The first tricycle rickshaws appeared in India in the 1930s (where they're still popular), and took 20 years to spread throughout Asia. Americans took an interest in them after high-tech versions were used at Expo '74 in Spokane, Washington, but it's taken until now for the idea to really catch on. Now there are commercial pedicab services all over the country, including San Francisco (the oldest operation), New York, Seattle, Denver, San Diego, Fort Lauderdale, Philadelphia and Baltimore.

Would-be entrepreneurs report mixed success. Larry Giles ran a pedicab operation in Orlando, Florida for a year, but ran afoul of stringent state and local laws. "I didn't have the right equipment for a taxi or for a horse-drawn carriage," he says.

The business' environmental dreamer is industrial designer George Bliss, who operates Pedicabs of New York (PoNY). Bliss' company runs 13 pedicabs around Manhattan, including one experimental electric-powered prototype that he hopes to market both nationally and internationally. "The greatest disaster would be if the Third World follows the American paradigm and switches to taxis or very-polluting combustion-powered pedicabs," Bliss says. "Most pedicabs in use here are in tourist operations, but we want to show that they can be a practical means of transportation. And that will create a model for China, India and other countries."

Bliss says New York City has been quite supportive of pedicab operations, unlike Boston, which requires drivers to get a $100,000 medallion, similar to a taxi license. With 80 drivers trained, PoNY has never had any kind of accident claim.

The modern fiberglass pedicab, costing around $4,000, is quite sophisticated, sporting hydraulic disc brakes and a six-speed gearbox. So while there's a family resemblance to those rickety contraptions pedaled around Bombay, working one of the latest models isn't back-breaking. Bliss reports that many of his drivers, who rent the pedicabs by the day, are performance artists at night. "We're not renting them to people who are one step from the street," Bliss says. "You don't have to feel bad for the driver, who's making $20 to $25 an hour."

CONTACT

PoNY
81 East 3rd Street
New York, NY
Tel. (212) PONYCAB

--Jim Motavalli

ADVENTURE ON THE HIGH SEAS

In past lives, she was a World War II minesweeper for the Royal Navy, a freighter, an auxiliary steam trawler and a fishing vessel. But now she's outfitted for an environmental mission. The 70-year-old three-masted square rigger Picton Castle has 21st century goals as it undertakes a 500-day voyage to conduct research for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, carry educational packets and solar panels to isolated Pacific islands, and create teaching programs for English-language schools. The Castle is also the flagship of OCEAN 98, a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) project designed to increase awareness of the growing environmental threat to the seas in this International Year of the Ocean (see E's cover story, January/February 1998).

Crewed by 17 professional sailors and 23 amateur, self-financed deck hands, the 180-foot Picton Castle, built in England in 1928, began her 35,000-mile circumnavigation of the globe from Nova Scotia November 25, and has already visited Bermuda and Aruba. There are almost as many women as men on board, with each novice (whose backgrounds range from microbiologist to policeman) paying $32,500 each for 18 months room and board.

"Knowledge here is the true quest," says Captain Daniel Moreland, ship master and the driving force behind the voyage. A recognized expert who's had more than 25 years at sea, Moreland holds the highest U.S. Coast Guard designation of master in sail. He found the then-derelict ship in Norway, and brought her back to Nova Scotia, where she underwent a three-year, $1.5 million refitting and renovation, underwritten by 85 investors. Moreland, originally from Norwalk, Connecticut, then formed the Windward Isles Sailing Company with chief operating officer Ben Wellington. "The incentive is not profit," says Wellington, "but there's a light at the end of the tunnel in terms of an eventual financial return through the cargo trade and possible corporate sponsorship."

The Castle is already getting results. During recent deep water temperature readings, divers among the crew discovered that water around the Galapagos Islands was 20 degrees warmer than normal. Such information is of more than theoretical interest. "If you have a one-meter rise in the ocean around Majuro, you lose 85 percent of the island," says Wellington.

Environmental volunteers can still sign on to the Castle if they're willing to make a commitment of at least a month. The Castle's progress can also be tracked on the web at http://www.pagecreator.com/~pictoncastle.

CONTACT

The Picton Castle
31 Summer Street
Nashua, NH 03060
Tel. (603) 881-9377

--Julia Fein Azoulay

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URANIUM'S DEADLY LEGACY

At the gateway of one of America's most popular and ecologically fragile wilderness recreation areas lies what some are calling a ticking time bomb. The Colorado River's blue line of water winds around Moab, Utah to Lake Mead, Arizona. It carries drinking water to millions of people in southern Utah, Nevada, Arizona and Southern California but, according to Utah's Division of Radiation Control, it also carries "radiological contaminants."

An abandoned Atlas Corporation uranium mill near Moab, which left behind 10.5 million tons of uranium waste, or "tailings," is slowly and steadily leaking toxins into the river. Atlas began shutting down the mill (next door to the Arches National Park and directly across the river from an 875-acre wetlands preserve) in the 1980s, and closed it completely in 1988. Two years later, Atlas began pumping water out of the tailings pile to prevent it from entering the river, but the company has only slowed the rate of leakage.

"Groundwater monitoring wells on the site reveal levels of uranium that exceed water-quality standards by a factor of 800," says Mark Peterson of the National Parks and Conservation Association. "There is 6,000 times more ammonia in the river bank near the pile than in the upstream river water." The tailings are also releasing radon, which can cause lung cancer.

Although there is no indication that the pollution has moved downriver to threaten the water supply, there is some concern about the bottom sediments and the fish in whose tissue some contaminants are showing up. "These toxins go into Lake Powell, Lake Mead, Las Vegas and even the Sea of Cortez," says Peterson. "The geographical spread of this thing is enormous."

Atlas Vice President Richard Blubaugh says that "changes in regulatory requirements and manpower availability" slowed the cleanup, which Atlas is not in a financial position to complete. Environmentalists want to see the tailings pile moved to a site about 14 miles north of Moab, out of the river course, but Blubaugh says that option would cost $150 million, compared to the $16 million cost of capping it in place to prevent further radon emissions. But there's worry that the capped tailings pile could be readily compromised by floods, erosion or seismic activity. Joe Holonich, chief of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Uranium Branch, admits, "The long-term impacts would be less if the tailings were moved," though he calls capping the pile "within the range of environmental acceptability."

A growing community of 7,000 people live less than three miles downstream, and many are watching and waiting to see what happens next.

CONTACT

National Parks and Conservation Association
100 Eagle Lake Drive
Fort Collins, CO 80524
Tel. (970) 493-2545

--Giselle Steele

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THE SUNSATIONAL SOLAR COOKER

It's hard to believe that something so simple that it can be built by a 12-year-old in a half-hour's time is changing lives for the better and is putting a new spin on a serious environmental problem. Made from scrap pieces of cardboard and aluminum foil, the solar cooker captures sunlight and reflects it off of a shiny surface onto a dark pot, which quickly warms up to 300 degrees Fahrenheit. In three or four hours, the cooker can produce steaming hot plates of food. It can also pasteurize drinking water and milk, thus eliminating organisms that kill two million children each year.

An estimated 2.5 billion people--about half the world's population--cook their meals over wood fires, and shortages of burnable timber are becoming acute. The result has been widespread deforestation, soil erosion, loss of arable lands, and famine. Each day, one million tons of wood are burned for cooking--equal to nearly 60 million square miles of forest.

For people who depend upon firewood, deforestation can be life-threatening. A woman from Belize told a solar cooking volunteer, "Many times the women have to go into the forest dragging their small children when they go look for wood. It is a special hardship for pregnant and nursing mothers."

People find it hard to believe that a foil-covered piece of cardboard can really help solve some of the world's most pressing environmental problems. But this low-tech industry has a 40-year history. In the 1950s, engineers tried to perfect a solar cooker that could be used in developing countries, but the prototypes were bulky, expensive and difficult to use. In the early 1970s, Arizona social worker Barbara Kerr, frustrated by the complexity of existing models, designed and built her own simple box cooker. It worked amazingly well.

Kerr joined forces with her friend Sherry Cole to produce the low-cost EcoCooker, suffering ridicule from "experts" who said the contraption couldn't possibly work (despite clear evidence that it did). Finally, in the late 1980s, they formed Solar Cookers International (SCI), a nonprofit organization that distributes the technology through such agencies as the United Nations High Commission on Refugees.

Some of SCI's most heart-warming success stories come from refugee camps. At the Dadaab Camp on the Kenya-Somali border, refugees earn their cookers by planting and nurturing trees. A Dadaab refugee woman named Amina says, "Before this solar cooker, I went to the bush to get firewood. Please, brothers and sisters, help more refugee women to get solar." A Tanzanian man, in a letter to SCI, added, "Could forests recognize your help to save their lives, they would sing joyfully praising you."

CONTACT

Solar Cookers International
1919 21st Street, No. 101
Sacramento, CA 95814
Tel. (916) 455-4499

--Susan Garrett Mason

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WRECKAGE OF THE ROADS

Some people believe the world will end in fire, others say ice. Rick and Susan Moon never expected their world to end in mud. In 1996, an incline behind the couple's Umpqua, Oregon home that had been clear-cut by Champion International Corporation became waterlogged after heavy rains. Without structural support from trees, the loose earth flowed unhindered, burying their home under 15 feet of mud, rock and debris. Four people in the house were killed--including the Moons--and two others severely injured.

The tragedy occurred in an area that an Oregon state forestry official had earlier cited as having a "high potential for slide damage." The destruction to life and property dramatically highlighted the danger when logging access roads and clear-cutting intersect human populations. "The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) has come to recognize the relationship of mudslides to road building," says Jeff Rook, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. "Their own people have been saying it for years."

The Clinton administration recently proposed a moratorium designed to protect some 33 million acres of national forest land from logging roads on tracts of 5,000 acres or more. But several important roadless forests in the Pacific Northwest and the Tongass National Forest in Alaska were excluded. And the considerable roadless acreage that would remain vulnerable to road development has angered environmentalists, who want the proposed policy to include all roadless forest of 1,000 acres or more.

Although, according to a USFS study, road construction multiplies the risk of mudslides 30 times, the growing scarcity of cuttable forest has some loggers looking at erosion-prone hillsides. "That's just irresponsible management--continuing to clearcut and build roads on steep and unstable slopes," says Steve Holmer of the Western Ancient Forest Campaign.

In a recent report, the Campaign charges that the Forest Service-sanctioned road-building fragments wildlife habitats. "Habitat islands [created by roads] are more prone to natural and human disturbances and, in time, these disturbances result in species loss," the report concludes. Roads can increase sediment load in rivers, endanger fish and other wildlife, degrade the quality of drinking water and clog pipes. Holmer says that roadless areas are "worth more for clean water, recreation and wildlife than they are for timber."

Boise, Idaho-based logger Bill Bachman counters that the logging industry is a good land steward. "We aren't going into wilderness areas, we're going into inventoried roadless areas that have been defined as not suitable for wilderness," he says, expressing concern for communities whose timber-based economies would be "devastated" by a wide-ranging road moratorium. But even Bachman admits that the logging industry hasn't always been responsible. "We certainly haven't done a very good job in the past of managing lands, and there's none of us very proud of that."

CONTACT

Western Ancient Forest Campaign
1025 Vermont Avenue NW, 3rd Floor
Washington, DC 20005
Tel. (202) 879-3188

--Jennie Greenburg

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CONTACTS

Western Ancient Forest Campaign
1025 Vermont Avenue NW
3rd Floor
Washington, DC 20005
Phone: (202) 879-3188

Solar Cookers International
1919 21st Street
No. 101
Sacramento, CA 95814
Phone: (916) 455-4499

National Parks and Conservation Association
100 Eagle Lake Drive
Fort Collins, CO 80524
Phone: (970) 493-2545

The Picton Castle
31 Summer Street
Nashua, NH 03060
Phone: (603) 881-9377

PoNY
81 East 3rd Street
New York
NY
Phone: (212) PONYCAB