Ed Cannady, the Forest Service’s back country manager, on top of a peak in the Boulder-White Cloud Mountain. (Photo: Guy Hand)

HAND: Even though motorized users make up only five percent of those who explore the Boulder-White Clouds, they are now the region’s most powerful wilderness opponents. Lumber companies aren’t interested in the area’s low-value timber, mining was banned in the ‘70s, and ranching is fading, so opposition is passing to dirt bikers, snowmobilers, and even mountain bikers. The International Mountain Bike Association is against the wilderness proposal because bicycles are also excluded from designated wilderness. Ed Cannady understands their position but thinks that much of what these mountains offer is missed on two wheels.

[SOUND OF CREEK]

CANNADY: I mountain bike a lot. I’ve ridden every mile of trail in the Boulder-White Clouds, but, you know, it’s a completely different experience. When you are rolling you focus on this little piece of ground a few feet out in front of your tire and the faster you go the more you have to focus. That’s a completely different experience than saying, “Wow, I went to that place and was amazed at the quiet and saw 13 mountain goats and passed by a grazing moose.” If you’re on a mountain bike, it’s pretty likely you’re not even going to see that moose.

HAND: From the bank of a forested river, Cannady points to a light spot in the gravels where Chinook salmon have recently spawned. It’s so easy to miss. Sometimes, even walking is too fast.

CANNADY: Oh, that is a Cooper’s Hawk it looks like from the back.

HAND: A small hawk glides through the trees, then silently lands on a stump right in front of us.

CANNADY: Oh wow, he’s 20 feet away. Look at him. He doesn’t know we’re here (LAUGHING).

HAND: Beautiful.

CANNADY: Yeah, he is.

HAND: Cannady’s admiration for this place is obvious. And so is his desire for visitors to have moments like this. He says his job is not only to help people recreate, but to re-create a connection to nature.

CANNADY: I’m wanting to, as the back country recreation manager, wanting to give as many people as possible the opportunity to re-create that connection. And I believe it’s a lot easier to do when you do slow your pace, when you find that not just moment of peace, but days of peace. I think once you slow your pace and start to see things differently, it’s easier for you to reconnect to the natural world and re-realize that dependency that we all have and we cannot escape it.

HAND: A fast pace, it turns out, isn’t limited to the motorized and mountain bike crowd. Leise Dean, program director for the Sawtooth Wilderness area, just west of the Boulder-White Clouds, says over the last few years she’s noticed people rushing, even as they head into the woods on foot.

DEAN: The way people are using the wilderness has changed. They’re going in for shorter trips. No longer are we seeing the people going in for ten days – that would be very rare. What they want to do is they want to go on a river trip for a day, they want to hike to the most beautiful lake, and they want to go horseback riding for two days, maybe an overnight. So, in a way, that makes wilderness ever so much more important, because, hopefully, when they do get in there, some of that settles down a little bit.

HAND: Motorized users say they like to settle down, too, in those still moments when the motors are off. Or in Sandra Mitchell’s case, the moment she and her husband got stuck in the snow.

MITCHELL: And so we were off our sleds, working on ‘em, and it was absolutely the quietest scene I have ever experienced in my life. There was no noise, there was no wind, there was nothing. It was just sheer quiet. It was a stunning moment, one of those moments when you just stop and you look around and you think, wow, God had such incredible taste when he created this world.

HAND: Mitchell, public lands director for the Idaho Snowmobile Association, says there’s plenty of public land out there for motorized and non-motorized users to find peace and quiet.

MITCHELL: There is a place for snowmobiles. And for folks who don’t want to even have the opportunity to come in contact with a motor, we’ve set aside in Idaho four million acres of wilderness where they can go.

DEAN: How many symphonies are enough? You’ve heard that quote before.

HAND: Again, Liese Dean, program director for the Sawtooth Wilderness. Dean thinks it’s a mistake to measure wilderness only in terms of recreation, ignoring its scientific and ecological value.

DEAN: Primarily, when the Wilderness Act was first in place, the areas that were designated were the classic rock and ice they’re called. They were incredible scenic areas, beautiful for the landscape, but ecologically not very diverse. And I think that that’s something that in the past 20 years we’ve recognized, and an effort has been made to have more diversity within the wilderness preservation system.

HAND: Dean says the Boulder-White Clouds – with its unique range of high and low elevation, it’s varied habitats, it’s profusion of animals – has the kind of diversity the system needs, ecologically. She gets three or four requests a year from scientists wanting to do frog research or temperature and water cycle studies, work that can only be done in pristine environments.

DEAN: Wilderness is a kind of our baseline in this country, where we can see how things actually take place and the consequences of things without human interference.

HAND: Yet, when it comes to creating a wilderness bill, it’s strictly a human endeavor, and increasingly complex. Representative Mike Simpson’s Boulder-White Clouds proposal would not only make concessions to off-roaders. It would pay local ranchers to retire their grazing rights. And give land to Custer County, the tax-starved county that holds much of the proposed wilderness. Mike Simpson:

SIMPSON: We’ve broadened this proposal to include many of the other things about how are we going to handle the ORV use, how are we going to handle the ranchers that are in the area that are being driven out because of lawsuits and so forth? How are we going to handle a county that is 94 percent federal land so they don’t have a tax base to actually provide the services? But I will tell you that it’s one of those things that nobody is going to like in the end.

HAND: The Sierra Club currently opposes the plan and other environmental groups are undecided. So here you have a wilderness proposal championed by a Republican and looked at warily by nearly every other interest group. Democrat Lin Whitworth, who is challenging Simpson in November, is also against it.

WHITWORTH: I don’t know that we need to make any more wilderness. We got plenty. If you was to make your goal to visit every area that we have in wilderness that we have now it would take you a lifetime.

HAND: So what made Simpson put three years of effort into just getting the locals on board? The same thing, he says, that drives most wilderness advocates.

SIMPSON: When I was young we used to go up to Red Fish Lake and the Sawtooth Mountains. And, of course, we’ve been into the White Clouds and just this past week, me and several of my staff backpacked into Castle Peak and spent a few days there. It really brings home the value of solitude.

HAND: So, can you describe what we’re looking at?

CANNADY: Oh, what we’re looking at is one of the finest slices of country on Earth, in my opinion.

HAND: Recreation Manager Ed Cannady has taken me to one final place: up a steep, talus slope to an astounding vista, way above tree line and political compromise.

CANNADY: This is O’Calkin’s Peak, David O’Lee Peak or Alabaster Peak in the distance, and, of course, Castle Peak on the skyline. These are the main White Cloud Peaks.

HAND: Surrounded by endless mountains and high above lakes that look like turquoise stones, it’s hard to imagine that the future of the Boulder-White Clouds could ultimately rest in Washington, D.C.

CANNADY: If they could have their hearing right here, I think we would get a lot more favorable outcome for this place. There’s a line in an old Eagles song that goes, “Oh, it seemed like a holy place protected by amazing grace,” and to a large degree, that’s what will protect this place, is amazing grace, the grace of the politicians who had the foresight in 1964 to pass the Wilderness Act. Who had the foresight to say these places are worth preserving in their current state. That was amazingly thoughtful. It was incredible foresight.

HAND: The passage of a wilderness bill is far from certain. Neither of Idaho’s Senators say yet that he supports it. In a recent poll, 61 percent of Idahoans do, but without the backing of the motorized lobby, mountain bike associations, and conservation groups, the fate of the Boulder-White Cloud Mountains will remain, as it has for over 20 years, unresolved. For Living on Earth, I’m Guy Hand.

CURWOOD: As an environmental journalist I have visited a fair amount of wilderness from Africa to Alaska, to the Amazon and the Adirondacks. And while I now look forward to being in the wild, it wasn’t always that way.

Many years ago, before there even was a Wilderness Act, my family packed me off to what is called the Farm and Wilderness Camps in Vermont to live in the woods for as much as a week at a time. I was not thrilled to trade in radio, television, cars, baseball, bathrooms and ice cream for a heavy pack filled with rations and survival gear. Nor did I appreciate the soaking downpour and a bloodthirsty swarm of mosquitoes on my first day on the trail. My body was worn out, so sleep came easy that first night. But when a heavy snuffling and grunting and scratching began out behind our lean-to, my eyes popped open and my throat went dry.

Related links:
- Wilderness Act of 1964
- Stewart Udall
- “The Enduring Wilderness” by Doug Scott
- Congressman Mike Simpson’s White Cloud Mountains plan

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Emerging Science Note/Canine, M.D.

Just ahead: why we are where we eat. First, this Note on Emerging Science from Jennifer Chu.

[SCIENCE NOTE THEME]

CHU: Man’s best friend may also be his best doctor. That’s what a team of British researchers discovered recently after it trained a group of dogs to sniff out evidence of bladder cancer in urine samples.

Cancer cells are known to generate volatile organic compounds that can be released into the air through breath, sweat and other biological functions. The scientists figured these compounds might give off specific odors strong enough to be detected by dogs, whose sense of smell is many times greater than humans’. Over seven months, they trained six dogs to pick out the specific odor produced by bladder cancer. The dogs were then put through a series of tests to see if they could distinguish the urine of bladder cancer patients from six other samples taken from healthy people and patients suffering other urinary complications.

In a study published in the current issue of the British Medical Journal, the canine diagnosticians reportedly picked out the samples from cancer patients 41 percent of the time. That’s more than double the probability of a random choice. In one case, the dogs repeatedly chose a sample from a participant who had originally been screened as healthy. Later testing, however, showed the participant did, in fact, have an early stage of cancer in his right kidney.

That’s this week’s Note on Emerging Science. I’m Jennifer Chu.

CURWOOD: And you’re listening to NPR’s Living on Earth.

ANNOUNCER: Support for NPR comes from NPR stations, and: Ford, presenting the Escape Hybrid, whose full hybrid technology allows it to run on gas or electric power. Full hybrid technology details at fordvehicles.com; The Noyce Foundation, dedicated to improving math and science instruction from kindergarten through grade 12; The Annenberg Fund for excellence in communications and education; and, The Kellogg Foundation, helping people help themselves by investing in individuals, their families, and their communities. On the web at w-k-k-f dot org. This is NPR -- National Public Radio.

[MUSIC: Billy McLaughlin “Fingerdance” FINGERDANCE (Narada – 1996)]

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Listener Letters

CURWOOD: It’s Living on Earth, I’m Steve Curwood. Time now to hear from you, our listeners.

[LETTERS THEME]

CURWOOD: Our recent story about Republican Senator John McCain’s stance on global warming drew a range of responses. Some of you praised the Arizona senator for being a leading advocate in Congress for action on climate change.

“What a coup!” writes Alan Barlow, who hears us in KUOW in Seattle. “Thanks for the interview with John McCain on my favorite subject: conservation. Now I want to email the senator and thank him, too.”

But other listeners were bothered by some of Senator McCain’s comments. Carol Greenwood, who listens to Living on Earth over the Internet, took issue with John McCain’s explanation for the League of Conservation Voters score on his environmental record.

“His response was he was graded down because LCV factors in “pro-life” positions in its scoring,” she writes. “This certainly wasn't the only anti-LCV position McCain took, and so couldn't have been considered the cause of his so-called "low" score.”

For the record, the League of Conservation Voters informs us that Senator McCain’s voting score has gone up sharply since he ran for president, and for the year 2003 he got a 53 percent rating.

And finally, a correction and a clarification concerning our recent interview on the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. Living on Earth misstated the number of plant owners seeking permission to boost the amount of power generated by their plants.

Since 1977, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved 101 production increases, or uprate, applications. The increases range from less than two percent to 20 percent boosts in power output. And there are currently ten power increase applications pending before the NRC, including that of Vermont Yankee.

Also, our story suggested that plants circulate water from nearby sources such as rivers to cool spent fuel in storage. For the most part, according to Neil Sheehan of the NRC, heat exchangers keep the nuclear power plant waste cooled. He writes that, “Only a limited amount of water is added to replace that lost by evaporation. There is certainly no constant infusion of water from a nearby body of water.”

Your comments on our program are always welcome. Call our listener line anytime at 800-218-9988. That's 800-218-99-88. Or write us at 20 Holland Street, Somerville, Massachusetts 02144.

Our e-mail address is comments at loe dot org. Once again, comments at loe dot org. And you can hear our program anytime on our web site, Living on Earth dot org. That's Living on Earth dot o-r-g.

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Some Like It Hot

CURWOOD: Those red hot chili peppers that appear next to entrees on many restaurant menus today can mean different things to different people. Some might consider them a hot, yet savory, challenge, while others see them as red flags – a warning to sensitive taste buds.

Whether you like your food spicy or not is a personal choice, but as Gary Nabhan contends, it’s also likely to be related to where your ancestors evolved and what they ate. For example, your genes might make you, what he calls, a “super-taster”--someone who can’t tolerate peppery foods.

He’s studied how the landscape might shape our dietary choices, and how our genetic makeup has adapted to these choices through time. Gary Nabhan joins me now to talk about his new book, “Why Some Like It Hot: Food, Genes and Cultural Diversity.”

Gary, hello.

NABHAN: Greetings.

CURWOOD: Now, I guess we can’t talk about evolutionary diets without addressing the very topic of your book: why some like it hot. And you open this section of your book about chili peppers and spicy foods with an anecdote from your own life and, in a way, it illustrates the dramatic taste preferences that people have. Could you tell us first about the time you dated a super-taster?

NABHAN: Yes. I did not know it at the time, but I was trying to make a romantic meal for a woman who had no tolerance to the piquancy of chili peppers. And I had just seen “Like Water for Chocolate” and there’s a wonderful recipe in there of stuffed chilis called “chiles enogadas”--it’s in a walnut and almond sauce but the chilis are quite hot. And so, what I thought would be a romantic meal that would have aphrodisiacal properties caused my date to flee to the kitchen after the first bite.

CURWOOD: (LAUGHS)

NABHAN: Her ears were burning, her face was red, she was coughing and trying to get down as much cold water as possible. And it was not her idea of an aphrodisiac.

CURWOOD: I see. The relationship didn’t last, huh?

NABHAN: The relationship somehow survived that, but let me say I became a lot more aware that everyone else does not have the tolerance for chilis that I do.

CURWOOD: Now, on the face of it you’d think that the extreme spiciness of chili peppers would be a turnoff. I mean, you’d say “Hey, Mother Nature is sending me a message: don’t eat this plant!” So, how come it’s in our diets?

NABHAN: Well, chilis have five different ways of reducing food spoilage, for example. They reduce microbial colonization of some of our foods. They can also provide us with this wonderful feeling of coolness because the food stimulates us to sweat. They can reduce the activity of parasites in our guts. So, it may be that chilis give us a little bit of pain but give our parasites a lot more pain. And some people have chosen to tolerate that certain amount of pain for the pleasure that it gives them and also for the health benefits.

CURWOOD: Now, this is completely unscientific, but it just seems from casual observation that the closer one is to the tropics, the more likely one is to find hot and spicy food. If that’s so, why?

NABHAN: Well, your anecdotal observation is born out by some very good research that shows that chili consumption is much higher in tropical climes and, in part, that’s because of this deterrence of food-spoiling microbes. Because of the heat and the humidity in the tropics we find a lot more use of chilis and other spices to control food spoilage. You don’t as often hear about Norwegian bachelor farmers having a lot of chilis in their diet; the cold is reducing food spoilage. So, I had a Norwegian bachelor farmer friend whose mother warned him when he went to University of Wisconsin not to have spicy food. And he said, “What do you mean spicy food? We’ve never had it. What kind of things are you talking about, Mother?” And she said, “Things like ketchup. We don’t want you to have any ketchup in your diet, it might upset your stomach.” So, there’s a huge gradient from the Arctic regions down to the tropics with more and more use of pungent spices, like chilis, in those areas that are prone to food spoilage.

CURWOOD: Now, E. O. Wilson, the biologist, is fond of saying that genes contain our deep history. And if I have it right, the basic thesis of your book is that genetically each of us is linked to certain types of food, that we evolved eating this food and we need to have it. In fact, you have a term, “evolutionary gastronomy,” that comes up a lot in your book. I guess that’s the scientific name here for what you’re talking about?

NABHAN: That’s right. The longer the chain of our ancestors who lived in one place--exposed to the same set of food choices, diseases, and environmental stresses in that place for centuries--then the greater the probability that there was genetic or evolutionary selection for a diet and for genes that worked well in that place. And what we see today is that so many people have been displaced that something that worked well in their metabolism for centuries--these gene/food interactions with particular foods that had a restrictive geographic distribution--the more that we have come out of contact with those foods, the more these interactions are expressed as genetic disorders rather than something that increases our fitness as human beings.

CURWOOD: You got into looking at food and the diabetes epidemic in Native Americans there in the southwest, where you are. And I’m wondering what relationship you’ve found between adult onset diabetes and Native Americans and traditional food patterns and the contemporary American dietary patterns?

NABHAN: Well, the remarkable thing, Steve, is that a half-century ago more Native American people in the desert southwest where I live died of accidental snake bite than they died of the consequences of diabetes. And now, it’s the reverse. In some communities where I’ve lived and worked over the last 30 years, more than half the adults now suffer from adult onset diabetes. And we used to just think it was the introduction of fast foods that are high in fats and sugars. And yet what we didn’t realize until recently is that the very foods that were in traditional desert diets, and had been for centuries if not millennia, were protective foods that chronically reduced blood sugar levels and improved insulin sensitivity and insulin activity. So that when those protective foods began to vanish from the diets of Native Americans in the southwest around World War II, the rate of diabetes skyrocketed. It went up 25-fold in three decades--an astonishing thing.

CURWOOD: What are the protective foods that Native Americans were eating, the foods that protected them from diabetes for so long?

NABHAN: Well, mesquite flour--ground mesquite beans--has been a major food in the southwest for over 8,000 years. A little drought-adapted bean that looks like a navy bean called the tepary bean is also very good at reducing blood sugar levels and increasing insulin activity. As is acorns of all kinds and a number of other wild greens and small seeds like the desert chia seed. And, fortunately, many of these foods are coming back into the marketplace.

CURWOOD: Now, your own ethnic background, as I understand it, is Lebanese.

NABHAN: That’s right.

CURWOOD: So, what is it about eating that food that makes you Lebanese?

NABHAN: Well, there are some wonderful gene-food culture interactions there. One of the most interesting to me is the connection with fava beans. The Middle East and northern Africa were an area where malaria was the number one killer of people for millennia, not just for centuries. And it ends up that there’s a very interesting interaction between the consumption of fava beans and a particular gene, called GP6D, that when people of Lebanese descent eat fava beans and are exposed to malaria, the probability of the malaria parasite fulfilling its life cycle and actually causing malaria fever is reduced. And that’s one of just several examples that the book goes through that discusses this interaction with our genes. Olive oil is another one.

CURWOOD: What does olive oil do in connection with your Middle Eastern genes?

NABHAN: It ends up that the Mediterranean diet studies that were first done in Crete showed that people consumed about twice as much fat as Americans did at the time of those studies, but it was almost all in the form of olive oil. And they didn’t have higher rates of heart disease even though they were consuming quite a bit of fat in the form of olive oil. And so people tried to extend the Mediterranean diet out to other cultures and, for example, people in northern France simply can’t consume that level of olive oil that is consumed in Crete or Lebanon or Syria where you’re really in the heartland of olive oil. So, even though there’s great benefits of the Mediterranean diet to some extent for everyone, if we really tried to consume as much olive oil as the people in Crete or Lebanon do, most Americans would fall short of even being able to absorb that much olive oil without metabolic effects.

CURWOOD: Yeah, how much?

NABHAN: I was surprised when I went to Crete of seeing about a cup of olive oil in the bottom of what we’d call a Greek salad. Here in the United States we might get two teaspoons of olive oil in a Greek salad and be able to tolerate that.

CURWOOD: Where’s the epicenter of this Cretian cuisine? It’s this mountain village, right?

NABHAN: It’s a little town called Spili that was studied in the mountains of Crete from the 1940s on, and that the basis of most of our insights about the Mediterranean diet were derived from this little town of Spili.

CURWOOD: What were your impressions when you first got there of the people’s village and their diet?

NABHAN: The wonderful thing about Spili is that you see 80 and 90 year-olds walking everywhere, carrying wild greens on their back. Or they might be carrying a bucket full of snails that they’ve just harvested from a streamside. And my impression was that it was not just the foods themselves, but the exercise and even the traditional fasting that this community did, that made their longevity so remarkable that scientists around the world have come to see what insights they have.

CURWOOD: What do you do in the contemporary American family or household? You may have people from different kinds of ethnic backgrounds, different body types. How should those kitchens operate?

NABHAN: Well, I would say play to that diversity. Experiment with what most people feel good eating though trial and error, paying attention to the roots of the various people at the table rather than ignoring those--rather than thinking everyone at the table would do best on a Zen macrobiotic diet or on the Mediterranean diet. And it means making food part of our culture again, our collective culture of playing back those histories and learning about one another more rather than ignoring those differences.

CURWOOD: Gary Nabhan is author of “Why Some Like It Hot: Food, Genes and Cultural Diversity.” Gary, thanks for taking this time today.

NABHAN: Thank you, it’s been a pleasure.

[MUSIC: Billy McLaughlin “Stormseeker” FINGERDANCE (Narada – 1996)]

Related link:
"Some Like It Hot" by Gary Paul Nabhan

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CURWOOD: You can hear our program any time on our website. The address is Living on Earth dot org. That’s Living on Earth dot o-r-g. You can reach us at comments at loe dot org. Once again, comments at loe dot o-r-g. Our postal address is 20 Holland Street, Somerville, Massachusetts 02144. And you can call our listener line at 800-218-9988. That’s 800-218-99-88. CD’s, tapes and transcripts are 15 dollars.

[MUSIC: Billy McLaughlin “Stormseeker” FINGERDANCE (Narada – 1996)]

CURWOOD: Next week on Living on Earth….As a budding astrophysicist, Neil Tyson used to go up to the roof of his Bronx apartment building to gaze at the night sky. Inevitably, someone would call the police to investigate, but the young Tyson had an instrument at the ready to bail him out of the tight spot every time.

TYSON: Yeah, you just show someone Saturn through a telescope and they become a puppy.

CURWOOD: Bringing the universe down to earth, next time on Living on Earth. And remember you can hear us anytime and get the stories behind the news by going to Living on Earth dot org. That’s Living on Earth dot o-r-g.

CURWOOD: We take you now to a showdown, of sorts.

[ELK CALLS]

CURWOOD: Jonathon Storm recorded these two elk, bugling across a high meadow in Yellowstone National Park, making their best show for females on a cool autumn evening.

[EARTH EAR: “Challenge” THE DREAMS OF GAIA (Earthear – 1999)]

CURWOOD: Living on Earth is produced for the World Media Foundation by Chris Ballman, Christopher Bolick, Eileen Bolinsky, Jennifer Chu, Ingrid Lobet and Susan Shepherd - with help from Carl Lindemann, James Curwood and Kelley Cronin.

Our interns are Jennie Cecil Moore, Jenn Goodman and Steve Gregory. Special thanks to Ernie Silver. Our technical director is Paul Wabrek. Alison Dean composed our themes. Al Avery runs our website. You can find is at living on earth dot org. Environmental sound art courtesy of Earthear. I’m Steve Curwood. Thanks for listening.

ANNOUNCER: Funding for Living on Earth comes form the National Science Foundation, supporting coverage of emerging science; and Stonyfield Farm. Organic yogurt and more. Women of inspiration speak at the Stonyfield Strong Women programs taking place in Boston, New York and Washington, D.C. Details at Stonyfield dot com. Support also comes from NPR member stations, the Ford Foundation, for reporting on U.S. environment and development issues, and the Oak Foundation, for coverage of marine issues.

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