OUR CARBON LEGACY AND OUR KIDS

Paul Murtaughis a professor of statistics at Oregon State University, and he has brought his number skills to bear on environmental issues with papers like, “The Statistical Evaluation of Ecological Indicators,” and “Performance of Several Variable-Selection Methods Applied to Real Ecological Data.”

..The big bulge in our carbon footprint. (photo credit http://www.flickr.com/photos/mujitra/3274279516/ )

When he and M.G. Schlax published “Reproduction and the Carbon Legacies of Individuals” in 2009, he found out what a hot button reproductive issues can be in this culture.  He was labeled anti-birth and skewered in rabid blog after rabid blog.

CUTTING THE FOREST TO SAVE IT

I just had an article published in Odyssey Magazine this month.   This is a very cool, science magazine for middle school kids that I have loved for a long time.  Each issue has a theme, and April’s theme is trees.   I wrote a piece about how whole tree building can protect our forests.  Here is how it starts:

.. Whole tree building means building with "weed" trees and improving, rather than clear-cutting the forest.

If all of the trees on Earth were divided equally among all of the planet’s people, we would each have a piece of forest about the size of a football field. But your personal patch of trees is shrinking. Studies by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization show that each year the world loses 35,000 square miles of forest. That’s enough to cover the state of Indiana.

..Here is the same cozy house from the outside.

Roald Gundersen, architect and CEO of Whole Trees Architecture and Construction based in Stoddard, Wisconsin, thinks he has found a way to harvest trees that does not harm the forest. His preferred building material comes from what many people would call weed trees.

Clearcutting is the way most trees are harvested: All the trees in an area are cut at the same time, and those that are too small or scrubby are piled up and burned.

Rivers running through areas that are clearcut lose their shade, and the water gets warmer. Adding even a few degrees can make the water too warm for native fish, amphibians, and plants.

Without the trees, rain turns into muddy runoff as nutrient-rich top-soil gets washed downstream. Valuable soil nutrients are flushed out to sea, where they; harm aquatic life.

..Doug and I worked on this very house in a 6-day strawbale workshop last summer. (me on the left, Doug 3rd from left)

But we can’t stop cutting trees. Trees give us some of our best building materials. According to Doug Rammer, a research engineer at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Products Laboratory, wood has a greater strength-to-weight ratio than steel. His lab wants to find even more ways we can use wood.

You can read the rest of the article (plus many other cool things)

here

ART HANSMANN: 87 YEARS OF LIFE LIVED SMALL

Several of my posts lately have been short because of family health issues.  One of those issues concluded last Saturday when my father-in-law succumbed to a long, wasting disease.  This man was part of my life for 33 years.

He was a hard man for me to like – politically right-wing,  and uninterested in the natural world or environmental concerns.  I struggled to find common ground between us.  Though we stood on opposite sides of this chasm, we both found ways to support and love each other.

It’s taken something my daughter posted this week on her blog, DWELLING PLACES to make me realize that Art was walking the green walk much more than I ever gave him credit for.

Art, Dorothy, Suzanne, Doug in the scooter, and Alice on the way

When he moved to Racine with his young family and set up the first patent office in Southeast Wisconsin, he bought a modest, three-bedroom ranch house.  As a reasonably successful attorney, he could easily have traded up several times in his life and ended his days in some over-large McMansion.

But he chose not to.

He was comfortable and content with what is now a well-below-average sized house, filled with the very same 50s furniture that he and his wife purchased when they moved in.

He was reducing, reusing and recycling long before those concepts became buzz words, and often refurbishing junk his neighbors had left at the curb.  For years his TV stand was a swivel rack, salvaged from a discarded fridge and spray painted red-orange to match the shag carpet that my mother-in-law Dorothy called Bittersweet.

He maintained a voluntarily small footprint.  His house and its furnishings are modest but very adequate, and even so, more than most people in the world have.

Art didn’t crave grandeur or excess.  He had the common sense to know when he had enough to be happy.  His choices were fundamentally sustainable without ever considering the concept.

A simple house that served for 50 years.

If more of us felt that way, how different the world might be.

Rest in peace, Art.

THEY ARE COMING! JOURNEY NORTH TRACKS MONARCHS ON THE MOVE

Do you love the first sight of snow drops or crocus or scilla?  Are you watching the grass green up and watching willow branches turn yellow green?  Have you got geese nesting on a pond near you?  Senior citizens in Miami and Phoenix aren’t the only ones who venture north as the weather warms.

photo credit http://www.flickr.com/photos/lelepapillon/3810772155/

There are many waves of migration heading our way right now – whooping cranes, robins, humming birds, bald eagles, common loons, barn swallows, orioles and those might little monarchs.  You can follow them on Journey North.  Journey North is a nonprofit organization aimed at helping people tune into the global study of migration and seasonal change.

photo credit http://www.flickr.com/photos/28122162@N04/3758395703/

I was turned on to this map by Eric, a citizen scientist in Madison who has been submitting data for more than 10 years to the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project.  He knows from experience that his yard full of various milkweed plants is going to be a Monarch Motel, and the perfect place to take a break and lay some eggs.   He likes to know that those stout-hearted little butterflies that are winging up from Mexico.

It’s a harrowing trip.  The Monarchs that make it to the Midwest have spent the winter in the mountains of Mexico.  It’s touch and go for them down there.  If the winter is too hot, they move around too much, deplete their lipid reserves and burn out before spring, or perhaps worse, they may be triggered to start north too soon only to  freeze to death once they get here.    To avoid that they flap up hill some 3,000 meters in altitude where they can more or less count on survival conditions in the high mountain forests.  It will come as no surprise that these mountain forests where they gather together in colonies are currently being logged.

In March, they start to break diapause (a kind of dormancy to survive hard conditions) and get down to the business of heading north, mating and laying eggs as they go.  A few of those eggs survive to hatch and go through larval stages.  A few of those larvae form a chrysalis, and a few hatch out as freshly colored butterflies and head further north.  They reach the northern edge of their range about June.

Eric said he can tell when he sees the few who have made the trip all the way from Mexico.  They arrive at his milkweed patch ragged and faded.  They lay their eggs and then move farther north.

It’s an amazing saga, but it’s just one chapter in the big fat book of animal migration.  Journey North is one way to get a grasp on all these incredible journeys.  I used to marvel at the Monarchs.  I would see them and think, oh look!  The Monarchs are here.  I had no idea where they had come from.  What a complex interwoven environment it takes to keep them coming.  Now that I know more, I am in awe.

..Time to migrate! photo credit http://satellite.ehabich.info/

Eric is worried.   “Of course I hear the news,” he says.  “There is usually some event happening in Mexico that isn’t good for the monarchs, and you wonder if they are going to make it.”

Whether it is the logging or the creeping climate change that may make the wintering sites unsuitable within 50 years or all the perils that lay in their path, the monarchs and other migrating species surf the air currents and search the ground for shelter, experiencing the world in ways I cannot even begin to imagine.

The lucky ones will be blowing into Wisconsin in  June.  If you want to help them on their way, a good way to start is to check out Journey North.

THE FINAL FRONTIER BENEATH OUR FEET

Star Trek called space the final frontier, and that phrase is still resonating through our collective psyche.  Americans have nostalgia for our lost frontier, but if we want to recapture that excitement of discovery, we are looking in the wrong direction.

We need to look straight down at what we are standing on.

The dirt beneath our feet is poorly understood and practically unexplored.  I just finished an amazing book, Under Ground: How Creatures of Mud and Dirt Shape Our World by Yvonne Baskin that has got me looking at dirt with more awe than ever.

Baskin begins by noting that we have spent $820 million to explore the soil on the surface of Mars, and yet have never taken any thorough exploration of the earth beneath our feet.  This is misdirected of us.  This soil is what sustains all life, and it is just as precious a non-renewable resource as oil.

GOING TO BAT FOR BADGER BATS

In 2006 people started finding dead bats whose noses were covered in a white fungus in caves around Albany NY.  We now know this is the deadly White Nose Syndrome WNS, which has decimated the bat populations of Europe.  It’s spreading fast, jumping west more than 500 miles just last year, leaving more than a million dead and dying bats in its wake in Eastern U.S. and Canada.

Because they are nocturnal and have been associated with vampires and other ominous pseudo threats, we don’t know much about bats and we worry even less, but their loss is going to hit us hard.  Bats are crucial contributors to the ecosystem and our human health and comfort.   Those one million lost bats will not be consuming almost 700 tons of night-flying insects that harm forests, agriculture and garden crops and spread germs.  (check out my previous bat post ).

79 IDEAS THAT REDESIGN TEACHING AND LEARNING

Continuing family health issues,  so I am taking the opportunity to recommend another really neat site I recently learned about.

The Third Teachert is based on the premise that children develop through interactions, first with adults, then with peers, and ultimately with the environment around them.

(photo credit http://www.flickr.com/photos/pbouchard/5168547010/

For children, that environment is most often their school.  So how can we make schools sustainable and teach sustainability?  If we have any hope for the future, isn’t this where we should be pouring our resources?

USA NATIONAL PHENOLOGICAL NETWORK NEEDS YOU

Family health issues have compromised my ability to put a regular  blog post together.  I was going to write about  an amazing young organization USA National Phenological Network I have learned about while researching for a book.  So I’ll just urge you to check out their website.

Phenology is noting plant and animal life cycle stages, such as leafing and flowering, emergence of insects, and migration of birds.  This is an ancient human occupation.  Knowing these things allowed early man to make life and death decisions about when to plant, when to hunt and when to move.

USA National Phenology Network, established in 2007, has brought that elemental monitoring instinct into the computer age, and just in time.  Today we need phenology for:

• Health (allergens and infectious diseases)
• Recreation (wildflower displays and fall colors)
• Agriculture (planting and harvest times, pest control)
• Management of natural resources (water and timber)
• Understanding hazards (monitoring and prediction of drought and fire risk)
• Conservation (abundance and diversity of plants and animals)

As they say on their website,

Phenology records can help us understand plant and animal responses to climate change. Changes in phenological events like flowering and bird migrations are among the most sensitive biological responses to climate change. Across the world, many spring events are occurring earlier—and fall events are happening later—than they did in the past. However, not all species are changing at the same rate. The phenology of some species is changing quickly, while for others it is changing slowly or not at all. These different shifts in timing are shaking up ecosystems and altering interactions and processes that took place in the past.

USA NPN NEEDS YOU!

To gather this data, the USA NPN asks you to sign on, pick your favorite part of nature and start reporting what you see.  Their electronic Nature’s Notebook is a great way to get involved.  Are you paying attention to something out there that interests you? Then start reporting your findings!

You’ll contribute to a crucial data set that will inform scientists, resource managers and the public.  We need this information to make the best choices as we try to adapt to changing climates and environments.

LIVING IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

Yesterday I was listening to Erle Ellis of the Department of Geography and Environmental Systems, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, speaking about “The Ancient Anthropogenic Landscapes and the Emergence of the Anthropocene”  as part of the Weston Roundtable Series at UW-Madison. Check out a you tube on his research here.

I’ve been learning more and more about the Anthropocene.  It is a concept to describe the most recent period of time on earth in which human activities have begun to have an impact on global ecosystems.  Traditionally, ecologists have studied biomes.  But what we are really dealing with  are what Ellis calls anthromes – biospheres reshaped by human systems.

photo credit http://ecotope.org/anthromes/

According to Ellis, it started sooner than you might think.  He says we began to change the atmosphere 5,000 years ago.  True there were not as many of us then, but because there was so much land available, people were very relaxed about practicing a kind of slash and burn agriculture that could transform a lot of ground very quickly.

Currently Wildlands only exist in places where people have decided not to use the land – usually because it is too dry or cold to use efficiently.  These areas are down to 23% of the earth’s terrestrial surface, and most of them are places where you would not really want to hang out.  40% of the world’s lands are being for agriculture and residence and.  37% are what Ellis calls Novel Ecosystems, which means little bits of natural systems embedded into human cultivation.  They exist along a spectrum of degradation/ recovery depending on their circumstances.

Erle Ellis standing in front of a little bits of natural systems embedded into human cultivation.

Ellis said most ecologists prefer to study the small preserves of “pristine” Wildlands, but he is interested in the Novel Ecosystems.  “We’ve altered the biosphere irreversibly.  We have a human system into which nature is embedded – many of them in places like China are more than 300 years old,” he said.  “They matter.”

It reminds me of what I learned last year at the Midwest Organic Farming Conference when Jeff Moyer, Director of Farm Operations at Rodale Farm talked about the importance of ecological edges.  I have heard many people come at this same concept of edges from different angles, but most of them say edges are good.  The edge between woods and grassland, the shore of a stream or pond.  These are vital places.

My own 44 acres is interlaced with interfaces between many different micro-ecosystems.  It’s not just a random mish mosh.  It’s simply one small example of what humans do, according to Ellis.  For better or worse, he says, “we create a complex anthromosaic landscape wherever we can.  We need to understand it and manage it.”

I’m on board.  Doug and I didn’t quite realize what we were taking on when we signed papers and traded money for our 44 acres.   But we are learning everything we can and trying to preserve and encourage the biodiversity that is surviving there.

One more case of Thinking Globally, and Acting Locally.