Leveraging Lake Erie
David Orr Interview TranscriptParticipants:
Dr. David Orr
Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics and Chair of the Environmental Studies Program, Oberlin College
Joe Frolik
Associate Editor, The Plain DealerJoe Frolik: David Orr, thanks for coming out here today. We’ve been talking about Lake Erie and it’s, as an asset to this region as a place to live but also as a part of the economic future of the region, at a time when maybe water is an issue of concern at other places around the United States even a conflict point in places around the world. We have the happenstance to be sitting right adjacent to trillions of gallons of fresh water. But you have also raised some concerns that there are some threats to the quality of Lake Erie that could impact, if we don’t change some things on that asset. Can you expand on what some of those threats are and concerns and maybe we can talk about what we need to do to change to avoid those issues.
David Orr: The first threat Joe that people focus on about the lake is pollutions from phosphate and sewage treatment plant in 1950 and 60’s and that resulted in a dead zone in the lake and that dead zone is still there. It’s changed in perhaps in composition and it kind of comes and goes but it’s still there, now perhaps more of a product of farm chemicals and complex industrial chemicals than before. There is another thread of invasive species that has been dealt with in some degree. We know that zebra mussels and other species that come into the lake change the ecology of the lake dramatically. But there is a third threat living on the horizon and that is climatic change. The first two threats have nothing to do with the volume of water in the lake, mostly lake water quality but climate change will change the volume of Lake Erie water as well as all the other Great Lakes. And climate change is known to be real. The story of the industrial era when Cleveland was founded, carbon in the atmosphere was about 280 parts per million, it’s now about 380 parts per million, about ¼ or 30% increase in that time. It will go higher still as we burn fossil fuel and as that occurs, temperature changes will occur and it will alter rainfall patterns, the volume of water coming into the Great Lakes watershed will change dramatically. So this is the ultimate threat to the lake is to the volume of water in the lake.
Joe Frolik: Let’s talk about each of those threats internal. So with the dead zone first. What caused and has the cause changed since say when it was first identified in the 1950-60’s and are there things that we can do to either reverse or to limit the growth or expansion of the dead zone areas in the lake?
David Orr: Well I think the good news about dead zones is that, yeah, that’s a solvable problem with policy changes and land use changes. Dead zones are a result of pollution in a variety of forms that comes into the lake from industrial or sewage sources, urban run off or what is called non-point run off, it doesn’t have a pipe it just flows off parking lots or farm fields. The changes all have to do with beginning to shift the way we use land in the area. We know how to control point source pollution with the sewage treatment plant and industrial pollution treatments but land use patterns are the larger threat. This is run off from farms, and developments of leaking septic tanks and that kind of thing. But that’s a sizeable problem with enough will and enough money that problem that can be solved. And to some degree it has improved since 1968, but not nearly enough yet to solve the problem.
Joe Frolik: What are some of the things you do to solve the problem on the non-point polluters.
David Orr: Well development is a big culprit here. Cleveland hasn’t grown but the population has dropped some as it has hollowed out. So people are moving out to the outer ring of suburbs in Medina County and Lorain County. We see this around Oberlin Ohio the former starter mansions on places where there have been farms fields and farms before. And that’s occurring in the United States all over, but particularly in this region. So if you want to improve water quality, one of the best ways to begin to do this is to improve land use patterns, more condense developments. Tie people into the waste water treatment systems. Keep riparian zones or force zones along farm fields to prevent run off from getting into streams and rivers. But that’s known. We know how to do those things. That’s a matter of political leadership and enough money to do it.
Joe Frolik: Now you talk about the riparian zones that are basically having nature cleaning itself up?
David Orr: Well it is. It’s creating marshes and wetlands. One of the good things about the region is it was historically a long time ago mostly wetlands from the Appalachian plateau on towards Toledo. That was mostly a swamp at one time and parts of it still are. So further ways to clean water is simply allow wetlands to recur and restore them and allow them to filter water before it flows into streams and rivers and eventually into Lake Erie.
Joe Frolik: Now you’ve also mentioned the invasive species and one of the even current day economic benefits of the lake is the enormous both tourist and sport fishing industry and the commercial fishing industry. Do the invasive species, do they threaten that part of the economy and again what do we do about invasive species?
David Orr: Well that’s a tough problem. They do threaten the economy in all kinds of ways. Lake Erie is like a kaleidoscope, remember the toy you had as a child and you turn it and you see different patterns? The ecology of Lake Erie is like that kaleidoscope, the patterns have changed, the species come in, disappear, the only way or the best way to control it is to keep them out in the first place. It’s very difficult, for example, once the zebra mussels were in the lake, it was virtually impossible to get rid of it until another invasive species comes in begins to pray on it.
Joe Frolik: And the thing that brings them in is that they come through the St. Lawrence Seaway or the Mississippi or is it the fact we all have the various rivers feeding into the
David Orr: All of the above. It primarily in the past has been a function of commerce. Tankers come in and release their ballast tanks into the lake and the ballast tanks have things that they pick up in the black sea as in the case of the zebra mussels or wherever they have been in the past. So that is a threat to the lake. A tough threat to control, but both pollution and invasive species are well known. We know something about the climate change and it’s going to be a much bigger problem, because it’s tied to other patterns having to do with the way we use energy in society and the combustion of any fossil fuel, coal being the worst, oil being second and natural gas being the best of the fossil fuels. But any fuel with carbon burns, produces carbon dioxide and that forms that greenhouse layer in the atmosphere that allows the sunlight to come in but traps the outgoing heat. So just like a car with its windows rolled up in a parking lot on a summer day, the interior gets a lot hotter than the outside temperature. That’s what we are going through right now.
Joe Frolik: Again if that’s not abated in some way, what will that do to the lake, to the lake level, to the quality of the lake and to the climate, what we normally expect in terms of our seasons here in Northeast Ohio?
David Orr: Well it changes everything. It will change rainfall patterns for one thing. Change the temperature patterns. There will be many more heat waves but overall with the lake you can expect falling volume of lake water, falling lake levels. Probably increase pollution as lake temperatures rise and then changing ecological composition very different fishery will emerge with warmer water. And of course, climate change isn’t something we simply move to and now you are in a different climate. It’s again a kind of shifting kind of thing. The lake with one kind of body water at 280 parts per million, it will be a very different body of water when the carbon dioxide levels and the atmosphere go to 400 to 450 and again very different at 500 and 550. So we are going to watch the lake change dramatically unless we can control the emission of carbon dioxide and that means becoming much more energy efficient and making the transition over through a very different energy economy.
Joe Frolik: Talk about that economy, what might that look like and how may it play out here realistically in region of Northeast Ohio?
David Orr: Well let’s run the film fast forward, let’s say in 50 years and standing on this very spot, what might we see? We would be standing on a building maybe largely powered by sunlight. Today is a very sunny day and you could very easily put a photovoltaic here and catch your sunlight converting sunlight into electrons, your taking photons and making electricity out of those. That technology is well advanced. We’ve powered space shuttle missions for years by that technology. To your right the lake shore here is classified by the federal government as a class 4 wind sight, which is commercially exploitable wind power. So it might be that at a future time we’d see wind towers 150’ or so out here in the lake shore generating electricity, a sizable fraction that would be needed for a city the size of Cleveland but between photovoltaics and wind towers you have a very different technological base. None of which require coal or oil or natural gas.
To your right also just below us is a rail quarter which could feature a high speed array of trains between Cleveland and Chicago to the west or the northeast or Washington DC to the east and again a very different kind of transportation network. Further out here to your right is a parking lot of cars that on average get probably about 22 miles per gallon. State of the art now is 50 to 70 to 80 and higher. So 50 years from now we will see a different kind of economy emerge here and the question is whether Cleveland is part of that economy or a buyer of that economy, whether we are a supplier or simply a buyer of what is made elsewhere.
Joe Frolik: How do we insure that, because certainly in the previous industrial ages, we were a major producer? Cars were build here, still are built here, a lot of the major components of trains and other things like that, how do we get ourselves into that supplier niche in the economy that’s emerging?
David Orr: Well there are two answers. One is historical. Cleveland was the ground zero for the first industrial revolution. Euclid Avenue was the site of a lot of houses that built the first industrial revolution like the steel mills and all the manufacturing places that are still, many of which are still here. The second answer is to look into the future and see a very different kind economy emerging and what’s necessary now in terms of political leadership and financial expenditures to move it in that direction. If Cleveland was once the start place where the industrial revolution really did start in the United States, why could it not be the place where the second industrial revolution also begins? That’s a revolution where we power not from coal, oil and natural gas but efficiency first and then direct sunlight and wind power and very different kind of technology in photovoltaics and fuel cells and micro turbines, but they could be made here. We have a workforce here, we have political leadership on those issues but this is one of those good news, bad news stories. The bad news is we have to move in that direction. The good news is that we have every reason to want to move in that direction and we could once again lead in that transition.
Joe Frolik: Where does the leadership come from, where is sort of the popular impedance to say we’ve got to change direction and change directions dramatically baring some cataclysmic event, but how do we do that in a way that it’s both effective and timely to get us where we need to be?
David Orr: Well I think there are 3 big sectors that need to be involved here. We need the political leadership, the Mayor, Mayor’s office, city council and regional governments’ needs to begin to come together around a very different vision. Instead of trying to keep the industrial economy in place which they cannot do for long, it begins to leapfrog that economy to a very different kind of economy and the second is the financial leadership of the region. This will require a lot of investments, lots of decisions involving money and interest rates and taxes and investment capital. Then the third is the leadership of the buying public. I happen to be in the educational sector and we’ve got enormous amounts of buying power nationwide, $120 billion goes to purchase goods and services for colleges and universities. But if a fraction of that, just from the institutions here in the Cleveland area go to begin to support this economy the a very different economy begins to emerge.
If Oberlin College and Cleveland State and Case Western and John Carroll and all of us together begin to say, we want to power our campuses by current sunlight made from equipment manufactured here in Cleveland by Cleveland workers by Cleveland inventors behind it, that’s a major transition, that’s a lot of buying power. That’s a big chunk of the market beginning to come over and saying, we want a very different kind of energy system here and we want it to be local. We want to harvest the sunlight here and wind power here with equipment made locally. So it’s a complicated but pretty straight forward revolution involving political leadership, the financial sector and also the buying sector.
Joe Frolik: An interesting role you described there for the universities. Traditionally we would have thought about it or I probably would have even thought about it that the university’s role is to do the research. I know they got the fuel cells set at the Wright Center at Case and some of the other things that the schools have been doing but as a buyer in addition to being sort of the developer of the technology.
David Orr: I think it can do three things. I think the research certainly is part of it and Case Western has been a leader in this field. Other universities can join in as well, that’s certainly part of it. The second thing that we need is to harness buying power. Brad Massey in Oberlin and Ned Hill at Cleveland State have come up with a number that in this region we buy about $6.7 billion dollars worth of food but all but $200,000,000 of that is purchased from outside. So there is another way to think about the regional economy and that is harnessing the buying power again at colleges and schools and hospitals to support the emergence of a very different economy based on local resources and in that case agriculture. Then as a third role, we need young people equipped to begin to be the entrepreneurs for this new revolution. And there are exciting careers there. You take the word environment and renewable energy and apply that to any of the old career lines of law and medicine and journalism or television or anything else and you’ve got a wonderfully exciting career field. So we can play a major role in leveraging change in higher education.
Joe Frolik: When you talk about getting on the cutting edge of what some people think of it as an environmental engineering or managing this change. Are there other cities or regions that have begun to do that in a serious way or is it a pretty much an open field here for Cleveland and Northeast Ohio to carve a different path and hopefully the path that others will hopefully want to follow us down?
David Orr: Joe I think you can find bits and pieces in cities around the United States. Chattanooga comes to mind, Seattle comes to mind. You can find a green city movement beginning to appear in lots of places. But in Cleveland with the leadership of David Beach and Eco City Cleveland and the Cuyahoga Planning Commission and lots of other people, there is a start of conversation about rethinking Cleveland for the 21st century. Not trying to keep Cleveland in the 19th or 20th century you know in tact but beginning to forge ahead. But no city, I think, has put all the pieces together to begin to rethink how it operates, where it gets it’s energy, how it serves it’s people as well as what it’s people do. There is a formation of that regional economy based on regional resources and the most important of which will be learning how to harvest sunlight and wind and making it an efficient economy and the technologies and equipment necessary for the world to move in that direction. It will happen. The question is whether it happens here in Cleveland or happens someplace else. But it will happen in time.
Joe Frolik: Let me ask you a couple of quick questions on the types of renewal energies you mentioned. Like I see today is nice and sunny but we all know the fact of the matter is that there are a lot of days here that aren’t real nice and sunny. How realistic is this as a part of the energy mix in a region that’s got the sunlight issues of Northeast Ohio?
David Orr: Well it’s very interesting, none of the viewers watching us own mainframe computers. Most of them own laptops computers or notebooks computers or desktop computers as part of a distributed information network. They are linked by Internet and other ways through this larger information economy. The same thing is beginning to happen with power sources being distributed through rooftops and the sides of buildings and all kinds of different equipment. So a distributed energy system is trying to get born, it’s the way in which power was provided to NASA Space Shuttle for fuel cells and photovoltaics.
Technology is well known, well understood, research is under way to move it to higher levels of efficiency but it is already beginning. The building that we built at Oberlin the Adam Joseph Lewis Center is powered substantially by current sunlight falling on the roof and yet in this region we have as many cloudy days in the city of Seattle. But sunshine, direct sunshine as on a day like today with wind power captured on days and nights when the sun is not shining but the wind is blowing and along the lake shore to your right, that is again a class 4 wind sight that is a commercially exploitable resource.
And if you begin to think about this against the backdrop of the events of 9/11; at 9/11 what we found out as a country is that we are very vulnerable to disruption to things such as oil supply and trans Alaska pipeline and through nuclear power plants, all of those are susceptible to terrorist attacks. Wind mills no, photovoltaics no. It is possible to build a distributed energy system that provides jobs and power locally while making us much less vulnerable to terrorists and acts of God or disruptions or simple accidents within a power plant.
Joe Frolik: Let me ask you about one other future energy source in the economy. Let’s talk about hydrogen economy. I remember enough about science that there’s 2 parts of hydrogen to 1 of oxygen and all those trillions of gallons out there. How possible is it and are we geared to extract that hydrogen from fresh water and use that as a power source and again in this hydrogen economy that people talk about?
David Orr: Well it’s possible to do that. There are old experiments that some of you may have done as a high school chemistry student where you ran electric current through a little vat of slightly salty water and you separated hydrogen from oxygen and you can store the hydrogen. And again this is who we power the space shuttle mission. And you can do this in fuel cells that dissociate hydrogen from oxygen and then recombine it. So you can take hydrogen and oxygen apart, you can also put them together. And when you put them together again what occurs again what occurs chemically is electricity and heat. And so hydrogen can become a way to store power for future usage and fuel cells that will burn in hydrogen burning engines. But the source of power to dissociate hydrogen from oxygen could be sunlight, it could be electricity provided by wind or photovoltaics. So that is a major part of the energy economy that is in process.
Joe Frolik: One of the aspects of a future economy perhaps based on different models is that, you made the point, we’ve made great progress in the past 30 years in the terms of cleaning up the lake, cleaning up the Cuyahoga River, some people suggest that the expertise that has been developed from that pollution heritage could be a industrial cluster. A body of knowledge that we can sell to other places, is it your sense that that is realistic, that we have an expertise that perhaps that in terms of product production or the selling of professional services to other places again water treatment centers become more important in the next few decades?
David Orr: Well I think so. Again at the Adam Joseph Lewis Center we have what’s called a living machine. A living machine is a glorified phrase to describe a wetland or a marsh inside a greenhouse. It looks like a tropical greenhouse. And waste water comes into the system through series of tanks that have plants floating on the surface, the roots of those plants go down into the water column and take out phosphorus and nitrogen and so forth. But the knowledge to do that has been inherent in wetlands for as long as there have been wetlands. So beginning to package that and commercialize ecologicalize engineering to make living machines is something that we could very well do. There is no good example in the Cleveland area other than the living machine in Oberlin right now that does that in our area.
Joe Frolik: Now you have suggested in terms of and I always hope the people can see this; I was able to go out to the Lewis building and be able to see that, it’s a pretty remarkable setup there. But you have talked about the idea that perhaps of a large scale prototype that could be done in the Cuyahoga Valley would show what could be done, would actually clean up but would also be something that would draw people from other parts of the country in the world to see what we have done almost like make a statement. So let’s talk a little bit about your idea about a big, big living machine.
David Orr: Well over my left shoulder is the Cleveland Rock N Roll Hall of Fame and imagine a building that looks like that sitting on the banks of the Tremont, coming down the Cuyahoga River so that somebody looking out from the third deck of Jacobs Field who is looking out toward Tremont would see a glass building that looks like a large greenhouse stepping down the hillside as a waste water treatment facility and sewage from surrounding blocks would come into the building and cascade down through a series of tanks with tropical plants in them and then what would be released to the river would essentially be pure water. Stripped of nitrogen and toxic chemicals, and in between the river and the in point or intake of that building would be nothing more than a series of miniature eco systems that purify waste water. We know how to do that and that could be a signature of this kind of technology in the Cleveland area. No chemicals, no chlorine which under some conditions could be carcinogenic or aluminum salt or alum; simply the workings of sunlight, gravity and plants.
Joe Frolik: That would be a very different image then the city of the rustbelt or the burning river?
David Orr: Well it would be appropriate wouldn’t it, for a city that is known around the world for the Cuyahoga fire in 1968 and it would be appropriate civil restoration as well as a way to move the technology forward and the knowledge of how to clean water using natural means, a source of jobs and employment and an economic magnet in that area.
Joe Frolik: Great. Well David Orr thank you for coming. Appreciate it very much.
David Orr: Well, thank you very much.