The National Audubon Society has honored six women with the 2009 Rachel Carson Award for their outstanding conservation efforts.

• Dr. Sylvia Earle, an oceanographer, author, lecturer and National Geographic Explorer in Residence whose work has expanded awareness and conservation of the fragile marine environment. Former chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Dr. Earle is president and founder of Deep Search International. She has led more than 60 expeditions, including the first team of women aquanauts during the Tektite Project in 1970. She also set a record for solo diving to a depth of 3,300 feet. Her research focuses on marine ecosystems in the deep sea and other remote environments.

• Sally Jewell, president and CEO of Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI), a national outdoor gear and apparel retailer dedicated to inspiring, educating and outfitting for a lifetime of outdoor adventure and stewardship. Additionally, Jewell sits on the boards of the National Parks Conservation Association, Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust, Initiative for Global Development and the University of Washington. She also serves on The National Forum on Children and Nature Advisory Board and the National Parks Second Century Commission.

• Elizabeth C. Titus Putnam, the president and founder of the Student Conservation Association, the nation’s largest youth conservation leadership organization. While studying at Vassar College in the mid-1950’s, she envisioned a contemporary conservation core that would utilize her strength and the energy of students to respond to the threats facing America’s national parks. Through her hard work, vision and determination, she established and nurtured the SCA which enlists nearly 4,000 students, who contribute over two million hours of service each year to protecting and restoring America’s parks, forests, refuges, seashores and communities.

• Elizabeth Colleton, Jane Evans and Susan Haspel – NBC Universal’s “Green is Universal” Initiative: Launched in May 2007, Green is Universal is NBC Universal’s ongoing effort to promote environmental awareness and action, and to green the company’s own operations. Spanning numerous business units, Green is Universal provides hundreds of hours of green-themed content and activities, especially during dedicated “Green Weeks.”

The women received their awards at the sixth annual Women in Conservation Luncheon held at the Plaza Hotel in New York City earlier this month.

Carol Browner, head of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change and past Chair of the Audubon Society; Alison Rockefeller, Founding Chair of the Rachel Carson Awards Council and Gloria Reuben, Golden Globe nominee and star of “Raising the Bar” and “ER,” also attended the ceremony on May 19.

The award commemorates the late Rachel Carson, whose landmark book Silent Spring made the world aware of the damage caused by pesticides in the early 1960s. Audubon established the award in 2004 to honor similar visionary women. Past honorees include Bette Midler, founder of the New York Restoration Project; Teresa Heinz Kerry, chair of the Heinz Endowments and the Heinz Family Philanthropies; Majora Carter, founder and executive director of Susainable South Bronx and Laurie David, producer of An Inconvenient Truth.

The National Audubon Society headquarters in New York City has distinguished itself as a builder not just of avian habitats, but of green, sustainable office spaces too, earning a LEED Platinum rating from the U.S. Green Building Council.

In fact, the society’s 27,500-square-foot headquarters at 225 Varick Street received the highest point total of any commercial interior in the world that has been evaluated by the USGBC, according to an Audubon news release today.

The conservation group reports that the redesign of the space, which included a long list of energy-saving changes, cost only about 10 percent more than the upfront price for comparable conventional improvements. And most modifications are expected to pay for themselves within 10-15 years.

“Our new home office demonstrates Audubon’s commitment to providing employees with a cost-effective, productive and comfortable workplace that fits our environmental values and also allows us to concentrate financial resources on our conservation mission,” said Audubon President John Flicker, in a statement. “Most importantly, what we’ve done here is a model of cost-effective sustainability that can be replicated by others.”

The building conserves energy through a variety of innovations, including a floor air distribution system that helps lower the cost of blowing warm or cooled air around with fans; Energy Star appliances; daylight lighting that minimizes the need for “polluting lights” (the building already had tall windows, which was a key reason the space was chosen) and a system of sensors and controls to monitor and mitigate electricity use.

Other features that helped the workspace win LEED points include an array of salvaged and recycled materials such as steel, drywall and carpet with recycled content, and locally sources materials, like tables made from fallen walnut trees in the Hudson River Valley. Recycled barn siding became a décor feature of the reception area. (See photo, above, by Kim Phillips.)

Architects FXFowle also used cork and bamboo, which are quickly renewable materials, for flooring and cabinets.

The building also won points for being near subway and bus stations, which allows employees to use greener mass transit.

The USGBC’s certifies buildings under a four-tier ranking system called LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design). Buildings that meet basic standards are “LEED certified.” Rankings continue upward from Silver, Gold or Platinum, as the building meets increasingly stringent guidelines for building materials, energy installations, waste management and other sustainable features.

See video of before and after images at the Audubon website.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Geoff LeBaron gets paid to count birds, among other things. And this is an especially busy time of year for him and all bird watchers. From Dec. 14 through Jan. 5 the National Audubon Society conducts its annual Christmas Bird Count. LeBaron has served as its director since 1987.

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“It’s neat to be able to work for the National Audubon Society in this [endeavor] that brings birding and ornithology together,” LeBaron says, explaining that ornithologists like himself are trained scientists who study what birds do, while birders are folks, also like himself, who are captivated by watching birds. Not all ornithologists, he points out, enjoy birdwatching as a pastime.

“The Christmas Bird Count is a unique crossover with ‘citizen scientists’ making important contributions. These amateurs have an impact on the overall knowledge [of ornithology].”

So what exactly is the Christmas Bird Count? The count was initiated by ornithologist Frank Chapman in 1900 as an alternative to the traditional holiday ‘side hunt,’ in which teams went up against each other to see which group could shoot the most birds. Chapman, who worked for the American Museum of Natural History, suggested that instead of shooting, they count birds in order to identify and record their numbers. He realized that declining bird populations could not survive over-hunting.

Horseshoe crabs – believe it or not – scuttle about in Jamaica Bay, a 20,000-acre maze of marshland, islands and water that forms the southern boundary of Brooklyn. There would be more if they could find a place to breed.

Decades of debris have piled up on the bay’s beaches, blocking the path to egg-laying sites for the prehistoric-looking crabs. But things will soon get better for horseshoe crabs in New York City – and blue-winged warblers in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, and marbled godwits along the Mendocino Coast of northern California – because of TogetherGreen, an initiative of the National Audubon Society paid for by Toyota.

The program awarded TogetherGreen Conservation Innovation Grants totaling $1.4 million this fall. The grants, ranging from $5,000 to $68,000, will fund 41 projects in 24 states. As you might expect from Audubon, many of the funded projects benefit birds.

Jamaica Bay, New York

What’s good for horseshoe crabs, it turns out, is good for semi palmated plovers, ruddy turnstones and other birds that feast on horseshoe crab eggs when they migrate through Jamaica Bay. Declines in crab populations over the past two decades have been accompanied by falling bird populations.

“Jamaica Bay is this incredible resource for wildlife right in the shadow of JFK Airport,” says Glenn Phillips, executive director of New York City Audubon.  While the water is cleaner than in years past, the flotsam and jetsam of decades does incredible damage to the beaches and marshes, Phillips says.

Lumber, chunks of broken fiberglass boats, industrial plastic, “anything you can imagine, including the kitchen sink, winds up on those beaches,” says Phillips.

About 80 percent of the junk, Phillips explains, is “perennial debris” that is moved from beach to beach by storms that churn the waters of the narrow-neck bay. Haul it off once and the problem is largely solved.

“The hardest part is getting the bodies there to clean it up,” Phillips says.

Part of the $58,000 grant will be used to hire buses and boats to get volunteers to clean up sites in the spring. Most of the grant will be used to hire someone to cut through the red tape. Jamaica Bay is managed by 27 agencies – federal, state and local. That makes organizing volunteer efforts complicated, Phillips says.

(For more information on the Jamaica Bay estuary, see the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation.)

Lehigh Valley Restoration Project, Philadelphia

A $7,800 TogetherGreen grant will pay for plants used in the continuing restoration of Kittatinny Ridge in the Lehigh Gap Wildlife Refuge northwest of Philadelphia, a project of the Lehigh Valley Audubon Society.

The air pollution from more than 80 years of zinc smelting denuded Kittatinny Ridge, an important flyway for tens of thousands of raptors. The Lehigh Gap Nature Center was been working to restore the 400-acre landscape.

“We’ve created a grassland where there once was a moonscape,” says Dan Kunkle, director of the  Lehigh Gap Nature Center. (See before restoration photo, top, 2002; and after, below, 2006.)

The grant will allow volunteers to give nature a boost by planting native wildflowers such as sunflowers and asters, as well as forbs, or herbaceous flowering plants.

The project is a bit of an experiment, Kunkle says, to determine what plants can flourish in the soil contaminated by zinc, cadmium, and lead deposited by the smelting operation. The new vegetation will also be planted inside and outside fenced areas to learn which plants withstand heavy browsing by hungry deer.

The projects awarded grants are designed to “achieve measurable results in energy, land or water conservation,” says Brenda Timm of Audubon.

Toyota is a company that is based on efficiency and measurable goals, says Dan Sieger, spokesman for Toyota North America. The automobile maker wanted to work with the National Audubon Society because of its long history and its effective network of 500 chapters across the country.

“These innovation grants we’re funding are going to pay dividends for years and years,” Sieger says.

The grants are just part of a five-year, $20 million gift from Toyota. Other money is being used for a fellowship program designed to develop conservation leaders and mentors. Forty fellowships – each with a $10,000 stipend – were awarded in November. Recipients include professors and Ph.D. candidates, an artist, ecologists and representatives of wide-ranging community organizations.

Copyright © 2008 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Every spring, as sure as the sun warms the cedars and the birds flock back from Mexico, Lee Clauser leads a stealth group of intense adults dressed in khakis and boots to the edge of a wild thicket near his house in north central Texas.

They creep into the brush, quietly unloading their weapons of mass observation.

Putting binoculars to eyes, they look, and listen, for the brilliant Golden-cheeked warbler, and for the reclusive Black-capped vireo. Both songbirds are listed as endangered in the United States, their nesting grounds having been narrowed to a strip of Texas Hill Country that supplies just the right shrubbery and old-growth cedars. The birders, who come from Fort Worth, Dallas, New England, the Pacific Northwest and beyond, know that catching a glimpse of one of these delicate creatures is a rare treat.

“People have come from Europe to see those birds, both species. For birders all over the world, it’s a huge deal,” says Clauser, a retired banker and life-long bird rescue and rehabilitation expert.

“Texas is the only place in the entire world that they nest,” confirms Gail Morris, president of the Fort Worth Audubon Society. “They require certain junipers and ash and that habitat is just not available anywhere.”

The Black-Cap (estimated population 6,000) and the Golden-cheek (estimated population 21,000) have been listed as endangered for nearly two decades, according to government records. The reason for their decline and the biggest threat to their recovery is one and the same: Loss of habitat to residential and commercial growth.

In Texas, exurbia, agriculture and industrial pursuits – cement plants, landfills, gas drilling – have encroached on the birds. . . and are poised to claim even more of them. The forests favored by Clauser’s bird groups occupy land adjacent to a proposed gravel pit that would bring rock blasting and mining nearly certain to affect the vireo and the warbler.

A Story Echoed Everywhere

Sadly, it is a common story, replayed across the globe. From Sumatra to China to the United States, animals are being crowded out by residential sprawl and human “improvements” to the land. The answer — to hold the line on the growth – has proven difficult to impossible in many cases.

“Habitat loss is the biggest driver of species endangerment in the world,” says Colby Loucks, deputy director for the Conservation Science Program at the World Wildlife Fund. And it’s hard to fight, whether the animal in immediate harm’s way is a Texas songbird or a Pacific sea turtle.

Civilization is crashing into natural places such as the Baja region of Mexico, where massive tourist expansion is projected to bring a ten-fold increase in population, imperiling not just the sea turtles that nest there, but the region’s freshwater, which supports the wildlife and the people, Loucks said.

It’s happening, too, in central China where roads and railroads designed to bring development to the mountainous wilderness, are carving up the ancient byways used by the Giant Panda to migrate to new bamboo forests. And it’s happening in the Appalachians, where mountaintop coal mining is filling valleys with slag and pollution, stifling stream life, lacing the ecosystem with mercury and heading straight for our tap water.

Scientists like Loucks, and others, are increasingly stressing the big picture: That we need to preserve our planet’s biodiversity and recognize the inter-connectivity of animals and plants, large and small, because we’re all perched on the same slippery slope.