The Daily Nightly : Environment

Mama told me not to ride

Daily Nightly Editor — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:57:00 GMT

By Anne Thompson, NBC News chief environmental affairs correspondent

Growing up, motorcycles always seemed so cool. They looked like the ultimate expression of motorized freedom. My mother thought they were frightening. I had a romantic vision of seeing the world from a bike, the wind blowing through my hair. She saw broken bones, trips to the hospital and worse. In high school, a lot of the guys had bikes, but I could never ride with them. Mum said no. I obeyed and never rode… until this story.

Producer Kelly Venardos heard about electric motorcycles and got intrigued. A clean motorcycle? Talk about counterintuitive. Aren't they supposed to be all about power and smoke and that loud rumbling sound? We had to check it out.

We traveled to Ashland, Oregon, just north of the California border where Brammo builds electric motorcycles. Brammo is run by Craig Bramscher, not a tree-hugger by anyone's definition. He made his money in computer software. Tired of the fast lane in Malibu, he moved his family to Ashland to start a new life and a new business. He made quite an impression at first. As he says, he rode into this liberal city in a Hummer with a Bush sticker on the bumper.

Not only that, but he came to build high end sports cars for big guys like him. As his company built those cars, he watched the price of gas go up and became curious about electric cars. Tesla was already in the market and struggling, so Bramscher thought is there another way to go? The owner of gas motorcycles and an enthusiastic rider, he decided to build an electric motorcycle.

Light, quiet, no emissions, Bramscher thinks of the bike as more as a gadget like your iPod, Flip camera, or Blackberry. In other words, a gadget that makes a statement and a gadget you don't want to live without.

The BRAMMO Enertia

So of course, Kelly and I had to try out the bikes. Kelly got on and rode like she had been doing it all her life. Me? Not so much. When you see the standup in tonight's story, I look pretty comfortable. If you could only see what it took to get me there! The guys at Brammo gave me a crash course in how to ride a motorcycle. Unfortunately, I took the "crash" part to heart. I fell off the bike three times just trying to ride. I would lose my balance and go over on the side. Eventually, I got the hang of it and shot the standup.

Yes, I know I am not wearing a helmet. We made that decision because otherwise I would have looked like Darth Vader. I never left the parking lot, never hit the open road without a helmet. And after my lesson, I know why wearing a helmet is always a good idea. No bones were broken in the shooting of this standup, but I came away with quite the collection of bruises.

Riding a motorcycle is trickier than I ever anticipated but even on my very short ride, it was a blast. Sorry, Mum!

Video: Green bikes, born to be mild

An early warning for the world's oceans

Daily Nightly Editor — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 16:44:00 GMT

By Ian Williams, NBC News correspondent

TASMANIA, Australia-Will Howard used to think the biggest threat to the World's oceans came from the things you could see - like the detritus clogging so many of our estuaries and coastal regions. Now the researcher at the Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre at the University of Tasmania has found new evidence of how invisible changes in the chemistry of the water pose a disturbing new threat to life in the oceans.

"The impact has already begun," he told me. "It's not a matter for laboratory experiments. It's happening now."

As they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the world's oceans are becoming more acidic, and Howard has discovered the first direct field evidence of the impact on marine life - tell-tale changes in tiny sea snails the size of a grain of sand, which are struggling to make their shells.

"These organisms are the base of the marine food web, and what happens to them reverberates throughout the eco-system - right up to whales and penguins," says Howard.

It was the raw beauty of this remote corner of Australia that drew Howard here from his native New York fourteen years ago. He came on a short-term research project and never left. I met him in his Hobart laboratory, where researchers weighed the shells of sea snails collected from deep beneath the southern ocean, which separates Australia from Antarctica. The weight had fallen by half in a decade.

"The fact that we are seeing it now, that it's already happening, came as a bit of a surprise to us," he says. "If these organisms are seeing the impact, the rest of the system can't be far behind."

VIDEO: Oceans offer warning on climate change

                                                                             Photo by Ian Williams
                          Dr. Will Howard of Australia's Antarctic Climate and
                                 Ecosystems Co-operative Research Centre

Because the oceans naturally absorb carbon, they've been seen as a buffer against climate change. Around half the carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere is absorbed by the oceans, and scientists say acidity levels have risen 30 percent in the last 100 years. The impact has been faster in the cold waters of the southern ocean, which is why it is such a good laboratory, and why Tasmania-based scientists have been at the forefront of this emerging research. They believe the oceans' natural processes are now being overwhelmed.

"We're just pumping carbon into the ocean at too rapid a pace for the system to adjust itself and offset this problem," says Bronte Tilbrook, who heads an acidification project a the Australian government's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Hobart.

Shell-making is one the processes by which carbon is absorbed and then transferred to the depths of the ocean, and if this is inhibited, so ultimately might be the oceans ability to buffer against climate change.

"So if they're not making shells, it means the mechanism that transfers carbon from atmosphere to the ocean depths is also altered," Howard says.

What's more difficult to predict is just how quickly the rest of the eco-system might be affected by the changes. Ron Thresher, another New Yorker now based at the CSIRO in Hobart, thinks we will soon have a clearer picture thanks to ground-breaking research on recently discovered reefs near the Antarctic shelf.

In January, an unmanned submarine, the Jason, was able to collect the first coral samples from highly acidic water up to ten thousands of feet beneath the ocean.

"Look, you can see the effects of acidification," he said, handing me a small piece of coral, which started to disintegrate like a piece of chalk as I rubbed it. "See how fragile it is. It's flaking away."

The submarine collected live coral from a depth of around four thousand feet; below which the coral began to die off. Thresher calls this the "saturation point", the point at which the acidity is so high that the reef can no longer live. That point is moving higher as more and more carbon goes into the ocean. Coral reefs are vital marine habitats - nurseries for thousands of fish.

"As these things die off, all the associated things that live with them can't survive either," Thresher told me as we stood in front of a large cupboard stacked with coral.

It's early still, but he now believes his coral samples will yield more precise information than ever before about the pace and impact of acidification on marine eco-systems.

"It will enable us to predict the ultimate fate of these things," he says. The information will also hopefully help them devise strategies for mitigating the effects.

Before we left Australia, we visited Sydney, where we wanted to catch up with a young PhD student at the University of Western Sydney. Laura Parker was suddenly thrust into the scientific limelight when she discovered abnormalities in the shells subjected to rising levels of acidity in the laboratory.

"It was a bit scary," she told me. "Because oysters are bioindicators, so anything that happens to them might happen to other organisms in the environment."

Rock oysters are also big business in Australia - worth US $30 million a year in New South Wales alone, and Parker's findings not only re-enforced the Hobart research, but is a reminder - a wake-up call to the more hard-headed - that there also the serious economic issues at stake.

The Hobart research has led to an extraordinary meeting of Australia's leading marine scientists - and a call for more and urgent global research.

When Howard isn't pouring over his microscope in his lab near Hobart's spectacular harbor, he often found sailing along the coast, where the abundance of life--from birds to penguins and dolphins--is a reminder to him of why he settled here, but also of just how much is at stake.

He and Thresher believe they've found the ocean equivalent of the "canary in the coal mine," an early warning of what is fast emerging as the biggest threat to our oceans.

Stuck in the Arctic for 23 days

Ian Sager — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 16:42:00 GMT

By Peter Alexander, NBC News correspondent

There we were, in the Arctic and on a ship for 23 days. Pass the Dramamine!

It promised to be one of those rare opportunities to visit one of the world's most extreme environments -- a place few people, including scientists, ever get to explore. Producer Paul Manson and I -- along with cameraman Callan Griffiths and soundman Ben Adam -- were sent on assignment to report on climate change and its impact on the Arctic. The primary news peg for our trip? For only the second time in recorded history the Northwest Passage was ice free this summer, effectively clearing this shortcut between Europe and Asia.

Our intention was to stay on board for 10 days, shooting video and interviews. Mother Nature, apparently, had other plans. Inclement weather, along with an emergency search and rescue mission, spoiled all five of our attempts to disembark the ship. Getting stuck in the Arctic -- due to bad weather -- isn't uncommon; getting stuck five times -- on a swaying ship, no less -- is mentally exhausting.

Joining the team
We left New York City on September 3, joining up with a team of scientists from ArcticNet on board the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker, Amundsen. (In Canada, the Coast Guard is civilian, not military. It is part of the country's Department of Oceans and Fisheries.) This particular Coast Guard ship was dedicated to scientific research and outfitted with all the necessary tools.

In a unique partnership, the scientists work side-by-side with the Coast Guard crew. For example, the scientists were testing water samples and sediment samples (from the ocean floor) as well as mapping uncharted territories in this remote part of the world. There were 40 scientists, 40 Coast Guard members and the four of us. By the end of our stay, we're treated like members of the crew -- learning to help on deck, in the lab and at dinner (cleaning dishes, really).

We boarded the Amundsen Thursday, Sept. 4, in Resolute Bay, a small Inuit village, along the Northwest Passage. The plan was to fly off by helicopter at the northern most civilian community in North America, Grise Fjord, and then begin our long journey home. Freezing rain and harsh weather kept our chopper grounded both Monday and Tuesday. The ship kept going and our chance to get off passed. We continued North with the expedition along the coasts of the Canadian Arctic and Greenland, coming within 900 miles of the North Pole.

Over the next couple weeks, we would make three more attempts to fly to land. Each one failed due to weather. Unbelievably, on Thursday, our absolute best chance to get off the ship failed, too. The ship was diverted back north to assist a search and rescue mission, something the crew let us know had only happened at best two times in the last couple years. From the beginning, we were warned that the ship's primary mission was science. The cost of operating this icebreaker and moving the expedition forward -- $50,000 a day. While we were welcomed guests on board, we knew the ship wouldn't be making any unscheduled stops for us.

Close quarters
Paul and I have shared what would normally be the infirmary on the overloaded ship. To our eye, it was roughly, 10- by 12-feet. A thin curtain was the only thing separating us -- and our dignity. Callan and Ben shared a bunk bed in a slighter larger room downstairs.

In our 23 days on the ship we covered more than 2,587 miles. (Not that anyone was keeping track.) The ship rocked incessantly and a sonar machine used for ocean floor mapping ticks loudly all day and night. It’s akin to being audibly poked day in and day out. Callan promised to buy each of us a metronome when we got home so that we'd be able to sleep just as comfortably in Manhattan. I'm still waiting.

We were essentially done shooting two weeks into the trip, leaving us with plenty of time to fill. Meals became a priority. It's often the only way we kept track of the time of day. Thursday quckly became a favorite -- breakfast crepes. Speaking of crepes, we'll remind you it was a French-Canadian ship, so we ate well. In fact, we were convinced Fabien, the ship's pastry chef -- yes, I said pastry chef -- was trying to kill us slowly with desserts.

Meals were always heavy and large, but fear not, there was a fitness club onboard. Let me describe it for you: it was half the size of our bedroom (read: infirmary), and consisted of a treadmill, two bikes and a bench that’s parked beneath a four-foot ceiling. (Running on a treadmill when the ship was rocking could easily have passed as its own Olympic sport.) Not to worry, we collectively ran or biked the length of Greenland six times over. The other hours were spent staring at the ocean, staring in the abyss and staring at each other -- followed by routine games of Scrabble, "What's for dinner?" and "If you could be any kind of animal, what would you be?"

A once-in-a-lifetime experience
Let's be clear, although we were mentally ready to leave after ten days, we were extremely grateful for this awe-inspiring experience, including the chance to meet numerous bright and passionate scientists whose dedication to their field reminded us each day why we were there. We saw polar bears, beluga whales and icebergs the size of floating hotels. Each sighting reminding us how far away we were from home. In addition, we witnessed sea creatures from far below the ocean's surface that would rival the characters at the Star Wars bar.

As you've now seen for yourself, the Arctic is both breathtaking and intimidating. We were awed by sights that most people will never see and greatly appreciative for our once-in-a-lifetime visit.

Nov. 16: The Arctic is one of the few unspoiled environments on Earth – eight million square miles that at first glance, seem frozen in time. But as NBC’s Peter Alexander reports, climate change is having a number of deleterious effects on the region. Watch the report.

Saving the gorillas

Barbara Raab — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:53:00 GMT

By Justin Balding, NBC News producer

Editor's note: Ann Curry's report on saving the Congo's gorillas airs tonight on the broadcast.

"My director died immediately," he recalled.

During his 17 years as a park ranger in eastern DR Congo's Virunga National Park, Pierre Kakule had many close calls, but none as close as the time he was riding with his boss. Their car hit a land-mine, and though Kakule survived, his forehead is still decorated with scars caused by the blast. In other instances he was involved in gun battles. And he has lost many friends and relatives.

Some 120 park rangers in the last 10 years have been killed trying to keep the war-torn Virunga National Park safe from poachers and armed groups looking to make money out of killing animals. Antelopes, buffaloes and elephants are all routinely slaughtered, their "bushmeat" sold in nearby towns and villages. But most sickening of all to Kakule is the killing of gorillas.

The gorilla is not just an iconic living ancestor to him, but a part of the human family tree nearing extiction. In the last two decades the worldwide gorilla population has been cut in half -- mainly by by deforestation and disease. In eastern Congo, the gorillas' plight is complicated by a 10-year war which has left hundreds of thousands of people displaced and desperate for money and food.

Kakule says he understood the answer to Congo's conservation problem was much more complex than killing poachers or putting them in jail. "We put them in prison but we didn't educate people. There was a distance between us as park guards and the population, " he laments.

So he dreamed up an extraordinary conservation experiment -- a 350 square mile laboratory-in-the-jungle for gorillas and people, about 200 miles north of the Virunga. The idea became a reality once Kakule, a local man, convinced tribal chiefs that their people and the rainforest and the gorillas would be better off as a "community conservation area" managed by the people themselves. They would declare their rainforest land a protected area, and in return they would receive development for a zone surrounding the Nature Reserve. Kakule reached out to Conservation International's Patrick Mehlman, based in Kinshasa, who, in the past seven years, has obtained more than $7 million from USAID and other donors to finance the project.

Together Kakule and Mehlman took us to see what they are creating -- called the Tayna Nature Reserve. Ours would be the first TV cameras in the remote enclave.

Five of us, laden with camera and audio gear, jammed ourselves into a small bush plane and bumped our way through the clouds. An hour later we disembarked on an unassuming dirt strip and were summarily dressed down by a man in fatigues for taking photos of it. "Strategic place" he shouted, gesticulating wildly, reminding us we were still in a war zone.

Then we drove five hours into the rainforest on a road that only just qualified as that, passing freelance gold miners sifting gravel in a stream; villagers with anything from technicolor purses to hefty logs on the heads; and lots of cattle. The cattle are a bad sign -- at least as far as the gorillas are concerned. Farmers expanding pastureland for their herds means precious rainforest is cut down -- which means the gorillas lose their habitat.

"They're a kind or barometer for the health of the rainforest," says Kakule. "Gorillas cannot live where the forest is destroyed".

But what about the people's need for dairy and meat?

"The issue," says Mehlman,"is finding a balance--finding the balance between preserving globally important biodiversity in areas where you have that and also having areas that can be used for development, that can be used for perhaps pastureland or agriculture or any number of other development activities."

Right now, he adds, the balance is upset and too many gorillas are being lost.

After five hours of rough road, past the occasional home made of mud, we emerged from the forest to an almost unbelievable sight -- the village of Kasuogh. It's a huge clearing, where new buildings have sprung up, their tin roofs reflecting the evening rays, a thriving community of several thousand people. There's a hospital, a school, even a university with 400 students dedicated to conservation science. But most amazing is that this remote corner has running water; and electricity from a small hydroelectric power station, powering satellite dishes, computers and even a radio station.

For the people here, maintaining their rainforest is personal. It's the reason they receive development aid -- and no one wants to stop that. So any would-be poachers have to take on a whole community.What's more, the people here believe that in the future their gorillas will bring eco-tourist dollars, just as they have in neighboring Rwanda.

Since it's a relatively new project, it's hard to know exactly how the experiment is affecting the gorilla population in the Tayna Nature Reserve. But according to Patrick Mehlman, early indications are that the gorillas are thriving. One of the park rangers there recently spotted a newborn baby.

Restoring the reef

Barbara Raab — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 15:53:00 GMT

By Ian Williams, NBC News correspondent

Editor's note: Ian Williams's report airs tonight on the broadcast. Watch a preview here.

Phi Phi Islands, Thailand--Andrew Hewett fished a small fragment of coral from a bucket of water and held it between his fingers.

"It's been knocked off, broken by an anchor or somebody standing on it," he said, explaining that while the devastating 2004 tsunami caused a lot of damage to the area's coral reefs, the bigger threat to the reefs comes not from nature, but from man.

He then showed how to drill a small hole in the fragment and attach it to a metal rack (see photo, right). Moments later, a production line was up and running on the deck of the dive boat, students threading hundreds of fragments and pulling them tightly to the racks.

"If I can't pull it off, then a fish certainly can't," said Nichole Niewald, a biology major at the University of Missouri.

The fragments had been collected from the ocean floor, the remains of a badly damaged reef.

"Day by day people are walking on the reef, not paying enough attention, and not treating the coral like the animals they actually are," said Steve Monson, who studies food science at Mizzou.

Eighteen students and staff traveled from Missouri to the Phi Phi islands in Thailand to take part in a pioneering coral rehabilitation project. Their trip was organized by Bob Sites, Professor of Entomology at Mizzou's Division of Plant Sciences, a regular visitor to the Kingdom. It's the second year he's brought students to the coral project. All the students are from Mizzou's College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources. (Photo, left: NBC cameraman Kyle Eppler videotapes as Andrew Hewett and the students examine coral fragments.)

"Getting some college students from the central U.S., where there are no reefs, to come here and study reefs, is a very important thing," he told me. "It's hands-on conservation."

Once the racks were full, the students -- most of them recently qualified divers -- donned their dive suits and tanks and took the plunge, carrying the racks down to a coral nursery a few yards beneath the surface. The nursery is a suspended platform, anchored to the seabed. The fragments were left here to grow for ten months, away from the sediment.

"It's very much like a greenhouse. First getting it to grow, then transplanting it back to the real thing," said Allison Clarke, a major in Agricultural journalism.

"The coral's going to grow now, without anybody bothering it," said Niewald.

The project began as reef clean-up after the tsunami, which killed more than seven hundred people in the Phi Phi islands alone. In the weeks that followed, all manner of rubbish, from beds to air conditioners, was pulled off the reef by volunteer divers organized by Hewett, who runs an eco-tourism company called the Adventure Club.
Hewett, his wife, and two young children narrowly escaped, running to high ground, when the wave swept across the island.

He now runs the rehabilitation project with marine biologists from the Phuket Marine Biological Centre, welcoming young volunteers, like the Mizzou students.

"The tsunami did some damage, but not nearly as much as man," said Mizzou's Sites. Perhaps five to 10 percent was destroyed by the force of the wave.

The Phi Phi Islands, comprising giant limestone cliffs, as well as stunning beaches, is slowly recovering from the trauma of the tsunami, though redevelopment has been slowed by disputes over land ownership. The seas around the Phi Phis still contain some of the most pristine reefs in Asia, but they are increasingly under threat - with careless divers and snorkelers, as well as dive and tour and fishing boats taking a heavy toll.

The coral project now concentrates on reef rehabilitation and education. Once the students had placed the new racks in the nursery, they took racks from last year, the coral showing healthy growth, for replanting on a damaged reef (see photo, left). They did this by finding small natural holes, or by drilling holes, into which to insert the stem of the coral, which they hope will bond with the host coral. Once the students have returned to the U.S., the local marine biologists will monitor the growth.

Many corals take decades to grow; others are quicker. The coral fragments the students worked with had grown around half an inch in a year.

"Some grow so slowly that if you break off an inch, that could be a decade of growth," said Kizzi Roberts, a Animal Science major.

The project is also trying to create an entire reef of its own -- an artificial one, made from giant concrete blocks, some thirty feet below the surface. They hope it will provide an alternative dive site, to take pressure from tourism off natural coral formations. When I dived with the students, the coral was showing healthy growth, and curious marine life was moving in. A pair of clown fish had taken up residence.

"Seeing the dead coral, then planting the coral, its kinda neat to see, bringing it back," said Dustin Warner, who studies Business Management.

The Mizzou students certainly felt they were making a difference for the marine environment: "Getting down there and planting the coral, you really feel you are actually doing something," said Allison Clarke, who looked on with deep concern as a bunch of snorkelers splashed around in an area close by. "I'm feeling protective," she said. "We've put a lot of work in, and I wouldn't want to see them stamping all over it."

Regrowing a tropical rainforest

Cynthia Joyce — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 16:59:00 GMT

Editor's note: Anne Thompson's full report from Costa Rica airs tonight on the broadcast.

A snapshot of the Mekong Delta

Sam Singal — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 11:25:00 GMT

By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer

One of the great gentlemanly travel writers of a bygone era, Norman Lewis, once observed that “the lives of the people of the Far East are lived in public…. The street is the extension of the house and there is no sharp dividing line between the two.”

Here in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, the street is the river.

And the people’s lives are played out on the muddy waters of the world’s ninth longest river system.

One afternoon, off the River Can Tho, everywhere we looked there was human activity. An elderly man with a caved-in chest was washing his neck. A woman swung in a hammock hooked up inside a boat cabin. Teenage girls, fresh from a meal at a nearby hawker stall, rinsed their feet and hands in the water. A young man squatting on a makeshift dock was sorting eggs. Thin long boats cruised the canals, more than a few of them sporting a potted green shrub and the day’s washing. On some, dogs or cats lounged in the shade - one even sported a rooster pecking around the deck.

Further along the river, the pace stepped up. A lone fisherman gathered his net from the water, the skeleton of a new bridge (one of two in the immediate area) looming over him. We chanced upon a crane unloading loose rock and gravel from a barge onto a construction site by the riverbank. Not far, on another barge, four men sifted slowly through a pile of wood logs a dozen feet tall.

THE RIVER IS THE ROAD

Seeing all the cargo shuttled about, we begin to appreciate that here the rivers are roads.

Puttering along the water, narrow long boats and cargo ships criss-cross the Mekong’s tributaries and canals all day long -- ferrying people and goods. Lots of goods.

In Ben Tre province, we were transfixed by the sight of four men in a longboat tossing coconuts several feet UP to fellow workmen standing on a huge freighter. On a second ship moored not more than a few hundred feet away, groups of men stacked large bales of straw on top of one another.

At the early morning floating market -- a defining feature of Vietnam’s Delta region -- we filmed tradesmen plying regular and potential customers with lychees, pineapples, coconuts, limes, in fact, all manner of tropical fruits from boats bursting with locally-grown produce.

Later, as the light fell, and the sky behind us erupted into a mixture of pink and orange, the riverbank was dotted with the day’s last bit of activity. We smelled - rather than saw - cooking. Even at the widest point of one canal, fried garlic and baked bread (no joke; to the western palate, the Vietnamese baguette ranks among the finest bread in Asia) wafted out to our longboat zipping down the middle of the water.

Men of all ages - shirtless and gaunt -- washed their torsos with river water. Strips of fluorescent lighting dotted the landscape before us as families gathered for a meal. Teenagers took a last dip as the rain began to come down.

It was hard not to summon Norman Lewis once again. Although his description below from A Dragon Apparent comes from Saigon in the 1950s, it seems befitting of the Mekong Delta in the 2000s:

“Here it was the diversity of occupation that was so remarkable. There must have been many hundreds of people in sight, all busily living their own lives and most of them independently of the actions of others in their immediate neighbourhood.”

view photos from along the journey

Hard water, hard choices

Sam Singal — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 19:53:00 GMT

By Anne Thompson, NBC News chief environmental affairs correspondent

We've all heard a lot about our "carbon footprint." Tonight, on Nightly News we are going to take a look at our "water footprint." I know, you're thinking this is going to be about low-flow toilets and drip irrigation systems. That is part of the story, but the bigger part is learning about how Americans use water. It impacts almost every aspect of our lives in large and small ways. Do you have any idea how much water it takes to produce the food you'll eat today? How about where Americans use the most water? Is it inside our homes or outside? As a country, are we using more or less water today than a couple of decades ago?

As you ponder those questions, think about Phoenix, Arizona. This desert metropolis is in the second decade of a drought, yet there are no water restrictions. Though desert landscaping is becoming more and more popular, producer Clare Duffy and I saw some people there watering their very green lawns in the middle of the day when the temperature topped 100 degrees! Clare's mom and my brother, who live about a mile apart in the coastal town of Hingham, Massachusetts would be envious. They are under water restrictions and they can't water their lawns at all.

Conservation is a hot topic in Phoenix. (Please feel free to groan at the pun) The area's water is imported. And with projections that the population will double by 2040, concerned citizens and entrepreneurs are trying to find smarter ways to use this precious resource. Growth is a big part of the economy, but Phoenix can't grow without water.

One of the most ingenious things we saw concerns pools. In Phoenix, pools are almost as plentiful as cacti. How else would you survive temperatures that top 100 degrees? But pools take a lot of water... some 16-thousand gallons on average. That water is hard, filled with minerals, and only becomes "harder" as it evaporates, leaving the minerals behind that can aggravate your skin, hair and ruin the filters and machinery needed to keep pools clean. To change the water, homeowners would have to use some 32-thousand gallons. So what's a pool owner, who doesn't want to waste water to do?

There's a company that can change the water without wasting a drop. Calsaway patented a process that does just that. Watch how it works. It is truly a fascinating process. We will also show you how one developer in Phoenix is conserving water with style. And we will answer those questions I raised at the start. I think the answers will surprise you.

Eco-Jargon

Sam Singal — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 11:21:00 GMT

By Martin Fletcher, NBC News correspondent

You hear a lot these days about sustainable resources, forest degradation, sensitive ecosystems and water-borne disease. So much that it all begins to fade into incomprehensible eco-jargon. A bit like the war of the Bosnian-Herzogovians against the Serbo-Croats, which one writer described as a war of the unspellables against the unpronounceables. It all seems a long way away. What’s it got to do with me?

But up close and personal, it’s different. In a clinic near the Masai Mara in Kenya, the smallest unit of the Kenyan health system, my NBC News team and I crammed into the tiny room of surgical officer Richard Lemiso, and watched as a stream of worried mothers entered carrying their sick babies. Most had walked miles to visit this last beacon of hope, the man in the white coat.

Fever, diaorreah, stomach cramps, vomiting, sweating. The tiny faces either serene in sleep, or contorted in pain. The mood – resigned. The cause was almost always the same – dirty water. The diagnosis – typhoid, dysentery, dehydration, all potential killers.

This is the process, put very simply: trees have been cut for firewood, or died from disease, or been broken by large animals like elephants near the water springs. This allows other animals and cattle to approach and their feces and germs to enter the water source. That changes the balance between water for animals and water for people, dirtying the water available for villagers.

In other words, forest degradation harms the sensitive ecosystem, which reduces sustainable resources and leads to water-borne disease.

And so twelve-year-old Patrick sits in front of Nursing Officer Richard Lemiso and hears the verdict – typhoid. Again. He’s suffered from one water-borne disease or another every year of his life. His father James says it wasn’t always like this. Once his Masai village drank water from the same spring and nobody fell sick.

“So what’s changed?” I asked.

“Too many people today, too many animals, the water gets dirty.” he answered. Population growth, increased herd sizes, and all competing for declining amounts of water, because more is used for agriculture, which is expanding.

NBC News/ Jeff Riggins

Masai warrior pictured shortly after Masai baby naming ceremony.

It’s hard to imagine that of Africa’s 800 million people, almost one in three, 250 million, have no access to clean water. Not even a tap. And no Perrier for the Masai, or even San Pelegrino. Even in the capital Nairobi, people fall sick from the water.

And as for the hospitals, take care. On one day we spent in the capital, the national newspaper carried a story headed: “Skeleton found in Hospital Tank.” In Nandi South District, the paper reported, hospital patients and staff had been drinking from a water tank with a decomposing body inside it. Patients found human hair in their cups. They all gathered to watch as the skeleton was pulled out.

Our report for NBC will focus on a new Dutch invention, Lifestraw, which is a cigar-like filter you put into any dirty water and suck. The water passes through a series of filters and comes out clean into the mouth, say the manufacturers.

NBC News/ Martin Fletcher

Masai herder boys drink with LifeStraw.

If it works, it could be revolutionary. It costs less than $3.75, although a newer model may reach $5. People with no access to tap water and who routinely live on water they find on the land, such as cattle herders like the Masai boys near the Masai Mara, could now take along their portable water cleansers.

The trouble is, drinking clean water is only part of the solution to water-borne disease. Rural people have to be taught to wash their hands before they eat. That helps. But if the water they wash with is dirty, tit doesn’t do much good. And if the dirty water spills and mixes with a mud floor, and children lie or play in it, it doesn’t matter how much water they drink through a Lifestraw, they still face the risk of water-borne diseases.

NBC News/ Jeff Riggins

African Sunset - Acacia tree surrounded by wildebeest on Masai Mara.

Frankly, it’s heart-breaking to measure the difference between the lives of children in Europe and America and those in areas without clean water, especially in Africa.

And I’ll be a lot more sympathetic to eco-jargon.

To contribute to the distribution of LifeStraws
More information on LifeStraws and to purchase them

Our Journey out west

Sam Singal — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 19:52:00 GMT

By Lee Cowan, NBC News correspondent

Along our journey, our production crew Christiana Arvetis, Ray Farmer, Dennis Frye and I sought the perfect spot to capture the essence of this remote area for my standup.

There are few better places to show just how beautifully desolate the Great Basin valley is than along parts of I-93 between Baker and Castleton. The Wilson Creek mountains rise up off the flat desert floor into picture perfect blue skies. There are nothing but jack rabbits, crows and sage brush that seems to stop crowing when it gets about knee high. Even the clouds here look different here. If you're looking for a place to be truly alone -- whether to think, whether to camp, whether to just go for a long dive. This place is it. Just bring your own water and a full tank of gas. Rest stops are few and far between.