EarthTalk®

Dear EarthTalk: I was appalled to find out on a recent backpacking trip to Yosemite National Park that I could get three bars of service on my cell phone. What about getting away from it all?

-- James P., Seattle, WA

Cell service in national parks has become a flashpoint in recent years as cellular providers compete to blanket the U.S. with coverage—even in remote, traditionally off-grid areas. On one side of this most modern of environmental debates stand wilderness buffs, who liken letting cell towers into national parks as no different from letting other forms of industrial development into these most sacred of wild and natural places. On the other side are those who say cell coverage in otherwise off-grid areas will help attract a new generation of (screen-addicted) young people to our parks and wildlands while also making it easier for first responders to save the lives of those who get into trouble in the backcountry.

“Cell phone towers have sprouted up in national parks across the country because the National Park Service (NPS) lacks any coherent policy and instead lets telecommunications companies decide where and how many towers will be constructed,” says Jeff Ruch of the non-profit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), which has been leading the charge against expanding cell service on public lands. “As a result, the incessant chirp of the cell phone can be heard in the wild backcountry as well as at iconic places like Old Faithful.”

To date, only four out of 401 national park units (Golden Gate, Rock Creek Park, Lake Mead, and Yellowstone) have adopted a plan for cell towers or wireless communication within their boundaries. At Yellowstone, the first national park in the U.S. system and the second largest in the Lower 48, park managers have recommended a moratorium on the installation of new wireless infrastructure and reducing or relocating some cellular installations that are visible to park visitors. The CellularMaps.com website reports that NPS has restricted any new or relocated facilities to “provide no more cellular coverage than is already available and no service can be expanded into designated Wilderness areas.”

But elsewhere, NPS has been quietly working with cellular providers to greatly expand “connectivity” inside park boundaries—not just at visitor centers but along park roads and at trailheads. “This stealth scheme to wire our national park system has advanced without public involvement,” reports Ruch. “It will mean more ugly cell towers marring park vistas and ‘spill-over’ coverage in wilderness and backcountry.”

“Part of the point of wilderness is the ability to be disconnected and feel alone, but if somebody on the same trail can order a pizza, or sell stock, or chase Pokemon, that takes away from the visitor experience,” he says. While some cellular providers have expressed interest in directing their signals away from backcountry areas, PEER and others consider it to be too little, too late—and would instead prefer binding legislation that forces parks and companies to work together to make sure at least the wildest and remotest areas are free of cell signals.

“Parks should remain unplugged from the modern world,” says Ruch. “Experiencing the wonders of nature should not require a smartphone.”

CONTACTS: PEER, www.peer.org; CellularMaps.com, www.cellularmaps.com.

Dear EarthTalk: If the world is running out of fresh water, why aren’t we desalinating more ocean water? -- H. Smith, Providence, RI

The protagonist of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 lyrical ballad The Rime of the Ancient Mariner proclaims: “Water water everywhere / nor any drop to drink” as his ship drifts through Antarctic seas with no land or fresh water in sight and the crew slowly dying of thirst. A fitting allegory for our modern age.

Indeed, we’re in that same boat today given that salty oceans cover 70 percent of the Earth’s surface while freshwater becomes increasingly scarcer due to human overpopulation and climate change. Globally some 700 million people lack access to clean water while droughts are the norm in many regions.

Stepping up desalination—that is, filtering salt out of seawater to make it potable—seems like an obvious solution. But the two most common techniques, reverse osmosis, pushing seawater through membranes to separate the salt; and distillation, boiling seawater and collecting the resulting salt-free water vapor, both require costly amounts of energy and infrastructure. They also create a lot of potentially toxic “brine” as waste that can kill crops and other vegetation and render groundwater too saline to drink, not to mention negatively alter the chemistry of the ocean. Currently the world’s 18,000+ desalination plants pump 140 billion liters of brine into terrestrial holding pits or back into the ocean every day.

Ngai Yin Yip and his team of environmental engineers at Columbia University think their alternative method—“temperature swing solvent extraction” (TSSE)—can fix the problems of leftover brine, in turn making the desalination process cleaner and more efficient. TSSE uses a solvent that reacts to inexpensive low-grade heat to extract freshwater as efficiently as RO or distillation at a fraction of the cost.

Another promising alternative as pioneered by Penn State engineer Bruce Logan and colleagues is called battery electrode deionization (BDI), in which salty water is routed into channels with electrodes designed to capture salt ions and divert freshwater and salt accordingly. BDI is still in the R&D phase, but researchers hope it can eventually become a useful alternative to reverse osmosis or distillation.

But even these alternatives may be less desirable than leaving ocean water alone and focusing instead on conservation and recycling of existing fresh water supplies. The non-profit Pacific Institute reports that stepping up conservation and efficiency measures already in place in water-wise regions like California could reduce annual water use in urban areas by as much as 57 percent. Meanwhile, recycling (and treating) freshwater and making a bigger effort to capture stormwater run-off could produce enough drinking water to quench Los Angeles’ thirst two times over.

Given the magnitude of the problem, we need to embrace all forms of increasing our supplies of freshwater, whether they involve old-school methods like recycling or new-fangled approaches like technology-enabled desalination.

CONTACTS: Temperature Swing Solvent Extraction, engineering.columbia.edu/press-releases/ngai-yin-yip-radical-desalination; “New desalination method offers low energy alternative to purify salty water,”

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180102171113.htm; Pacific Institute, www.pacinst.org.

Dear EarthTalk: What’s the background of the controversy over whether to allow development of a big copper and gold mine near Alaska’s Bristol Bay? -- C. Karo, Pittsburgh, PA

Environmentalists, fishermen and Native Americans breathed a sigh of relief in 2014 when the Obama administration invoked a rarely used provision in the Clean Water Act to block the proposed development of the Pebble Mine near Alaska’s Bristol Bay, one of the most productive fisheries in the world. At the time, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that the proposed mine would cause "complete loss of fish habitat due to elimination, dewatering and fragmentation of streams, wetlands and other aquatic resources" in parts of Bristol Bay.

But Northern Dynasty Minerals, the Canadian company behind the proposed mine, hasn’t given up pushing for the project which could yield some 10 billion tons of recoverable ore (including lots of copper as well as gold and molybdenum). Only one other ore deposit of its type in the world, Indonesia’s Grasberg Mine, is bigger.

An early August 2019 meeting between Alaska’s conservation Republican governor Mike Dunleavy and President Trump on the tarmac as Air Force One refueled in Anchorage on its way back from the G20 summit in Japan led to an announcement the next day that the EPA was rescinding its original veto and green-lighting the Pebble Mine development after all.

As soon as word got out, dozens of former and current EPA officials and researchers came out to say the reversal ignores the science that warns of total ecosystem collapse which, forgetting about the effects on marine wildlife and the subsistence culture of Alaska Natives, could decimate the $1.5 billion Bristol Bay fishery and its 14,000 jobs.

According to the non-profit Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the EPA conducted extensive scientific assessment of the Bristol Bay watershed to determine the potential impacts of large-scale mining on salmon and other fish populations, wildlife, development and Alaska Native communities in the region. “EPA’s Watershed Assessment found that Pebble Mine would have significant impacts on fish populations and streams surrounding the mine site,” reports NRDC. “A tailings dam failure releasing toxic mine waste would have catastrophic effects on the ecosystem and region.”

The EPA’s conclusions were derived from three years of data review, scientific analysis, public hearings, peer review and revision. “Up until now, EPA has taken every precaution to ensure that its assessment represents the best science regarding potential large-scale mining in the Bristol Bay watershed.”

Why the Trump administration would sell out the region’s fisheries and millennia-old culture for a quick sale followed by a cut-and-run mining operation by a Canadian mining company is anybody’s guess.

Environmentalists are sure to fight the Pebble Mine development just as hard now as they did five years ago leading up to when President Obama blocked it. But this time will be more of an uphill battle given the tenor of the times and who’s in the White House.

To express your concerns about Pebble Mine, send your elected representatives a message via the “Take Action” section of the website of the non-profit conservation group Save Bristol Bay.

CONTACTS: NRDC, nrdc.org; Save Bristol Bay, savebristolbay.org/take-action.

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