Juneau

Juneau artist Constance Baltuck paints in the rocky shoreline of Lynn Canal. The legs of her easel are getting wet from the incoming tide. On the canvas, details emerge from the colors.

“This is the barnacles and the kelp and the mussels, they’re just so beautiful the way they interact and cling to the rocks,” Baltuck says.

Baltuck is the first artist of a pilot program at the cabin run by Alaska State Parks. Located 26 miles from downtown Juneau, the cabin is where former territorial Gov. Ernest Gruening wrote the book “The State of Alaska,” making a case for statehood several years before it would happen. The cabin started out as a summer getaway for the family and later became a year-round residence. More than six decades later, the historic cabin is now used as a retreat for Alaska artists.

Park Superintendent Mike Eberhardt says the Ernest Gruening State Historic Park received $30,000 to run an artist-in-residence program for two years. The artists are required to hold a community workshop and contribute a piece of art to the park. Eberhardt hopes the program will generate more interest in the site.

“Whatever art comes out of there, whether it be written or music or paintings, using that to publicize the state park system and with notoriety hopefully comes additional funding, comes additional support,” Eberhardt says.

Eight artists from across the state applied for the residency and all were admitted for this startup year. Each will stay in the cabin for up to two weeks through September.

For Baltuck, the park has been one inspiration after another.

“This place is just alive, everywhere you look, there’s something flowering, jumping, creeping around in the woods, flying past the window,” Baltuck says.

And she’s trying to capture as much of it as possible. Baltuck describes it as gathering starts — the beginnings of paintings she’ll finish later.

Inside the cabin, unfinished works are laid on a bench or leaned against walls. She counts how many there are out loud.

“Eleven this first week, plus I’m doing a series of little wildflower drawings,” Baltuck says. “This is supercharged for me. I’m going to have to go back to town and get more canvas because I’ve just about used up what I brought that I thought would last the whole 15 days.”

Baltuck has done other artist residencies. She’s been in the middle of the desert at Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park, in sand dunes above the Arctic Circle in Alaska’s Kobuk Valley National Park and once spent three months in Norway. Baltuck says each has shown her windows into different lives.

For this residency, when she’s not on the rocks painting or at the easel inside the cabin, she’s on the deck sipping coffee. She watches people fishing and “the eagles,” Baltuck says. “They’re sometimes right up in the trees right over here and the evening is when they swoop back and forth, and I can see whales. And it’s always changing, whether it’s a beautiful sunset or just the clouds, how deep they settle on the mountains.”

More than once, Baltuck calls the residency a gift – a gift of no distractions, no internet, no phone ringing, nobody waiting on you. It’s also a gift of time.

“It’s so neat to settle into an experience of observing nature for hours, just looking at the same scene for hours and just knowing you have that time. There’s no rushing out here,” Baltuck says.

The only concern, she says, is the tide. When the water comes up by your feet, it’s time to move.

When you hear the words “green brewery,” you might picture gleaming solar panels or aerodynamic wind turbines. But the most valuable piece of technology at the $24 million dollar LEED-Gold-certified headquarters of Smuttynose Brewing Co. on the seacoast of New Hampshire isn’t quite as sexy.

“The place you have to start is the building envelope,” says Smuttynose founder Peter Egelston.

That’s the name for the interface between a building’s interior and the outside world. It’s basically the structural shell that’s made up of exterior walls, windows, doors, the roof and foundation. Heating, ventilation and electrical work more efficiently in a tight building envelope, which keeps the interior temperature consistently cool or warm, prevents energy loss and ultimately saves money.

Homeowners understand all too well the payoff that comes with battening down the proverbial hatches, but the beer industry veteran says his team’s motivation to tighten up was both an economic and a strategic response to Smuttynose’s location.

New England has been battling some of the most brutal winters on record, forcing Egelston to reckon with the shifting power of Mother Nature. And he’s not alone. Breweries around the country (and beyond) are grappling with their own climate and weather woes, and many are coming up with creative ways to adjust to their changing environments.

“Being sustainable these days isn’t only about reducing our carbon footprint or saving resources and money,” Egelston says. “It also means adapting to weather-related incidents — heat waves, freakishly snowy winters, heavy rains and drought. Sounds pretty grim when you rattle them off – but it’s a new reality.”

This new reality is hitting home in parts of California. Brewers there are reeling in the face of a relentless drought, now in its fourth year. The lack of precipitation has cast a dark shadow on their growing industry because water is one of the four main ingredients in beer – along with barley, hops and yeast. Water is also essential to keeping brew house equipment clean and sanitized.

Some companies have even had to cut back on production due to limited water availability from the drought. Bear Republic Brewing Company on the depleted Russian River in Sonoma County tells The Salt it has had to pull out of distributing to 27 retail markets across the U.S.

The enduring drought has certainly highlighted the critical need for adaptation, says Cheri Chastain, sustainability manager at the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, headquartered in Chico, Calif. She’s in charge of improving efficiency in every department at a brewery that sells about 1 million barrels of beer a year.

“We’ve been trying to be good stewards and all of the low-hanging fruit has been picked – things like automating more systems, which reduces the risk of human error and waste, and making sure all of the brew house hoses have highly-controllable nozzles and flow meters so we can identify leaks,” she says.

They’ve also built a CO2 recovery system to capture the gas that’s created during fermentation and recycle it back into operations. “This not only prevents CO2 from fermentation from immediately entering the atmosphere, but eliminates almost all of the need to purchase CO2 which eliminates a great deal of trucks from the road,” she says.

Chastain is also helping raise awareness outside the walls of her own brewery as the co-chair of the national Brewers Association’s sustainability subcommittee, which meets monthly to strategize about solutions.

Jarrett Diamond of the non-profit Green Brewery Project says it’s essential for an industry that depends so much on natural resources to get serious about sustainability. His consulting venture focuses on helping craft brewers be more efficient through better facility design, water management and converting to renewable energy sources. Diamond says beer makers both mammoth and micro are taking heed of signs signaling a need for change.

One example he points to is SAB Miller (South African Brewers), the multinational company based in London that’s responsible for brands including Grolsch, Miller Genuine Draft, Pilsner Urquell and Peroni. For its African beer Eagle, SAB Miller is experimenting with the indigenous and plentiful cassava root as a more sustainable, local and less expensive replacement for barley malt, which doesn’t grow well in tropical climates.

According to Ceres, an environmental sustainability group that’s working with the beer industry, warmer temperatures and extreme weather events are also hurting hops, which are cultivated mainly in the Pacific Northwest. “Rising demand and lower yields have driven the price of hops up by more than 250 percent in the past decade,” Ceres notes.

In March, the group announced that 24 breweries had signed its Brewery Climate Declaration, aimed at calling attention “to the specific risks and opportunities, of climate change on the $246 billion industry.”

As for the hops, Diamond says some small farmers are stepping up to help breweries by growing hops so that they don’t have to rely solely on the large hop producers in the Pacific Northwest hurt by their shifting climate.

Then there’s Klamath Basin Brewing Company in Oregon. Diamond says staff there are taking advantage of geothermal energy sources that are abundant in the northwest, and it’s the only U.S. brewery using geothermal directly to produce beer.

Diamond also sings the praises of the Alaskan Brewing Company where brewers have begun turning a waste product — their spent grain — as an energy source. Rather than burn fossil fuels by shipping the byproduct to other states, the staff there built the world’s first grain-burning furnace that reportedly cut fuel oil consumption by up to 70 percent.

Diamond says these types of forward-thinking adaptations will serve those breweries well in the in an uncertain future. And he sees a “business climate change” on the horizon that he believes will cause the growing craft beer market bubble to burst. The sustainability expert predicts only the greenest breweries will survive.

“It’s my theory that the breweries that are best equipped and have adapted to using fewer resources, less electric, natural gas, less water are going to be the ones that can sustain themselves through the coming sea change in the brewing industry,” he says.

Andrea Shea is arts and culture reporter for WBUR in Boston and was a professional brewer for two years in the 1990s.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The crime rate in Juneau went down in 2014, according to an annual report released by the local police department.

Police Chief Bryce Johnson presented the report to the Juneau Assembly on Monday and noted that the underlying crime statistics show two clear trends.

“Property crime is down significantly, but violent crime is up,” he said.

In property crime cases, Johnson said an ordinance the Assembly adopted last August to curb fencing of stolen goods through certain businesses has become investigators’ primary tool.

“So on average, twice a month, the secondhand ordinance is the main reason we’re able to clear a criminal case,” Johnson said. “So from our perspective, it’s an extremely successful ordinance. We’re still working a little bit on the compliance part for some secondhand dealers. But it has been as productive or more productive than we actually thought it would be. It’s really helping us to clear some crimes.”

Since it took effect in September, Johnson said the ordinance has led to recoveries of jewelry, electronics and firearms in 11 separate cases.

The ordinance targets shops that buy and sell secondhand goods and is similar to state laws requiring pawn shops document and hold inventory.

Assemblyman Loren Jones said jewelry taken from his household ended up in the new system.

“When the police officer was in our entryway getting the information from my wife, a picture of the pawned item showed up on his phone. So she could identify it. It’s now sitting in the PD’s property,” Jones said. “It worked as it was supposed to.”

A massive spike in heroin seizures also drew attention. Police seized $4.7 million of heroin in 2014, about eight times more than in 2013. Meanwhile, OxyContin and oxycodone pill seizures fell to about 1 percent of 2013 levels.

Johnson said the spike in heroin seizures is likely driven by addiction, and partially from increased police presence at the airport. Juneau police replaced private firms for round-the-clock security at the airport in October 2013. The airport is a primary point of entry and hub for regional trafficking.

Another trend Johnson mentioned to the Assembly was the use of body cameras.

“Every agency in the country is trying to get body cameras right now. So I may come back at some point to talk body cameras. It’s the future; I don’t see how we don’t go forward with that,” he said.

Finally, Johnson also noted that the department had lost its professional accreditation because the credentialing organization it used no longer exists. The department is seeking a new credentialing agency. Accreditation essentially means that a third party can verify that a department meets professional police standards.