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Life & Times Transcript

12/12/06

Coverage of Town Hall Los Angeles speakers on Life and Times is made possible by a grant from the Boeing Company.

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

It takes tons of sand, gravel and cement to build new roads. Whose yard do we dig in first?

Susana Duarte>> This is the perfect site for a quarry. As you can see around you, it's isolated, it is far away from a populated area.

Laurene Weste>> We have put all our resources against this. It's probably the most devastating thing that could possibly happen to this community.

Val Zavala>> And then, questions have haunted families of these veterans for decades. Can this World War II researcher uncover the answers?

These stories and more next on tonight's Life and Times.

Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val Zavala>> California has recently improved spending billions of dollars on bridges, roads and freeways, but they didn't realize at the time what kind of impact that would make on the suburban city of Santa Clarita. Now all that building will need a lot of cement and what does cement have to do with Santa Clarita? As Hena Cuevas explains, it's gotten the town up in arms.

Hena Cuevas>> As Los Angeles continues to grow, so does construction, especially after this last election. Voters approved more than forty billion dollars worth of bonds, much of it to build new roads and freeways. But freeways take lots of concrete, a combination of cement plus aggregate, that is sand, rock and gravel. Now those materials are at the center of an ongoing environmental debate in the Santa Clarita Valley.

The valley is home to the city of Santa Clarita about thirty-five miles northwest of Los Angeles, home to two hundred fifty thousand residents. But now a major problem has appeared nearby. One of the world's largest cement companies wants to dig for rock and gravel here and many believe that it could ruin the area. How much of your time is consumed by this issue?

Laurene Weste>> Well, we in the city are spending a great deal of time.

Hena Cuevas>> Laurene Weste is the mayor of Santa Clarita.

Laurene Weste>> We have put all our resources against this. It's probably the most devastating thing that could possibly happen to this community.

Hena Cuevas>> At issue is this hill in the Soledad Canyon area about a mile away from homes. In 1990, the federal government granted mining rights to Cemex, a company based out of Mexico.

Narrator>> "For one hundred years, Cemex has been helping people make . . ."

Hena Cuevas>> Cemex operates in more than fifty countries. The twenty-eight million dollar contract gives Cemex the right to mine the site for twenty years, but there's been so much opposition to the project that nothing has happened for sixteen years. But city officials insist they are not against mining per se. After all, the area was designated as a mining zone by the state back in the 1960s and there are plenty of mining operations around.

What they say has changed are the number of people living around here. What may have been once considered to be the middle of nowhere no longer is as more and more homes keep getting built. According to Weste, the proposed mine is just too big. City officials say that it would extract more than ten times what has been mined in the past.

Laurene Weste>> It's a very different community from what it was five, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago and this project is right on top of the school system and thousands and thousands of homes.

Hena Cuevas>> So in 1998, the city began a relentless campaign involving town hall meetings and millions of dollars.

Laurene Weste>> "We are fighting this project on every front, legal, political environmental, the media, and with you the public. It's your valley. Make it so."

Hena Cuevas>> Last October, they put up an eighty-foot billboard and the website "stopcemexmegamine.com" includes this five-minute video.

Narrator>> "The twenty-year megamine would remove enough sand, rock and gravel to fill the Rose Bowl one hundred twenty-seven times. That's sixteen times greater than the size of historic mining levels for the area."

Hena Cuevas>> But their boldest step came in 2003 when Santa Clarita bought the land which is just outside their city limits. They could only buy the surface, not what's beneath it. That belongs to the federal government, but at least the city can monitor the mining activities. They're now in the process of annexing it. But the land purchased and the anti-mining campaign hasn't gone unnoticed.

Susana Duarte>> This is the perfect site for a quarry. As you can see around you, it's isolated, it is far away from the populated area.

Hena Cuevas>> Susana Duarte is the spokesperson for Cemex. She says there's a lot of misinformation and confusion surrounding the project.

Susana Duarte>> I don't think anybody is in any way, shape or form blindly lost in this court battle. I think they have been mislead or convinced by the fear of the concept of an operation in the site perhaps to misunderstand what will be happening here.

Hena Cuevas>> Cemex's website now has an question and answer section devoted to the Soledad Canyon project. So why is this mine so important? According to Duarte, Los Angeles needs the additional aggregate if it ever plans to build new roads, freeways and other projects. According to a 2004 report by the California Geological Survey, current supplies of sand and gravel will run out in ten years and that study does not include the materials needed for the new bond projects.

Susana Duarte>> Without this project, this same material will have to come in areas that are much farther away and therefore will increase the price of the aggregate to such an extent that the taxpayers will get less for more.

Hena Cuevas>> At the heart of the city's debate is traffic and, in particular, the additional trucks that will use area highways. But Duarte says that Cemex plans to limit the number of trucks during rush hour.

Susana Duarte>> When you look at this in day-to-day terms, the size of this project would impact traffic the same way a typical supermarket was impact traffic.

Hena Cuevas>> Even without the mine, she says, traffic will get worse.

Susana Duarte>> If this project does not go through, this type of material will be coming in from further away and more trucks on the road for longer distances.

Hena Cuevas>> But it's not just traffic. The city is also concerned about additional dust and water pollution. Cemex's response?

Susana Duarte>> Coring and mining is one of the most regulated industries in the United States. Those regulations will be extremely adhered to in this project.

Hena Cuevas>> But Kai Luoma of Santa Clarita's planning committee isn't convinced that these regulations are enough. One of the things that they're arguing is that the mining would take place on this side of the mountain which would then not affect the developments that are on the other side.

Kai Luoma>> Well, the mining will be lowering the ridge lines that we were looking at previously from the city of Santa Clarita, so the mining actually will be visible. The dust will be visible.

Susana Duarte>> This mountain is not coming down. We are not going to be bringing this mountain down to the highway level. In fact, very much the opposite. We will only be quarrying on this side of the canyon. This operation will not be seen from the highway or from any other area other than from this side.

Hena Cuevas>> Duarte also explains that, once the mining is complete, they will turn the site back to a natural state. This Cemex video shows what they did in Ventura County.

Narrator>> "After the sand and gravel has been removed, the land is graded and re-vegetated. The reclamation costs are funded through the reclamation account that is part of the annual budget."

Kai Luoma>> The reclamation, meaning what they're going to do with it after the mining occurs, is just that. It's after the mining occurs. The impacts that the city is concerned about are during mining, so there's going to be twenty years of mining, or at an accelerated rate less than that, but those are the impacts the city's concerned about.

Hena Cuevas>> So far, Santa Clarita has spent eight million dollars fighting the mine.

Laurene Weste>> The money to battle it is coming from our city's general fund and our citizens very much support not having our community devastated, so we continue to fund the battle and we will as long as it takes.

Hena Cuevas>> The city is also working to get legislation passed in Congress limiting mining in Soledad Canyon.

Laurene Weste>> We're a community of a quarter of a million people and we, the city, will be here forever. Therefore, the battle rages on forever.

Hena Cuevas>> Courts so far have upheld Cemex's contract with the United States government and its right to mine here and, at this time, the company plans to begin operations in Soledad Canyon in 2008. I'm Hena Cuevas for Life and Times.

Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".

Val Zavala>> When you think of globalization, you usually think about jobs going overseas or international trade. But you may not realize that globalization has a major impact on our environment, on wildlife and on conservation efforts. Just what is that impact? Well, for some answers, we talked with the head of the World Wildlife Fund, Carter Roberts. Saul Gonzalez talked with Roberts who was recently a guest of Town Hall Los Angeles.

Saul Gonzalez>> Carter Roberts, President and CEO of the World Wildlife Fund, thank you for joining us on Life and Times.

Carter Roberts>> Nice to be here.

Saul Gonzalez>> I think I, like many people, know your organization from its symbol, which is the panda, but you do far more than that. What's some of the work you're involved with in this country and indeed around the world?

Carter Roberts>> Well, we are known by our logo, which is one of the most recognized on earth, but we work in a hundred countries around the world. We go deeply into local communities like the Amazon, the Congo, the Bering Sea, creating parks, working on sustainable livelihoods. But we also go all the way upstream and work with governments and some of the biggest institutions on earth in trying to change their behavior.

Saul Gonzalez>> Change their behavior from what to what?

Carter Roberts>> Oh, change their behavior from unsustainable practices to sustainable practices. So when we look at the Amazon or we look at the Congo or we look at parts of the United States, what is driving change in the destruction of those ecosystems more than anything else are the biggest institutions on earth, the multi-national corporations -- in some cases, it's government -- who pursue policies or practices that change the trajectory of natural resources in the places at an unsustainable rate.

So we're seeing the Amazon begin to disappear, we're seeing the fish begin to disappear from certain fisheries because we are not sourcing those products in a way that we can sustain over the long haul.

Saul Gonzalez>> And you've got an indication that, in some fundamental ways, the environmental movement over the last twenty, thirty, forty years has failed, that we still see these kinds of problems and problems that are indeed growing, whether it's the shrinkage of the Amazon rainforest, the collapse of our fisheries around the world, climate and so on.

Carter Roberts>> Oh, there are successes we can point to. We have cleaner air and cleaner water in the United States than we used to. We have certain species that have come off the endangered species list. But I believe we made a mistake early on in deciding that nature is something out there, it's something separate from people.

We realize that, to succeed, we have to conserve landscapes that include people, include their livelihoods, include animals and look at all in a holistic way. The most progressive environmental groups that I see are the ones that recognize that reality and do something about it.

Saul Gonzalez>> Where humankind is not described as the enemy of nature, but part of nature.

Carter Roberts>> Right. It's changing the personality of our movements from a personality of crisis and confrontation to a personality based on facts and seeking constructive solutions that are holistic in nature.

Saul Gonzalez>> Do you think we're able to reconcile necessary economic growth with protecting the environment in these circumstances? I mean, as you well know, I think one out of every six people on this planet live in abject poverty. They make less than, you know, a dollar day. How do we raise their standard of living, which has to be done, right? It's the moral thing to do while protecting the resource wealth of this planet.

Carter Roberts>> Well, you know, the world came together in creating millennium development goals in Johannesburg a few years ago. The goals were to reduce poverty, reduce infant mortality, increase standards of living and address sustainability.

Saul Gonzalez>> And can we do all of that for hundreds of millions of people while protecting the environment of this earth?

Carter Roberts>> It's not a zero sum game. The interesting thing about the millennium development goals is that you can't address poverty unless you address conservation in the places in which those people live, whether it's people who rely on protein from fish off the coast of Africa, people who rely on timber products in the Amazon. The fact is, if you take away their ecosystem, you set them up for a life in which they rely for the rest of their lives on handouts and support from elsewhere. So conservation in helping people address poverty and livelihood issues has got to be a part of the solution. Rather than fight globalization -- I think globalization is here to stay -- we have to find a way to navigate it, understand the consequences of it and alter it so that sustainable factors happen, so a case in point.

Saul Gonzalez>> But some of that often involves sacrifice, though. In a country as wealthy as the United States, western Europe, Canada, Japan, do we simply have to understand that we consume too much and we have to consume a lot less?

Carter Roberts>> Oh, of course. It involves making hard choices about the way we live our lives, the products we buy and, if you're a company, the products you sell. The smartest companies looking ahead do the math. They realize there are finite resources on earth. The companies that are able to sell more efficient, more sustainable products and enter those kinds of markets are going to have a comparative advantage over those who don't.

I think our obligation as consumers in the United States or people who lead organizations in the United States is to recognize that reality and to change our behaviors, change our business behaviors, so that our children and our grandchildren have a world to live in.

Saul Gonzalez>> Are we prepared to do that?

Carter Roberts>> Well, time will tell. I think we see evidence that people are prepared to do that. California has just passed a law that is one of the most advanced addressing the issue of climate change. Companies like HSBC in London or Wal-Mart or Coca-Cola are beginning to change their practices to recognize the reality of finite resources.

Saul Gonzalez>> But it seems to me that, yes, if it's painless, we will change the way we live to help protect the environment, but if there's any hint of inconvenience, of sacrifice, people will say, "No, thank you."

Carter Roberts>> Oh, there's no question. I compare notes with my colleagues in Europe. Europeans are so far out ahead of us in terms of making personal sacrifices for the planet, whether it's not turning on air conditioning, taking public transportation, living in smaller houses, driving smaller cars.

Americans are going to need to change our lifestyles if we're going to make a difference in the world. At this point, the parts of our society that are way out ahead are the most progressive companies in some of the most progressive states. When you see evidence in California, you see evidence with some things like Goldman Sachs that they look ahead, they see the future and they're prepared to make changes.

Will our whole nation do that? I hope so, but in some ways we have to. You either pay now or you pay later. The price we're going to pay later because of climate change or because of collapse of fisheries. It's going to be enormous and my hope is that we recognize that reality now before it's too late.

Saul Gonzalez>> On that note, that thoughtful note, I'd like to thank you for joining us on Life and Times.

Carter Roberts>> Thank you for having me.

Val Zavala>> Carter Roberts was a guest of Town Hall Los Angeles. If you'd like more information on future speakers, you can go to their website at townhall-la.org.

Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

Life and Times
4401 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90027

You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val Zavala>> He runs his business out of his kitchen and he gets a boost now and then from Hollywood whenever a big war picture comes out like "Flags of Our Fathers" or "Letters From Iwo Jima". Why is that? Because, as you'll see, Bill Beigel is an expert at solving military mysteries.

Inside this modest home in Torrance, a detective of sorts is hard at work.

Bill Beigel>> Okay, we've got a number of names that come up here. Some of the sources are from people that are relatives of these guys.

Val Zavala>> Wedged into a small breakfast nook between the family calendar and the microwave, William Beigel types away at a computer.

Bill Beigel>> And this would give me a lot more information. It will give me a serial number on top, state entered from the service, his rank, his unit, which was the 121st Calvary Reconnaissance Squad, and the date that he disappeared, which was August 2, 1944.

Val Zavala>> He's digging for very personal information on complete strangers.

Bill Beigel>> He was killed in action down in Cook County, so he was probably from the Chicago area. What I do is find out records regarding people that served in World War II and Korea and specifically the people that were wounded or killed or made prisoners of war. One of the reasons I do that is because that kind of information was just not available back when it was happening.

Val Zavala>> What do you mean? You mean precisely what happened to them?

Bill Beigel>> Right. An example would be that somebody would be shot down and, three weeks later, mom and dad or brother or sister would get a telegram saying, "Your son, Johnnie Wilson, is missing in action over Germany July 15, 1943. Further details may be provided." Typically, the further details would be either he's now a prisoner of war or we have determined that he is dead, and that would typically be all they would get.

Val Zavala>> That's because they didn't want to compromise military strategy.

Bill Beigel>> The other reason, of course, is that the scope of the casualties was tremendous. There were over a million American casualties in World War II between killed, missing and POWs, so the two things put together made it very difficult. "94th Bomb Group? Shot down January 11, 1944."

Val Zavala>> But Bill Beigel has learned how to navigate through the massive national archives and work through the maze of military records. He knows the structure of the Armed Services and the right questions to ask. It all started about fifteen years ago with a gap in his own family's history, a gap he wanted to fill.

Bill Beigel>> My father grew up in Detroit, Michigan. He had a cousin that grew up in the same home with him. His cousin was a gunner on a B-17 heavy bomber that disappeared over the Atlantic and nobody ever knew what the cause was or ever heard another word from my father's cousin or anybody else on the crew.

Val Zavala>> After a few months of research, Bill found out that the cousin's flight crew was sent on a mission to Germany during a freak hail storm. Sending planes up during bad weather was against military policy.

Bill Beigel>> However, the base commander in Newfoundland said these planes got to go. So it turned out that eight or nine planes left that day, three of which, not just my father's cousin's plane, but two others disappeared because of weather.

Val Zavala>> From then on, Bill was hooked. Now he's helped more than five hundred clients learn the details of their loved one's death or injury, details that many vets have never talked about.

Bill Beigel>> I just got done doing some work for a woman whose husband was shot down and survived the war, but would never tell his wife or kids about what happened. I find that time and time and time again. They just don't want to talk about it.

Val Zavala>> Really?

Bill Beigel>> Yeah. All the time. It's almost the default position of a lot of these guys is to be humble or reticent. They just don't want to talk about it.

Val Zavala>> Some cases are tougher than others. Often people have varied or incorrect clues to go on.

Bill Beigel>> For example, they say Battle of the Bulge, December 24, 1945, which is actually a year after the Battle of the Bulge.

Val Zavala>> Oh, so they got that wrong.

Bill Beigel>> So they did, but that's a typical mistake.

Val Zavala>> But Bill, like a Marine on a mission, works through mistakes keeping track of the cases, often waiting months for answers from the military records division. But when he gets the answers he's looking for, it's like striking a target.

Bill Beigel>> This is a crew of a B-24 flying out of Italy. The guys on this crew actually were out in an olive orchard the day before they went on their last mission. What was interesting and what made this a real research challenge is that when the plane crashed, it went down over Bulgaria which, right after World War II, became a soviet satellite. So their remains were stuck in an area that was very difficult for Americans to get into. They eventually did, but it took until about six years after the war before they were able to get in there and identify the remains of these guys.

Val Zavala>> Paul Edlund was the only survivor. That day, he was stuck in a hospital bed wounded, so he didn't join his crew on that fateful day. After research help from Bill, Paul wrote a book.

Bill Beigel>> He was very courteous to thank me like he did in this book too.

Val Zavala>> Bill has a regular job. He does this on nights and weekends. And how much does it cost?

Bill Beigel>> My work typically is one hundred to two hundred dollars for most people.

Val Zavala>> But, he says, the best feeling comes from letters like this one.

Bill Beigel>> This is awesome. We kept reading and rereading each page to take it all in. "We knew Robert Miller enlisted before the war, but didn't know when. It was the defining of death report that showed us."

Val Zavala>> That must be so satisfying to get these.

Bill Beigel>> It's incredibly satisfying for me. Every time I read one of these, I get chills. I share them with my wife and it's always a nice experience for her too.

Val Zavala>> Now are there ever things that you don't tell the families? You have to use your discretion?

Bill Beigel>> I get information on occasion that I can tell will be disserving to families. When I get that, I advise them in advance that, when you read this particular part of the report, know that it's going to be something that may be upsetting to you for whatever reason.

Val Zavala>> Like it could be an especially gruesome death?

Bill Beigel>> It could be an especially gruesome death or it could be a death that is not as --

Val Zavala>> -- honorable?

Bill Beigel>> Honorable or as expected as it might be. That doesn't happen much, but it does come up.

Val Zavala>> And sometimes the client will end up telling Bill things they'd never told anyone before. One of his clients was a soldier in Germany toward the end of the war. He was assigned to guard a bridge.

Bill Beigel>> He said, "Our orders were not to allow anybody to come across the river, no matter what. So one day in broad daylight, a German woman and about ten other Germans started to try to wade across this river. We had a German interpreter who said, "You got to go back. You may not cross this river." They kept coming. Our orders were to fire into the air two or three times and make them stop. A couple of them turned back and went back, but a couple of them kept coming.

We fired again in the water in front of them, you know, twenty yards in front of them, and a couple more turned back, but the woman who was leading them kept coming. Bill, I had my orders. I shot that woman coming across the river and I watched her float down the river." By this time, he was really shaking and his eyes were bloodshot. He said, "I've never told anybody that in my life."

Val Zavala>> These days, information going to families is much more detailed, so Bill won't have the inquiries from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as he had from World War II or the Korean War. Still, he has plenty to keep himself busy.

Bill Beigel>> Four hundred thousand killed, six hundred thousand wounded and around a hundred fifty thousand prisoners of war.

Val Zavala>> Bill says that he can't wait to retire. Then he'll be able to do this full-time, discovering stories that give families a deeper respect and understanding for the beloved fathers, grandfathers, uncles and husbands whose secrets have been hidden for decades. If you'd like to reach Bill Beigel, you can go to his website at www2research.com.

And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

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