Earth Matters

Yellowstone Park Considering Ban on Snowmobiles; Canada's Bears May Be Hungrier Than Usual Come Springtime; Mysterious 'Sqrat' Invades N.Y.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

NATALIE PAWELSKI, HOST: This week on EARTH MATTERS, a wild ride on the wild side -- going eye to eye with bison and toe to toe with people who think snowmobilers are going too far.

What was once a haven for bears turns into a killing zone. And as the hungry creatures emerge from hibernation this spring, there are fears that things will only get worse.

And is it love or war between squirrels and rats?

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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I've seen a rat mug a squirrel, but I've never seen one mate with one.

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PAWELSKI: The hunt for the elusive sqrat. Those stories and more, on this edition of EARTH MATTERS.

A snowball fight of sorts in the world's oldest national park.

Welcome to EARTH MATTERS. I'm Natalie Pawelski.

A lawsuit brought by environmental groups has Yellowstone National Park considering new rules on what winter visitors should be allowed to do. Now the Environmental Protection Agency has weighed in and it could mean the end of one type of recreation some find thrilling and others find appalling.

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PAWELSKI (voice-over): Yellowstone National Park in winter -- hot springs, wildlife in the snow, the hills alive with the sound of snowmobiles.

JOHN CATTON, GREATER YELLOWSTONE COALITION: When you can't hear the wind and the trees, or the chirping of birds because it sounds like the Indy 500, America's first national park is going downhill and we need to turn that around.

PAWELSKI: On the other hand, snowmobilers say, this is one fun way to see the park.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You hear the echoing of the machine coming down through the canyon. It's an exhilarating feeling, and the animals -- it doesn't bother them. You stop, you let them cross the road, you enjoy them.

PAWELSKI: On our ride through Yellowstone, we found ourselves in an unusual traffic jam -- half bison, half snowmobile. Seeing these giant animals up close is a thrilling experience, but you figure it can't be good for wildlife.

MICHAEL FINLEY, SUPERINTENDENT, YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK: In some circumstances, sometimes the bison appear to just ignore the vehicles. In other circumstances, though, we have seen them disturbed and pushed off the road, just wasting energy, energy that is so important and so valuable to them in the winter.

PAWELSKI: In addition to providing a sanctuary for wildlife, Yellowstone is what's called a class-one air shed, so the National Park Service has a legal obligation to protect its air quality. Snowmobiles make that difficult.

(on camera): Over the course of the year, cars and other vehicles outnumber snowmobiles 16 to 1 here in Yellowstone. Even so, studies show snowmobiles are responsible for most of the air pollution here.

(voice-over): At West Yellowstone, 55,000 snowmobiles enter the park each winter. When employees working the entrance gate reported getting sick, the park found high carbon monoxide levels and had to start pumping fresh air into the booths.

CATTON: Carbon monoxide measured here at the west entrance rivals or exceeds the pollution in notoriously smoggy cities like Denver and Los Angeles. That's not right.

PAWELSKI: It may be hard to believe these small machines could be affecting Yellowstone's air on a broader scale in a park bigger than the states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined, but their two- stroke engines spit out 78 percent of the park's carbon monoxide emissions, 94 percent of its hydrocarbons, leaving a smelly blue haze in their wake.

FINLEY: Many visitors complain of a sore throat and that they can taste the fuel or the smell in the back of their throat after a day of snowmobiling.

PAWELSKI: The Environmental Protection Agency says the park should ban all snowmobiles until they clean up their act. That would limit winter access for much of the park to cross-country skiers or people riding in snow coaches, Yellowstone's strange-looking mass- transit option. A snowmobile ban would mean serious problems for the gateway community of West Yellowstone, which calls itself the snowmobile capital of the world

MAYOR JERRY JOHNSON, WEST YELLOWSTONE, MONTANA: If you cut off snowmobiles in Yellowstone tomorrow or for next season, it would devastate our community. I'm talking about your fire department, your police department, your school system. The monies that come in, in our winter season are a good portion of the tax dollars that West Yellowstone survives off of.

PAWELSKI: Like so many people here in West Yellowstone, Mayor Jerry Johnson's family depends on snowmobilers for a living.

JOHNSON: Well, they matter because it's our winter economy. I mean, it is how we make a living. It's why the town can be open in the wintertime.

PAWELSKI: Some are pinning their hopes for a solution on a new generation of cleaner, quieter snowmobiles, like this one, a four- stroke prototype being tested by Yellowstone rangers.

BOB SEIBERT, YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK: Even when you're running down the road at full power, it doesn't have that piercing, high- pitched whine that the high-revving two stroke has.

PAWELSKI: The snowmobile industry is coming in for criticisms for not moving faster to bring cleaner machines to market. It's not clear when that will happen, or whether Yellowstone, like many other national parks, will decide that snowmobiles don't belong.

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PAWELSKI: Later on EARTH MATTERS, more freedom for the star of "Free Willy."

Also ahead, in the fight over what to do about global warming, one side loses a major player.

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PAWELSKI: Welcome back.

It's almost springtime, and that means bears are just about ready to emerge from hibernation. But in one forest, conservationists are afraid of what the warm weather will bring.

Rick Lockridge explains.

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RICK LOCKRIDGE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Canada's Great Bear Rainforest hasn't been so great for bears recently. Many are starving because of a collapse in salmon stocks and their search for food is forcing confrontations with humans.

JIM FULTON, DAVID SUZUKI FOUNDATION: They wouldn't run away when dogs were attacking them. They literally were hanging around the houses, and around the school, right in the downtown part of the community.

LOCKRIDGE: At least a dozen bears have been shot, either by conservation officers or by frightened townspeople. Some of them were black bears like these, but most of them were grizzlies, attracted by garbage around homes and in the local landfill.

MATT AUSTIN, CANADIAN MINISTRY OF THE ENVIRONMENT: The landfill can serve as a school of bad habits to teach bears that they can associate people with food and to lose their fear of people.

LOCKRIDGE: For two decades, the salmon shortage has been a growing concern. This remote community, the Owekino (ph) Indian Nation, also depends on the fish for food. Environmentalists attribute the shortage to overfishing and poor logging practices that allow mud to run into streams.

FULTON: I think it's clear that it's more than a coincidence that large-scale industrial overcutting in that area has played a role in the decline of the salmon resource.

LOCKRIDGE: Conservation officers are also worried that most bears went into hibernation last year undernourished and may cause even bigger problems when they emerge this spring.

AUSTIN: They had very little fat on them, and this was in October, at a time of year when we would expect them to be almost at their maximum weight.

LOCKRIDGE: Wildlife officials and environmentalists do agree that something has to be done to control the animals, but some feel that killing the bears is unnecessary.

FULTON: This large number of grizzlies simply should not have been shot on the spot the way they were. There were alternatives.

LOCKRIDGE: Like relocation. Some environmentalists see this as a viable alternative to killing the animals. But British Columbia's environment division disagrees.

AUSTIN: We are really just shuffling the problem around as opposed to dealing with the root cause unfortunately.

LOCKRIDGE: Wildlife officials say most relocated bears try to return. Others become stressed, usually do not mate, and routinely become a nuisance in the area where they are transplanted. Experts also feel that without natural food supplies, relocating the bears merely postpones the inevitable, causing a slower, more painful death.

AUSTIN: It's really a tragic situation from our perspective, something we are very concerned about.

LOCKRIDGE: But wildlife officials say people can improve the situation.

AUSTIN: There are things that we can do about how we manage our garbage, how we manage compost, and things of that nature.

LOCKRIDGE: The Owekino Nation is considering a proposal to clean up the landfill. However, this will not solve the salmon shortage. That will take a years-long government effort.

But with bears about to emerge from hibernation, time may be something these animals don't have.

For CNN EARTH MATTERS, I'm Rick Lockridge.

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PAWELSKI: It seems time is also working against those who are fighting efforts to slow climate change. The list of major defections from the Global Climate Coalition has grown again.

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PAWELSKI (voice-over): The leading industry group opposing efforts to curb global warming is losing another member. Texaco is quitting the Global Climate Coalition. The oil giant becomes the third Fortune 500 company in recent months to leave the GCC, joining carmakers Ford and DaimlerChrysler.

JOHN PASSACANTANDO, OZONE ACTION: It's virtually over for the Global Climate Coalition. This has been the lead organization running the misinformation campaigns on global warming.

PAWELSKI: Most scientists say we're in for a century of rising temperatures and sea levels, as gasses like carbon dioxide build up in the atmosphere and warm the Earth. As that consensus has broadened, the Global Climate Coalition's support has began to melt. BP Amoco, Royal Dutch Shell, and Dow Chemical are among the biggest companies that have pulled out of the coalition.

And the GCC has shifted its tactics. Where once it mounted aggressive campaigns to question the science behind global warming theory, it now focuses on the politics, reserving its harshest criticism for the 1997 Kyoto Treaty, an effort to get the world's industrialized nations to cut back on pollution that causes global warming.

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UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: Don't rush to sign a treaty that won't work.

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PAWELSKI: Today, the Kyoto Treaty is in limbo. In the U.S., the world's biggest producer of greenhouse gasses, most senators say they'd vote against ratifying it. They say trying to curb global warming could do more economic harm than environmental good. The GCC says it has helped save the U.S. from a bad treaty.

GLENN KELLY, GLOBAL CLIMATE COALITION: The real issue here at hand is the Kyoto protocol, what we see as an international agreement that is misguided, that's going to jeopardize 2.5 million American jobs and make the oil price increases that the Northeast is experiencing look mild by comparison. (END VIDEOTAPE)

PAWELSKI: Other observers say moves likes Texaco's could help move the climate debate toward middle ground and break the ice on doing something about global warming.

Stay with us. We'll be right back.

Coming up, the cities of the sea are under siege. Find out what may be done to save them.

And later, look closely at the squirrels.

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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And I looked at it and I said, oh my God, that is no squirrel, that's a sqrat!

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PAWELSKI: There may be a new rodent in town.

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PAWELSKI: Welcome back.

The star of the movie, "Free Willy," is now one step closer to freedom himself.

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PAWELSKI (voice-over): Keiko, the killer whale, was released from his pen in a bay in Iceland Friday. He is now free to swim around the bay, which is 22 times the size of his pen. A barrier net separates the bay from the open ocean. It is hoped he will be free to the wild later this year, but he still has a lot to learn. For instance, Keiko still hasn't learned to catch and eat live fish.

This is the first time Keiko has experienced a natural marine environment since he was captured off Iceland more than 20 years ago. He lived in a cramped enclosure in a Mexico amusement park until his role in "Free Willy" sparked an international movement to release him. He was transferred to a roomier aquarium in Oregon for rehabilitation. And in 1998, amid a barrage of publicity, Keiko was taken to Iceland to prepare to live once again in the wild.

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PAWELSKI: A recent study reported that 60 percent of the world's coral reefs, including most U.S. reefs, are at risk. This week's "Solution Seekers" are proposing a plan they hope will begin to turn the tide.

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PAWELSKI (voice-over): Some call coral reefs the rainforests of the sea, hubs of undersea life, home to at least a million plant and animal species. But coral reefs are in trouble.

JAMES BAKER, U.S. NATIONAL OCEANIC AND ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION: We have already lost something like 10 percent of our reefs, two-thirds of them are under great stress, and we expect that if we don't do something, we may lose another 30 percent in the next 20 -- 10 to 20 years.

PAWELSKI: A federal coral reef task force says that over the next decade, the U.S. should set aside 20 percent of its reefs as ecological reserves. The idea is to set up a series of no-fishing zones, from the Florida Keys, where one such reserve is already in the planning stages, to Guam, Hawaii and other U.S. territories in the Pacific.

DONALD BARRY, U.S. DEPT. OF INTERIOR: The concept is basically giving certain areas a rest, letting them become nurseries for regrowth and for restocking a fish population.

PAWELSKI: Around the globe, threats to coral reefs include overfishing, scarring from careless boats and divers, water pollution and disease. And predictions of warmer sea temperatures have scientists worried, too.

CARL SAFINA, LIVING OCEANS PROGRAM, NATL. AUDUBON SOCIETY: It looks possible that the die-offs of coral reefs are the first ecosystem-wide effects of global warming, where one whole ecosystem around the world, the coral ecosystems, are being affected by global warming.

PAWELSKI: Researchers say the world's coral reefs are worth hundreds of billions dollars a year, as tourist attractions, fishing grounds, coastal protection and sources for new medicines. Seen in that light, preserving coral reefs makes sense for the economy, as well as the environment.

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PAWELSKI: Tune in to EARTH MATTERS in the coming months for progress reports in the fight to save coral reefs. We'll be right back.

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PAWELSKI: Next week on EARTH MATTERS, environmental disaster in Eastern Europe -- a dam at a Romanian gold mine leaks, contaminating rivers with cyanide and killing untold numbers of fish and other wildlife. But animals are not the only victims. We'll show you how the spill is affecting area people as well, next week.

A couple of years ago, giant mutant rats were reported to be attacking barnyard animals in Chile. Well, in this week's "Parting Shot," a new tale of mutant rats running around New York's Central Park. But as Jeanne Moos reports, these creatures are not much of a threat.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) JEANNE MOOS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): What do you get when you cross a New York City squirrel with a rat?

IVY SUPERSONIC: And I looked at it and I said, oh, my God. That is no squirrel, that's a sqrat.

MOOS: Ivy Supersonic swears she saw one in Central Park.

SUPERSONIC: They look like a squirrel, but they have the rat face.

MOOS: Supersonic, a flamboyant hatmaker, was so enamored of the name sqrat that she spent a 1,000 bucks to get it trademarked. She's printed up sqrat T-shirts and sqrat tattoos. She's hoping the sqrat will knock off Mickey Mouse.

MICKEY MOUSE: Ladies and gentlemen...

MOOS: The ladies and gentlemen we talked to had never seen a sqrat.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I've seen a rat mug a squirrel, but I've never seen one mate with one.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: A squirrel running with a cheese doodle, a rat chased him down, knocked him over, and grabbed the cheese doodle and runs.

MOOS: Sqrat does have a nice ring to it.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's called sqrats? That's great.

MOOS (on camera): And you know what to call that? A sqrat.

UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: Oh.

MOOS (voice-over): Actually, this kid was the only one who does think he's seen a sqrat, though he was a little fuzzy on the tail.

MOOS (on camera): Does it have a furry tail or a naked tail?

UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: It's like furryish naked, kind of.

MOOS (voice-over): True, horses and donkeys have gotten together to produce mules, and cattle plus buffalo equal beefalo. So what are the chances of a squirrel and a rat having a fling and then offspring?

DR. DAN WHARTON, DIRECTOR, CENTRAL PARK WILDLIFE CENTER: Basically, nil.

MOOS: Dr. Dan Wharton is the director of the Central Park Wildlife Center. Though rats and squirrels are both rodents, they belong to different families.

WHARTON: Well, she either saw a very bushy rat or more likely saw a very threadbare squirrel. SUPERSONIC: No.

MOOS: Supersonic won't take no for an answer. Besides...

SUPERSONIC: For me to make my money, for me to sell my animated series, it definitely does not have to exist.

MOOS: Take the jackalope, an imaginary cross between a jack rabbit and an antelope. The town of Douglas, Wyoming, calls itself the home of the jackalope, luring tourists with postcards, pins and hunting licenses featuring the so-called horny bunny. Back in 1939, Doug Herrick taxidermied the first jackalope at the suggestion of a friend.

DOUG HERRICK, JACKALOPE TAXIDERMIST: I never had no idea that they'd ever, you know, would take off like they did.

MOOS: So there's hope for the sqrat. Next thing you know, they'll be rewriting squirrel classics, "The Tale of Sqratnutkin." And if squirrels mate with pigeons, someone can market "squigeons." And if donkeys mate with antelopes...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Jackassalopes.

MOOS: If you don't know squat about sqrats, here's what to be on the look-out for.

For CNN EARTH MATTERS, I'm Jeanne Moos.

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PAWELSKI: Well, it's back to the rat race for us. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time on EARTH MATTERS.

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