clean up your act

Going green with God: The Energy Action Team aims to educate congregations onearth-friendly energy

IEN Interim Steering Committee (left to right): Lou Snead, Tom Spencer, AllenCooper, Chris Searles, Wynn Stenftenagel, Kerry Stevens, Marie Betcher, BoTownsend, David Todd, Steve Folberg

Does God, in whatever form you see such a higher power, expect us to take good care of the earth? A group of people from various faith communities in Austin think so, and in 2009 founded the Interfaith Environmental Network. Their stated goal was to work together to “claim the common call of environmental stewardship.”

The activist group, which meets monthly, sponsors speakers on relevant topics such as Austin’s water issues, recycling, the proposed electric rate increase and community gardening.

Last November, a group discussion on “The Energy Challenge: A moral imperative for climate change,” spawned a sub-group called the Energy Action Team, or EAT, facilitated by a coalition of energy professionals called Climate Buddies. Since then, more than 20 EAT volunteers have been meeting three times a month, ramping up their environmental efforts and spreading their message.

EAT's goals include building awareness about the environmental consequences of reliance on fossil fuel energy sources and other human activities affecting climate changes, and examining best practices for energy conservation, efficiency and promotion of renewable energy sources.

Joep Meijer, co-founder and chair of Climate Buddies, is an environmental chemist who has helped groups, governments and businesses quantify sustainability for more than 15 years. He says the end goal is a tool kit and manual that a congregation anywhere in the world could use to become carbon positive. Currently, the EAT is developing a tool kit for Central Texas and looking for two or three congregations to run a pilot program.

The Team uses the term “carbon positive” rather than the more common “carbon neutral,” he adds, to emphasize a positive attitude toward dealing with the issue. “The goal of both is the same, to get to zero carbon as quickly as possible. We hope to inspire members to do the same in their households. That is where positive spin-off will happen and grow.”

EAT’s goals include building awareness about the environmental consequences of reliance on fossil fuel energy sources and other human activities affecting climate changes, and examining best practices for energy conservation, efficiency and promotion of renewable energy sources.

To implement the tool kit, a congregation needs an organized team of people to do the work. The EAT will conduct a baseline energy audit, Meijer says, “so everyone knows where they are on energy consumption and climate.”

EAT then selects specific actions, starting with those that are simple to implement or that don’t have significant costs, yet will make meaningful progress toward becoming carbon positive.

“Based on the audit, we know the most important areas to work on, the high leverage items,” says Meijer. A congregation may need to start from scratch and weatherize, switch out lighting and upgrade or replace HVAC, for example, or it may be ready to implement alternative energy sources. “We’ll find actions that deliver the most result for the money and effort put into it. It’s not a list of things that work for everybody, but from which we can select items that work best for that church.”

The focus is always on three things, though: conservation, or using less energy overall; efficiency, or doing the same things with less energy; and switching to renewables for the consumption that is left. “Wherever a church spends a dollar, that will go into our review,” Meijer says. “We’ll tell them where most of their carbon footprint comes from and how to mitigate and reduce that. We want measurable results.”

The EAT currently offers free climate audits to any interested congregation. This helps the Team understand how typical congregations work, energy-wise. The audits are also an important awareness and education tool, teaching congregations about their carbon footprint and what it means.

Why a specifically faith-based approach? For results, Meijer says. “We wanted to find groups that include a significant amount of people, and that were willing to make this a focus for an entire year. We looked at what is here in Austin, and thought, why not find a group with a high buy-in for taking care of the earth? IEN gives us a platform for being positive, and also inclusive. We can talk about the things that join us, not that separate us. They also committed to making it an issue for 2012.”

The Team’s carbon positive efforts will ultimately not be restricted to the faith community, but, Meijer says, it is a wonderful one to start with.

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to spawn or not to spawn?

Killer aquariums: One Texas-based scientist's effort to breed tropical fish andsave dying coral reefs

After a diving trip in the Caribbean 20 years ago, Joan Holt became interested in raising tropical fish in her lab — especially after learning that nearly 100 percent of the colorful fish in our aquariums are collected from the wild and that a huge majority of them die from the process.

Holt has spent the larger portion of her career at the University of Texas Marine Science Institute in Port Aransas studying the rearing of commercial fish species (like red drum), and her work has been put to practical use in state and commercial hatcheries and aquaculture operations.

Stocking aquariums is a $1 billion industry, moving an estimated 30 million reef fish around the world each year, but removing that many fish from the ocean can have a negative effect on the health of reef environments. Certain species of fish, for example, eat algae and, if their numbers become too low, overgrowth of algae can suffocate corals.

The methods used to collect these fish can be harmful as well: Cyanide, used as an anesthesia to make fish easier to catch, can bleach the coral and kill or harm other species, especially those that can’t swim away. Cyanide is also one reason almost 80 percent of collected fish die soon after capture. Many of the rest die within a year in captivity, despite the fact that many species live for decades on the reef. In addition to cyanide, fish sometimes die from being brought up from depth too quickly, loss of protective scale coating due to handling, poor water quality and being deprived of food for days during transport.

Holt hoped she could help solve these problems by figuring out how to raise tropical fish in captivity.

Raising Nemo

It proved a huge challenge. First, she had to figure out a harmless way to collect a small amount of tropical fish to begin her research. Trial and error led to a rather low-tech method: two divers (one with a hand net or large plastic bag) and another to carefully herd fish toward the bag. Next, she had to convince those wild fish to reproduce in the lab. Based on efforts with commercial species, Holt knew fish will spawn if lab conditions match those in the natural world, so she studied temperature and day length at locations such as the Florida Keys and Jamaica and replicated those conditions for her studies. Eventually, she successfully spawned 18 ornamental species.

The next step, growing baby fish (larvae) into adults, had been tricky enough with commercial species, and it turned out to be even more challenging with tropical ones. Some tropical species spawn in the open ocean, and their larvae hatch in a relatively undeveloped state, not yet able to eat on their own; others attach eggs to a solid surface, one or both parents care for them (think of Nemo’s dad, Marlin), and larvae hatch ready to start eating. The former were much easier to raise in the lab, but Holt focused on the more complex ocean-spawners — i.e., the most popular kind of aquarium fish.

In general, tropical fish larvae put picky eaters of any species to shame, so figuring out what to feed them was no easy task and the mystery remains somewhat unsolved. Work on refining the fishes' preferred menu continues at the MSI, with the ultimate goal to identify food that can be grown in the lab or easily collected.

Meanwhile, another major challenge in breeding tropical fish was creating the right water conditions for the captive fish and figuring out how to feed them, without turning the water into a terrible mess. The lab eventually hit upon a tank design that accomplished both. Ultimately, Holt was able to get seven of her original 18 spawned species to grow into adult fish that produced their own offspring: lined and pygmy seahorses, comet fish, jack knife fish, cubbyu, and fire and peppermint shrimp. These species can conceivably now be commercially produced.

Fishy Business

Aside from producing these fish in commercially viable numbers, the next step, in Holt’s mind, is developing some way to tell buyers what they’re getting: fish raised sustainably in a lab or fish collected from the wild with potentially harmful practices. To help distinguish the eco-friendly method from the rest, she envisions a certification process, or paper trail, similar to that used in organic farming.

Many hobbyists, she believes, would support sustainable captive breeding — at least in part because those captive-bred specimens will likely have better survival rates than wild-caught ones, many of which survive only a few days or weeks in home aquariums.

Holt is working with other scientists on a marine ornamental aquaculture book. She hopes more people will come to see captive-raised ornamentals as an important conservation tool that helps protect tropical reefs and their occupants in the wild.

So, what will you keep in your aquarium?

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