 |
HOME |  |
SCHEDULE | |
PROGRAMS | |
KIDS & FAMILY | |
LOCAL | |
SUPPORT KCET | |
ABOUT US | |
SHOP KCET |  |
| About Us | Contact Us | |
 |
|
 |
          |
|
|
 |
 |
||
|
|
Life & Times Transcript
2/13/07 Announcer>> 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's your money, a deposit paid on every bottle and can you buy in California, so why don't you get it back? Kreigh Hampel>> If the bottles and cans just end up going into the landfill, they get buried and there's no way to redeem that money at the end of their life. So they're simply buried treasure. Val Zavala>> Southern California is blessed with beautiful beaches, but wait until you see the unholy mess we make on other shores. 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>> Don't throw away those cans or bottles. They're worth more than ever before. That's right. Recyclers are, in a sense, getting a raise and why is that? Because the state-run recycling program has ended up with a surplus, believe it or not. How did that happen and what does it mean for you? Toni Guinyard has our story. [Film Clip] Toni Guinyard>> Empty cans and bottles. You can look at them one of two ways, as trash or as cash if recycled. But the truth is, only sixty-two percent of beverage containers purchased in California are actually being recycled. The rest are ending up in the dump. Bridgett Luther>> The only thing we know that helps to recycle more is to increase CRV. Toni Guinyard>> Bridgett Luther is Director of the California Department of Conservation and those three letters she mentioned, CRV, stand for California Redemption Value. That's the deposit we pay every time we purchase beverages in most aluminum, glass or plastic containers. Bridgett Luther>> So you're paying four cents for anything under twenty-four ounces is your CRV and eight cents for anything over twenty-four ounces. But if you take that same container back to the recycling center, you're going to get a nickel for the small one and a dime for the large one. Toni Guinyard>> When California first started the recycling program in 1986, the refund for small bottles and cans was only a penny. Burbank resident, Nicholas Nappi, remembers how it was then collecting bottles and cans and hauling them to the neighborhood store. Nicholas Nappi>> I'd take my wagon. I'd go to the neighbors and get bottles of Coke and, you know, Nehi, all kinds of soda. You'd get a couple of cents for them and you'd buy some candy. Toni Guinyard>> We have come a long way since then. It's estimated that some one hundred sixty billion containers have been recycled over the past two decades here in the state of California and the increase in the California Redemption Value is expected to encourage people to consider recycling. Hope McAloon>> You know, everybody does this. There are people, I think, who are really dedicated to the environment, who really care, and then there are people who want to make a little money off it. Kreigh Hampel>> I love to see the deposits go up because the recycling rates have traditionally gone up every time that increases. Toni Guinyard>> Kreigh Hampel is recycling coordinator for the city of Burbank's recycling center. Here we get an up close look at what the public doesn't normally have a chance to see, the journey those bottles and cans and other recyclables take. What isn't dropped off by the carload -- Hope McAloon>> It's all walks of life. You know, I see Mercedes and BMWs as well as, you know, the people who push carts around and come in with their carts from the supermarkets. Toni Guinyard>> -- is collected at curbside and trucked in. Everything gets sorted. Kreigh Hampel>> The plastic bottles, the glass bottles, the aluminum cans, newspaper, cardboard, all those things. Toni Guinyard>> Eventually ending up in bales ready to be shipped out for processing into recycled goods. As big as this operation seems, when it comes to bottles and cans, consumers in California are still throwing money away. Kreigh Hampel>> The trail of money is that, when you buy bottles and cans at the stores, the stores collect that money and send it into a state fund. Now if the bottles just end up going into the landfill, they get buried and there's no way to redeem that money at the end of their life, so they're simply buried treasure and it's lost revenue in the terms of plastics, glass and aluminum, but the revenue is just sitting in state funds not being returned to people. Bridgett Luther>> Every couple of years, people decide that fund has gotten too big and that we need to do something with it. This year, the governor decided to give consumers an incentive. Toni Guinyard>> Incentive in the form of the increased refund on bottles and cans. Bridgett Luther>> Last year, Californians recycled 12.4 billion containers. In the twenty years that we've been running this program, we've recycled enough materials to fill up I-5 fourteen feet high. So we have cut a lot of resources out of landfills, but we need to recommit ourselves. Toni Guinyard>> Sometimes it takes transplants to California to remind us of the value of recycling. Teri Maier>> We're from Louisiana, so we don't have these great opportunities to have recycling at your fingertips. Toni Guinyard>> This is Teri Maier, wife, mother of three and dedicated recycler. Teri Maier>> They don't recycle like we do here. They don't have the programs and giving people incentives to recycle. Toni Guinyard>> The Maiers no longer rely on curbside recycling. The family started the nonprofit, funded with money raised from the refunds of bottles and cans. Teri Maier>> Sometimes we average roughly a good thousand or fifteen hundred dollars a month of recycled materials that are being donated to Mac's Project. Toni Guinyard>> Mac's Project, Make Another Child Smile, was born after Maiers' middle child, Mackenzie, was diagnosed with cancer at age four. At the time, Maiers' oldest daughter had the job of collecting recyclables at home. Teri Maier>> She was in charge of making sure all of the bottles and cans got into the container and, if she wanted extra money for her allowance, then she would take those containers in and would cash them in. She would average about ten dollars a month. Toni Guinyard>> After Mackenzie's health improved and she got out of the hospital, it got Maier thinking. Get more people to pitch in and she could raise funds to help kids with cancer and their families. Teri Maier>> We are now in lots of places in town. We have over thirty families recycling for us. We've got five schools recycling for Mac's Project and probably about fifteen to twenty businesses are recycling for us. Toni Guinyard>> This small idea built on pennies and nickels and dimes, those CRV refunds, is now large enough that the Los Angeles Conservation Corps sends a truck to the Maier home each week to pick up bag after bag of empty bottles and cans. Teri Maier>> And it just adds up, so every little bit counts. That's what we hope people will realize. No matter how big or small, it counts. And when you group it together with lots of members, then the accumulation of volume is where it makes a difference. It's like everything in life. Everybody likes win-win-win situations and I think that's what we have here. It's a win-win situation. We're helping the environment and we're collecting cans and we're being able to use those funds to help, you know, families that are battling cancer with their kids. Toni Guinyard>> And for those who believe redeeming the CRV amounts to nothing more than pocket change and isn't worth the effort -- Nicholas Nappi>> They're mistaken because it is worth it. I mean, if you can get something and also help the environment or whatever it is and you pick up a few dollars yourself, I think it's more than worth the time and effort and it's not that hard to do. Toni Guinyard>> And until June 30, the beverage container deposit you pay at the store will remain at four cents for small containers and eight cents for large, but -- Bridgett Luther>> Starting July 1, you'll be paying in a nickel and a dime and you'll be getting back the same nickel and dime. It's not a tax. It is in fact a fee. You can go get your money back. A lot of people don't. Toni Guinyard>> Leaving two-tenths of beverage containers sold in California ending up in the landfall. Kreigh Hampel>> So it's not just, you know, the traditional soda pop bottles that we had when we were kids. Now it's all sorts of other drinks that we come to form habits around and we're not recycling those. Toni Guinyard>> I'm Toni Guinyard for Life and Times. Val Zavala>> If you'd like more information on recycling, you can go to the website of bottlesandcans.com or you can call the Department of Conservation at 1-800-RECYCLE. 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>> You've probably heard the term "media consolidation". That's the trend where more and more TV, radio and newspapers are owned by fewer and fewer big corporations. Clear Channel, for example, used to be limited to forty radio stations. It now owns twelve hundred. Is that a good thing? Not according to New York University sociologist, Eric Klinenberg. He's written a book about how media consolidation has hurt local news and community services. I talked with Klinenberg who was a guest of Town Hall Los Angeles. Why should people care? We have more choices than we ever had ever. Why should we be worried about who actually owns what we see or hear? Eric Klinenberg>> Well, the problem is, even though you can get access to CVG, to the news in South Africa, to the weather in Rio de Janeiro, I'm concerned about whether you're getting enough local news and information, whether you can find out what's happening in City Hall, if there's a polluting corporation in your neighborhood, whether you get the information reporting you need to know, whether you can still get the sounds of your city when you turn on the radio. What I've found in the five years that I've spent talking to people throughout the country is a real concern about the lack of local voices and information about the places we live. Val Zavala>> What's the prospect? Eric Klinenberg>> Well, one of the big changes in the industry in this big consolidation story is that whether it's radio or newspaper, we've seen chain owners replace local owners of our stations or our newspapers and the result is a kind of severing of this relationship between the media company and the communities that they serve. Actually, Los Angeles is an important story in this respect. The story of the Tribune Company which is based in my home city of Chicago taking over the Los Angeles Times, I think, has been a horror story. A number of people in this city, I know, are concerned that the Tribune just doesn't have the local commitment to sustain the quality journalism that a city like Los Angeles deserves. Val Zavala>> What situation is Los Angeles in in terms of media consolidation and ownership? Eric Klinenberg>> Los Angeles is interesting. It's technically illegal for a company to own a newspaper and a television station in a given city unless they get special permission to do so from the government. The Tribune got that for Los Angeles. Val Zavala>> The Tribune owns both Los Angeles Times -- Eric Klinenberg>> -- and KTLA. This is a new thing. The Tribune acquired the Los Angeles Times in 2000 from the Chandler family. The Times Mirror was a locally owned and operated paper. It was not a perfect paper, but it was a paper that was unmistakably part of Los Angeles, a paper with a deep history to Los Angeles. I think the reporters who are left at the Los Angeles Times could tell you -- Val Zavala>> -- because it had a lot of cutbacks? Eric Klinenberg>> They're ambivalent about the Tribune. I mean, the Tribune has fired about two hundred sixty reporters from the newsroom that was almost twelve hundred when they took over. You know, two editors of the Los Angeles Times have gone, either resigned or lost their jobs, because they were so upset at what the Tribune Company from Chicago was doing to their newsroom. Look, the Los Angeles Times is a precious resource. It's vital for cities to have good newspapers that are really covering their communities. Los Angeles is an incredible city. It's going through amazing changes and record levels of immigration. A cultural economy is booming here and people in Los Angeles need to know what's happening where they live. I think people here are experiencing the hard way the real danger of consolidation when a distant corporate owner like Tribune from another city thousands of miles away comes over and takes your hometown paper. You might find that you're not getting your hometown voices, you're not getting your hometown news. This is a story we're seeing throughout the country. Val Zavala>> It's very likely that the Los Angeles Times, the Tribune Company, will sell the paper again, so it could go back to local hands. In other words, their experiment in whatever they wanted to do didn't work. Eric Klinenberg>> It's questionable whether the Tribune will actually sell the Los Angeles Times. Although the company has been on auction, the managers in Chicago have not received bids that they think are adequate. There are a lot of people in the city of Chicago who are convinced that the Tribune managers are doing everything they can to hold on to the corporation. They're reluctant to let go and, frankly, the Tribune managers have seen what happens when a newspaper company thousands of miles away takes over another paper. They don't want that to happen to their city of Chicago and their paper. So it's an open question. I think the people of Los Angeles would be better served by a local owner. I hope that the city of Los Angeles gets one. I'm just not convinced that's what's going to happen. Val Zavala>> What about things like the internet or whatever? There's a lot of different ways these days to get information on what's happening around the corner or in City Hall. Eric Klinenberg>> Well, in my book, I actually interviewed some of the people who are doing the best local websites or great blogs, people who are trying to think, well, how can we use new technologies to do innovative local reporting? What they all said is, "Eric, the work we do is totally dependent on newspaper journalism actually. We get our story ideas from newspapers. We might interpret or push a story in a different direction, but we don't have the resources to go out and dig up the stories. We'll never do investigative work. We can't have a beat system. We depend on newspapers." So I think we do ourselves a disservice when we say that the internet will replace all these old media. We need them working together. The danger is that, in our enthusiasm for the online stuff, we'll take the old media for granted and we'll eviscerate the institutions that provide reporting, that provide local music, that help us kind of get that local cultural stuff from the ground where it can be difficult to see up into the air. Let's remember that this is message fighting for air. The airwaves, when we talk about broadcasts. The airwaves are public property. It's a public resource like the national parks. The deal in this country has always been that corporations and public organizations that use the airwaves make a deal. In exchange for getting that space, they provide public service programming. They serve the public interests during ordinary times. They do community programming. They provide news. During disasters, they're there with the information that we need to stay safe. That contract has been broken. Val Zavala>> Are there really cases where media ownership has made a difference? Eric Klinenberg>> Actually, just five years ago this year, in Minot, North Dakota, there was a train that derailed while going outside of town. It spilled two hundred forty thousand gallons of anhydrous ammonia which is a highly toxic chemical. The chemical formed a big cloud, a poisonous cloud, that floated into the town and penetrated the homes of fifteen thousand people in town. We've been trained over a lot of years to turn on our radios and get emergency information. Well, in Minot that morning, the dispatchers weren't able to get through to the emergency broadcaster. It was one of six stations owned by Clear Channel Communications. They own all of the non-religious commercial stations in town and they had gotten rid of the local talent and replaced them with all this automated content. There was no one to answer the phones. There was no one in the studio station on alert. The result that morning to the viewers tuning into their radios to find out how to stay safe was that they were getting Big Country, they were getting Alternative Rock, they were getting Easy Listening, smooth-talking DJs, nothing that would help them. I think today, after a decade of extraordinary consolidation of ownership, Americans need to be asking themselves if their broadcast system is really providing them with the news they need during crises or during normal times. Val Zavala>> What can people do about it? What can we as consumers do about it consolidation? Eric Klinenberg>> Well, this is the second story of fighting for air. It's about the millions of Americans who are already doing things to try to create a better media system in this country. Americans are going online. There is Free Press, which is a new media form of organization. You can check them out at freepress.org. They have a whole set of programs that people can enlist in. There are letter-writing campaigns to the FCC and Congress to try to do something to prevent our nation's big media companies from growing even bigger. I actually liken the media reform movements to the environmental movements forty years ago. We're just waking up to the idea that, hey, we don't have to just accept this stuff. It's not natural. We can actually take back our airwaves and have a better media. Val Zavala>> The book, again, is "Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America's Media" by Eric Klinenberg. If you'd like more information about Town Hall Los Angeles events and 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>> It's hard to believe that trash from Los Angeles can travel thousands of miles across the ocean and end up on a beach in Hawaii, but it does. Tons of it. And now the Los Angeles Times has documented this traveling trash in print and video. Here's their report. Narrator>> The islands of Hawaiian archipelago act like the teeth of a giant comb, snagging debris drifting around the Pacific. Just walking on the Big Island beaches can be hazardous. Decades ago, Noni Sanford walked these beaches looking for driftwood. Now this is where she can get all she needs for the annual Hilo Trash Art Show. Noni Sanford>> Well, before the first cleanup, just right next to me here, this is like eight to ten feet high and nothing but junk. Bill Gilmartin>> The first time I was down here, you basically drove over plastic. You couldn't see sand on the beach. Narrator>> Retired wildlife biologist, Bill Gilmartin, has been organizing beach cleanups for a couple of years now. Bill Gilmartin>> The beach was just solid nets and other kinds of plastic debris. Narrator>> Tons of trash have been removed, but more keeps coming, brought here by the tides. Bill Gilmartin>> We bring people down here that have seen other beaches and even thought they were bad beaches until they saw this one. They're shocked. Narrator>> For Charles Moore, the shock came when he sailed this catamaran through the North Pacific subtropical gyre. Mile after mile of floating trash. Spurred into action, he returned two years later to conduct a high-seas survey. It wasn't just the big stuff he was pulling out of the ocean. With a fine-mesh net used to collect plankton, Moore noticed the ocean was full of a confetti of plastic, some of it broken fragments and some of it still in pellet form, the raw materials from most plastic products. Moore says that it's places like this southern California rail yard that are the source of most of the pellets. Charles Moore>> It's like a pellet beach. This particular rail yard has more tonnage of pellets on the ground that have the potential to reach the catch basins, storm drains, rivers and oceans than any place else that I've surveyed. Narrator>> This is the Los Angeles River where it empties into the ocean. Booms corral some of the trash that surges down the channel after a rainstorm, but much of it slips past and rides the currents for thousands of miles, a plastic plume that is transforming the ocean in ways that are unmistakable. Val Zavala>> The Los Angeles Times also reports that there are huge garbage dumps floating in the ocean. One of them between here and Hawaii is as big as the state of Texas. If you'd like to read or watch more about our ocean environment, you can go to their website at latimes.com. Val Zavala>> They come from a secret training camp somewhere in Los Angeles and their mission is to stop suicide bombers in the Middle East. No, we're not talking about secret agents. We're talking about dogs. Now some of these specially trained dogs will be returning from Israel to work in California. We thought that it would be a good time to look back at a story Gay Yee did in 2002 about an unusual program called "Pups for Peace". [Film Clip] Gay Yee>> Glen Yago is a Jewish-American who’s seen the violence in the Middle East and witnessed the terror come home. Glen Yago>> I’ve been over teaching in Israel. I’d witnessed a number of suicide bombing attacks. I had, you know, spent six hours trying to find my son on September 11. The people that want to kill civilians for political purposes, that’s what terrorism is. Gay Yee>> How does one fight someone willing to strap on explosives to kill himself and take others with him? Yago, who’s an economist with the Milken Institute, is a trained problem-solver. To him, the solution to the frequent bombings was fairly obvious. Israel should bring in specially trained dogs to sniff out explosives and stop at least some of the suicide bombers before people got hurt. Glen Yago>> This idea of going towards human sacrifice in terror is a taboo that is aligned that, as a species, we cannot cross. Gay Yee>> Using bomb dogs to sniff out terrorism. It all seems so simple that Yago wondered why Israel hadn’t thought of it before. Well, it turns out that Israel had. There just weren’t enough dogs. So Yago came up with another solution. He started a bomb detection school for dogs solely aimed at helping Israel and he called it “Pups for Peace”. [Film Clip] Gay Yee>> Nitro is a star pupil, as we saw during this demonstration at a private home in Bel Air. For security reasons, the school itself operates in secret at an undisclosed location somewhere on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Yago knows that, without the secrecy, these dogs could easily become targets. Mike Herstik>> Their job is very simple. They seek out explosive materials usually in the form of a bomb. They detect it, they indicate it to their handlers. They haven’t ever come up with anything better. They have all kinds of machinery out there, but nothing is able to detect explosives with the sensitivity of a dog’s nose. Gay Yee>> Mike Herstik is an expert who’s trained bomb dogs for the Los Angeles Police Department. Mike Herstik>> The reason they are such a tremendous deterrent to the terrorists is because they are so excellent at their job and the presence of these dogs is enough to redirect the plans of a would-be terrorist. Gay Yee>> Herstik took a pay cut to work at “Pups for Peace”. His mother and father were Holocaust survivors and he says he always felt indebted to Israel for giving his family a second chance. Mike Herstik>> It’s about doing the right thing, but the fact that I was born in Israel, there was a certain spiritual connection. I happened to leave there when I was three and a half and I feel like things have come full circle. Gay Yee>> And it comes as no surprise that Herstik also feels a strong, almost spiritual, bond with Nitro. Mike Herstik>> How do you feel about a dog that you bet your life on? We’re a team. Glen Yago>> “One idea led to another and we said why aren’t there dogs in Israel? So we....” Gay Yee>> Yago’s goal is to train a thousand dogs such as Nitro to work in Israel to protect schools, buses, train stations, any place you’d find the public, but it isn’t cheap. Every trained dog ends up costing around ten thousand dollars. Yago is counting on strong support from other Jewish-Americans who share his concerns. Glen Yago>> It’s a global problem. It’s not just an American problem. It’s not just a Jewish problem. It’s not just a Middle Eastern problem. But it’s a problem of trying to get a discourse going about problems in the world where there are grievances where people don’t target civilians as the strategy. Gay Yee>> Israel’s problems once seemed far away, but since 9/11, Yago believes America has gotten a glimpse of the future, a world where terrorism is an everyday threat for all of us. Glen Yago>> You know, it’s not a matter of whether or not you want to go visit the Middle East. The Middle East has a way of coming and visiting us and it certainly did on September 11. Gay Yee>> And while a permanent solution remains elusive, Yago says he’s encouraged by a handful of loyal canines who seem to have a nose for peace. Val Zavala>> As we mentioned, some of these dogs, sixteen of them, will be coming back to California. They'll be working with sheriff's departments in various cities, including Los Angeles, assigned to anti-terrorism taskforces. 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. Sponsored in part by:  | |
|
Home | Features | Arts | Health/Science | OC Edition | L&T Blog | Archives | About Us | Contact Us | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use |