemming from the climate crisis.
“The philosophy,” she said, “is repair, not prevent.”
This story was updated to give the correct year in which $5 million was secured from the state of Illinois to address the erosion.
This piece is part of a collaboration that includes the Institute for Nonprofit News, Borderless, Ensia, Planet Detroit, Sahan Journal, and Wisconsin Watch, as well as the Guardian and Inside Climate News. The project was supported by the Joyce Foundation.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline On Chicago’s South Side, neighbors fight to keep Lake Michigan at bay on Aug 8, 2023.
