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LAXMI SINGH: From NPR News in Washington, I'm Laxmi Singh. In a stark sign that the recession is getting worse, the US economy lost 533,000 jobs in one month. The heavy losses came in November, and they were the worst the US had seen in more than 30 years. NPR's Chris Arnold reports.

CHRIS ARNOLD: This jobs report number is echoing like a bomb blast around the financial world. It's very, very bad. Nariman Behravesh is chief economist at Global Insight.

NARIMAN BEHRAVESH: The only way to describe this is this number is horrible and it's very scary. Not only did we lose 533,000 jobs in November, but prior months were revised down. So all told, we've lost nearly 2 million jobs this year in the US economy. That is about as bad as it gets.

CHRIS ARNOLD: Behravesh says now the economy is losing jobs in almost all areas, including the service sector, retail, business services, travel and leisure all saw declines. Economists say all this likely means the worst recession since at least the early 1980s. Behravesh thinks the unemployment rate could easily go above 9% by the end of next year, and it could get as bad as the 10-plus percent we saw in the early 80s. Chris Arnold, NPR News.

LAXMI SINGH: Detroit's Big Three are back on Capitol Hill. A day after addressing the Senate, the heads of General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler are now asking the House to approve a $34 billion bailout for the financially ailing companies. The president of the United Auto Workers union, Ron Gettelfinger, is also pushing for congressional support.

RON GETTELFINGER: The UAW supports conditioning any emergency bridge loan funds, both on strict accountability measures and on the companies pursuing restructuring plans that will ensure the viability of their operations in the coming years.

LAXMI SINGH: Today, GM announced it would lay off 2,000 unionized workers. At the White House, President Bush urged Congress to pass a rescue plan next week.

Later today, President Bush will defend his policies in the Middle East. In prepared remarks, Mr. Bush acknowledges that the war in Iraq has dragged on longer than hoped, but he will also try to make the case that the Mideast region is heading in the right direction. NPR's Michele Kelemen reports.

MICHELLE KELEMEN: President Bush says his goal has been to help the Middle East take steps on a path to freedom, prosperity, and hope, but not all has gone according to plan. "The fight in Iraq has been longer and more costly than expected," he says. "And there have been," as he puts it, "unfortunate setbacks in the peace process."

In a speech he is to give later today at the Brookings Institution Saban Center, the President says that Israelis and Palestinians have started on a path that will end with the two-state solution. And he says talks have been determined and substantial, but gone are his earlier predictions that a peace deal could be reached by the time he leaves office.

He also says that the US cannot allow Iran to develop an atomic weapon, though he didn't offer any new policy prescriptions on that. Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Washington.

LAXMI SINGH: Dow's down 162. This is NPR.

SPEAKER 1: Support for news comes from Kauffman, the foundation of entrepreneurship committed to expanding human welfare through economic growth. On the web at kauffman.org.

STEVEN JOHN: From Minnesota Public Radio News, I'm Steven John. Governor Pawlenty and DFL legislative leaders met privately this morning to discuss Minnesota's massive budget deficit. The projected $5.25 billion shortfall includes an immediate budget gap of $426 million in the fiscal year ending June 30.

Pawlenty has directed state agencies to look for ways to cut 10% of their budgets and has told the legislature that he will use his emergency powers to cut spending if necessary. On his weekly radio show today Pawlenty said today's meeting was constructive.

TIM PAWLENTY: I think people came to the table with the hope and intent to try to get this worked out cooperatively and we're going to be moving on that in the next few weeks. And we got to move fairly quickly. We have a deficit in the current budget as well, which has to be fixed fairly promptly.

STEVEN JOHN: Pawlenty also re-emphasized that he will not support tax increases to balance the budget. DFL legislative leaders said after today's meeting that they're waiting for a rundown of about $700 million in state spending that remains this year before they look at cost-cutting measures.

Minneapolis election officials are still searching for 133 ballots that city officials believe to be missing during their search this morning. In a Minneapolis warehouse, they did find a thin plastic bag that could contain uncounted overseas military ballots from another precinct. The statewide recount was supposed to wrap up today, but the Secretary of State's office has given Minneapolis an extension until December 16 to locate the 133 ballots.

The playing status of two Minnesota Vikings players remains up in the air. There's no word yet on this morning's hearing into the NFL player's union request for an injunction blocking the suspensions of Kevin Williams and Pat Williams and three players from other teams.

Mostly cloudy snow showers this afternoon. For Minnesota, highs to mid 10s to middle 20s. This is Minnesota Public Radio News.

MIKE MULCAHY: Thanks, Steven. It's six minutes past noon.

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And good afternoon. Welcome back to Midday. From Minnesota Public Radio News, I'm Mike Mulcahy in today for Gary Eichten. This hour, a Voices of Minnesota interview with Dave Tilman and Deborah Swackhamer. Both are University of Minnesota professors.

Tilman is an internationally recognized expert on biodiversity, Swackhamer is a widely consulted expert on water quality. And as you might imagine, they are both very interested in how the Obama administration will address climate change and other environmental issues. Here's Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Olson.

DAN OLSON: Saving the planet sounds a bit grand, but is actually an apt way to describe what Dave Tilman and Deborah Swackhamer do for a living. Both are influential scientists. Tilman is this year's winner of the prestigious International Prize for Biology.

Swackhamer is the new chair of the Science Advisory Board to the Environmental Protection Agency. Dave Tilman is a University of Minnesota Regents' Professor of Ecology. He studies the ecological effects of human domination of the Earth, including the evolution and maintenance of biodiversity, population ecology, effects of habitat destruction, and more.

Swackhamer is co-director of the U's Water Resources Research Institute. She studied how PCBs, dioxins, and pesticides have gotten into the Great Lakes. She's analyzed sediment accumulation, the impacts of endocrine disruptors, and much more. We'll hear from both of them this hour.

59-year-old Dave Tilman is a tall, lanky guy and a first-time grandfather. He grew up next to Lake Michigan and in his parents' basement, experimenting.

DAVE TILMAN: Oh, I was always outside on the lakeshore and the sand dunes tinkering with things. I don't know how my parents gave me that much freedom. And I would go in the basement and, I don't know, plug-in long pieces of wire and see how quickly they would melt and things like this. [LAUGHS] I was just a little amateur scientist. I'm surprised I lived through it all.

DAN OLSON: I talked with Dave Tilman at his office on the U's St. Paul campus. Tilman issued a tall challenge for the incoming Obama administration.

DAVE TILMAN: The big one major area for investment we have to have now much more than in the past. We now have 6.5 billion people. We're heading toward about 10 billion people on Earth within about 50 years and these people are becoming much more wealthy.

And when people are more wealthy, the first thing they demand is a lot more food. And they should. They need better diets around the world, and they also eat much more meat. We're going to have to be able to produce more than twice as much food-- more than twice the amount of food we have right now within 50 years.

If we don't have big increases in crop yields, if we don't find ways to grow that food more efficiently-- lower nutrient inputs and lower pesticide inputs, we could have massive environmental problems from meeting this human need for food.

DAN OLSON: You've highlighted what is essentially the finding of a World Wildlife Foundation study that made some news here not too long ago. One of their reports saying that we're using up 30% more stuff in the environment, the ecology than can be supported. What do you think of a finding like that?

DAVE TILMAN: There have been a variety of studies which are pointing out that we are using energy and nutrients and so on and land at a rate that if we kept on this trajectory for the next 50 or so years, we would create a world that probably would not be able to support as many people on the world as there are now.

It might support them but not support them with a quality of life at all like ours. And to me, there's an ethical question as well as a scientific one here. I think that I want everyone on the world to have adequate food and energy and to have meaningful full lives.

And this is to me I think in some essence as humans, we owe each other the right to live that way. But we also owe all future generations-- our children, our grandchildren, and people living on Earth 1,000 years from now the same right-- the right to have the quality of life that is similar to our quality of life.

And what I think is happening right now because we are just entering this period of massive explosion in consumption all around the world where people in India and China and Indonesia, they want to live like us and they're going to start to live like us. And when they do, the world cannot afford 10 billion people living like Americans live.

DAN OLSON: However, every time that's been said in the course of human history, we've thought something new up, whether it's been fertilizer or better seeds for growing more rice or wheat and the problem has been kind of pushed back a little bit, is that not so?

DAVE TILMAN: Yes, that has happened, and I'm hoping we can do it again. That's my goal. What I want to do is find out how we can live more sustainably such that we can overcome these problems. I'm saying if we continue on the paths we've been on for the last 45 or 50 years and how we use energy and how we produce food, we're going to create some significant problems for the world.

DAN OLSON: You've said before it means lifestyle changes, so for you and for me. What about you? How have you adapted this personally, and what have you done personally to change your life to accommodate this somewhat bleak outlook?

DAVE TILMAN: Well, actually, I don't think it's bleak. I frankly am optimistic that we can find lives that are as good or better than we're living right now, and at the same time, use the resources we need more efficiently and effectively.

My wife and I have greatly decreased the amount of meat that we eat. I like some kind of meat. I'm not a vegetarian. But I know that even relatively small reductions, getting rid of one or two meals a week, if this were adopted by many people around the world could have a huge impact.

If you look at food, about half of all the grains grown in the United States we don't eat ourselves we feed them to livestock. It takes a lot of land to grow those grains. And the same thing has been copied around the world. One of the first things people who are poor do when they get higher income is buy more meat. If that meat is produced by grain, there's a big cost.

Now we can eat different kinds of meat. It takes less grain to make chicken than it does to make pork. And even some fish, farm-raised fish like tilapia take even less grain. A pound of grain, dry grain gives about 1 pound of tilapia fish to eat. It takes about 2 and 1/2 or so pounds of grain to give us 1 pound of chicken to eat.

Those are pretty efficient. So we can eat even the same number of meals of meat per week but actually eat meat that is more efficient and in doing so have a big environmental advantage.

DAN OLSON: You've made a lot of news talking about biofuels and concern you've expressed about the use for corn-based ethanol. Did we take a wrong turn going into the cornfield for ethanol? Should we have turned more to soy for biodiesel based on soy?

DAVE TILMAN: First of all, the main initial push for corn ethanol was because we had global surpluses of grains, including corn. And we had decades where we had the developed nations of the world producing more of the basic grain crops-- corn, wheat, and rice than the whole world was consuming.

And so it made perfect sense to find another use for them. And they do give some environmental benefits. It's not that corn ethanol is a horrible thing, it is just that as we look at it, there are alternatives now that are much, much better.

DAN OLSON: Did you run into a little political trouble here a year or so ago when you and some colleagues suggested, you know what? We're going a little too fast and far down the wrong path on corn-based ethanol here. Did some producers pull research dollars from the University of Minnesota?

DAVE TILMAN: Our paper which caused this problem was written in the journal Science. And as scientific papers, they're fairly hard for nonscientists to read, which I understand. But the paper was not actually criticizing corn ethanol in the United States or soybean biodiesel made here. It said, "Around the world, other people are cutting down rainforests and plowing up grasslands to make these fuels."

And we pointed out that when you do that, when you have to destroy existing ecosystems, you release a lot of carbon dioxide to the air. If you look at a tree, half of the dry weight of a tree is the element carbon, and that all becomes carbon dioxide. There are massive amounts of greenhouse gas that are released if you take a forest or a native prairie and cut it down or plow it under and use it to grow biofuel.

And what we showed was it can take hundreds or more years before that biofuel actually gives society a greenhouse gas advantage. That's not true for corn ethanol in the United States because that land has been farmed for a long time.

DAN OLSON: We do have hundreds of millions of dollars now invested in Minnesota in these corn ethanol plants. So if we change course or if we modify course and go to switchgrass, cellulosic production, whatever you want to call it, are these plants capable of being modified? Can they be retrofitted for some kind of different production that would not harm the big investment that's been made in them?

DAVE TILMAN: Parts of them. I'm not an industrial engineer. So those I've talked to about this say that there are elements in a corn ethanol plant that would be useful for other ways of making ethanol from other crops than corn. I don't know the cost of doing this. I don't know the aspect there. I do think that the whole situation we've seen with corn ethanol points out something.

We have to have a way that we can assure those who are encouraged by society as corn ethanol producers were to make a product that they will be able to get a reasonable return on that investment and have some security such that we don't have every single scientific finding throw all of the economy into a mess.

But we also have to have some way that we can have society change as we learn more. And I don't know what the right way to do this is, but we shouldn't just have-- I don't think we should pull the plug on ethanol plants. I think that they should have a reasonable life and we should transition toward other fuels. And that's exactly what Congress and its wisdom is having happen in the current America's Energy Independence and Security Act.

It calls for a cap being put on how much corn ethanol will produce, and it's about the amount we'll have this year or next. And then it calls for the next inducements to be for fuels that are more efficient, that have better greenhouse gas impacts on the environment. I think there's a wise bill that was passed. And I think that's the direction of change that I would support.

DAN OLSON: Still on car culture and I might not wanting to give up my car or my ability to drive wherever I want to go to, what's the fuel of the future? Hybrid, plug-in electric, hydrogen? What are you putting your bet on?

DAVE TILMAN: Well, I drive a hybrid. We have two cars, one's a hybrid, one's a conventional gasoline car. I'm hoping for some hybrid that's a convertible. [LAUGHS] I would love that.

But [SIGHS] I've spent a lot of time the last few years talking with engineers and served on a variety of government panels trying to understand these issues and none of us can predict the future. The most efficient form of transportation for us, especially when we can start using wind electric power would be having cars that have more of a battery input. So a plug-in hybrid or a pure plug-in car.

But battery technology isn't very good yet. And battery technology has not been improving very rapidly over the last several decades. So we need either a major breakthrough in batteries or they're not going to be the-- they won't be a major part of our solution in the short term.

DAN OLSON: So does all of this keep circling back to lifestyle change?

DAVE TILMAN: I think in the long term. If you look at, let's say, European cities, there is in general much better mass transit in those than we have in many cities in the United States, and there's also better transit between the cities than there is in the US. And that mass transit, if it's properly made, is much more efficient than automobiles.

Now I want to say something else. Transportation is only 25 or so percent of our energy use in our greenhouse gas release. We actually use more energy in buildings than we use in cars.

I'm sitting in an office that's lit with fluorescent lights. We have lots of fluorescent bulbs in my house and we are replacing them more and more as time goes on. That actually is a major way to save energy and to save money for consumers. We don't think about it, but our house uses more energy probably than our car does.

DAN OLSON: Dave Tilman, University of Minnesota Regents' Professor of Ecology and this year's winner of the International Prize for Biology. This is Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Dan Olson.

Later this hour, we'll talk with Deborah Swackhamer. She's the new chair of the Science Advisory Board to the Environmental Protection Agency. The piece of Dave Tilman's work that has won him a lot of media attention is his plan for helping us reduce our reliance on crude oil for fueling our vehicles.

A large color photograph perched atop one of the file cabinets in his St. Paul campus office shows plots of prairie plants. The dozens of square plots are carefully laid out at the U's Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve. That's a large ecological research site in Central Minnesota, which Tilman directs.

Tilman has found that biodiversity is a good thing and that prairie plants are a potentially rich source of raw material for cellulosic ethanol. This could be a replacement for corn-based ethanol, a highly controversial source of fuel. Tilman has at times drawn criticism from US corn growers who he says have misunderstood his research. The photo of the prairie plant plots was in front of us as we continued our conversation.

Why do you find this interesting? What magic do you see in these collections of plants, in these plots?

DAVE TILMAN: Well, we set this up in 1994. And at that time, what we thought we knew in science and science-- the reason we keep doing science, we keep learning new things. At that time, we thought that the number of species living in an ecosystem probably didn't have that much of an influence on how that ecosystem functioned.

What mattered more, we thought, was which species were in the ecosystem. So having, let's say, a pine forest we knew was very different than having a hardwood forest or having a grassland was very different than a forest. Those things are all very true. But we didn't think that it would matter if you had a grassland ecosystem with, let's say, three or four species in it or 1 or 10 or 50.

And this experiment was set up to test that idea. It has several hundred plots. The plots are each about 30 by 30 feet in size. And each plot we randomly chose, whether we'd put one species in it or two species or four or eight or 16. And when we did that, we randomly chose which species would go into that plot from a pool, the common species in the native prairie of Minnesota.

And there were concerns raised about extinctions and then there were responses raised to those concerns. And the basic response was, well, does it really matter if a species goes extinct? Does the number of species in an ecosystem actually affect anything that humans should care about? We have been surprised, actually amazed at the things that we have found.

DAN OLSON: More is better. More species are better?

DAVE TILMAN: More species are better and much better than we ever imagined and anyone in the discipline imagined they might be. I mean, we found that going on average from having one species in a plot to having 16 of these prairie grassland species in a plot that we get 238% more production every year in high diversity than we do in a single species plot. That's much more than anyone ever imagined.

DAN OLSON: So to leap ahead, is this one of the fuels of the future for powering my car that I don't want to give up?

DAVE TILMAN: It could be. What we find is that these mixtures-- this is a very nutrient-poor sandy soil. It was abandoned from agriculture 40 or so years ago because it was so bad farmers couldn't make money on it. And we planted this out with these mixtures of prairie plants.

And this huge benefit of diversity, this 200-some percent increase in production means every year you can go out to these plots, mow them, if you will, for prairie hay. You can take that prairie hay and turn it into liquid fuels by a couple of different processes we now know about, and you get a lot more liquid fuel from this prairie if it has high diversity.

DAN OLSON: But I'm just looking here, Dave Tilman at the land and I'm assuming some of this land was cleared. Some of these trees and stumps were pulled out. Is it more valuable for the planet to have trees rather than growing grasses and other plants for fueling my car?

DAVE TILMAN: When you first clear land, all the carbon that was in those trees and so on gets released to the air. And then as you farm land, soil, it turns out, has lots of carbon in it. In fact, if you look at all the soils on land for the whole Earth and all the vegetation on land for the whole Earth, soils have twice as much carbon in them than the vegetation does.

So soils are what scientists call a major sink for carbon. Plants take carbon dioxide out of the air and they make compounds that become their leaves and roots and so on. And when the plant sheds these, these slowly build up in the soil. Some of them decay, but some of them are very hard to decay and they build up year after year, century after century. And it gives these very large storehouses of carbon in the soil of these ecosystems.

So when you farm it, you mix it up and it makes it easier for bacteria and fungi to eat that carbon in the soil. They release it as carbon dioxide to the air and you get greenhouse gases building up. What we found here is when we added high diversity mixtures of these native prairies back to these degraded soils, these prairies basically recreated the soil that used to be there. And in doing that, they're storing carbon.

We're getting about a ton and a half to two tons of carbon taken out of the air every year by these plants being stored year after year in the soil for every acre of land.

DAN OLSON: Is it a one-for-one replacement for crude oil? Can we possibly make enough fuel of any kind, whether it's ethanol, to replace crude oil 1 for one?

DAVE TILMAN: No, not with how much we're using right now. Just the United States burns about $200 billion gallons of gasoline and diesel every year. There's no way that we can do that using land in the United States. We would have to plow under all the remaining prairies and forests and so on. Not all, but the vast majority of them around the country to have this happen.

And it just wouldn't be wise. Because if we took native lands and did this, we'd release so much carbon dioxide to the air that we would not be having a benefit from this biofuel. So what we suggest is something a bit different.

We can take lands that have already been farmed in the United States and are no longer used for farming. And some of these lands are in the CRP program. There are other lands that aren't in that program that could be used. And if we plant on them the right kind of crops-- in the Midwest, it looks like using these prairie grasses are the best crop. And on poor lands like we have, it looks like using high diversity for prairie grasses works.

And maybe something else will work on a richer, wetter land than ours. We don't know. We need a lot more work done. That will give us some biofuel, enough that can help. But there are three other ways we can get things that make biofuel out of us, each of which can be about as much as we can get by growing a dedicated crop like this diverse prairie mixture.

First, municipal solid waste, the garbage that all of us get rid of. There is paper, there's cardboard, there are food scraps, there are plastics. All these things have carbon in them that with the right technology, and we know what these are, now can be converted into a liquid fuel like ethanol or even into synthetic gasoline. That can give us about as much liquid energy as we can get by growing dedicated crops on degraded land.

There also are ways that we can get from timber forestry operations. We can do thinning. So as forests grow in forest plantations, we normally plant out more trees there than we want. And some of those trees can be removed once we know which ones live. We can thin them, letting the other trees grow faster and giving us better timber, but the things we can take out as thinnings can be used for energy. So that's a possibility.

The other thing is, when we cut down trees, the trees have bark we don't use, they have sawdust and chips and so on at the mill. They have branches that we normally would leave as slash in a forest when they're cut, all those things have carbon in them. Some we have to leave behind to add nutrients. So the smaller branches or the leaves and needles we should leave in a forest to add nutrients back in. But the rest we can take and make energy.

So these kinds of other sources can give us enough energy that we think for the United States and for the world they might give us about 20% of the liquid fuel that we use. That's not going to get rid of all the oil we need.

But if we do other things, if we switch to cars that are more fuel efficient, if we buy more and more hybrids, for instance, compared to other cars, if we can have plug-in hybrids, which give us even greater mileage, if we can power those with wind power rather than coal power from electric, we can move in the direction of decreasing our need for liquid fuels and have a more sustainable approach. I think within 50 or so years liquid fuels will be a thing of the past.

And here's the second part of the ideas that I find intriguing. Because plants like these prairie plants put so much carbon in the soil every year, if we can get that kind of benefit from our biofuels, we can make biofuels that are called carbon-negative. It means that in the whole process of growing the crop, making the biofuel and burning it, you actually have less greenhouse gas in the atmosphere when you're done than you did before.

And if you make the biofuels properly and there are some other techniques-- one is called carbon capture and sequestration that you can use, with these other techniques, you can make a biofuel from biomass that is so carbon-negative that one gallon of biofuel will forgive you the greenhouse gas that would come out of a gallon of petroleum. You can mix them together, have a fuel that when you burn it there's no net effect on the atmosphere of the world.

And so that lets our 20% suddenly be 40% of our need is fossil, is greenhouse gas neutral liquid fuel. That plus the increases in efficiency that we have probably could let us have a global transportation network that although it had to burn liquid fuels for the next 30 or 40 or 50 years could within the next 15 or 20 years go to burning fuels that don't have any effect on greenhouse gases. So suddenly transportation is not a greenhouse gas issue for us.

DAN OLSON: University of Minnesota ecology Professor Dave Tilman. He's the winner of this year's International Prize in Biology. Later this hour, a conversation about water, with the U's Water Resources Research Institute co-director Deborah Swackhamer.

Dave Tilman says he's an optimist about the future. He believes we can think and adapt our way into a way of living that will save the planet. However, Tilman is a skeptic of some of the ideas for addressing global warming. One idea is to use genetic engineering to consume more carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. Here's more of our conversation.

There are folks who think we can make microorganisms that eat more carbon. Do you put much stock by biological fixes that increase carbon consumption to help us reduce CO2 and the greenhouse effect?

DAVE TILMAN: If by consuming carbon, you mean taking more carbon dioxide out of the air, the only organisms to do that right now are plants of various kinds. So algae and lakes and so on. Algae have been living in lakes and in oceans for 3 billion or so years. 3 billion years of natural selection on them has made them incredibly efficient at what they do.

If you engineer something, I could very easily see that someone could engineer an algae, a microorganism to take up more carbon dioxide than it needs. The dilemma is it's competing with other ones in nature that don't do that and those other ones in nature won't be wasting energy on something which it doesn't need. And by not wasting energy, they'll be better competitors.

So I think these things are what biologists call evolutionarily unstable. They're going to lose out as soon as they're out in nature. And we can't afford to build enough structures to have these things living in tanks. We have to have them, at least in these ideas, in big, big lakes.

Well, guess what? Ducks fly into lakes, air blows, dust around. Guess what lives in dust? There are spores of these algal cells in dust and so on. Any body of water that's out anyplace has hundreds and hundreds of species of algae coming into it. Wild species that will be better competitors.

These are wonderful dreams. But if you dream knowing ecology and evolution, not just molecular biology, you realize that it's just a dream. It's not going to work.

DAN OLSON: Has the scientific community, do you think, Dave Tilman tiptoed around the issue of population control and has been reluctant to say, look, we have too many people and we're having too many people, we need to stop that?

DAVE TILMAN: Well, there are many scientists who have said that through the years. When I look at the numbers, I draw a little bit different conclusion. There's a problem having more people. But in fact, in last century, 100 years ago, the increase in population was actually smaller than the increase in per capita consumption.

And the projections are in the next 50 years, population will only go up 50% but per capita consumption will go up 150%. I don't know how one could really try to constrain global population. It's not something that I think is politically viable. I would question it in some ethical sense.

It's not where I want to go scientifically or politically or culturally. It's just not what I-- well, it doesn't feel right to me. But it does feel right to me that we have to ask what we are consuming, how we're consuming it, how much we're consuming, and if this is in fact a sustainable path forward for the world, and all the analyzes that have been done say that it is this increase in consumption that is the biggest issue we face.

So for me, I think we can have 9 or 10 billion people on Earth. I think we can have that many people and we have wonderful lives for all of us, they just won't be the same life we have now. We have to be doing things more efficiently than we are right now.

DAN OLSON: Dave Tilman. He's on his way to Japan to accept the world's top prize in biology. Tilman will receive a medal, a $100,000 cash prize, and a gift from Emperor Akihito of Japan in a ceremony in Tokyo.

DAVE TILMAN: It's a prize that was established 24 years ago in Japan in honor of the royal family of Japan, the Emperor, and I guess the Emperor's father also are avid biologists, and the current emperor has published papers in major journals like Science and Nature and works on a marine fish called the goby.

And so this was given by friends of the royal family in honor of the Emperor's love of biology. It was also given because when they first announced the award, they said, well, there is no Nobel Prize in biology. There's a Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine, which is part of biology, but not all.

And so they've been giving this prize out as a sort of mini Nobel Prize in some sense. And clearly, I'm deeply honored to have been chosen. And it'll be an interesting trip. I'd been to Japan a few times in the past. It's a fabulous country with a rich and deep history and wonderful people that I've met there. So it'll be a big honor and a wonderful visit.

DAN OLSON: Dave Tilman, thanks so much for your time. What a privilege to speak with you.

DAVE TILMAN: My privilege. Thank you very much.

DAN OLSON: Dave Tilman is a University of Minnesota Regents' Professor and the McKnight Presidential Chair in Ecology. He's the director of Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior. I talked with him at his office on the U's St. Paul campus. This is Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Dan Olson.

Deborah Swackhamer, Dave Tilman, and legions of other scientists in this country yearn for a bit more respect from federal officials. Swackhamer thinks the incoming administration may supply it.

Swackhamer is an environmental chemist. She's the new chair of an influential panel she's been a member of for several years-- the Science Advisory Board to the Environmental Protection Agency. Swackhamer is co-director of the University of Minnesota's Water Resources Institute.

She's a member of several Minnesota and upper Midwest panels that offer advice on the region's water resources. Swackhamer grew up in the hills of the Garden State, New Jersey. Since her childhood, she says the little town and surrounding countryside where she grew up have become a suburb. Swackhamer summers were spent north of the border.

DEBORAH SWACKHAMER: Our parents had a summer place up in Ontario on a beautiful, pristine lake, Trout Lake. And I spent my summers up there from Memorial Day to Labor Day every single summer until high school. And I have to say it was a marvelous way to grow up.

So I spent my every day outside playing on the shores of this lake, and I thought that was what other people got to do. So I really sort of took it for granted. But that's where I got my love for the environment, my love for water.

DAN OLSON: Deborah Swackhamer, whose office is on the U's St. Paul campus. We talked recently about the role she and other scientists play on the Science Advisory Board to the EPA.

DEBORAH SWACKHAMER: We get to help shape the transition for the new incoming administrator. It will take several months for a new administrator to be named and we will help provide some guidance on that transition. We will also help to specify our priorities to the new administration as to what Environmental Protection should mean for this new administration.

DAN OLSON: And what's the rumor mill churning out these days? What's the shortlist? Who's on the shortlist for the new EPA administrator?

DEBORAH SWACKHAMER: Well, it's an interesting list. The transition team has floated a number of names in some-- there's everything from directors of environmental protection at the state level to former senators or sitting congressmen. There's also one rumor that's probably gotten the most attention, which is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who created Riverkeepers and is at the Pace Law School, as I recall.

And he's certainly been very active in the environmental protection business. And he's a lawyer by training, an environmental lawyer. He'd be an interesting choice, but that's not been floated so much by the transition team as I think by the press. So we'll see where this goes. These are always-- they float balloons and they wait to see how people respond.

DAN OLSON: Is there a position in a reformulated EPA that would be of interest to Professor Deborah Swackhamer?

DEBORAH SWACKHAMER: Oh, no. I'm quite happy in my academic role and in my advisory role. But I'm very excited that it sounds like the transition team is at least considering looking at how EPA fits within the federal family as to whether it should be elevated to cabinet status or not.

There's also a discussion of creating a climate czar, someone who would really coordinate all the climate research and climate change policy across the different federal agencies because they each have a piece of it and they need someone to help coordinate that. So it would be interesting to see how they reformulate. But no, me personally, I'm quite happy to watch from a distance and to offer my advice when asked.

DAN OLSON: What would be your agenda, things at the EPA should put towards the top of its agenda?

DEBORAH SWACKHAMER: I think one of the first things they need to do is to institute and incorporate climate change into everything they're doing. They really have had eight years of denying the climate change as a problem, and as a consequence, their policies, their regulations, even their research programs really don't have this major 800-pound gorilla incorporated into them.

And so they need to make that a huge priority, not research so much on climate change. There is research being done, but it's acknowledging it as a major stressor on the environment and incorporating it into all of the rulemaking and all of their perspective.

DAN OLSON: So if you would just take a second to spell that out for those of us lay people. How does that filter on down, setting an agenda item like that at the top and practically in our day-to-day existence in terms of being a business or a person, how would that play out?

DEBORAH SWACKHAMER: Well, I can give you an example. So under the Superfund program, for instance, EPA, they have the responsibility for restoring areas that have been damaged by past pollution. But if you don't restore that with keeping in mind that the climate is going to be different. You might have say you're restoring a harbor that's on the Great Lakes, well, the lake levels are changing.

If you don't incorporate the right plants that can tolerate a climate 50 years from now, if you don't take into account that our environment is going to look very different 50 years from now, then all of that effort is for naught. So that's an example.

DAN OLSON: Minnesota, Deborah Swackhamer points out, is the most water-rich state of the country's lower 48. Cleaning up polluted waters took a quantum leap forward in 1972 with the Federal Clean Water Act. Among other requirements, it mandated treatment of municipal sewage. One result is the stretch of the Mississippi River through the Twin Cities-- once an open sewer, it's much cleaner.

However, more than a third of Minnesota's surface water is considered impaired and polluted with chemicals that harm human health. Rainfall washes pollution from city parking lots and chemicals from rural farm fields into streams and lakes. Swackhamer says, "We know how to prevent or treat the runoff."

Minnesota voters this past election approved a constitutional amendment, the Clean Water, Land, and Legacy Amendment to tax ourselves to pay for part of the bill. Here's more of our conversation.

DEBORAH SWACKHAMER: There's a whole array of things that need to happen. It's not just about taxes and paying for the pollution downstream. A lot of it is changing what we do upstream. It's encouraging farmers through economic incentives to do the right thing. It's changing the mindset of people's expectations.

For instance, we use so much pesticide not just to boost yield but to make product look good. Well, the organic farming experiment has shown that people will buy organically grown produce and vegetables even if they don't look perfect. And it's a question of, would you rather have a small black spot or would you rather have pesticides in your children's diet?

So people I think can change their expectations and change their practices. We can also change how we build our cities, how we manage the land. Our land use isn't just agricultural land use. It's urban land use, it's suburban land use. And there are all sorts of best practices and mindsets that could, if we were to adopt some of those changes, we could really put much less stress on our water to begin with instead of paying to clean it up after it's polluted.

DAN OLSON: Do you want to take Minnesota back in time to a point where, yes, we have more of those prairie potholes and thus the big rigs that cultivate the fields, it's more difficult for them to operate? Do you want to go back to a time where there are fewer exurban developments and higher density housing? Is that part of your vision?

DEBORAH SWACKHAMER: No. I wouldn't say we want to go backwards. We can't really go backwards. It's not a reasonable expectation. But I do think we want to go forward in the right way. You can go forward in the wrong way or you can go forward in the right way.

So it's a question of really planning for the future in a coherent way, looking to the future and saying, what do we want for clean water? Well, we'd like clean water. And so the state of Minnesota spoke. They voted for this amendment to dedicate a certain amount of the sales tax to improving protecting our state's water resources.

DAN OLSON: In the scheme of things, as you look across the national picture, is that a lot of money among what some other states are doing in this area or is it kind of a pittance?

DEBORAH SWACKHAMER: Oh no, it's a lot of money. It's a great deal of money. And it's one of the reasons that our legislature hasn't acted up to now to provide that kind of funding in a one-year or a two-year budget cycle.

DAN OLSON: Deborah Swackhamer, co-director of the University of Minnesota's Water Resources Research Institute. This is Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Dan Olson.

The Clean Water, Land, and Legacy Amendment approved by Minnesota voters in November adds 3/8 of a percent to the state sales tax. It's expected to raise as much as $300 million. About 2/3 of that money will go to clean up water and to preserve habitat.

A board appointed by the governor and lawmakers will make recommendations about how to spend the money for preserving habitat. That board had its first meeting recently. Still to be determined is who will decide how to spend the money for cleaning up the state's polluted waters. Here's more of my conversation with Deborah Swackhamer.

DEBORAH SWACKHAMER: The water money is to me, the least clear of how that's going to work. I sit on the governor's Clean Water Council and we are, as a council, very curious of course how this is going to go forward. Under legislation under the Clean Water Legacy Act, we were charged with, should there ever be an appropriation for the Clean Water Legacy Act that we would oversee the spending of those funds?

Because the money's coming through the amendment, it isn't clear whether that is copacetic with the original plan. So I think there's some sorting out to be done between the Clean Water Legacy Act and this new constitutional amendment.

DAN OLSON: Could the sorting out process actually really delay progress and turn into a great big mess, or will it all kind of work out, do you think?

DEBORAH SWACKHAMER: I would hope since we all have the exact same agenda, which is to protect the state's water, that we would be able to sort this out relatively quickly and it shouldn't impede progress.

DAN OLSON: OK. Now that's the amendment that we just voted on in the most recent election which passed. Then earlier this year, something came out the Minnesota Statewide Conservation and Preservation Plan with 50 recommendations. What's that plan all about?

DEBORAH SWACKHAMER: Yes, there are 50-some recommendations, but they really fall under five major areas-- recommendations that will improve land use, protect water quality, protect habitat, protect air quality, protect human health.

DAN OLSON: So does this plan essentially in your vision become a roadmap for how to spend these tens of millions of dollars we're raising?

DEBORAH SWACKHAMER: It does indeed. I can't imagine a more perfect storm, to use an oft-quoted phrase, of where we have an opportunity to really move the state forward, to leap forward and plan for 20, 30 years in advance and have the funding to actually do it.

DAN OLSON: So are there counter forces though at work, which even as this plan is laid out and even as these millions of dollars become available, there are folks still doing things in the same old way. We have broken septic systems in Minnesota. We have folks still laying drainage tile and getting water to run off farm fields as fast as they can. You, I think, were quoted as saying at one point, you'd like to revisit the state's entire drainage law. What does that mean?

DEBORAH SWACKHAMER: One of the recommendations in fact that is in the plan is to do a thorough review of the state's drainage policies, really with an eye to looking to whether they are protective of the environment, whether they're current, whether they could be improved for farming and water protection, both agricultural production and water protection in the 21st century.

DAN OLSON: Does this mean at the ground level for laypeople that in the next 2, 5, 10 years I'm going to be witnessing, maybe even feeling if I'm a farmer or a suburban dweller or urban dweller, a whole new set of regulations coming at me or down on me that, sure, they might have been approved by lawmakers but they are setting a new course in terms of how we protect our waters?

DEBORAH SWACKHAMER: I really want to emphasize that there are so many tools at our disposal and it's not just regulations. I do think that a number of things do need to be regulated. I personally believe that we need to regulate shoreland management, that we need buffer strips around all our lakes, that we need buffer strips around all our streams, whether it's agricultural-related or whether it's homeowner-related.

I think that kind of thing shouldn't be voluntary. I think it should simply be mandated. On the other hand, there are so many other things that can be done without looking at regulation. There are all sorts of incentives. I'm a big carrot person as well as a stick person. I think that there's lots of carrots out there.

DAN OLSON: So you think real lifestyle changes are in the offing here fairly shortly to address Minnesota's water situation?

DEBORAH SWACKHAMER: I do. I think that, for instance, in terms of water use, actually, we use less water than we did back in the 1970s, largely as a result of water-efficient appliances. So that's a good thing.

On the other hand, we take water for granted. We turn on our tap. We might have a private well, so we don't really think about even paying for it at all, or if you're in the city and you get a water bill, it's nowhere near the cost of producing and delivering and giving you that clean water.

So one way we might want to change behavior would be to price things accurately. Now, repricing water in the United States is an ambitious concept and probably not a very realistic change at this time. But I always use it as an example to point out to people that they view water as something like air. It's for everyone to breathe. That's what air is. We don't pay for air.

But water requires-- there's a cost to providing water to come out of a tap. There's delivery, there's distribution, there's the cleaning, there's all sorts of things that go into water.

DAN OLSON: Who owns Minnesota's water?

DEBORAH SWACKHAMER: Oh, that's a very complicated subject and I'm not a water lawyer, so I'll simply say that we're part of the eastern water law, which is really done at the state level. Not so much. There is no federal law for who owns the water. But essentially we believe in a common good of owning the water.

So if you own land, you also own those water rights. But something like if you own shoreline, you only own the water out to a certain legally defined limit, but then the lake itself belongs to the common good of the people.

DAN OLSON: Who owns Lake Superior's water?

DEBORAH SWACKHAMER: Oh, that's even more complicated because there's a line somewhat down the middle that east to west. That means that Canada has jurisdiction over the northern part of the lake and the US has jurisdiction over the southern part of the lake. And then, of course, the states have jurisdiction over their shorelines. So it gets very complicated very quickly in the Great Lakes.

DAN OLSON: Are we now, because of recent decisions, protected from folks who would like to put a big straw into Lake Superior and use that water and take it hundreds, even thousands of miles away?

DEBORAH SWACKHAMER: The law that just passed the US Congress and Senate and signed by President Bush that will protect Great Lakes water from being exported to any kind of a degree. And Canada has a similar law.

So the idea of draining the Great Lakes to provide less water rich areas of the country or even overseas, as was happening at one point, people were bottling water and shipping it to Asia, that will not happen now under legal protection from both Canada and the US. Now, that's an ambitious law. There's no other law like it and it's never been challenged in court.

DAN OLSON: Jumping back to these very mundane, almost personal details of how we're going to, in your view, probably end up managing our personal water use-- flush toilets. What's going to happen? I mean, I'm aware of some parts of the country. If you visit New York City, if you visit some other large cities, Los Angeles, it's a pretty different water use environment. Is that so?

DEBORAH SWACKHAMER: That's true. And again, this isn't rocket science. We know how to build high-efficiency low water-use appliances. We know how to build septic systems. We know how to build sewage treatment plants. We know the technology that's needed and it is not rocket science.

It requires political will to keep that infrastructure modern and to keep it functioning and maintained. And one of the problems even, say with Minnesota, even a status as ethically minded as ours, we have upwards of 1,000 communities that have failing septic or failing sewage treatment facilities. We have many septic systems, individual homes septic systems that are failing.

And this isn't because we don't know how to do it. It's because of the funding needed to keep these systems current or to get homeowners to replace-- having everything from enforcement. I mean, they're against the law. So it's enforcement to find these systems and replace them.

DAN OLSON: But again, going back to the personal level, how should I as a homeowner be expected to come up with the $5, $10, $15, $20,000 that might be needed to fix my broken septic system if I'm living in Southeastern Minnesota? I just don't have that kind of money. I know it's the right thing to do, but how can I afford it?

DEBORAH SWACKHAMER: To me, it's the same as if your roof is caving in. It's going to cost you maybe $10, $15,000 to replace your roof. And I don't mean to sound heartless to those that are less fortunate or that are really living hand to mouth. They're land-rich but not financially well-off.

I do believe that there should be some government assistance to make sure that for the greater good of the water resources, for instance, of the state, that there be appropriate opportunities and mechanisms to help people do the right thing.

DAN OLSON: University of Minnesota scientist Deborah Swackhamer is the co-director of the U's Water Resources Research Institute. This is Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Dan Olson.

What happens when a scientist links pollution to powerful business interests? Deborah Swackhamer found out 10 years ago. She says it taught her a strong lesson about how vested interests can influence science. Here's more of our conversation.

DEBORAH SWACKHAMER: I was looking at toxaphene in the Great Lakes. And toxaphene was the replacement chemical for DDT after it was banned. It's not a well-known chemical by the public, but it was the most widely used chlorinated pesticide in US history.

The thing is, it was mostly used in the Southern United States. And so to find it in the Great Lakes meant that it came in from the atmosphere. But what I found was in Lake Michigan, in northern Lake Michigan, I found excessive amounts of toxaphene.

I mean, really excessive amounts of toxaphene, eight times what I would have expected in the sediments of Lake Michigan, which meant that we had a source of toxaphene to Lake Michigan that was not coming from the atmosphere, it was coming from a direct point source into the water.

I speculated that it might be related to the paper industry because there had been some research earlier-- not by me but someone else from Illinois, who had shown that if you took pulp liquor from the kraft mill process and you reacted it with sunlight, you could create something that looked a little like toxaphene.

So I speculated that this might have been a source. The largest concentration of craft paper mills in the world is actually in northern Wisconsin. So it was a speculation, not an accusation. And it was not-- it was more of a hypothesis than a conclusion.

But the next thing I knew I had a Freedom of Information Act placed on every piece of paper I had ever touched-- all my phone records, all my email for a 15-year period. They wanted 15 years' worth of records of grants, of papers, of notes, of telephone records, of everything. I mean, everything.

DAN OLSON: Who wanted to know this?

DEBORAH SWACKHAMER: This was a law firm. And, of course, under the Freedom of Information Act, they don't have to reveal their client. And at the same time, my husband was getting the exact same request at EPA. He was a scientist at EPA at the time.

And so we figured out by-- over about a six-month period, we figured out that in fact, it was the paper industry's lawyers that were making these requests. And it really was a case of harassment. They were really looking to deflect this attention on toxaphene being associated with the paper industry. And they ultimately-- they never did acknowledge that it was them. But there was a number of reasons why privately I was told that that's what was the case.

DAN OLSON: And what was the outcome? Were you chilled by this and decided, OK, that's it. No more toxaphene for me. I'm out of here. What happened?

DEBORAH SWACKHAMER: No, I've continued to work with toxaphene. And the irony of course is that after all of that scare and concern over the paper industry, I subsequently did a project to directly test my hypothesis and look to see whether the worst-case kraft mill could possibly be producing toxaphene in its ponds. And the answer was no.

So they really had nothing to worry about. But they overreacted and got caught up in trying to scare me off and to scare my husband off who was funding other researchers to do similar work.

DAN OLSON: Two questions-- where did the toxaphene come from or the toxaphene-like toxaphene come from?

DEBORAH SWACKHAMER: We don't know. And I think it's the records of pesticide use back in the '60s and '70s and '80s were simply-- we don't have these national records to really look back and say, oh, it was used by the blueberry industry or somebody else. I mean, again, that's just hypothetical. So it came in from somewhere, but we will probably never know where it came from.

DAN OLSON: But in the meantime, you were a young scientist, what was your personal reaction to the suits coming at you with all these requests?

DEBORAH SWACKHAMER: It was a very sobering time. I will say that those six months where I had these legal requests but had no idea why was a very scary time. At the same time, the university was going through this discussion of whether they should ban tenure.

The legislature had suggested we might ban tenure and change the academic model. And I was very caught up in the whole concept then of academic freedom that having someone dislike my research was no reason to run away from it.

And so tenure protected me, which I became a strong advocate of something that had been theoretical prior to that-- this concept of academic freedom suddenly became very real, that the university should provide me some cover and some support to make sure that I'm allowed to do the research that I'm supposed to be doing as a researcher and not be influenced by outside vested interests.

DAN OLSON: You were tenured at the time, even so, did the university stand by you and say, Professor Swackhamer, don't worry about a thing, we're there for you?

DEBORAH SWACKHAMER: That's a complicated answer. The university protects the regents of the university. And so the lawyers for the university who I engaged with early on basically said, as long as our interests coincide, we will protect you. But if you get your own counsel, if you go a different path than we go, we will not be able to protect you because our job, the legal counsel for the university is to protect the president and the regents.

And I understood that. So I worked with the university and they didn't want me to be hurt or damaged in any way by this process. So our interests were coincided. They wanted to protect me because if an industry could come in and disrupt a university researcher's life so badly, then that could happen to anyone. It was the idea that I could be anyone is what scared people.

And right at the same time, this exact same couple of months was when the tobacco case was going on and the university folks had been subpoenaed over tobacco research. So the university saw that if the Freedom of Information Act and the Data Practices Act of Minnesota could be misused, they were going to protect their researchers.

But it made me a little bit more certainly not cynical, but it made me much more realistic about the role of academia, the fact that vested interests can have such a profound influence over what happens. So it just made me a little bit more realistic about that.

DAN OLSON: Professor Deborah Swackhamer, thanks so much for your time. What a privilege to speak with you.

DEBORAH SWACKHAMER: It's been my pleasure. Thank you.

DAN OLSON: University of Minnesota Professor Deborah Swackhamer is the co-director of the U's Water Resources Research Institute, and she chairs the Science Advisory Board to the Environmental Protection Agency. Earlier this hour, we talked with University of Minnesota ecology professor, Dave Tilman. Both conversations can be heard online at minnesotapublicradio.org.

You've been listening to Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. The editor for the series is Mike Edgerly. I'm Dan Olson in St. Paul.

MIKE MULCAHY: And I'm Mike Mulcahy. That'll just about do it for Midday today. As Dan mentioned, you can hear that program again on minnesotapublicradio.org our website if you want to. You can hear any Midday program again at that website, just go to the Programs menu and pick Midday.

Minnesotapublicradio.org you can also play our You Decide the Ballot game. Midday is produced by Sarah Meier and Jane Sollinger. Our technical director is Randy Johnson. I am Mike Mulcahy. Gary Eichten will be back here on Monday. His guests will be legislative leaders Margaret Anderson Kelliher and Larry Pogemiller in the studio at 11:00 on Monday.

SPEAKER 2: Programming is supported by Concordia College in Moorhead and its Concordia Language Villages committed to global education, prekindergarten through college. More information at concordiacollege.edu.