The Green Guide Blog

When my brother and I were young, my mom would take us on Transportation Days.

It goes like this: You can't take any mode of transportation more than once. We would start from home, walking the two blocks to the commuter rail station. We'd take the train into Center City (Philadelphians' name for "downtown"), then a bus, switching to the subway-surface--the Southeastern Pennsylvanian Transportation Authority (SEPTA)'s name for a trolley), then maybe a taxi. We always considered taking a horse-and-buggy in the historic district (Society Hill or the Independence Mall area) but we didn't like the way the horses were treated, so we never did.

At the end of the day, we took the subway to our closest station, where her friend was waiting to give us a ride home - our first car ride of the day.

My mom was never a big bicyclist, but if I have kids, a bike ride will definitely be part of our Transportation Days.

The brilliance of Transportation Days is not only that she taught us how to get around. It's that her instincts were multimodal. She understood that car dependency was a failure of the imagination and, most likely, a failure of confidence--the product of a childhood not spent navigating subway tunnels.

Once you learn the route map and step with assurance over the gap between the train and the platform, nothing is scary anymore. New cities are just light-rail lines to be explored. And your personal car, if you have one, becomes just one more tool in the toolbox--and more often than not an inadequate one, limiting both your mobility and your wallet.

On Transportation Days, we might stop for lunch on Chestnut Street or buy a new book or toy, but the transportation was the point. First, it was exciting enough to watch the world zoom by from the train window. As I got older, my mom helped me unlock the mysteries that would otherwise have paralyzed by first attempts to do it myself: How do I know where to get off? How do I know how much it costs? How do I know when I need tokens, and when I need tickets, and where to get them? What track, what line, which direction, where's the stop, and will I get wet when we go under the river? (I never understood how we didn't.)

I'm writing this right now on an airplane, the other mode we neglected on our Transportation Days and, we now know, the dirtiest and most polluting of them all. My flight routed me through Philadelphia. A layover well spent: My multimodal mom met me for dinner in the airport. She took the SEPTA train to meet me.

For tips on how to wean yourself off your car, visit the American Public Transportation Association's website.

Tanya Snyder is the Capitol Hill editor of Streetsblog, an online news source about livable communities and alternative transportation. She has covered federal Washington for NPR affiliate stations around the country and for Pacifica Radio's national newscast--and she's covered local Washington for WTOP-FM and various local papers. Wherever she works, she gets there by bike.

National Geographic Fellow Barton Seaver, a Washington, D.C.-based chef, writer, and ocean advocate talks to Green Guide about genetically engineered salmon.

By Rachel Kaufman

Last month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that genetically engineered salmon is safe to eat, but has not yet officially approved the fish for sale.

The final-approval process could take years, but is not likely to require that much time unless the FDA decides that the fish could pose a significant environmental impact.

In the meantime, activists and legislators are working together to get the so-called frankenfish banned.

Eleven U.S. senators, mostly from coastal states, have signed a letter to FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg requesting that the approval process be halted.

A similar letter was signed by 29 members of the House of Representatives. Another 53 environmental groups and food businesses endorsed both letters, and a Food & Water Watch poll found that 78 percent of Americans believe the salmon should not be approved for human consumption.

Photograph of sockeye salmon in Adams River, British Columbia, Canada, by Robert Sission.

GM Salmon an Easy Fix?

So why is genetically engineered fish even on the table, so to speak?

AquaBounty, the makers of the fish, say that their GM salmon--dubbed AquAdvantage--eat 10 percent less food than a traditional salmon, grow twice as quickly, and are safe and sustainable. And so far, the FDA appears to agree with AquaBounty: an advisory committee said in a September 20 hearing that the fish seems to be safe.

Critics say the health risks to humans are unknown. For instance, the FDA has relied on studies that use small samples of fish--one study used just six fish--and that were performed by AquaBounty or its contractors.

AquAdvantage salmon are sterile female Atlantic salmon with a growth gene from the Chinook, or king, salmon, and a gene that acts as an "on switch" from a fish called the pout, which keeps the growth hormone "on" permanently. If approved, it will be the first GM animal sold for human consumption.

Since no one has yet eaten an AquAdvantage fish, it may be hard to take a hard stance on whether the animal is safe to eat--though some critics have contended that the fish will aggravate allergies in some people, at the very least.

Sustainable Chef: Wild for Alaska Salmon

To get more background on the issue, Green Guide spoke with National Geographic Fellow Barton Seaver, a Washington, D.C.-based chef, writer, and ocean advocate whose restaurants serve sustainable seafood--like catfish--instead of less ecofriendly choices, such bluefin tuna. For Seaver, it's not a question of GM or nothing.

"This is the weird thing: Wild salmon is incredibly plentiful," he said. "Wild Alaskan salmon is exceptionally well managed. It's delicious, it's sustainable, it's everything you would want it to be.

I would rather start serving frozen, processed product from Alaska than I would serve GM salmon," he said, adding that he already doesn't serve farm-raised salmon in his restaurants "because it doesn't taste any good."

In one sense, AquAdvantage fish may be more ecofriendly than traditional farm-raised salmon because all AquAdvantage fish will be raised in land-based pens. This prevents fish farm waste (which can be pretty gross and potentially harmful to sea life) from getting into the ocean, though farmers still have to deal with the waste somehow. It also prevents the GM fish, of which 1 in 20 are fertile, from escaping and wreaking possible havoc on the ecosystem.

Alaska's Pink Salmon Underused

But still: Do we need more, bigger salmon?

"I don't think we need more access to salmon," Seaver said. "We need more access to foods lower on the food chain. The GM salmon is aimed at curing the ills of a fish that eats a lot and requires a lot of energy to produce a small amount of protein. So instead of farming a fish like herring, smaller species that are not carnivores--instead of going after that, we're trying to change the very nature of the salmon."

Seaver also dismissed the argument that farmed, engineered salmon is a way to make the fish accessible to everyone--wild sockeye is regularly $18/lb or more, even in nonspecialty grocery stores.

"Pink salmon from Alaska is an underutilized resource," he said. "Eighty percent of what's caught in Alaska is pink salmon. It ends up in cans, cat food, cosmetics, and biofuels, but it's delicious fish. I think it tastes better than farmed salmon--instead of seeing it go into cat food, let's see it go into human food. Sustainable wild food exists."

About 111 million pink salmon are harvested in Alaska each year. The majority of it, in fact is canned or sold frozen, according to seafood-industry analyst Chris McDowell. But about one in six fish don't make it to the plate.

McDowell said that could be blamed on the salmon's life cycle: when a pink salmon gets ready to mate, "they get these changes - the skin darkens up, the meat color's not so good, you look at that and go, 'wow, ooh, ouch.'"

Seaver added that if GM salmon gets the go-ahead, he hopes that it will be labeled as genetically engineered. The FDA currently doesn't plan to require labeling unless the salmon is proven to be "substantially different" from the conventional version, and the agency has said that isn't the case.

"I'm not inherently against new technology," Seaver said, "but I'm inherently against a lack of transparency. Saying that the American consumer doesn't need to know this information is simply wrong."

Rachel Kaufman is a writer and editor covering science and the environment, emerging technology, and a potpourri of other topics. Her freelance writing career has taken her inside Victorian-era "castles," French patisseries, and a haunted train tunnel, and in addition to her work for National Geographic News, her byline has appeared in the Washington Post, ScientificAmerican.com, and CNN/Money. Rachel grew up outside Minneapolis and received her B.A. in English and journalism from Adelphi University on Long Island, but finds her constitution (and temperament) far better agrees with the swampy air of her adopted hometown, Washington D.C. Her blog and portfolio can be found at http://readwriterachel.com and she tweets about science, journalism, and video games at @rkaufman.

Urban farming visionary Will Allen expands his services, growing even more healthy food in the concrete jungle. Two feet of compost, Allen says, is enough to turn asphalt into a cornfield.

By Rachel Kaufman

Grow, bloom, thrive: that's Will Allen's motto.

Allen is the founder and director of Growing Power, a Milwaukee-based nonprofit that helps people grow their own local, healthy food. His work with Growing Power over the last two decades has earned him a McArthur "genius grant," a mention on Time's list of 100 most influential people, and a partnership with First Lady Michelle Obama on her "Let's Move" campaign, designed to get children eating healthy food.

All this from a guy who just wanted to grow things.

Photograph of Will Allen courtesy Growing Power.

"I bought the farm originally to sell produce," Allen told audience members at a talk he gave last week at the Ecology Society of America/National Education Association Ecology and Education conference in Washington, D.C.. Allen grew up on a farm in Maryland, "and when I turned 18 I swore I would never do this again." He became a pro basketball player for the European Professional League, and while visiting another player's farm home, he realized what he'd been missing since he left home.

But after a few years of training kids to work summer jobs on his farm, he realized he wanted something bigger.

Now Growing Power makes 22 million pounds of compost a year; maintains 15,000 pots of greens, herbs, fruits, and veggies; and grows tens of thousands of fish to market size yearly.

Not to mention the chickens and the goats.

And the bees. And the mushrooms.

Photograph of a Growing Power greenhouse courtesy Growing Power.

As well as offering low-income residents a cheap CSA (community-supported agriculture) food box and selling compost and worm castings to other gardeners, the organization also teaches people how to take the systems Allen has pioneered--like an aquaponic set-up that costs less than a tenth of a commercial system--and take them to urban yards, vacant lots, and even empty parking lots. Two feet of compost, Allen says, is enough to turn asphalt into a cornfield.

What Allen and Growing Power are doing is green in a number of ways: the local food travels shorter distances to get to the plate, for one. Two, Allen's farm is partially powered by solar energy. And those greens? Grown year-round in Wisconsin? Yeah, but unlike a lot of commercial growers that heat their greenhouses to keep their plants alive, Allen just shovels compost up to the edges of the greenhouse. The bacteria give off enough heat to keep food toasty all winter long.

Photograph of Will Allen with worms from compost bins courtesy Growing Power.

Growing Power isn't just about saving the planet with local food. Allen's out to change the injustices of the food system—to make sure that people, regardless of income, have access to fresh, good food.

"You can't have sustainable communities and green communities if you have a lousy food system," he told the conference audience. "Food is the number one community development tool. Why would anybody want to do anything if they're hungry or sick? Our food today is making us sick.

"A lot of the food we eat has lost a lot of its nutritional impact," he added. "It's being shipped from miles away and may be 5 or 10 days old. We're basically just eating cellulose."

Growing Power now has satellite farms outside Milwaukee, and in Chicago. And more are coming: the organization has plans to build a five-story vertical farm that would have 23,000 square feet for classrooms, offices, and a demonstration kitchen, and 15,000 feet for growing veggies. They're fundraising now, "so if you want to write me a check for $10 million dollars, go ahead," Allen joked.

With all those vegetables and fruits to choose from, what does Will Allen like to eat?

"Okra," he told the Green Guide. "You can fix it a million different ways."

Rachel Kaufman is a writer and editor covering science and the environment, emerging technology, and a potpourri of other topics. Her freelance writing career has taken her inside Victorian-era "castles," French patisseries, and a haunted train tunnel, and in addition to her work for National Geographic News, her byline has appeared in the Washington Post, ScientificAmerican.com, and CNN/Money. Rachel grew up outside Minneapolis and received her B.A. in English and journalism from Adelphi University on Long Island, but finds her constitution (and temperament) far better agrees with the swampy air of her adopted hometown, Washington D.C. Her blog and portfolio can be found at http://readwriterachel.com and she tweets about science, journalism, and video games at @rkaufman.

Pesticides produced by genetically modified (GM) corn have been found dissolved in streams in Indiana, raising new questions about whether GM foods could have impacts beyond immediate food safety, a new study reports.

Jennifer Tank of Indiana's University of Notre Dame and colleagues sampled 217 streams in a 400-square-mile (1,053-square-kilometer) area in northwestern Indiana, six months after the corn harvest. Of those streams, 28 had corn "detritus" (that would be husks, cobs, leaves, and so on for those playing along at home) containing the Cry1Ab protein, which is produced by so-called GM "Bt corn" to ward off the European corn borer, an invasive pest.

The researchers, whose work was published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also found Cry1Ab protein in the water of another 50 of the 217 test stream sites, even though there were no corn husks in the water. However, all 50 of those streams were located within 1,640 feet (500 meters)--or roughly five football fields--from a cornfield.

"In this part of Indiana, there's corn and soybean throughout the landscape," study co-author Emma Rosi-Marshall, of Loyola University Chicago, told Green Guide. "It's hard to get too far before you come across another cornfield."

But the fact that the protein was found without the immediate presence of corn implies that the stuff sticks around for a goodly while, and that streams are able to transport the insecticide far and wide.

"It wasn't surprising to us, given our previous research showing that the flow in the stream dictates how far corn material transfers, that this stuff would move once it got in," Rosi-Marshall said.

Tank and Rosi-Marshall also collaborated on a paper in the journal Ecological Applications showing that the toxins in Bt corn can affect caddisflies' growth, at least in a lab setting.

The corn borer pest has the potential to develop a resistance to Bt corn and has done so in a lab, scientists have found.

As for the pesticide's toxicity to humans, nobody really knows. Indiana's streams ultimately drain into the Great Lakes or the Mississippi, but whether Cry1Ab is still present by the time the water enters the human supply is unknown.

Researchers in France found that Cry1Ab causes organ damage in rats, even when the corn made up a third or less of the rats' diets. Study author Gilles-Eric Séralini of the University of Caen and CRIIGEN, the Committee for Research & Independent Information on Genetic Engineering, said it was an open question whether the insecticide would do the same in humans.

"Unfortunately, the modified Bt toxins, mutated and as produced by GM plants, have never been tested on human cells in regulatory tests, despite our requests," he said. "This is a shame."

(Related: "Food: How Altered?")

--Rachel Kaufman

Rachel Kaufman is a writer and editor covering science and the environment, emerging technology, and a potpourri of other topics. Her freelance writing career has taken her inside Victorian-era "castles," French patisseries, and a haunted train tunnel, and in addition to her work for National Geographic News, her byline has appeared in the Washington Post, ScientificAmerican.com, and CNN/Money. Rachel grew up outside Minneapolis and received her B.A. in English and journalism from Adelphi University on Long Island, but finds her constitution (and temperament) far better agrees with the swampy air of her adopted hometown, Washington D.C. Her blog and portfolio can be found at http://readwriterachel.com and she tweets about science, journalism, and video games at @rkaufman.

Tanya Snyder, Capitol Hill editor for D.C. Streetsblog, recently blogged about how the information age may usher in a new era in intelligent transportation.

For instance, when highways get crowded and congested, some people start clamoring for more and wider roads to absorb the ever-increasing number of cars, Snyder wrote.

But advocates for sustainable transportation alternatives say we can make more of the roads we have--and the trains and buses, for that matter--with technology.

It's some of the same technology you've already grown accustomed to--think how much E-ZPass keeps traffic moving at tolls, or how online traffic maps help you plan your route.

What else could technology be doing for us as we try to maximize efficiency?

Related: Check out more D.C. Streetsblog news

Tanya Snyder is the Capitol Hill editor of Streetsblog, an online news source about livable communities and alternative transportation. She has covered federal Washington for NPR affiliate stations around the country and for Pacifica Radio's national newscast--and she's covered local Washington for WTOP-FM and various local papers. Wherever she works, she gets there by bike.

It seems totally counterintuitive. After all, the Chesapeake Bay is in a pickle right now because its oyster population, which once filtered impurities from the Bay at a rate of 50 gallons of water per oyster per day. The entire volume of the bay (about 19 trillion gallons) was purified every week. Now, with less than 10 percent of the bay's original oyster population remaining, it would take a year for the oysters to filter the same water.

(Read more about the critical role of oysters from National Geographic Fellow Sandra Postel.)

Photograph by Willard Culver.

So why would eating oysters save them? Aren't they overfished already?

Yes, but oyster farms are booming.

"Oyster farms can be definite environmental positives," says Roger Mann, with the Virginia Institute of Marine Science at the College of William & Mary. "Whether they are sitting in the bottom filtering the water or sitting in a cage filtering the water, they're still filtering the water."

Simply put, the more oyster aquaculture is done, the more benefits for the waters.

Bruce Wood, owner of Dragon Creek Seafood & Produce in Montross, Va., has seen the effects with his own eyes. When he started his aquaculture operation, in a creek that empties into the Potomac and ultimately the Chesapeake Bay, 10 acres of nearby river were too polluted to use for oyster farming. Not anymore. It helps that he's using a variety of oyster bred for its tolerance to low salinity waters and disease, which means that even in environments too harsh for wild oysters, his commercially-bred ones can begin filtering the water, improving the environment, and eventually "hopefully reconstitute the native oyster," Wood said.

Photograph by James L. Amos.

Here's another way eating oysters can help them: Wood's started a program with one of the restaurants he supplies, Hank's Oyster Bar in Washington, D.C., where the restaurant will save diners' shells and send them back to the bay, where they will become the base for new oysters, both cultivated and wild. Without some sort of base, be it shells, stones, or reef balls, similar to what are used to help restore coral reefs, the adult oysters sink into the muddy river bottom and die.

Tossing shells back into the water isn't a brand new idea, but surprisingly, getting the shells back from restaurants is a relatively recent practice.

The Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR) has been re-shelling the bay for decades, getting its shells by dredging elsewhere in the bay. In 2008, though, a sport-fishing group argued that dredging for shells stirred up too much sediment and damaged an important fishing area. So earlier this year, the Maryland DNR piloted its own shell recycling program, picking up 25,000 bushels of shells from two dozen area restaurants.

North Carolina has been running a similar program since 2003, offering a small tax credit for restaurants that participate, but that one's collected an average of only 14,000 bushels a year.

But the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, which started an oyster shell recycling program in 2007, just two years later announced that it was going to return to focusing on its reef ball program. "The shell is harder and harder to come by," CBF spokesman Tom Zolper says, "and the reef balls have habitat qualities that are beneficial." He notes that oysters seem to prefer vertical variety, which reef balls provide and a pile of shells do not, and that the balls, which are made of concrete, deter poachers who would otherwise dredge shellfish from the water.

So is eating oysters a cure-all for the Bay? Maybe not, but it's more tasty than a ball of cement. So grab your squeeze of lemon and slurp away.

(Find more about freshwater issues at National Geographic's freshwater website.)

Rachel Kaufman is a writer and editor covering science and the environment, emerging technology, and a potpourri of other topics. Her freelance writing career has taken her inside Victorian-era "castles," French patisseries, and a haunted train tunnel, and in addition to her work for National Geographic News, her byline has appeared in the Washington Post, ScientificAmerican.com, and CNN/Money. Rachel grew up outside Minneapolis and received her B.A. in English and journalism from Adelphi University on Long Island, but finds her constitution (and temperament) far better agrees with the swampy air of her adopted hometown, Washington D.C. Her blog and portfolio can be found at http://readwriterachel.com and she tweets about science, journalism, and video games at @rkaufman.

A dash of oregano does more than make pizza taste delicious: it also can reduce the amount of methane in cow burps, new research shows.

Scientists have been trying to decrease methane from livestock for years; methane is over 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide (CO2) as a greenhouse gas, and cows in the U.S. emit about 5.5 million metric tons of methane per year. Scientists have tried vaccines, breeding, antibiotics, and other dietary supplements like garlic or fumaric acid (found in lichens and moss).

Photograph by W. Robert Moore.

A new possibility: common oregano.

Alexander Hristov, assistant professor of dairy nutrition at Penn State, spent six years in his lab trying various natural methods to cut cows' methane belches. Eventually, oregano surfaced as the most effective methane suppressant.

Hristov then took oregano into the field, "and we saw the same effect there," he says, cutting the cows' emissions by 40 percent.

Decreasing methane production in dairy cows, the type Hristov worked with, also increases their milk production. "Methane is an energy loss to the animal, and if you reduce methane production, there is energy available for the animal" to make milk, he explains.

The advantage of oregano: If Hristov's team can isolate the compound inside the oregano and synthesize it in the lab, it'll be very cheap. "I don't think just feeding oregano to nine million cows in the U.S. is going to be very cost-effective," he says.

But if we could--or if Hristov gets an oregano supplement to market--the U.S. would cut its cattle methane emissions by 2.2 million tons.

Of course, the greenest way to cut methane emissions from cows is to have fewer of them: meat-eaters are responsible for the equivalent of 1485 kilograms of CO2 per year more than a vegan eating the same number of calories. (But carnivores, take note: just cutting out red meat in favor of fish, poultry, and eggs is a great way to cut emissions--beef, pork and lamb are the big culprits. Or switch to grass-fed and free-range, which often takes less energy to raise.)

Until that happens, Hristov and other researchers all over the world will carry on, always trying to make their cows less gassy.

Hristov and colleagues are presenting their work at the Greenhouse Gases and Animal Agriculture Conference in early October.

Rachel Kaufman is a writer and editor covering science and the environment, emerging technology, and a potpourri of other topics. Her freelance writing career has taken her inside Victorian-era "castles," French patisseries, and a haunted train tunnel, and in addition to her work for National Geographic News, her byline has appeared in the Washington Post, ScientificAmerican.com, and CNN/Money. Rachel grew up outside Minneapolis and received her B.A. in English and journalism from Adelphi University on Long Island, but finds her constitution (and temperament) far better agrees with the swampy air of her adopted hometown, Washington D.C. Her blog and portfolio can be found at http://readwriterachel.com and she tweets about science, journalism, and video games at @rkaufman.

The long, hot summer is finally shifting into fall gear. In New England, the maple trees are turning red. It's one of the most beautiful times of year.

So why enjoy nature in a way that damages it with your vehicle's greenhouse gases? You can make your autumn tradition more eco by leaf-peeping from your bicycle seat or from a train window.

For instance, October brings the Fall Foliage Classic, a weeklong, 314-mile (505-kilometer) bike tour through Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. You'll start off pedaling a manageable 32 miles (51 kilometers) through coastal fishing villages the first day, and by the end you'll be logging 68-mile (109-kilometer) days through communities that look like they're out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

(Check out Green Guide's new bike buying guide.)

For those who can't take a whole week--or don't live in New England--there are other options. After all, why burn fossil fuels on a long road trip when there are beautiful colors closer to home? A little farther south, for instance, you'll find the Shenandoah Fall Foliage Bike Festival. Pick a route--from ten miles to a hundred miles (16 to 160 kilometers)--that winds through the Virginia hills.

In the Midwest, the Missouri Bicycle Federation has its own Fall Foliage Extravaganza with routes of 17 to 62 miles (27 to 100 kilometers) on low-traffic, two-lane country roads within several national forests and conservation areas.

Leaf-peeping season has already started in Wisconsin, and along with it, multiday bike tours to take in the fall colors. Ride your way through Cheese Days in Monroe, the Thirsty Troll Brewfest in Mount Horeb, or the Wine & Harvest Festival in Cedarburg. Midwesterners sure know how to spice up a bike ride!

(See pictures of fall colors.)

Of course, cycling isn't for everyone--so for those of you who haven't ridden a two-wheeler for more decades than you choose to remember, hop on a train for some leaf-peeping. New England, as always, leads the pack with endless destinations (and some beautiful old-time rail lines). Try the Conway Scenic Railroad in New Hampshire or a short afternoon trip on 1920s-era trains on the Naugatuck Railroad in Connecticut.

But New England hasn't cornered the market on autumn train vacations. Westerners can enjoy Colorado's "Gold Rush" on the Pike's Peak Cog Railway. The route climbs nearly 8,000 feet (about 2,400 meters) from a historic depot at Pike Peak's base to the summit. The Pacific Northwest gets in on the action, too, with Mount Rainier Scenic Railroad's weekend steam trains. On October 2, they'll have their "Rails to Ales" trip, featuring beer, brats, and live music.

So turn over a new leaf this fall and hop on a bike or train!

--Tanya Snyder

Related:

Calculate Your Energy Diet

Green Guide's Travel & Transportation Hub

Bicycle Nation

Photograph courtesy Bret Edge, My Shot

So you don't drive a hybrid. But you can still get better mpg in the car you have.

Join the ranks of the hypermilers--people who compete over how much they can improve their fuel economy just by using better driving techniques. There are more of these techniques than you think--and they make a big difference. Here are tips from the website Ecomodder.com on how to maximize your miles.

Give the Brake a Break
One obvious intervention: Don't break hard at a traffic light. Don't waste your momentum--ease off the gas early and coast to a stop. The hypermilers have a whole rulebook on how to avoid braking. Turn wide, so you don't have to brake as hard. Anticipate changes in traffic lights, slowing as you approach in case a green turns red--or in case a red turns green, allowing you to coast slowly toward the light and accelerate when the car isn't completely stopped. And when you do stop, accelerate slowly--don't floor the gas pedal.

Hypermiling Starts Before You Even Start the Car
Taking stuff out of your trunk will lighten your car. Try putting bike racks on the back, not on top, where they add to drag. Or taking off roof racks you don't use. Check your tire pressure: Tires that aren't properly inflated produce too much friction on the road, slowing you down. Tire pressure drops with temperature, so check more often as the seasons change.

No More Idling
Idling means you're getting zero miles per gallon. It's actually better to turn off your engine (that's how hybrids work). Switch the key from "run" to "acc" (not "off"). (This works best in cars with a stick shift and no power steering.) An easier way to reduce idling is to go to gas stations at off-peak times, so you're not waiting for a pump. Avoid the drive-through. Get an E-Z Pass to slide right through toll booths instead of waiting in line.

And of course, do everything you can to avoid getting stuck in traffic. Plan your route ahead of time to avoid rush hour. On city streets, driving in the right lane may mean you end up having to navigate around buses making frequent stops and delivery vehicles double-parked in the street. Pick the lane of least resistance.

Plan Ahead
Run several errands on the same trip. Take the longest trip first. That way, your car warms up more and might not cool all the way down by the time you finish your errand. Starting a warm car is more efficient than getting a cold engine going.

To Draft Or Not to Draft
Drafting off trucks by driving close on their tails might increase efficiency, but it's dangerous and inconsiderate. (A smart hypermiler puts safety first.) But the physics of drafting can come in handy other ways. You can drive next to (and a little behind) trucks to let them reduce crosswinds. And sometimes following a slow-moving truck (at a safe distance) is helpful if you want to slow down without angering other drivers. After all, reducing speed is one of the best ways to improve your mileage.

Amenities and Add-Ons
You don't need your lights on during the day. Don't use four-wheel drive unless you really need it - four-wheel drive increases friction with the road, making your car work harder to move forward. Reduce your use of air conditioning by parking in the shade. Some hypermilers suggest using a beaded seat cover, which increases ventilation and might keep you from reaching for the AC.

But remember, keeping your windows open creates a lot of drag on the car, especially at highway speeds. You can open them in the city--but otherwise, it's best to use your vents.

Drive It Like You Bike It
If you also ride a bicycle, you'll notice a lot of these techniques feel familiar--you probably already do them on a bike. After all, the energy you're burning on a bike is your energy, and it's hard not to notice when you're wasting it. It wouldn't make sense to pedal as hard as you can to a red light and then brake hard. It goes without saying that tight turns on sidewalks force you to slow way down, as opposed to wide turns on streets, where you can keep your momentum going. You ride with as little extra weight as possible. You also avoid stops and starts--ever see those fixed-gear riders balancing at red lights without ever putting their feet down?

Hypermilers say they can improve their fuel efficiency easily by 35 percent. Now, can you go the extra mile?

--Tanya Snyder

Related:

Calculate Your Energy Diet

Green Guide's Travel & Transportation Hub

Cars Buying Guide

Photograph courtesy Lorenzo Menendez, My Shot

In Sacramento, they pick figs, kumquats, and plums from public trees. In New York, they harvest purslane--an edible flower--from the cracks in the sidewalk. Down south, it's fiddlehead ferns, and just about everywhere, people are picking black walnuts, wild mushrooms, and dandelion greens.

Urban foraging--gathering fruit, vegetables, and other useful things from parks, lawns, and sidewalks--isn't a new thing. But as more urbanites become aware of the free bounty surrounding them, new issues are--pardon the pun--cropping up. When a public park's berry patch is raided, whose responsibility is it to make sure there are some left for everyone to enjoy? What about pesticides?

The Institute for Culture and Ecology has been studying urban foragers since 2008 to understand how foraging fits into a city's ecosystem. The latest project, studying foragers in Seattle, kicked off in early 2010 with partial funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Since then, researcher Melissa Poe and her team have interviewed 35 foragers.

Among their findings:

This tiny group of foragers--just a small percentage of the people in Seattle who gather wild plants--together picks a whopping 250 different species of plants, year-round. Some have been gathering in Seattle for over 60 years. Most act as caretakers for their favorite spots, which they return to year after year.

Most popular item? "Right now, it's blackberry season," Poe said. Seattle is also home to the Oregon grape--more closely related to the barberry than an actual grape--and English ivy, an invasive vine that Seattle-area crafting groups weave into baskets.

How many people are doing this? It depends. Poe has identified 150 self-identified foragers, but "I don't think people consider what they do wild plant gathering," she told Green Guide.

"It's just what you do. There's a blackberry [plant] in the alley, so you pick it. The number of people who gather blackberries, I am positive, is over half of Seattle."

Foraging can be a risky business: in some municipalities, it's not allowed in public parks. Earlier this year, the New York Times' urban foraging columnist suggested that would-be gatherers pick day lily shoots from Central Park; the Times had to quickly post a clarification that picking plants from city parks was against the law.

"If 15 people decide to go harvest day lilies to stir-fry that night, you could wipe out the entire population of day lilies around the Central Park reservoir," Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe told the Times.

There's another risk: chemicals. "Most of the foragers we have talked to are expressing concerns about toxicity," Poe said. Public park managers aren't necessarily interested in preserving the edibility of the wild things that grow there--don't even start on whatever might grow in a median or alley. Park managers and city planners could make it easier for foragers, Poe suggested, by minimizing the chemicals sprayed or, at the very least, putting up signs to alert would-be foragers when pesticides are at their most potent.

But outweighing those risks? The food is free and would likely go to waste if not harvested. Foraging gets people outdoors, learning more about the environment. And the food is about as local as can be.

--Rachel Kaufman

Related:

Buy Into Bounty--Join a CSA

Green Guide's Food Hub

Seven Steps to Safer, Healthier Food

Photograph courtesy Chris Johns, National Geographic

BPA's in almost everything, it seems. The chemical is great for making transparent, nearly shatter-proof plastic, called polycarbonate, so it shows up everywhere--in CDs, water bottles, even eyeglasses.

Now it's in your urine, too. And if you're a guy, it's messing with your hormones.

Researchers at the School of Biosciences at the University of Exeter in the UK have found an association between BPA (Bisphenol A) and higher levels of testosterone, proving a link that up until now has only been decisively shown in lab animals.

The new study, published this month in Environmental Health Perspectives, looked at hundreds of men in Italy who had volunteered to donate blood and urine samples.

Out of all these men of all ages, 98 percent had some level of BPA in their urine.

"And as soon as you see something in 98 percent of the population, you think, 'That could be a health risk,'" said Tamara Galloway, the lead author of the study.

Photograph by Ana Meza/MyShot

Galloway's group's previous work with BPA has established links between exposure to the chemical and cardiovascular diseases, and diabetes. But the chemical had long been suspected to also act as an endocrine disruptor; that is, something that mimics or blocks hormones in the body.

The men who excreted the most BPA through their urine also had the highest amount of testosterone in their blood.

BPA passes through the body "rapidly and completely," according to the study. But because BPA is so ubiquitous, the damage is through a low level of constant exposure, so even as "old" BPA is flushed out, we're ingesting more of it. "everything we've seen suggests that there's a low level of consistent exposure," Galloway said.

Getting Rid of BPA

In an unrelated study, researchers have been working on ways to degrade BPA-containing plastic without releasing BPA into the environment.

Mukesh Doble, a professor in the Indian Institute of Technology's biotech department, and his colleagues exposed sheets of polycarbonate to UV light and then inoculated them with white-rot fungus. The researchers were able to partially decompose the plastic with no release of harmful BPA. The fungus isn't exactly feeding on the BPA, Doble said, but "this fungi breaks it into pieces, so whatever is coming out is not exactly a BPA molecule." Left alone without the white-rot fungus, the plastic will be attacked by bacteria that eventually do break it down, but release BPA into the environment during the process, Doble explained.

Instead, using Doble's technique, the UV light "pretreats" the plastic, making it easier for the mold, used commercially for bioremediation all over the world, to grow. Combined, they made for the best and fastest plastic killer.

The solution isn't a quick fix: after a year, the plastic was only about 6 percent degraded. Doble estimates it would take about 20 years to break down the entire thing. And until a plastic treatment plant based on the scientists' findings opens up near you, your only option to get rid of your bottle is to dump it in the trash. Most municipalities don't accept #7 plastics for recycling.

Many companies, prompted by health concerns, have been phasing out polycarbonate in favor of other plastics. But BPA is still found in some food storage containers, baby bottles, the linings of metal cans, and in all sorts of non-food related uses, so it'll be with us for a long time. Even if we do let it rot.

--Rachel Kaufman

By Tasha Eichenseher

Crabbing, shrimping, and fishing along sections of the oil-tarnished Gulf Coast were re-opened last week.

The media buzz is about whether the seafood coming out of the Gulf is safe to consume, but you'd never know there were health concerns when you sit down to eat with the locals.

"This is the safest seafood in the world. It's like flying after 9-11," remarked the Lafourche Parish President's husband over dinner with Expedition Blue Planet last Friday night. His reasoning: The catch coming into shore here is probably more thoroughly tested than anything being imported into the state.

The questions are tested for what, and is that testing adequate?

Photograph by Ali Sanderson/Expedition Blue Planet

Read the whole post.

Coverage of Expedition Blue Planet is part of a special National Geographic News series on the global water crisis.

We're all told to lower our carbon footprint. But as far food goes, it's not always that simple.

Companies are increasingly attempting to label products--from cribs to Coke bottles to cabbages--with a number that encompasses all the carbon that went into producing that product. So a box of powdered laundry detergent might have a carbon footprint of 750 grams, while a bottle of concentrated liquid might have a footprint of 650 grams. It's more popular in the EU so far, though last year California Rep. Ira Ruskin introduced a bill that would have created a labeling standard in the state. (The bill didn't make it out of committee.)

But even if every bag of chips and tray of veggies came with a sticker telling consumers about its environmental impact, it's not that easy.

Susanne Freidberg, a geography professor at Dartmouth, has been studying the issues, and presented some of her findings at the American Association of Geographers' conference earlier this year.

She says that when British supermarket chain Tesco started adding "food miles" labels to produce, a common way of distinguishing between "good" locally grown food and "bad" imports, it was a "fiasco." Most of Tesco's produce comes from Africa, but it turns out that growing green beans in Kenya actually produces less carbon than growing them in a hothouse in Europe. "Even Tesco eventually admitted that the label was 'of no environmental use whatsoever.'"

And even if a label includes more than just food miles, where do you stop? "Let's say my client is a retailer comparing apples from Washington State to apples from New Zealand. What are you going to measure? It's standard to count on-farm machinery and fertilizer," Freidberg said, "but do you also count the emissions that make that machinery? The transport of the workers going to the farm and back? If you don't count those workers driving to work, you're biased against countries where people walk to work, like Kenya." There are very few studies about life cycle assessments (LCA) on food in peer-reviewed literature, she added.

And doing an LCA--on anything, not just food--is hard. It requires "a lot of data," wrote Scott Kaufman on GreenBiz.com. "Some of the data is relatively easy to come by -- the amount of energy used in a manufacturing plant that your company owns and operates, for example. Other types can be extremely difficult to obtain -- a common example is a material used in your product (such as plastic packaging) that is bought from an overseas supplier." After Tesco ditched its food miles label, it announced it was going to put more accurate carbon footprint labels on 70,000 of its products--three years later, it's managed to label just 120, including milk, orange juice, potatoes, and toilet paper.

Carbon footprinting isn't all bad. Walkers, a potato-chip brand in the UK, was one of the first to sign on to have its footprint measured, in 2007, so it asked The Carbon Trust, a UK nonprofit created by the government to lower carbon emissions, studied the life of a Walkers potato chip--from growth to transport to manufacture. The Trust discovered that Walkers' suppliers were storing the taters in humid rooms to keep their skins soft, and that a huge amount of heat was needed to dry them out before frying. Walkers now pays farmers a bonus if their potatoes are drier, which has helped reduce a bag of chips' carbon footprint by 7 percent. But clearly more work is needed to develop a standard that is fair to all producers and yet easy for consumers to understand.

There's currently no standard in the U.S. for carbon footprint labeling, but the International Standards Organization (ISO) is working on a set of standards that's currently going through committee and should be published by 2011.

--Rachel Kaufman

File photo by Rebecca Hale

For the first time, a genetically modified (GM) crop has been caught in the wild in the U.S., growing weedlike across roads and parking lots across North Dakota.

Cynthia Sagers and colleagues from the University of Arkansas sampled canola plants along 3355 miles (5400 kilometers) of North Dakota road. Out of more than 400 plants collected, 80 percent of them tested positive for "Roundup Ready" or "LibertyLink" genes, which give crops resistance to weedkillers.

Photo: Herbicide-resistant canola grows out of a sidewalk crack in North Dakota.  Courtesy University of Arkansas.

Farmers like these GM breeds of plant because they can spray a field with herbicide and then plant resistant canola. The canola will grow though nothing else can.

Sagers said that most of the very dense populations of canola--where there were more than a thousand growing in a narrow, 164-foot by 3.3-foot (50-meter by 1-meter) strip of land--were found in agricultural areas, where seeds could have blown from a nearby farm, or along major roads, where seeds could have spilled off a truck. But one GM plant that contained resistance to both Roundup and Liberty was "in the middle of nowhere," Sagers said. "There was no canola within 50 miles."

"Feral" GM plants have been found in the wild before, but never at this scale.  A third type of GM canola exists too, but Sagers and her team didn't have an easy test for the third gene. That means that it's possible that more than 80 percent of wild canola could contain human-engineered genes.

GM advocates say that modified crops allow farmers to produce more and thus feed more people. Critics, like the Organic Consumers Association and Greenpeace say that the long-term health risks to humans consuming GM crops haven't been thoroughly studied. Some GM crops using nut genes, which never reached the market, have been found to cause allergies in people allergic to nuts.

The companies that create these GM plants have not been shy about trying to protect their patents.  More than a decade ago, Monsanto sued Percy Schmeiser for growing "Roundup Ready" in his fields without paying Monsanto's technology use fee. One problem: Schmeiser had never used "Roundup Ready" and didn't even want it there.

At the time, he argued the plants must have contaminated his field from a nearby farm. "They argued in court it couldn't have blown in, because the seeds would only blow a few feet," he said. (The case ended in a "draw" with the Canadian supreme court finding Monsanto's patent valid for Schmeiser's "volunteers," though Schmeiser was not forced to pay anything to the agribusiness company.)

The new study seems to cast further doubt on Monsanto's claims, though Schmeiser, nearly 80, who now spends his time speaking and trying to raise awareness of GM crops, says he's done with lawsuits.

Sagers said her concern with detecting so much transgenic canola is the effect it could have on the native ecosystem. Ten years ago, she said, agricultural, non-GM crops hybridizing with native species was a concern. Now, "we're pretty certain that what we stick into a crop is going to get out there somehow."

Schmeiser added: "Once you introduce a new lifeform, there's no calling it back," he said. "It's over."

--Rachel Kaufman

National Geographic Little Kids blogger Jane of the Jungle Gym occasionally blogs about being a green mom, and here are some recent green-themed posts:

• Paper Cuts: Jane discusses ways to green your kids' doodling.
• Gray Matter: Jane tackles those pesky gray hairs and green ways to get rid of them.
• Bye-Bye Plastic Bottles: Jane discusses how to cut bottled water from your lifestyle.
• Good for the Planet, Good for the Sole: Jane goes over ways to re-use the shoes kids grow out of quickly.
  

Jane also asks for ways you green your lifestyle, so join the conversation!