Earth Matters

Plans to Build New Airport Near Florida Everglades Touches Off Fierce Debate; Will Colorado's Great Sand Dunes Become Next National Park?

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 high- flying plan to bring more jobs and business opportunities to a community still recovering from Hurricane Andrew. Find out why some people don't like the idea.

A new Olympic event, but the winners don't get gold, silver or bronze, they get -- worm waste.

And scenic sand dunes nowhere near a beach -- will this striking landscape become America's newest national park?

Those stories, and more, on this edition of EARTH MATTERS.

A plan to put a commercial airport next to two national parks -- will it fly?

Welcome to EARTH MATTERS. I'm Natalie Pawelski.

Congress is considering spending $8 billion of taxpayers' money to restore Florida's troubled Everglades. But at the same time, there are plans to bring major airlines to a runway a few miles away. That's touched off a fierce debate.

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PAWELSKI (voice-over): Fighters take off on a training run, while abandoned barracks waste away. Florida's Homestead Air Reserve Base has been part military airport, part ghost town, since Hurricane Andrew blew through in 1992. Now the base's future is the focus of an intense debate: whether to turn this relatively quiet air base into a busy commercial airport.

CURT IVY, HOMESTEAD CITY MANAGER: The city supports a commercial airport there for redevelopment of the air base.

ALAN FARAGO, SIERRA CLUB: We're simply opposed to that. It doesn't belong here. It's not the right thing to do.

PAWELSKI: Turning an underused military airport into a commercial one may seem like a no-brainer, but there's a major hitch: location. Homestead Air Reserve Base is less than two miles from Biscayne National Park, and about eight miles from Everglades National Park.

LLOYD MILLER, HOMESTEAD RESIDENT: I am scared to death of this airport, because you can't take a multijet aircraft, fly over the Biscayne National Park at 2,000 feet every 90 seconds without completely destroying the park.

PAWELSKI: Environmentalists say there's too much at risk: the quiet, the clean water, the wildlife, the Everglades' river of grass, the islands of Biscayne National Park.

FARAGO: There is the run-off issue. There is the water quality issue. There is the issue of air pollution.

PAWELSKI: Right now, there's not a lot of air traffic at Homestead. It's unclear how big a commercial airport could get.

FARAGO: The level of military use was much, much less than the proposed commercial airport. We're talking about 230,000 flights per year, a flight every minute, minute and a half. That's a huge impact.

PAWELSKI: Conservationists say south Florida's unique ecosystem has already suffered enough.

(on camera): Over the past century, the Everglades has lost about half of its territory to growing cities, towns and farms. And with the population of south Florida expected to double in the next 50 years, development pressure is only going to increase.

(voice-over): The airport's backers say all that growth is pushing Miami International to the limit. Sooner or later, they say, the area will need another overflow airport, and if you're going to build an airport, it might as well be in a place that already has a runway.

RAMON RASCO, ATTORNEY: There will absolutely be a negligible environmental impact to the parks and to our environment. This is going to be very state of the art, and it's going to have all of the latest environmental safeguards known to man.

MAYOR ALEX PENELAS, MIAMI-DADE COUNTY: We would never, ever support a new commercial airport at Homestead Air Force base if we felt that in any way it would damage the surrounding environment.

PAWELSKI: Since Hurricane Andrew, the city of Homestead has rebuilt. There's a small downtown, a new racetrack, and growing neighborhoods. Some here are eager for the new jobs and business opportunities a new airport could bring; others worry it could forever change Homestead's small town character, while putting the land around it at risk.

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PAWELSKI: Years of toxicity tests involving soil, groundwater and other substances may be worthless. A major testing company is under investigation for falsifying data in thousands of tests.

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PAWELSKI (voice-over): Tracking down contaminants in the air, toxic waste in soil, and cancer-causing chemicals in water all depend on accurate lab work. But federal prosecutors in Texas say cost cutting at a giant testing company resulted in thousands of flawed test results on samples from across the country.

PAUL COGGINS, U.S. ATTORNEY: Why did the lab time and again fail to properly calibrate the machines? The answer is greed. Calibrations are costly and time-consuming.

PAWELSKI: Further, prosecutors alleged, employees at the lab, a branch of London-based Intertek, knew its tests were wrong and fudged them to make them look right.

COGGINS: The ultimate victim is the public. To fatten its profits, this lab played Russian roulette with our environment.

PAWELSKI: Intertek's CEO released a statement, saying "While this employee conduct was unacceptable, the tests were not substantially in error and none of the tested sites has been found to pose a risk to safety or health."

The EPA says so far that is true, but it's still looking.

Meanwhile, a federal grand jury has indicted 13 former Intertek employees. If convicted, one executive could face up to 155 years in jail. At least three customers have also sued Intertek, including oil giant BP Amoco, which used Intertek to check for pollution at refineries.

The government says Intertek also conducted suspect tests at Superfund sites, old industrial and military facilities with some of the most dangerous toxic pollution problems in the country.

KURT PENNELL, GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY: Then there's no incentive for a lab that perhaps was corrupt, or even if they weren't doing analysis correctly, there's no checks on that type of those data.

PAWELSKI: Privately, Superfund observers say the Intertek case may be the tip of the iceberg. A lot of other labs could find themselves in legal trouble, too.

(on camera): The Superfund program has been under attack almost since its inception 20 years ago for spending too much money for too little result. New questions about the accuracy of testing at toxic waste sites could be powerful ammunition for Superfund critics and could further muddy the politics of cleaning up.

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PAWELSKI: Coming up, Louisiana fishermen are hopeful, but time is running out for a bill some call the most significant environmental measure of the year.

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PAWELSKI: Welcome back.

Time is running out for the Conservation and Reinvestment Act. The bill was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives back in the spring. Now conservationists are racing the clock to get the act passed into law before the end of the current Senate session.

Mary Pflum has more.

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MARY PFLUM, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It's been called the most significant piece of environmental legislation in decades. The Conservation and Reinvestment Act, otherwise known as CARA, would give $45 billion, over 15 years, to preserve sensitive lands, dwindling species, and parks.

All 50 U.S. states would benefit from CARA, but coastal states, like Louisiana, California, and Alaska, would gain the most, owing to their active offshore oil leases. CARA's funding pulls from the $90 billion the federal government has collected from offshore drilling fees in the past half century.

SEN. MARY LANDRIEU (D), LOUISIANA: It's a revenue-sharing bill. It's saying, while we are depleting one natural resource, which is oil and gas, one day these wells will be dried up -- we in Louisiana know this, because most of them are off of our shore -- let's have something to show for our money.

PFLUM: The House passed the bill this spring. Now it's headed for the Senate floor. But appropriations matters have put CARA on the backburner.

SEN. TRENT LOTT (R-MS), MAJORITY LEADER: Right now, I don't think that the CARA legislation could be passed in its presence form. But there's work going on, and I hope we can enlarge the loop of who's involved in that effort.

PFLUM: Insiders fear Republicans will keep CARA off the Senate floor in efforts to rob President Clinton and Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore of an environmental victory mere weeks before the November election. Thursday, President Clinton made a last minute pitch for the bill.

WILLIAM J. CLINTON, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: A chance like this comes along once in a great while. That's why there were over 300 votes for this bill in the House. And there ought to be 100 votes for it in the Senate.

PFLUM: But for land rights' activists, the delay of CARA comes as welcome news.

MIKE HARDIMAN, AMERICAN LAND RIGHTS ASSN.: CARA is an unprecedented land-grab trust fund. It hands over unprecedented powers of adverse condemnation of private property to state and local and federal government.

PFLUM: For coastal states, the potential demise of CARA spells the death of more wetlands.

LEN BAHR, LOUISIANA COASTAL ADVISER: The habitat will continue to degrade at an alarming rate. It's a catastrophic problem. It's not just a state problem. It's a national crisis, because the ramifications of the loss of this area spread out all over the country.

PFLUM (on camera): Conservationists remain hopeful that, if nothing else, key components of CARA will pass through the Senate attached to a last-minute omnibus bill.

(voice-over): If that fails to happen, they say the November elections, and a new team of players in Congress, could serve as the ultimate undoing of a bill years in the making.

For CNN EARTH MATTERS, I'm Mary Pflum.

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PAWELSKI: Time is also growing short for another bill making its way through Congress, this one would create the United States' newest national park. Videographer Tim Wall shows us what's at stake, the striking scenery of Colorado's Great Sand Dunes.

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JAMES KUENKEL, GREAT SAND DUNES LODGE: We're in the Great Sand Dunes National Monument, located in the south central of the state of Colorado. It is the tallest sand dune mass on the North American continent, vertical feet reach about 780 feet out there on some of those sand peaks.

TIM WALL, CNN VIDEOGRAPHER (on camera): How did they get here?

LIBBIE LANDRETH, U.S. PARK SERVICE: Over thousands of years, the Rio Grande out on the San Luis (ph) Valley floor, changed its course and brought in sediments and debris, leaving it for the prevailing southwesterly winds to blow the sand up against the Sangro de Christo (ph) mountain range, and basically it formed a little pocket of dunes, 39 square miles all together.

WALL: What's being proposed in Washington right now?

KUENKEL: What they're doing right now -- in fact, there's a House bill in now by Scott McInnis, one of our senators, and they are proposing to change this into a national park. Now, your difference between a national park and a national monument is a monument can be dedicated by a president, where a park has to be voted on by Congress.

LANDRETH: You have to have something more than just one feature to create a national park, so that's what they are looking at right now, is adding some additional lands to the watersheds that enter the monument and then to the west is the Baca Grand (ph), and they are proposing to add some of that land to the monument, and so it is a very, very special place with a lot of diversity.

KUENKEL: OK, this proposal is to buy that ranch which is trying to export the water to the front ranger to out of the state, or wherever they want to take it. President Clinton has already set aside $8 million to try to put a down payment on this ranch, and their main purpose is, is to protect the water rights of this area. In the San Luis Valley, water is very important because 80 percent of our income is farming.

LANDRETH: The national park is probably going to bring in, you know, more clientele, so it would attract folks in that way. That can be good or bad. And it's a depressed economy here, as a general rule, and relatively poor populations of folks that do live here. So I think they'd see it as a great benefit to have a national park in their backyard.

WALL: In terms of the natural environment, what's special about this place?

KUENKEL: Well, I believe, number one, you can look 360 degrees and see 14,000 foot mountains around you, you can see one of the largest sandboxes in the world, 780 vertical feet high with mountains in behind us. Kids come up, play on the sand. There is a little creek at the base of the sand. They just love it. It's kind of like Malibu Beach on Memorial Day here. We have the Sandhill Crane Fiesta in Montevista, which was the first of March, and we also have four wildlife refuges in the area.

LANDRETH: I have been here for 18 years and this is a spot that I just -- I don't think I could leave very easily. There's nothing more special than camping out in the sand and watching the stars come out at night if it's a nice clear night. You almost feel like a little ant out there, because you just almost become enveloped in dunes. And it's a really special place for everybody that visits.

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PAWELSKI: Next on EARTH MATTERS, meet a man who brings new meaning to the word "commitment." He has committed his life to restoring this watershed, a process that helped save his life as well.

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PAWELSKI: Welcome back.

You've heard stories about people working to save ecosystems -- well, for this week's "Solution Seeker," an ecosystem returned the favor.

Mary Pflum explains.

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PFLUM (voice-over): For more than 22 years, John Beal has spent his days working to preserve the waterways in and around Seattle. Armed with only a dream, his efforts have spawned an environmental success story.

JOHN BEAL, ENVIRONMENTALIST: Three million worth of work that I dreamt about, and thought about a lot, and fought for, and here it's done.

PFLUM: What he did was reclaim large stretches of the virtually dead Hamm Creek and Duamish River, both poisoned by industrial pollutants.

BEAL: We are in the heart of the industrial sector of south Seattle. This used to be a sewage treatment facility.

PFLUM: Now, people and animals enjoy these waterways. But this was not always the case.

BEAL: The ecosystem wasn't here. There weren't any ants there, gnats, chiggers, birds even. There just wasn't anything here.

PFLUM: The revival of this ecosystem mirrors Beal's personal journey.

BEAL: Well, I was told by a number of doctors in one month that I was going to die. I'm a Vietnam veteran. And I had found this place, close to my home, and I kind of enjoy the sound of water. But it was just filled with so much garbage that I decided that if I was going to check out, I'd like to leave the place a little cleaner than I found out. That was 22 years ago.

PFLUM: There was a lot of work to do. Decades of abuse and dumping had overwhelmed the area. But Beal sought out, and got support from a number of private and governmental agencies, like the People For Puget Sound, the King County Department of Natural Resources, and the Army Corps of Engineers.

He also recruited thousands of volunteers, who have spent hundreds of thousands of hours cleaning, restoring, and maintaining this ecosystem. And they have become as passionate, and protective, about this place as John Beal. This trash was dumped in one of their restored areas.

RYAN DESCHENES, VOLUNTEER: Makes me mad. Shoot, I mean, I worked out here a long time, and I mean, it wasn't easy work either.

PFLUM: The result of all this hard work is readily apparent. New channels are being created to help creek water run more freely, and the industries on the Duamish River have begun to clean up their act. But Beal says, this is evidence that there's still a lot of work left to do.

BEAL: This is illegal. This is very illegal, and I vow to stop these -- this company from discharging into the river before I'm done.

PFLUM: Over the years as the waterway recovered, so did Beal. But several years after launching the project, his energy and his finances began to fade. It took a visit from his hero, Jacques Cousteau, to encourage him to continue. BEAL: I had recently been written up on a "Reader's Digest," and that's how he first heard of me. We actually ended up camping out here for the night, sitting by the stream, talking most of the night away. It wasn't a real good financial situation that I was in, and he encouraged me to keep going.

PFLUM: Beal heeded the advice. He says stewardship for the planet is his ultimate lesson, and empowering young people to continue this work is his ultimate reward. Beal says despite all the work that's been done, he's not done yet, vowing that as long as he is alive, he will continue to breathe new life into dying ecosystems.

For CNN EARTH MATTERS, I'm Mary Pflum.

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PAWELSKI: Greenpeace has awarded Australia a bronze medal for its environmental efforts in the Sydney games. The environmental group says if Sydney had adequately cleaned up toxic waste when building the main Olympic venue at Homebush Bay, Australia would have won the gold. Nevertheless, Greenpeace is praising the use of solar power and other renewable energy. Olympic organizers are also focusing on recycling, even the food waste. They're using worms to turn garbage into high quality fertilizer.

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PETER OTTESON, ENVIRONMENTAL PROJECT MANAGER: This is one product we are very proud of. This is what we call our Worm Wee. So this is a by-product of the worm farm. It is the liquid which drains out of it, and it is extremely rich in minerals. Gardeners love it. So we thought, bit of fun, we put it in a bottle and of course we have some serving instructions here on dilution rates, so we don't want people to sort of overdo it.

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PAWELSKI: And we don't want to overdo it, so that's all for now. Thank you for watching. We'll see you next week, on EARTH MATTERS.

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