Environmental t News New Pfiesteria toxin identified
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omething in the water killed billions of fish in eastern U.S. estuaries throughout the 1990s. When a group of scientists blamed the kills on blooms of the dinoflagellate Pfiesteria piscicida, they wrote the beginning to a detective story that would spawn bitter debate over the next 15 years. Now, a key piece of evidence has emerged that could help bring an end to the controversy. In this issue of ES&T (pp 1166–1172), a team of chemists and toxicologists led by Peter Moeller of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) describe a newly identified ephemeral toxin produced by Pfiesteria. The key to its elusiveness over the past decade, they say, is that the toxin is produced rapidly and then vanishes quickly upon exposure to sunlight and other environmental cues. “We would observe toxic activity, and then it would disappear,” says Moeller, who spent more than 7 years characterizing the toxin using advanced analytical techniques. In the end, he resorted to working under red lights in the lab to keep the purified toxin stable long enough to study it. During the peak of the crisis, a group of scientists led by JoAnn Burkholder of North Carolina State University described several species of the genus Pfiesteria. Burkholder published numerous papers on the high toxicity of Pfiesteria. State agencies scrambled to fund Pfie steria monitoring projects, and the horrified public saw fish covered in bloody lesions and wondered what the so-called “cell from hell” would do to swimmers and fishers. Over the years, other groups published papers saying that Pfie steria wasn’t toxic at all. It was a parasitic fungus, or even just
plain-Jane hypoxia, they said, that killed the fish. Or if it was Pfiester ia, it was the animal-like algae’s proclivity for feeding on fish skin. The oft-cited missing link was the lack of an identified toxin. Meanwhile, the fish kills
Pfiesteria piscicida : a potent fish killer? (Adapted with permission from Harmful Algae. Copyright 2002 Elsevier.)
stopped after 1999. Burkholder attributes this change to the algae’s sensitivity to sediment disturbance from hurricanes such as that year’s Hurricane Fran. The uproar that had been dubbed “Pfiesteria hysteria” started to look more like “Pfiesteria fizzle”. But debate continued within the scientific community even as the mainstream news media lost interest. Now, Burkholder says the identification of the toxin will allow research to move forward. “It’s like having a smoking gun,” she says. The key to identifying the toxin lay in knowing what to look for. David Newman, chief of the natural products branch at the National Cancer Institute, provided an insight based on his 40 years of experience working with natural compounds. Moeller described to Newman the ephemeral nature of the toxin, noting that “it was only stable for a short time and relatively water soluble,” says Newman. “And I asked him if he had ever thought about a metallated [metal-contain-
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ing] toxin.” In the end, Moeller’s group identified congeners of the toxin that contain iron and copper. The molecules produce free radicals, which act “like a molecular welding torch” to wreak cellular havoc, Newman says. However, even Moeller is careful regarding direct links between the toxin and fish kills. He purified the toxin for toxicological studies with Burkholder before it was fully characterized. “The confirmation of a toxin found as reported in this paper is that we have wild samples that are identical to our culture, so there’s good evidence that it’s the same toxin that killed fish. Now we have to go out into a wild bloom and identify it,” Moeller says. Others go further. “It may be toxic, but in order to kill billions of fish, there’s got to be an awful lot of it and it’s got to stick around long enough to kill the fish,” says Robert Gawley of the University of Arkansas. Moeller acknowledges the short lifetime but says that free radicals are produced in large quantities and can act rapidly on cells. “It’s what everyone has been waiting for—the characterization of a toxin. It could open up new avenues of research and resolve many of the issues that remain, and many of the controversies,” says Wolfgang Vogelbein of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. In 2002, Vogelbein published research on Pfiesteria’s feeding behavior in Nature and on its toxicity in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Both papers questioned the existence of toxigenic Pfiesteria species. The environmental relevance of the newly described toxin will need to be tested next, he says. Pfiesteria research is likely to continue. “I don’t think the controversy is solved by this publication,” says toxicologist Andrew Gordon of Old Dominion University. —ERIKA ENGELHAUPT © 2007 American Chemical Society
News Briefs
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The cost of controlling mercury from coal-fired power plants can be up to 50% less than the 1999 baseline estimates, according to an economic analysis from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The new report, published in this issue of ES&T (pp 1365–1371), focuses on a well-known technology, activated carbon injection (ACI), and has sparked interest from electric utilities and environmental advocates who sparred over EPA’s Clean Air Mercury Rule (CAMR) when it was released in 2005.
Time is running out for U.S. coal-fired power plants to install technologies that will control mercury emissions.
“The clock is ticking for U.S. coal-fired power plants,” in terms of developing the most effective strategies for responding to CAMR, writes Thomas Feeley and coauthors at DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL). Coal-fired plants are the largest single source of mercury emissions nationally and emit 48 tons (t) of mercury annually, according to DOE. The CAMR (Environ. Sci. Tech nol. 2005, 39, 232A–233A) requires power plants to control mercury emissions to achieve a nationwide reduction of 38 t beginning in 2010 and an additional cut of 15 t by 2018. “The most significant message of the research is that the cost of
controlling mercury is coming down,” says Feeley. “While the results are promising, there are a number of issues that still need to be addressed,” Feeley says. The results are based on relatively short-term field tests and not on long-term commercial demonstration runs. ACI is a promising way to remove mercury from a plant’s flue gas that is commercially available, technology experts say. In a typical configuration, powdered activated carbon (PAC) is injected upstream of a particulate control device, either an electrostatic precipitator or fabric filter. The PAC adsorbs the mercury from the combustion flue gas and is subsequently captured along with the fly ash in the particulate control device, the authors write. DOE has been working on the development of mercury control technologies since the early 1990s, in anticipation of a mercury control rule, Feeley says. DOE’s baseline cost estimate in 1999 was $50,000–70,000/pound (lb) of mercury removed. EPA used this data when developing CAMR, according to technology and policy experts outside DOE. In the new ES&T paper, researchers developed an economic analysis of pilot test results from six small coal-fired power plants, in an attempt to provide the costs of reducing mercury at low (50%), mid (70%), and high (90%) levels. In 2004, they conducted 30-day pilot tests at plants ranging from 60 to 360 megawatts. These smaller plants are likely to need ACI to control mercury, while the larger facilities can rely on mercury reductions achieved as a co-benefit of controlling SO2 and NOx, Feeley suggests. The ACI technology was varied by using either a brominat-
Plastics component linked to breast cancer
Bisphenol A (BPA), a building block of polycarbonate plastics used in products such as baby bottles, hikers’ water bottles, and microwave-safe containers, has been identified by a growing body of research as a mimic of the hormone estrogen that has significant effects at low doses. Now, researchers at Tufts University have discovered an association between BPA and breast cancer in rats exposed to the compound in their mothers’ wombs. The study, published in Reproductive Toxicology (2006, doi 10.1016/j.reprotox.2006.10.002), treated mother rats with doses of BPA ranging from 2.5 to 1000 micrograms per kilogram of body weight per day (μg/kg/day), similar to levels measured in the U.S. population. About one-third of their female offspring exposed to 250 μg/kg/day in the womb developed cancerous lesions in their mammary glands when they reached adulthood. The researchers did not expose the rats to additional tumor-promoting agents. Although the mechanism behind tumor formation remains largely unknown, the study hints that BPA alters the development of fetal breast tissue in a way that promotes formation of cancer later in life. The study also supports the theory that fetal exposure to estrogen mimics is behind the rise in breast cancer rates over the past 50 years, the authors say. Environmental groups and some scientists have called for the removal of BPA from plastic products.
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Mercury control costs drop
Environmentalt News ed PAC or untreated sorbent. And the plants used various kinds of low-rank or lower-heat-value coal. The economic analysis shows that the costs of controlling mercury with ACI are as much as 50% less, plus or minus 30%, than what was predicted in 1999. The authors calculated costs ranging from $3,810 to $166,000/lb mercury removed. They also calculated the increased cost of electricity (COE), finding it varied from 0.14 to 3.92 mills/kilowatt-hour (kWh). Western coal, long thought to be incompatible with ACI because of the coal’s very low chlorine levels that result, after combustion, in high levels of elemental mercury, is shown to be a good fuel source for a plant with brominated ACI, says Mike Durham, president of ADAES, Inc., a technology and chemicals specialty firm that participated in some of the pilot tests. Once the researchers impregnated PAC with bromine, they found that they had very good results with western coals, according to Durham. Many experts agree that the cost figures in DOE’s analysis are
realistic. “The paper clearly illustrates what technology vendors and environmental groups have been saying all along, that this technology is relatively inexpensive and it’s very efficient,” says Martha Keating, associate in research with the Children’s Environmental Health Initiative at Duke University School of the Environment and Earth Sciences. Keating helped develop EPA’s assessment of mercury control technologies in the 1990s. “From our perspective, this technology has been available and shown to be cost-effective since 2002,” says Ann Weeks, an environmental attorney involved with the CAMR lawsuit against EPA. Yet the debate over the costs of controlling mercury emissions continues. One electric utility officer, who did not want to be named and who works for a large U.S. company, stressed that the cost estimates have a wide range; are very plant specific; and depend on a variety of inputs, including the amount of carbon that is injected, the type of coal that is burned, the
Throughout the tropics, chemical-intensive crops such as coffee and bananas grow in valleys and on hillsides near biologically diverse mountain forests, including rainforests that are home to disappearing frog species. New research published in this issue of ES&T (pp 1118–1123) reveals that surprisingly high levels of pesticides currently used in Costa Rica are being transported to high-altitude forests, some of which are in protected areas such as national parks and volcanoes. The new data are the most complete for Costa Rica and the first to show that pesticides used in lowlands accumulate in tropical mountain forests miles away. Researchers say that a meteorological quirk created by mountain ranges
FR ANK WANIA
Pesticides waft into pristine rainforests
Air samplers such as this one in Costa Rica measured pesticide concentrations in protected mountain areas that were sometimes almost 10-fold higher than in areas adjacent to farms.
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efficiency and size of the plant, and the electricity demand. For example, Table 3 in the ES&T paper shows that at 70% removal, including the cost of byproducts, the cost per pound of mercury removed ranges from $19,200 to $149,000, while the COE at 70% ranges from 0.90 to 3.92 mills/kWh. And 90% mercury removal wasn’t achieved at three of the plants, the utility officer points out. “What I’m seeing is really such a large range of control costs that it makes it difficult for managers or operators to find where one of their plants would fit in. It’s very hard to make a general statement of how much this will cost” at every plant, the utility representative says. The paper is excerpted from a larger DOE report, DOE/NETL’s Phase II Mercury Control Technol ogy Field Testing Program—Pre liminary Economic Analysis of Activated Carbon Injection, which can be found at www.netl.doe. gov/technologies/coalpower/ewr/ index.html. —CATHERINE M. COONEY
carries the pesticides to destinations previously considered too far from agricultural areas to be of concern. In a related paper also in this issue (pp 1124–1130), the same researchers survey older banned pesticides in Costa Rica and propose a simple method to detect and prioritize pesticides in the environment. The team, led by Frank Wania of the University of Toronto, Scarborough (Canada), measured air and soil pesticide levels for both papers at 23 sites across Costa Rica and then modeled the potential accumulation of the chemicals at high altitudes. Wania explains that air above farms is carried up the sides of mountains and then cools at higher altitudes. As the air cools, precipitation forms and carries the chemicals down in rainwater and fog.
puzzling declines in amphibian populations, for which climate change, parasitic chytrid infection, and chemical use have been blamed separately or in combination. “There tends to be a pattern of more extinction at high elevations, which is tricky to explain because most of the human activity is at low elevations. We might have an explanation, because pesticide concentrations are higher at high altitude,” Wania says. The team’s models are consistent with research in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains by Don Sparling of Southern Illinois University and colleagues. In a 2001 paper in Environmen tal Toxicology and Chemistry (doi 10.1897/1551-5028), that group reported on residues of endosulfan and organophosphates in amphibians and found increasing pesticide concentrations with higher altitudes. When Sparling exposed frogs in the laboratory to 0.8 ppb endosulfan, they were partially paralyzed and would “swim in spirals. . . . If fish came by, they would just gobble them up,” Sparling says. “At lower concentrations we see lethargy—the frogs just lay around until they die,” he says. Sparling says the concentrations seen in Costa Rican soils would be of concern in water, but “direct comparisons of soil and water concentrations are difficult to make.” Wania says the team wants to return to Costa Rica to test water as well. Wania hopes the team’s work will help inform management practices in the tropics. Costa Rica is known for partcularly stringent protection of rainforests and biodiversity, with 25% of the country protected in some manner, according to the Costa Rican nonprofit National Biodiversity Institute. “We tend to think if we set land aside and leave it alone, that this protects it. But that may not be enough if we can’t prevent contaminants from depositing or accumulating,” Wania says. —ERIKA ENGELHAUPT
News Briefs Megawatt mileage
Running the 220 million cars and light trucks in the U.S. fleet on electricity instead of gasoline would have no net adverse environmental effects, according to a new report from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Moreover, the current power grid already has enough “off-peak” electricity production and transmission capacity for 84% of these vehicles if they were plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. Researchers assumed that most drivers would charge up overnight when electricity demand is much lower. The additional 30– 40% of electricity needed would come from coal- and natural-gasfired power plants, which emit greenhouse gases. However, the report says the process of electricity generation is more efficient and produces less greenhouse gases overall than gasoline production.
Bugs are everywhere— even on dust in city air
A new survey shows that microbes thrive in greater numbers and diversity than expected on aerosol particles spawned from cities. Researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, publishing in the January 2 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2006, doi 10.1073/ pnas.0608255104), surveyed the concentrations of various microbes living on urban aerosols. They designed a microarray chip to detect 16S rRNA gene variations in bacteria and archaea. The team identified more than 1800 bacterial types, some pathogenic, and followed variations in their presence according to weather and particle size in Texas air. The researchers say that such information could assist in monitoring pathogens for national security purposes and for future climatechange effects.
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The La Selva Biological Station in northern Costa Rica was a typical sampling site. “La Selva looks like a picture-book jungle, as pristine as it gets, but agricultural activities are very close by. I drove through one banana plantation after another,” Wania says. Pesticides are not only transported to mountain forests, the researchers say, but they also accumulate there. In some cases, the team found that levels were almost an order of magnitude greater on mountains than in low-lying areas closer to plantations. Crispin Halsall of Lancaster University (U.K.) points out that high altitude environments are of special concern as headwaters for water catchments. “With currently used pesticides, most risk assessment is focused on the local environment and fails to take into account the subsequent evaporation or transport of the chemicals” to vulnerable locations, Halsall says. “There is a whole series of mountain environments which are going to be susceptible to transport of pesticides,” Halsall adds, citing sensitive ecosystems in the Himalayas, Alps, and the Sierra Nevadas. Plus, he says, “Most currently used pesticides are quite soluble, unlike some of the older organochlorine pesticides. So they will dissolve into rain more readily than the hydrophobic pesticides of the past.” The research in Costa Rica confirmed that the pesticides of greatest concern there are those in current use. The insecticide endosulfan and the fungicide chlorothalonil had the largest concentrations, with up to 1 ppb of chlorothalonil and 3 ppb endosulfan in soil. Pesticides banned by the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants were found in much lower concentrations, likely because large-scale pesticide use was not common in Costa Rica before these products were prohibited, Wania says. He adds that the team’s results might help explain recent
Environmentalt News Overlooked impacts of bioproducts piled an expanded data inventory for use in bioproduct life-cycle assessments (LCAs) by including the flows of nitrogen, phosphorus, pesticides, and U.S. EPA criteria air pollutants such as nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxides, and volatile organic compounds. Most inventories have overlooked these compounds. KEITH WELLER, AGRICULTUR AL RESE ARCH SERVICE, USDA
The debate over whether plantderived products are better for the environment than their petroleum-based counterparts has centered on the amount of energy that goes into growing the crops and making the products as well as the greenhouse gases that result from burning fuels. New research published in this issue of ES&T (pp 1457–1464) is the first to quantify the environmental impacts of the fertilizers, pesticides, and equipment that are used in soybean and corn agriculture. The work suggests that policy makers should rethink the benefits of bio-based fuels and plastics. Rising oil prices and the pursuit of energy security have led to government subsidies in the U.S. for ethanol and biodiesel and a growing market for bio-based plastics, glues, and inks. Compared with petroleum-based products, these commodities are considered “green” because they come from plant sources—even though studies have shown that their production may require more fossil fuels—and because they emit less greenhouse gases (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2006, 40, 1722). But the environmental impacts of these products are not limited to global warming, says Amy Landis, a civil engineering graduate student at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a coauthor of the paper. Chemicals and heavy machinery used in soybean and corn farming could adversely affect soil, groundwater, and air quality. Nitrogen and phosphorus in fertilizers and pesticides cause hypoxia and eutrophication, whereas the air pollutants, emitted during the operation of farm equipment, have human health risks. “People keep having this argument about whether or not [bio-based products] are better for global warming, but you have to make your lens just a little bit bigger and look at the whole problem,” Landis says. Landis and her colleagues com-
Research suggests that decision makers need to consider the local environmental impacts of greenhouse-gas reducing options such as biodiesel buses.
The researchers modified a software model developed by the U.S. Department of Energy to estimate energy use and air emissions associated with crop production and developed an independent model to estimate pesticide runoff. They used data from nine states in the U.S. corn belt that together produced 80% or more of the country’s corn and soybeans in 2003. They considered corn and soybean agriculture as one system, because farmers typically rotate the crops on a yearly basis. A key advance over past LCAs is that the researchers estimate a range of values for the factors they consider in their inventory, whereas past studies have estimated
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single values. For instance, they calculate phosphorus emissions at 0–0.65 grams per kilogram (g/kg) of corn; the most likely value is 0.1 g/kg. The total energy use is estimated at 2.3–3.3 megajoules/kg of corn. Including this variability in LCAs is crucial for agriculture because “there’s no one way that people farm,” says Susan Powers, a civil and environmental engineer at Clarkson University. “Rather than just taking an average and saying all fields in the Midwest behave like this, they’re saying there’s a range.” Thomas Seager, a civil engineer at Purdue University, says that having a range of values for emissions and energy use shows that the answer to whether biobased products make environmental sense is not a simple yes or no. “Under some conditions, biobased production might make a great deal of sense,” he says. “Under other conditions, it might be a bad trade, and that’s a distinction that up until now we just haven’t thought about.” Academic and industry researchers should be able to plug the inventory data into their LCAs to weigh the environmental impacts of bio-based products. Officials with chemical producer DuPont are interested in using this data for the LCA of a polymer product that is partly plant-based, Landis says. According to Seager, the paper should have immediate policy implications and cause decision makers to rethink their goals, especially in the corn-belt states, which are heavily subsidizing ethanol and biodiesel production plants. Biofuels have environmental benefits at the global scale and in urban areas, where they reduce smog precursors, he says, but “environmental costs may be felt in the [crop] production states. If we have increased hypoxia, eutrophication, or groundwater contamination, it’s going to be in the corn belt.” —PRACHI PATEL-PREDD
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Closing libraries and destroying documents may sound like the plot line of a dystopian novel, but it is part of a U.S. EPA campaign launched in 2006 to shave $2 million off the agency’s budget for specialized libraries. Many EPA scientists who were contacted by ES&T say that the move will make their jobs harder because of a basic lack of information.
The shutdown of more than two dozen U.S. EPA libraries last fall may have led to the loss of irreplaceable materials.
EPA accelerated the closure of some of its 26 libraries last November in anticipation of a proposed budget for 2007 that, if approved by Congress later this year, would cut library funding by 80%. EPA Deputy Administrator Marcus Peacock said that EPA will digitize all of its “unique” documents and place them online over the next 2 years. He says that the agency is “offering better access to a broader audience, all at a lower cost.” However, any documents that have not been authored by EPA staff members can’t be digitized or placed online, because such a move would violate copyright laws, according to Linda Travers, the acting assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Environmental Information, which is handling the library closures. These documents include one-of-a-kind reports au-
thored by contractors and the recipients of EPA grants, says Dotty Biggs, a retired EPA librarian. In addition, EPA’s plan does not include digitization of documents generated by states, local governments, and tribes—all of which is irreplaceable material that will no longer be accessible, she says. “There’s a very chilling effect when our management at the highest levels doesn’t understand the value of the libraries and the professionals in them, because our work is based on technical information that scientists and engineers need,” says Suzanne Wuerthele, a toxicologist at EPA’s Region 8 office in Denver, Colo. Her library, which is not being closed, is crucial to her work, which includes explaining science to the general public, reviewing risk assessments, and testifying in court. Some of the material she uses would not qualify for digitization under the closure plan, and some can only be located with the help of a librarian, Wuerthele says. Dismantled collections include the Office of Pollution, Prevention, and Toxic Substances (OPPTS) library in Washington, D.C., which houses scientific and other documents about the health effects of chemicals and pesticides, and libraries in EPA Regions 5, 6, and 7. Access for the public and government employees to library materials in Regions 1, 2, 4, and 10 and at headquarters will be impaired. Leaked memos from EPA employees describe journals being tossed into recycling dumpsters and materials being stashed in boxes in an unused cafeteria. The loss of the OPPTS library is a serious blow to the teams of EPA scientists that must assess the safety of new chemicals within 90 days after a company notifies EPA that it plans to begin manufacturing it, says Bill Hirzy of OPPTS and an officer of EPA’s employee union. The federal government is dismantling libraries not only at EPA
News Briefs Livestock and greenhouse gases
The livestock sector produces 18% of global human-related greenhouse gas emissions in CO 2 equivalents, which is more than the transportation sector, according to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN. Livestock’s Long Shadow concludes that livestock is responsible for 9% of anthropogenic CO 2 emissions, mostly from land-use changes. The sector also produces 65% of nitrous oxide, largely from manure, and 37% of methane from livestock digestive systems. The authors’ recommendations include increasing the efficiency of livestock production and feed-crop agriculture to reduce greenhouse gases, improving animals’ diets to reduce methane and nitrogen emissions, and setting up biogas plants to recycle manure.
State of the Arctic
Arctic regions continue to show signs of warming, according to new research on sea ice and a report released in November by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Warming over the past 5 years has led to declines in sea ice, warming permafrost, and greater concerns about melting on the Greenland ice sheet, according to NOAA’s State of the Arctic report. The authors found that warming effects were more widespread across the Arctic during the past 5 years than in the 20th century. Other new data show that feedbacks from warming of open water could cause the Arctic Ocean to be nearly ice-free by 2040, about 20 years sooner than previously thought. The research was published in the December 12 issue of Geophysical Research Letters (2006, doi 10.1029/2006GL027345).
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Scientists protest U.S. EPA library closures
Environmentalt News but also at the Department of Energy and the General Services Administration, Hirzy says. “What this administration appears to be doing is stripping away the public’s ability to easily access important information about all aspects of government,” he says. Ranking Democrats on three
committees that oversee EPA’s budget asked the agency on November 30 to halt the closures. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), chairperson of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, and 17 other senators urged EPA to stop destroying materials until the Government Accountability Office completes an
Britt Erickson, the newest managing editor of ES&T, will oversee the news and features section of the journal. Erickson began her ACS career as a reporter for Analytical Chem istry in 1997, and a few years later, she began writing for ES&T. She returned to Analytical Chemistry at the end of 2003 and joined the staff of the Journal of Proteome Re search as the senior news editor for both journals. In December 2005, she became assistant managing editor of Analytical Chemistry. She continued to be an active reporter, most recently writing about the controversy surrounding platinum in silicone breast implants. Erickson holds a Ph.D. in environmental analytical chemistry from the University of Maryland, College Park. “Britt is possibly the most independent of my students,” says her former graduate adviser, George Helz, “in terms of figuring out what she needed to do and doing it.” Helz recalls that Erickson’s doctoral thesis was “a rigorous piece of work,” following molybdenum reactions with sulfide. He notes that her findings have important implications regarding nutrient pollution in the Chesapeake Bay. Alan Newman, ES&T’s former managing editor, says that he is proud of hiring Erickson, who was his first hire and one that he knew in his gut would work out well. He often tells about how she bagged an important news story about dioxin-poisoned chickens in Europe. Erickson had been visiting a lab in Amsterdam when she heard about
GER ALD KELLER
New managing editor rejoins ES&T
Managing editor Britt Erickson escapes the hustle and bustle of Beijing and finds solitude at the Summer Palace.
the crisis. After a tip from a source, she immediately hopped a train to visit Pat Sandra at the University of Ghent. Sandra had solved the conundrum by detecting high levels of PCBs in the chickens’ feed. Her story about the incident, which cast ripples across the EU and mirrored a similar incident in the U.S., appeared in the August 1, 1999, issue of Analytical Chemistry. “It’s a great case of aggressive reporting, with Britt going the extra mile to follow up on a great lead for a great story,” Newman says. He describes Britt as “extremely smart” and “extremely careful—the best editor I’ve ever worked with. She pays tremendous attention to detail.” Newman also notes that Erickson is very passionate about writing, particularly about food and the environment. That passion is reflected in her dream of turning her old farm in Harpers Ferry, W.Va., into an organ-
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investigation into how the closures are being carried out. EPA will continue to shut down the libraries, according to Peacock, but will hold off on recycling or throwing out “duplicate” and “obsolete” materials until congressio nal concerns have been addressed. —JANET PELLEY
ic vineyard. She also wants to build a “green” house on the property. “I have been following the greenbuilding movement for several years and am pleased to see growing interest in it,” she says. What excites her most about her new position is the opportunity to travel internationally. “I enjoy learning about new cultures and tasting new cuisine,” Erickson says. “My fascination with Asian culture began when I lived in Japan for 5 years as a child in the mid-1970s.” A return visit to Kyoto for the World Water Forum in 2003 brought back many familiar sites and smells, although the language remained foreign, she says. A more recent trip to Beijing to attend the 2006 Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry’s Asia-Pacific meeting “inspired me to think more about the needs of developing countries,” Erickson comments. “One of my goals for the news and features section of ES&T is to reach out further to the international community, particularly Asia, to better understand their needs.” Erickson plans to host a discussion group in September at the Dioxin 2007 meeting in Tokyo. “Anyone interested in joining the group should contact me,” she says. Her future plans for ES&T will include a more online focus. “Like most journals, print subscriptions of ES&T are decreasing each year, and web subscriptions are increasing,” she notes. Future improvements will include better searchability of the journal’s online news and features, as well as possible forays into podcasts and other online elements. —NAOMI LUBICK
