Must-See: 'Racing Extinction' Exposes the Secrets Others Don't Want You to See

“Better to light one candle than curse the darkness.” —Shawn Heinrichs in Racing Extinction
In September of 2014 at around 10 p.m., I stood outside the United Nations building in New York City and watched a massive film being projected across the buildings in front and above me. Endangered species—from small invertebrates to large charismatic megafauna—world groove music and massive flowing images of nature streamed down the side of the 39-story building. Amidst the serene images were also scenes of environmental holocaust—smoke stacks, ecological decay and the threat of extinction to the web of life.
The UN building projection was the filming of the last scene in the documentary, Racing Extinction, just released a few weeks ago by the Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS), the same filmmakers who brought us the Oscar-winning documentary, The Cove.
Earlier this month, I sat in the Boulder Theater in Boulder, Colorado, and watched the Colorado premier of Racing Extinction. The same kind of large-scale effort that projected the film across the UN building permeates the entire documentary. It’s a racing, jet-set, epic kind of film—one that takes on the big problems at a worldwide scale literally racing all over the planet to find, face and fix extinction.
In screenplay lingo, Racing Extinction is James Bond meets The Cove meets Apocalypse Now.
The most intense scene in Racing Extinction is when the film crew gets on board a small manta ray fishing boat in Indonesia. A village fisherman stands on the bow of the boat with a long harpoon in his hand searching the water below. A giant manta ray, maybe 12 feet across and nearly flying through the ocean, surfaces just ahead of the speeding boat. A second later the fisherman lunges into the water, his full bodyweight on the harpoon as it stabs the giant manta ray in the back. Blood fills the water as the ray fights and flails. The film jumps an hour forward as the huge dead animal is hauled atop the boat.
What Racing Extinction does before and after this scene is what sets the film apart from other documentaries such as its predecessor, The Cove. Back on shore, the filmmakers show scenes of dozens and dozens of dead manta rays in just one day of fishing on this Indonesian island—it is an apocalypse, a type of species genocide, that is played out day after day on manta rays and other endangered species across the planet. The film jumps to other scenes of tens-of-thousands of shark fins in Chinese markets, bags and bottles full of endangered species body parts and oils for sale in markets worldwide, all while discussing the holocaust that humans are wreaking on the non-human world across the planet.
Racing Extinction then goes a step farther than just chronicling how human avarice and greed are purposely killing and profiting from the endangered species trade. The film delves deeply into the climate crisis and how it will likely lead to making many of Earth’s species endangered, especially those in the increasingly acidic oceans. Coral reefs dissolve and die before your eyes on the screen and hi-tech carbon-dioxide-sniffing cameras film the exhaust of the millions of planes/trains/automobiles polluting the oceans.
More importantly, Racing Extinction does not just chronicle the potential apocalypse, it also offers some hopeful outcomes and a path forward for everyone to take action. The same genocide that occurred with manta rays on the Indonesian island is now being replaced with a tourism industry that focuses on protecting and restoring the ocean and its species. The OPS team has been helping to educate children in that Indonesian fishing village and develop a tourist trade to replace the slaughter. Further, the entire film and its website is a call to action for people to engage and make a difference.
The two main people on the screen in Racing Extinction are Louis Psihoyos who is the Oscar-winning director of The Cove, and Shawn Heinrichs who is an internationally renowned oceanic photographer and owner of Blue Sphere Media. Another prominent person in the film is Leilani Munter, the “carbon free girl” race car driver who drives the Tesla that is fitted with extremely powerful film projectors that bring the images to life on the side of the U.N. building and wherever the filmmakers go. All three were on hand at the Boulder screening and were extremely gracious to visit with every person who came to see the sold-out event. Behind the scenes were dozens of producers, filmmakers and directors who helped bring the documentary to life.
In the trailer to the film, Louis Psihoyos says, “If you can reach people, you can change them." Racing Extinction is a big-screen attempt to reach people—not just environmentalists and the eco-choir—but also reach children, adventure seekers, educators, decision-makers and people who care of all ages.
As this film races across America and the world, try to catch it in your town or on the Discovery Channel which swiftly picked up the distribution rights. In fact, the CEO of the Discovery Channel said that the channel’s goal with this film and others is to “dump all the pseudo stuff and instead have programming that would impact people to do something.”
Stopping extinction is a race that we can win if we all run together—Let’s Go!
Gary Wockner, PhD, is an environmental activist and writer based in Colorado. Contact: Gary@GaryWockner.com.
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Editor's note: This story is part of a nine-month investigation of drinking water contamination across the U.S. The series is supported by funding from the Park Foundation and Water Foundation. Read the launch story, "Thirsting for Solutions," here.
In late September 2020, officials in Wrangell, Alaska, warned residents who were elderly, pregnant or had health problems to avoid drinking the city's tap water — unless they could filter it on their own.
Unintended Consequences
<p>Chemists first discovered disinfection by-products in treated drinking water in the 1970s. The trihalomethanes they found, they determined, had resulted from the reaction of chlorine with natural organic matter. Since then, scientists have identified more than 700 additional disinfection by-products. "And those only represent a portion. We still don't know half of them," says Richardson, whose lab has identified hundreds of disinfection by-products. </p>What’s Regulated and What’s Not?
<p>The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) currently regulates 11 disinfection by-products — including a handful of trihalomethanes (THM) and haloacetic acids (HAA). While these represent only a small fraction of all disinfection by-products, EPA aims to use their presence to indicate the presence of other disinfection by-products. "The general idea is if you control THMs and HAAs, you implicitly or by default control everything else as well," says Korshin.</p><p>EPA also requires drinking water facilities to use techniques to reduce the concentration of organic materials before applying disinfectants, and regulates the quantity of disinfectants that systems use. These rules ultimately can help control levels of disinfection by-products in drinking water.</p>Click the image for an interactive version of this chart on the Environmental Working Group website.
<p>Still, some scientists and advocates argue that current regulations do not go far enough to protect the public. Many question whether the government is regulating the right disinfection by-products, and if water systems are doing enough to reduce disinfection by-products. EPA is now seeking public input as it considers potential revisions to regulations, including the possibility of regulating additional by-products. The agency held a <a href="https://www.epa.gov/dwsixyearreview/potential-revisions-microbial-and-disinfection-byproducts-rules" target="_blank">two-day public meeting</a> in October 2020 and plans to hold additional public meetings throughout 2021.</p><p>When EPA set regulations on disinfection by-products between the 1970s and early 2000s, the agency, as well as the scientific community, was primarily focused on by-products of reactions between organics and chlorine — historically the most common drinking water disinfectant. But the science has become increasingly clear that these chlorinated chemicals represent a fraction of the by-product problem.</p><p>For example, bromide or iodide can get caught up in the reaction, too. This is common where seawater penetrates a drinking water source. By itself, bromide is innocuous, says Korshin. "But it is extremely [reactive] with organics," he says. "As bromide levels increase with normal treatment, then concentrations of brominated disinfection by-products will increase quite rapidly."</p><p><a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15487777/" target="_blank">Emerging</a> <a href="https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.7b05440" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">data</a> indicate that brominated and iodinated by-products are potentially more harmful than the regulated by-products.</p><p>Almost half of the U.S. population lives within 50 miles of either the Atlantic or Pacific coasts, where saltwater intrusion can be a problem for drinking water supplies. "In the U.S., the rule of thumb is the closer to the sea, the more bromide you have," says Korshin, noting there are also places where bromide naturally leaches out from the soil. Still, some coastal areas tend to be spared. For example, the city of Seattle's water comes from the mountains, never making contact with seawater and tending to pick up minimal organic matter.</p><p>Hazardous disinfection by-products can also be an issue with desalination for drinking water. "As <a href="https://ensia.com/features/can-saltwater-quench-our-growing-thirst/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">desalination</a> practices become more economical, then the issue of controlling bromide becomes quite important," adds Korshin.</p>Other Hot Spots
<p>Coastal areas represent just one type of hot spot for disinfection by-products. Agricultural regions tend to send organic matter — such as fertilizer and animal waste — into waterways. Areas with warmer climates generally have higher levels of natural organic matter. And nearly any urban area can be prone to stormwater runoff or combined sewer overflows, which can contain rainwater as well as untreated human waste, industrial wastewater, hazardous materials and organic debris. These events are especially common along the East Coast, notes Sydney Evans, a science analyst with the nonprofit Environmental Working Group (EWG, a collaborator on <a href="https://ensia.com/ensia-collections/troubled-waters/" target="_blank">this reporting project</a>).</p><p>The only drinking water sources that might be altogether free of disinfection by-products, suggests Richardson, are private wells that are not treated with disinfectants. She used to drink water from her own well. "It was always cold, coming from great depth through clay and granite," she says. "It was fabulous."</p><p>Today, Richardson gets her water from a city system that uses chloramine.</p>Toxic Treadmill
<p>Most community water systems in the U.S. use chlorine for disinfection in their treatment plant. Because disinfectants are needed to prevent bacteria growth as the water travels to the homes at the ends of the distribution lines, sometimes a second round of disinfection is also added in the pipes.</p><p>Here, systems usually opt for either chlorine or chloramine. "Chloramination is more long-lasting and does not form as many disinfection by-products through the system," says Steve Via, director of federal relations at the American Water Works Association. "Some studies show that chloramination may be more protective against organisms that inhabit biofilms such as Legionella."</p>Alternative Approaches
<p>When he moved to the U.S. from Germany, Prasse says he immediately noticed the bad taste of the water. "You can taste the chlorine here. That's not the case in Germany," he says.</p><p>In his home country, water systems use chlorine — if at all — at lower concentrations and at the very end of treatment. In the Netherlands, <a href="https://dwes.copernicus.org/articles/2/1/2009/dwes-2-1-2009.pdf" target="_blank">chlorine isn't used at all</a> as the risks are considered to outweigh the benefits, says Prasse. He notes the challenge in making a convincing connection between exposure to low concentrations of disinfection by-products and health effects, such as cancer, that can occur decades later. In contrast, exposure to a pathogen can make someone sick very quickly.</p><p>But many countries in Europe have not waited for proof and have taken a precautionary approach to reduce potential risk. The emphasis there is on alternative approaches for primary disinfection such as ozone or <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/eco-friendly-way-disinfect-water-using-light/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">ultraviolet light</a>. Reverse osmosis is among the "high-end" options, used to remove organic and inorganics from the water. While expensive, says Prasse, the method of forcing water through a semipermeable membrane is growing in popularity for systems that want to reuse wastewater for drinking water purposes.</p><p>Remucal notes that some treatment technologies may be good at removing a particular type of contaminant while being ineffective at removing another. "We need to think about the whole soup when we think about treatment," she says. What's more, Remucal explains, the mixture of contaminants may impact the body differently than any one chemical on its own. </p><p>Richardson's preferred treatment method is filtering the water with granulated activated carbon, followed by a low dose of chlorine.</p><p>Granulated activated carbon is essentially the same stuff that's in a household filter. (EWG recommends that consumers use a <a href="https://www.ewg.org/tapwater/reviewed-disinfection-byproducts.php#:~:text=EWG%20recommends%20using%20a%20home,as%20trihalomethanes%20and%20haloacetic%20acids." target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">countertop carbon filter</a> to reduce levels of disinfection by-products.) While such a filter "would remove disinfection by-products after they're formed, in the plant they remove precursors before they form by-products," explains Richardson. She coauthored a <a href="https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.9b00023" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">2019 paper</a> that concluded the treatment method is effective in reducing a wide range of regulated and unregulated disinfection by-products.</p><br>Greater Cincinnati Water Works installed a granulated activated carbon system in 1992, and is still one of relatively few full-scale plants that uses the technology. Courtesy of Greater Cincinnati Water Works.
<p>Despite the technology and its benefits being known for decades, relatively few full-scale plants use granulated active carbon. They often cite its high cost, Richardson says. "They say that, but the city of Cincinnati [Ohio] has not gone bankrupt using it," she says. "So, I'm not buying that argument anymore."</p><p>Greater Cincinnati Water Works installed a granulated activated carbon system in 1992. On a video call in December, Jeff Swertfeger, the superintendent of Greater Cincinnati Water Works, poured grains of what looks like black sand out of a glass tube and into his hand. It was actually crushed coal that has been baked in a furnace. Under a microscope, each grain looks like a sponge, said Swertfeger. When water passes over the carbon grains, he explained, open tunnels and pores provide extensive surface area to absorb contaminants.</p><p>While the granulated activated carbon initially was installed to address chemical spills and other industrial contamination concerns in the Ohio River, Cincinnati's main drinking water source, Swertfeger notes that the substance has turned out to "remove a lot of other stuff, too," including <a href="https://ensia.com/features/drinking-water-contamination-pfas-health/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">PFAS</a> and disinfection by-product precursors.</p><p>"We use about one-third the amount of chlorine as we did before. It smells and tastes a lot better," he says. "The use of granulated activated carbon has resulted in lower disinfection by-products across the board."</p><p>Richardson is optimistic about being able to reduce risks from disinfection by-products in the future. "If we're smart, we can still kill those pathogens and lower our chemical disinfection by-product exposure at the same time," she says.</p><p><em>Reposted with permission from </em><em><a href="https://ensia.com/features/drinking-water-disinfection-byproducts-pathogens/" target="_blank">Ensia</a>. </em><a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/r/entryeditor/2649953730#/" target="_self"></a></p>EcoWatch Daily Newsletter
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