By Michael Hawthorne Tribune reporter

8:46 p.m. CDT, May 23, 2012

OpenTable founder Templeton talks up his new gig: Impact Engine

April 26, 2012

Print | Email | 0 comments

inShare12

OpenTable founder Templeton talks up his new gig: Impact Engine BLOGS06
120429859
OpenTable founder Templeton talks up his new gig: Impact Engine-->

By Steve Hendershot

The Impact Engine, a new accelerator program for social-entrepreneurial companies, announced last week it hired OpenTable founder Chuck Templeton as managing director. Mr. Templeton, who runs collaborative consumption website OhSoWe and also sits on the boards of GrubHub Inc. and I-Go Car Sharing will devote half of his time to Impact Engine.

Impact Engine is designed to hatch for-profit businesses that aim to advance social or environmental good as well as to make money. It is the brainchild of two faculty members at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, Jamie Jones and Linda Darragh; the pair hatched the program last fall while Ms. Darragh worked at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, but she announced plans to return to Northwestern last month. They raised $500,000 for Impact Engine from prominent local investors including Mr. Templeton.

The program will begin accepting applications on May 7, select about 10 participating companies in July, then launch its three-month program in September. The program will culminate in an investor day similar to those held by accelerator programs Excelerate Labs and Healthbox.

Mr. Templeton tells Crain's more about the program, why he was drawn to it and how he plans to juggle a busy schedule.

Crain's: Accelerators such as Excelerate Labs thrive on involvement from veteran entrepreneurs who want to have a hand in building the next generation of companies in their industry. What's the appeal for them to take the same kind of role with Impact Engine, given its socially minded focus?

OpenTable founder Templeton talks up his new gig: Impact Engine BLOGS06
120429859
OpenTable founder Templeton talks up his new gig: Impact Engine-->

Templeton

C.T.: What you're seeing right now is a lot of entrepreneurs who have recently acquired some wealth and are starting to think well, maybe (the traditional philanthropic route of) starting a family foundation is not right for me. What I need to do is put my skills and resources to work helping other entrepreneurs solve problems using business methodology rather than purely making donations. The challenge is to create enduring companies that use business principles to solve social problems.

Entrepreneurs who have had exits are involved with Impact Engine in two ways: mentorship and capital. Research proves that entrepreneurs with mentors have a higher chance of success than those that don't have mentors. That's one of the key pieces that determines an entrepreneur's success — talent, entrepreneurship and capital. And that's the other way that the exited entrepreneurs can get involved, is they can provide capital. Instead of putting $2 million into a family foundation, now they're investing money directly into these triple-bottom-line companies focused on people, planet and profit, and these investments let them use business skills to create enduring organizations.

Crain's: The three-month accelerator model seems to have worked best with tech companies. Are you expecting mostly tech companies? Is that an expectation or requirement?

C.T.: Not at all, at least in some cases. One of the challenges with accelerators is that if you're trying to locate people here in Chicago and put them in office, well, if you're dealing with a renewable energy company with a cellulose-based system and they're out of Nebraska or Iowa or someplace where there are a lot of natural resources, it can be tough to get those companies to spend 12 weeks in Chicago. It's easier to get tech companies to move, because a lot of times it's just two computers and two people.

But that doesn't have to be the case here. If there's a grass-fed beef farm out of Wyoming that's come up with an innovative way to do something related to the way beef is raised, or that could have an impact on our consumption of grain, that could make sense for Impact Engine.

Crain's: How did you decide to take on this commitment? What does this mean for OhSoWe and your other ventures?

C.T.: This whole emerging world of impact investing that's out there, this is something I'm very passionate about. I was already an investor in the Impact Engine and believed in what (Ms. Jones and Ms. Darragh) were trying to do. They were looking for someone to run it, to be there every day and work with the entrepreneurs. I already spend a lot of time doing that now, meeting with two or three entrepreneurs per week while running OhSoWe, so I thought this was a good opportunity to formalize that through the Impact Engine. So I threw my hat in the ring.

Meanwhile, (OhSoWe cofounder Arun Sivashankaran) and I are going to continue to go forward with OhSoWe, which is very aligned with this social/environmental/for-profit idea. OhSoWe is not breaking any land-speed records for growth right now, but we are seeing nice growth and we're learning a lot about collaborative consumption. We also know that's going to be a long haul, and it's going to take time for people to change their behavior. So what we're working on is how we can maximize our runway and continue to let time be our friend. I'm going to spend 50 percent of my time on Impact Engine, then more than that once the class is in session. Arun will probably spend 10 percent of his time on it, so we can have his technical expertise and business acumen.

But, definitely, I'm busy.

Steve Hendershot writes "Silicon City," Crain's weekly column on Chicago tech news and newsmakers.

Follow Steve on Twitter: @stevehendershot.

Follow Ann on Twitter at @AnnDwyer_Crains.

inShare12

 

What do you think?

 

(Note: Your first name and last initial will appear with your remarks.)

More from Crain’s Chicago

• Cynthia Rowley has a confession to make (ChicagoBusiness.com)
• Pop fans storm Ravinia website on first day of sales (ChicagoBusiness.com)
• United's Smisek: Not enough demand for O'Hare expansion, Peotone (ChicagoBusiness.com)
• Rosie O'Donnell finds homebuyer in 24 hours: report (ChicagoBusiness.com)
• SingleHop nets $27M in VC funding (ChicagoBusiness.com)
• Startup promotes sustainability by sharing stuff, not selling it (ChicagoBusiness.com)

From around the Web

• America on Course for Economic Train Wreck, Economist Warns (Moneynews)
• NFL moving to suspend Pro Bowl, sources say (ESPN Chicago)
• 9-Year-Old Boy Left Dead Mom & Sister & Went to School Because He Had No Other Choice (The Stir By CafeMom)
• Secrets of a millionaire teacher (Bankrate.com)
• 10 U.S. Cities With the Highest Cost of Living (Kiplinger)
• FBI Instructs Agents Never 'Shake Hands With An Asian' (AOL Jobs)

[?]

By Julie Wernau Tribune reporter

12:10 p.m. CDT, April 16, 2012

Hitchhiking is so yesterday. A San Francisco-based startup called Zimride is using the power of social media to connect drivers with people needing rides -- saving people money, helping the environment and sometimes helping its customers make new friends.

"Zimriding is really fun," says John Zimmer, the company's co-founder and chief operating officer."We've had people who have met a girlfriend or boyfriend, or found a new job."

When I first heard about Zimride, I was dubious. Is there really a business in car pooling, especially when it requires riding with a stranger?

After talking with John, and learning more about the company, I've changed my mind. Zimride could grow into a nice business. It's off to a good start: Built on college campuses, around workplaces and events, Zimride by last summer had formed more than 26,000 carpools, created more than 100 million shared miles and saved drivers more than $50 million in expenses. Last September, Zimride raised $6 million in venture capital from investors Mayfield Fund, Floodgate and K9 Ventures. Facebook's fbFund provided $250,000 in seed funding back in 2008.

John ZimmerWhen we spoke over Skype last week, John told me that the Facebook platform is key to driving Zimride's growth. "If it's going to be mainstream -- if I expect my girlfriend or my sister to do this -- we need to reinvent the rideshare," John said. "We don't want anonymity." As Facebook emerges as the identity system for the Internet, it's a way for people to check out who their ride-sharing partners are, who their friends are, even the kind of music they like, which can be an issue on a road trip.

John, who is 28, got the idea for the company as an undergrad at Cornell's hotel school, where he graduated first in his class. "From the time I got to college, I was thinking about occupancy," he says. "When you look at our highway system, 80% of seats are empty. That's a 20% occupancy rate. That's an opportunity." He put in a couple of years at Lehman Bros., got out just in time and was introduced to Logan Green, who had a similar idea while serving on a public transit board in Santa Barbara, where he'd gone to school. They launched Zimride in 2007 at Cornell and at UC Santa Barbara, riding on the Facebook platform. The company isn't named after John, by the way; it got its name after Logan traveled to Zimbabwe and saw lots of people sharing cars there.

Today, the company has partnerships with more than 100 universities and companies, including Facebook, Intuit, Genentech and PwC. The colleges and companies pay Zimride a service fee to arrange rides, many of which are commutes of less than 50 miles roundtrip. Zimride doesn't charge people who use the service on its public platform, but it will. For now, it's most popular in California; plenty of people were sharing rides from San Francisco to LA, but there were few options for rides from Washington to Philadelphia or Boston to New York.

• 1
• 2
• next ›
• last »

Pullman, which was built over a four-year period starting in 1880, was one of the first built-from-scratch industrial cities in America. But the town’s fate was sealed just a few years later by the recession of 1894. Pullman simultaneously slashed wages but declined to lower workers’ rents. The result was a bloody two-month strike led by Eugene V. Debs of the American Railway Union that led to the deaths of several workers. In the aftermath, the state ordered the company to sell off its residential holdings. Pullman himself died in 1897.

In the decades that followed, Pullman became just another South Side neighborhood, albeit one with a distinctive look and feel. (The area is both a National Historic Landmark as well as a Chicago Landmark District.) The Pullman company remained the area’s largest employer before finally closing its neighborhood factory in the 1950s.

By the early 2000s the area was struggling. “A lot of the industrial companies that used to be here left, and the area started to go down,” said Anthony Beale, the alderman for the Ninth Ward, which includes Pullman.

Now, a series of projects and initiatives by various state agencies and nonprofit groups is raising hopes that the neighborhood may be on the brink of a revival.

The largest project is Pullman Park, a $350 million mixed-use development on the site of an old steel plant. The project, which will consist of about 670,000 square feet of new retail space, a 125,000-square-foot neighborhood recreation center carved out of a factory building and 1,100 housing units, will be completed in phases in the next decade.

The first phase, which includes a Walmart, is set to open late this year or early next year. The first phase of the project is costing $37 million, just over half of which is coming from U.S. Bank in the form of new markets tax credits and a $10 million loan. The rest, about $17 million, is coming from Walmart.

The developers of the project are the nonprofit Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives, or C.N.I., and U.S. Bank’s community development subsidiary.

“We spent a year going to all the community groups and block clubs and churches asking for input on how to improve the neighborhood,” said David Doig, the president of C.N.I. “The recurring themes were people wanted a decent place to shop; second, the residents wanted a safe, affordable place for their kids to play; and the third concern was the lack of affordable housing, particularly for seniors and young families.”

Community development projects in Chicago often include some form of city financing, like tax increment financing grants. The first phase of Pullman Park, however, does not do this. The reason is Walmart, which has a long, antagonistic history with the city’s unions and their allies in the City Council.

“We were basically advised that getting the plan approved at all was going to be as much Walmart as the City Council could absorb,” Mr. Doig said.

Steven Restivo, Walmart’s director of community affairs, said the new store would satisfy several goals. “It’s an opportunity to serve customers without a lot of options. It’s also an opportunity to show that Walmart stores can be a magnet for growth and development.”

Mr. Doig’s group and another large nonprofit entity, Mercy Housing Lakefront, are also moving ahead with affordable housing initiatives.

The original housing in Pullman dates from 1881 and is a mix of single and multifamily dwellings, with row houses predominating. Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives’ plan involves renovating and reselling foreclosed and abandoned houses on Pullman’s long-ignored north side. (The north side is separated from the more intact south side by the long-vacant Pullman company factory and administrative offices complex.)

So far, C.N.I. has spent about $4 million to acquire and renovate about 15 houses, and is currently working on 11 others.

“We sell them for $100,000, and it costs us probably double that to buy and redo them,” Mr. Doig said. “We have to renovate them to historic standards, which means custom windows and doors and architectural details like mansard roofs that have to be specially built.” Mr. Doig said the cost difference was made up with funds from the Neighborhood Stabilization Program, a federal initiative that helps state and local governments buy distressed properties.

• 1
• 2

Next Page »

January 31, 2012  |  

LIKE THIS ARTICLE ?

Join our mailing list:

Sign up to stay up to date on the latest Environment headlines via email.

Rudyard Kipling called it “Hell’s Half Acre,” a geothermal wonderland where people could fall through the Earth’s thin crust or be poached by steamy hot springs and geysers. Most visitors to Yellowstone National Park’s Midway Geyser Basin stroll the wooden boardwalks, but a few hike a short, steep side trail that reveals a bird’s-eye view of the entire valley, including Grand Prismatic Spring, which can be fully appreciated only from above. Mustard-yellow and vibrant-orange mats spread like tentacles from the turquoise pool. “Not even the most talented artist could imagine something as beautiful as that,” muses Sandra Banack, a biologist who studies cyanobacteria, the microbes that create the colorful mats — and that hold a toxic secret.

Banack works as senior scientist at the Institute for EthnoMedicine in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, alongside the institute’s founder, Paul Cox, a botanist and conservationist. Cox’s long list of achievements includes working to preserve Samoan rain forests, for which he was awarded the 1997Goldman Environmental Prize, and discovering one of the few compounds active against HIV, prostratin, from the Samoan mamala tree. In the early 2000s — when he directed the National Tropical Botanical Gardens in Hawaii and Florida and Banack was a biology professor at California State University, Fullerton — the two made a series of discoveries that led to the founding of the institute.

What started as a study of the island of Guam’s fruit bats and cycads, ancient seed-bearing plants that resemble palms, led to a startling hypothesis: Could cyanobacteria cause neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s?

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

“We never wanted to announce a problem without some thoughtful solutions,” says Cox. He, Banack, and I met at their small institute, a building tucked on a side street near Jackson Hole’s town square two hours from Yellowstone. The institute’s two-room laboratory is stuffed with equipment and Erlenmeyer flasks filled with emerald goo — cyanobacteria from around the world.

Cyanobacteria, which sometimes form symbiotic relationships with other organisms, live in marine and freshwater habitats and even in dried desert crusts, where they spring to life with the first droplets of rain. The microbes may cover shallow lakes and ocean floors or grow over the top of coral reefs. And under certain conditions, massive blooms erupt, covering the water’s surface in a pea-green scum.

Although frequently called blue-green algae, cyanos are actually bacteria that photosynthesize, or create food from light, which is why early scientists classified them as algae. Modern genetics shows they share no evolutionary lineage with algae; the classification is as scientifically accurate as calling a dog a plant.

Cyanobacteria produce a host of nasty compounds, including neurotoxins that derail nervous systems, hepatotoxins that damage liver function, and tumor promoters. Their blooms have poisoned wildlife and caused massive fish kills. In humans they can cause rashes, numbness, vomiting, and sometimes long-term liver or nerve damage. While “death by pond scum” has never appeared in an obituary, that could change: not only are blooms increasing worldwide, but scientists predict they will worsen as the climate warms and nutrient levels rise, when, for example, fertilizers from America’s breadbasket run into the Mississippi River and down to the Gulf of Mexico. Recently, burgeoning cyano blooms in the Great Lakes have garnered attention.

Although cyanobacterial toxins are well known, until Cox started studying them, no one had documented that they can cause health problems years after exposure.

I first met Cox in 2004, when he gave a seminar at Rice University in Houston, where I was a graduate student. He told a riveting tale about following a serendipitous trail of clues that led him to discover that a tiny toxic molecule, beta-methylamino-L-alanine (BMAA), believed to be from cycads on Guam, was in fact produced by cyanobacteria, and not just on Guam, but around the world. More astonishing, he and Banack discovered that BMAA had accumulated in the brains of humans who’d died from ALS, Alzheimer’s, or Parkinson’s — but not in the brains of people who’d died from other causes. Was BMAA accumulation a cause or an effect of these diseases? And how had BMAA gotten into these individuals’ brains in the first place?

Cox and Banack theorized that long-term, chronic exposure to BMAA — from eating food, drinking or swimming in water contaminated with cyanobacteria — could trigger these neurodegenerative diseases. He suspected that BMAA accumulated in the brain, creating a neurotoxic reservoir that eventually began to attack the nervous system. He also suspected a gene-environment interaction, since many people are likely exposed, but not everyone falls ill.

A 2005 New Yorker article detailed Cox’s hypothesis, and his critics complaints that his initial studies showing BMAA in human brains had been based on small sample sizes, and that there was no plausible scientific mechanism for how it could accumulate in brain tissues. BMAA is a nonprotein amino acid — in other words, it’s not one of the 20 amino acid building blocks that make up proteins in all living organisms. “My grail now is to raise this story to the level of scientific respectability,” the article quoted Cox. And he set out, guns blazing, to do just that.

After the Institute for EthnoMedicine was founded in 2004, Banack, who had studied bats, donned a lab coat while Cox built a loose consortium of scientists — neurologists, medical scientists, analytical chemists, bacteriologists, ecologists — who could help piece together the puzzle. Although their research will provide new insights into all neurodegenerative diseases, the institute focuses on ALS both because it’s more accurately diagnosed in living patients than is Alzheimer’s and because ALS has no known cause or cure.

Called Lou Gehrig’s disease after the baseball player who died from it in 1941, ALS is a brutal disease that strikes healthy people seemingly at random. Victims are slowly paralyzed, and within two to five years most have died, usually after reaching the point where they can no longer breathe or swallow. The only therapy approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration offers at best two to three extra months of life. Around 5,600 Americans are diagnosed with ALS every year, and 90 percent of cases remain unexplained.

“If we’re right, we can stop these diseases — and that’s huge,” Banack says. “We can get BMAA out of people’s bodies, and out of their diets. There’s a lot of potential for good.”

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

During Cox’s seminar he described the famous medical mystery of Guam. The indigenous Chamorro people suffer from what they call lytico-bodig; its symptoms include ALS-like paralysis, Parkinson’s-like shaking, and occasionally Alzheimer’s-like dementia. At the height of the epidemic, in the 1950s, Chamorros were succumbing to lytico-bodig at an astonishing rate — 50 to 100 times the normal rate of ALS worldwide.

In 1967, researcher Arthur Bell suspected lytico-bodig might be traced to the island’s cycads, and he was the first to isolate BMAA from the plants. More than 30 years later, Cox discovered that it was cyanobacteria within the cycad roots that produced BMAA, rather than the cycads themselves. On Guam, Cox also learned that the Chamorros craved stewed Mariana flying fox, consuming them whole — brains, bones, skin, and all. Perhaps, he surmised, BMAA biomagnified (or increased in concentration) as it moved up the food chain — from cyanobacteria to cycad to bat to human — much as the fat-soluble insecticide DDT once had.

Cox set out to find more collaborators. Renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks added his name to the first scientific paper outlining the hypothesis, in 2002. But others took more convincing. Banack recalls that after Cox presented his ideas before the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm in 2003 “the room was totally silent. We looked at each other. Finally Lars-Olof Ronnevi, at the Karolinska Medical Institute said, ‘Your account of flying foxes has been a source of great amusement at our cocktail parties. Now that I’ve heard your research, I think you are on to something.’”

One of the major discoveries made by Cox and his colleagues, published in 2004, was that 50 to 100 times as much BMAA is bound within proteins than exists as free amino acids, which are not bound together into chains but float in the cellular or intercellular fluid. Cells build proteins by stringing together amino acids using a process called translation.

“At the time Cox first published his hypothesis,” says Walter Bradley, a neurologist and ALS expert at University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, “the scientific world thought translation was so accurate that no amino acid other than the 20 that normally make up our proteins could be incorporated into them.” Since amino acids dissolve in water, most scientists also didn’t think BMAA could biomagnify.

Cox’s ability to see solutions where others see obstacles has earned rave reviews from some of his peers. Bradley, who collaborates with Cox, calls him a polymath, a Renaissance man. A former graduate student, Renee Richer — who helped connect higher rates of ALS in Gulf War veterans with inhalation of desert crusts containing cyanobacteria — describes him as “one of those rare minds that comes along only once in a while.”

But along with the kudos are still some criticisms. A handful of scientists were skeptical of the BMAA hypothesis, before and after Cox came along. These included Douglas Galasko, director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at the University of California, San Diego; Tom Montine, a professor at the University of Washington; and Daniel Perl of theUniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. The three published two separate studies, in 2005 and 2009, that failed to find BMAA in human brains. In the first study they had looked only for free, unbound BMAA, not BMAA in protein chains in tissues. “If BMAA is incorporated into proteins, leading to protein dysfunction or an immune reaction, this would be a remarkable and novel mechanism of toxicity,” Montine and his colleagues wrote in the journal Neurology in 2005.

As well as questioning biomagnification and sample size, they asked if Cox could have been detecting an isomer, a compound with the same molecular formula as BMAA but a different structural formula.

In response, Cox and Banack published two papers, in 2010 and 2011, detailing a method for differentiating BMAA from its isomers and suggesting that other scientists standardize their research techniques so that results could be more accurately compared. In 2009, Deborah Mash, a professor of neurology at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, replicated Cox’s brain study, finding BMAA in the brains of ALS, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s victims but not in the brains of people who’d died from Huntington’s, a neurodegenerative disease that’s linked to a specific gene. She also verified that BMAA crosses the blood-brain barrier in laboratory rats.

A 2006 paper coauthored by Susan L. Ackerman of the Jackson Laboratory in Maine, published in Nature, revealed that insertion of the wrong amino acid into a protein chain, known as misincorporation, can cause neurodegenerative disease. And research by Ken Rodgers and Rachael Dunlop in Sydney, Australia, which at press time was scheduled to be unveiled at the International Symposium on ALS/MND (motor neuron disease) in December, found that BMAA can be incorporated into protein chains within human neurons, causing proteins to “misfold” and form aggregates within the cells.

Many proteins have a highly specific three-dimensional structure in which the water-loving (hydrophilic) parts stay on the outside, and the water-repelling (hydrophobic) parts stay on the inside. “If proteins are damaged or contain a nonprotein amino acid such as BMAA, the structure of the protein can be altered so that the hydrophobic parts become exposed, and the damaged proteins can then stick together and form aggregates,” Rodgers says. What’s more, he found that the higher the concentration of BMAA, the more likely that it would be incorporated into a protein chain. When proteins misfold and stick together within nerve cells, it is thought to lead to neurofibrillary tangles, a telltale sign of neurodegenerative disease.

Much work remains to be done, but the scientists working on Cox and Banack’s hypothesis believe that normal metabolic processes should allow most people to metabolize and excrete small amounts of BMAA. But some individuals don’t metabolize or excrete BMAA, which could allow it to accumulate in their nerve cells. And that, if Cox and his team are right, could lead to ALS and other neurodegenerative diseases.

Based on recent discoveries, Phase II clinical trials are underway to see if a zinc-based drug could remove BMAA from the body and slow the progression of ALS, bringing hope to victims of a disease that has given them little reason for optimism.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

While Banack shows me how researchers at the institute test for BMAA using a machine called a triple quadrupole mass spectrometer, my mind wanders to how I might be exposed to the toxin — in drinking water, seafood, milk from cows eating pastures irrigated with pond-scum-laden water, spirulina in my protein shakes. I ask about blue-green algae supplements. “Our official policy is that we do not test them,” she says, choosing her words carefully. She refers me to a 2008 paper by Dan Dietrich from the International Symposium on Cyanobacterial Harmful Algal Blooms; he found large quantities of BMAA in commercially sold supplements, including ones containing spirulina and Aphanizomenon flos–aquae.

Cox and Banack have tested, but not yet published, data on several food items. “We are very interested in shellfish as a possible route of exposure, because an oyster can filter 4 to 8 liters of water a minute. They’re amazing indicators of waterborne toxins. They’re like canaries in the mine shaft,” says Cox. “The danger, if there is one, is in consuming shellfish from cyanobacterially contaminated habitats. But if you’re eating from a pristine habitat, you are OK.” I point out that people usually don’t know what kind of water their seafood comes from. Cox suggests that warnings could help. The government already warns people to avoid eating fish caught in mine-tailing areas and to avoid shellfish at certain times of year because of toxins; similar warnings could work for areas with cyanobacterial blooms or high BMAA levels.

In 2009, Larry Brand, a marine biologist at the University of Miami, published a study showing extreme BMAA levels in bottom-feeding species off Florida’s coast, where a massive cyanobacterial bloom exists. Pink shrimp, blue crabs, and species that feed on the ocean floor had the highest levels; people eat some of those species. Brand and Deborah Mash have since found BMAA in the brains of dolphins as well as in fins of several shark species, organisms at the top of the food chain. Meanwhile, European researchers have documented biomagnification of BMAA in Baltic Sea aquatic life.

“As the dose goes up, our data suggests that incidence [of ALS] also goes up,” says Cox. “If people are consuming a BMAA-rich diet, there’s more chance they are going to fall ill. People need to be very careful about the water they’re drinking.” Neurologist Elijah Stommel of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center has linked clusters of ALS cases in the same zip code, or even the same street or building, to exposure to cyanobacteria-contaminated lakes in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine. Stommel is building a geographic database of ALS cases in the northeastern U.S.; it already includes more than 800 cases.

Do standard water-treatment methods remove BMAA? Only one study has been conducted so far. A graduate student who works with microbiologist Tim Downing at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University Summerstrand campus in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, found that standard water-treatment methods, including sand filtration, powdered activated carbon (a bit like what’s found in a Brita filter), and chlorination, were particularly successful at removing BMAA. Flocculation, sometimes called coagulation, in which particles are allowed to settle and then made to cluster so that they can be separated from drinking water, was not as effective.

I knew that Texas’s Lake Houston, which supplies drinking water to residents of this country’s fourth largest city, including me, regularly has cyanobacterial blooms, so I collected water and sediment from the lake and mailed it to the institute. It returned positive for BMAA. Houston’s Northeast Water Treatment Plant uses coagulation, sedimentation, and sand-filtration processes, so I can only hope they remove the BMAA.

There are potentially bigger problems further north. According to Stommel’s research in New England, the rate of ALS doubles around lakes where cyanobacterial blooms have been reported. For people living around Lake Mascoma in New Hampshire, the prevalence of ALS was 10 to 25 times the normal rate. At present, no water facilities are known to test for BMAA, though in a 2005 article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cox and his colleagues suggested it would be prudent to monitor BMAA concentrations in drinking water contaminated by cyanobacterial blooms. Researchers at the institute have created an antibody that binds with BMAA and could be used in a simple dipstick-type water test. They’ve also developed the technology for a filter that would remove the compound. Cox hopes some company will commercialize these technologies. “We’re not a commercial lab,” he says. “We need to focus on finding a cure.”

In a world where poisons assault us from every angle — air, water, food, cosmetics — people tend to either overreact or ignore the problem. “You can cause panic pretty easily,” says Banack. “We want to urge measured caution.”

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Banack and Cox say they believe the paradigm is shifting in the science of neurodegenerative diseases. For the past decade or so, most funds have gone toward seeking genes that cause neurodegenerative diseases. “If there’s a gene that can cause ALS, then maybe there’s some way to block it. Everybody’s been looking at genetics,” says Banack. “There’s some good research out there, but as Cox says, scientists have been kicking the same ball for 15 years.” Given that 90 percent of cases haven’t yet been explained by genetics, more scientists have begun assessing environmental triggers.

One thing going for the institute’s research is the variety of fields represented in Cox’s consortium of scientists. Too often scientists work in disciplinary silos, “and the silos are not communicating,” says Cox. “A lot of neurologists never heard of cyanobacteria, and a lot of cyanobacterial people were not that familiar with ALS. But there have been a lot of really smart people working really hard for a long time, and there has just not been any progress in terms of discovering new therapies. It’s going to require an interdisciplinary group to approach the problem from a number of different angles.

“The paradigm here that is emerging is that there are ties between environmental health and human health,” Cox goes on. “There is a tie between cyanobacteria and human health. I think that’s pretty well accepted. And at this point we suspect there may be a tie between cyanobacterial toxins and your risk of progressive neurodegenerative disease — but it’s still a hypothesis.”

“If we can disprove it, we can go move on to something else,” adds Banack. “But so far we’ve been unable to disprove it. The data support the hypothesis.”

“We probably have some details wrong,” Cox admits. “But at this point, it’s hard to think that we, including all 20 universities focusing on it, are totally on a wild-goose chase.”

Wendee Holtcamp is a Houston-based writer whose work has appeared in Scientific American, Smithsonian, National Wildlife, Audubon, Sierra and Nature.

Tribal communities in the Southwestern United States are making renewable energy development on tribal lands a reality.  Areas defined as “Indian country” [see the end of the article for a definition] are known to be rich with potential for the development of solar, wind, biomass, and geothermal facilities on a large commercial scale.  Studies have found that tribal lands nationwide have the potential for producing up to 10 percent of the United States’ renewable energy.  To that end, tribal communities such as the Navajo Nation have begun to own and develop renewable energy projects on tribal lands.

This is no small feat.  For decades, tribal communities across the United States have suffered high unemployment, poor social conditions and widespread poverty.  These conditions were aggravated from the environmental impacts of supplying coal from tribal lands to utilities for the generation of electricity.  As the demand in the West for renewable energy grows, tribes have now recognized that they can diversify their resources and sell renewable energy without adverse effects on their lands and communities.  They have also recognized that renewable projects would serve as a vehicle for economic development and a source of long-term revenue for their communities.

Critics often dismiss the viability of renewable projects on tribal lands, stating that projects are subject to delays, and that tribes lack the expertise to develop renewable projects.  These are myths that reflect a misunderstanding of tribal communities.  In reality, tribes are successfully partnering with renewable energy developers or developing projects on their own.

For instance, the Navajo Nation has actively pursued the ownership and development of renewable energy projects on its lands.  The Big Boquillas Ranch project is a proposed wind generation facility that will be constructed on Navajo lands in an area known as Aubrey Cliffs, near Seligman, Arizona.  The project will have an estimated capacity of 85 MW for the first phase of development, and 200 MW for the second phase of development.  The first phase is scheduled for completion by December 2013.  It will be the Navajo Nation’s first tribally owned utility-scale project.

Another project is a wind generation facility, located on Gray Mountain on the Navajo Nation’s land in Arizona.  It has been found to be a prime location for wind generation, and will be owned by the Nation jointly with other partners.  It will have an estimated capacity of 250 to 500 megawatts (“MW”) of wind power. Efforts are also underway for the Navajo Nation to develop commercial solar projects on their lands.

These are projects under development that will be located within close proximity to existing transmission corridors and the Navajo Transmission Project, a large proposed transmission line that is well under development.  The Navajo Transmission Project will consist of a 500 kV transmission line that will stretch 470 miles from New Mexico to Nevada.  The largest segment of the project will have the capacity to deliver wind energy from the Big Boquillas and Gray Mountain projects, among other renewable energy projects.

The Big Boquillas and Gray Mountain projects are significant examples of tribal efforts to diversify resources of power supply on a commercial scale and provide local benefits to their communities.  The development of projects on Navajo lands will create jobs for the local community, and a revenue source from the sale of renewable power.  As these projects will increase competition for renewable energy sources, consumers will also benefit from the opportunities to purchase clean energy at competitive prices.

Clearly, everyone stands to gain from the development of renewable energy projects on tribal lands.  This growing trend will undoubtedly play an important role in the future demand for renewable energy resources nationwide.

Tara S. Kaushik is a Senior Associate with Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, LLP in the San Francisco office, where she focuses her legal practice on energy regulatory matters. She regularly advises and represents renewable power, clean technology, natural gas pipeline, oil refinery, and water utility companies, as well as tribal organizations concerning California and federal energy regulatory matters. Ms. Kaushik can be reached at (415) 291-7409 or tkaushik@manatt.com.

 

This column is the eleventh in a series of articles by law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, LLP’s Energy, Environment & Natural Resources practice. Earlier columns discussed Regulation of Nanomaterials, Energy Efficiency Retrofits, California’s Cap and Trade program, Green Marketing Regulation, Corporate Sustainability, Green Chemistry Regulation, Renewable Project Failures in California, Promoting Recycled Water, Environmental Liabilities in Bankruptcy Reorganizations, and California Renewable Policy.

 

Stay Up-to-Date On Environmental Management, Energy & Sustainability News with EL's Free Daily Newsletter

Reader Comments

One Response to “Renewable Energy Projects On Tribal Lands: A Growing Trend” -->

This is a great article. Refreshing news, with a refreshing perspective. Thanks for putting it together and getting it out there.

kmhurley (@kmhurley) | January 24th, 2012

Advertisers

New AltaTerra Report on Facilities Efficiency

Emerging IT Tools Reshape Building Energy Management >>

Are you an EPA Expert?

Take quiz now! >>

Campus Sustainability Training from UVM 100% Online

Make your campus a model for sustainability with University of Vermont! >>