PROGNOSIS POSITIVE WHEN NURSES TREAT ENVIRONMENT

I just wrote a about a really upbeat topic for Isthmus.   There is an exciting new trend in public health nursing that really gets at the heart of the problem.

Keeping their candles burning was a challenge in the falling temperature and rising wind as 150 committed Southwest Madison residents gathered in Hammersley Park in late November to walk the half-mile to Falk Elementary School. The crowd assembled in response to racist graffiti spray-painted in red the week before on fences and buildings in the neighborhood.

Neuschel and other members of the health equity team had a dramatic effect in Meadowood after a teen-on-teen murder. Photo Credit:Mary Langenfeld

The march, meal and discussion that followed in the school gym were a public display of the Southwest Community Organizing Committee flexing its new muscle. Strength has always been associated with health, so perhaps it’s not surprising that this community organization owes its existence to a small team of nurses in the Department of Public Health for Madison and Dane County.

Kim Neuschel, one of six nurses who form the health equity team, watched approvingly as people poured into Falk School. She checked with members of the organizing committee to make sure each table had a facilitator, then took the mike to set the agenda.

“They are the key,” Ald. Steve King says of the nurses. “What public health has done is the model for partnering with neighborhood associations and plugging in holistically. They are looking for root causes for what’s going on. Kim has connected the dots for everyone, making people think about the socioeconomic issues in a different way.”

Sheray Wallace, a long-term resident and member of the Southwest Community Organizing Committee, says that other residents have become more involved in the community since the public nurses became a steady presence. “They bring so much positive energy into everything we do,” says Wallace.

The health equity team is the brainchild of Judy Howard, public health supervisor at the public health department. “Public health will always need people focusing on individuals and families,” says Howard. “But health starts where we live and play, and this team can focus on the bigger picture — the neighborhoods. Is this a healthy environment? Does public policy support the changes people need to be healthy?”

Read the rest …

WHAT GARDENERS ARE GROWING AND WHY

Here is an article I wrote that appeared this week in Isthmus, Madison’s weekly newspaper:

A first-of-its-kind study

analyzes how much Madison-area gardeners produce and why

Surprise, it’s not just about food!
Denise Thornton on Thursday 09/15/2011

When Vincent Smith came to Madison to study urban agriculture, he picked fertile ground. Gardening is a growth industry here. One in three Madison-area households grows some of its own food. There is a waiting list for plots in many of the area’s 50 community gardens, and there are more than 40 organizations involved in local food production, with some of that produce going to food pantries.

(photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/charlesfred/2817155773/ )

Smith is the first person to systematically study how much area gardeners are producing and why. According to his findings, Madison-area gardeners cultivated 48,184 food-producing gardens on 6.5 million square feet of ground to produce $9.4 million of food in 2010, but whittling their grocery bill had little to do with why most seeded, weeded and watered.

The median household income of community gardeners was $70,000, and $87,500 for home gardeners — both higher than the Madison-area’s median income of about $55,000. “There is a lot of food growing out there, and for some, it is unquestionably a net gain financially,” says Smith. “However, the wide range of personal and social values associated with food gardening goes way beyond the actual market value of the food.”

(photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/usdagov/5908589011/

Smith arrived at the UW-Madison Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies to get a Ph.D. after a stint as program director of the Center for Urban Agriculture in Santa Barbara, Calif. He grew up on a farm in Missouri and has a master’s degree in environmental education with an emphasis on outdoor, farm-based education.

“UW-Madison has a phenomenal number of people working on food, including world-renowned environmental sociologists who study food, combined with a high community interest in food production,” says Smith. “I had only been in Madison a couple of months when Community GroundWorks, then Troy Gardens, asked me to be on their board of directors. I started meeting people and networking.”

As he reached out to such groups as the Community Action Coalition, Research, Education, Action and Policy of Food Group (REAP), Madison Area Community Supported Agriculture Coalition (MACSAC) and City of Madison Gardens Committee, Smith found that many groups and growers were looking for hard numbers on the actual value of community food production.

“Organizations needed data for writing grants, and growers just wanted to know if it was worth their effort,” says Janet Silbernagel, chair of the Conservation Biology and Sustainable Development Program of the Nelson Institute. Silbernagel served as one of Smith’s advisers. “Vincent decided to undertake this study because people needed it, and he was the right person to do it. That had not been studied before.”

READ THE REST HERE

CITIZEN SCIENTISTS HELP RESEARCHERS INVESTIGATE NATURE

I had an article published in Isthmus this week that I’m very proud of and excited about.  Citizen science is a topic near and dear to my heart.  These are the people like you and me who are going to make a real difference in the world.

A full moon rises over Owen Conservation Park on Madison’s far west side. The air throbs with the mating calls of chorus frogs. A pair of mallards try to corral their ducklings skimming through the rippling reflections on the surface of the pond. Barely visible, bats cut through the cooling air to scoop up the insects that have been drawn here by the pond and the street light.

It’s twilight, that moment Rod Serling called the middle ground between science and imagination. For Andria Blattner, whose attention is clearly divided between the rising moon and the sophisticated equipment in the rear of her gray Subaru Outback, it’s the science that has brought her out to the park as darkness falls. She’s come to count bats.

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

TWINKLE, TWINKLE, UW-MADISON

Look up into the sky and see some amazing constellations.  We’ve been trying to make sense of those stars for a long time, and science has been expanding our understanding as we see farther and more minutely.

Now you can look into the heart of the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus and see a remarkable new constellation.

..The Big Dipper from the European Southern Observatory. http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic0901d/

The University of Wisconsin does not have a major science museum on its campus, but it is a crossroads of constant scientific inquiry and education.  UW-Madison was established as a land-grant university , funded by the sale of state land and dedicated to teaching agriculture, science and engineering.  We used to value science literacy as a nation.

Furthermore, UW-Madison has been guided by The Wisconsin Idea for more than a century, which directs that research conducted here should be applied to practical problems of the state’s citizens.

...Tom Zinnen

The latest manifestation of this mandate is a new concept called the University of Wisconsin-Madison Science Constellation, which aims to make all that research more accessible to every student and citizen.  I learned about it from Tom Zinnen.

NOW I LAY ME DOWN TO …….

Greetings, dear readers.

As is my wont, when I publish something I’m proud of, I like to share it with you.

Here is a cover story I  wrote for the current  Isthmus , Madison’s alternative weekly newspaper, about the very active sleep research programs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  The sleep apnea info in particular woke me up to a growing national challenge.

By any measure, Donna Pahuski takes her health seriously. At 51, she exercises at least 45 minutes each day and makes good eating choices. So when she gained 20 pounds and her sleep became increasingly restless, at first she blamed it on menopause. 

“But I thought it was interesting that after the hot flashes were gone, I was still such a poor sleeper,” she remembers. “So when I saw my doctor two years ago, I mentioned possible sleep apnea. He suggested that the easiest way to check was for my husband to watch me sleep, but he falls asleep before I do. The other option was to come in for an overnight sleep test, but I wasn’t eager to take the time, so I let it go.”

This spring, Pahuski was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy, or weakening of the heart muscle. The left side of her heart was dangerously enlarged.

“The first thing the cardiologist said was, ‘We need to test you for sleep apnea,’” recalls Pahuski. “He told me that sleep apnea would certainly accelerate my heart failure.”

So Pahuski found herself descending the sunny steps into the quiet, underground clinic called Wisconsin Sleep, part of a larger program, the UW-Madison Center for Sleep Medicine and Sleep Research, to have her sleep apnea diagnosed. Each week about 60 patients spend the night there while their sleep problems are analyzed.

Click here to read the rest.

If you’d like to read the other articles I have written for Isthmus this year:

• Tera Johnson’s Big Idea (Whey to go!) A Madison entrepreneur capitalizes on a dairy byproduct.
• Can Ants Save the World? UW scientist Cameron Currie looks to the insect world for insights on how to save the planet.
• Climate Change for Madison Expect more freezing rain, floods and potholes, but at least New Zealand apples grow here now.

WHEY TO GO

So, here is my most recent publication, the cover story for this week’s Isthmus.  Researching this piece turned me into a believer in the benefits of whey, and Tera Johnson has made me believe that her whey is best for both my body and my planet.  Check it out:

Tera Johnson begins the tour of her one-of-a-kind organic whey processing plant at its back entrance, in front of a double-wide delivery bay. Here, on busy days, 20 tanker trucks roll in to deliver up to a million pounds of the sloshy cheese byproduct.

Wisconsin Specialty Protein, which opened early last year, occupies an eight-acre section of the Reedsburg industrial park, strategically located in the middle of exceptionally productive dairy country and a carefully protected network of Baraboo River Valley wetlands.

“The landscape architect who worked on this project, his dad studied with Aldo Leopold,” says Johnson, a Madison-area resident. “He got very excited when I asked him to implement native landscaping on a hardcore manufacturing site. He drew a plan that looks a bit like Eden.”

Johnson waves toward a landscape that supports a pair of nesting cranes. “See that tall grass?” she asks. “That’s an industrial-strength rain garden designed to handle all the stormwater on the site.”

She notes that the city of Reedsburg, like Madison, imposes a stormwater utility charge based on how much runoff a property owner generates. “We don’t have to pay it because of how we landscaped. People think green is more expensive. Not necessarily. It actually costs us less to have the rain garden.”

It’s innovative thinking like this that has earned Johnson more awards than she has time to hang on her office wall. Wisconsin Specialty Protein’s $14 million processing facility won a gold medal award in the green building category as an Associated Builders and Contractors of Wisconsin 2009 Project of Distinction.

Read the Rest

Spreading the Love

So,  I want to share my latest published article — a profile for On Wisconsin of Barry Levenson, currator of the National Mustard Museum.

Mustard is one of the simple but intense joys of life.

A  very sustainable condiment.

...Mr. Mustard (photo credit: Bryce Richter)

On October 28, 1986, at 2:30 a.m., Barry Levenson MA’73, JD’74, streaming tears, pushed an empty shopping cart through the deserted aisles of Woodman’s grocery store on the east side of Madison. He was mourning a close call and ultimate World Series loss by his beloved Boston Red Sox.

“I realized it was kind of nuts to be crying because of a baseball game,” Levenson remembers. “I needed a hobby. I decided to collect something, but what? I happened to be standing in front of the mustards, and I heard this voice that said, ‘If you collect us, they will come.’ ”

Levenson grabbed some lesser-known brands of the condiment and headed for the checkout lane. The clerk had no idea he was witnessing history as he bagged up the beginnings of the National Mustard Museum, which Levenson describes as half Field of Dreams, half Willy Wonka.

CAN ANTS SAVE THE WORLD?

Today I’m posting a link to an article I wrote for Isthmus, the weekly newspaper in Madison WI.

This was their lead story for the Earth Day issue, and I’m quite proud of it.

The long, windowless room is uncomfortably warm and humid. The counters and shelves are filled with Tupperware boxes, like the ones people use to store sweaters under their beds. But these boxes are filled with gray mold and crawling with leaf-cutter ants.

Don’t run for a can of Raid. Instead, cross your fingers and hope that the keeper of these ants, UW-Madison associate professor of bacteriology Cameron Currie, can tease secret recipes for cheap biofuel out of these teeming ant tunnels.

Currie, 39, a tall and soft-spoken Canadian, bends over an open box, stares intently for a moment, then dips a finger into the spongy mass and scoops out something that looks like a couple of gray jelly beans. It’s actually an ant queen. The entire colony relies on her, and, as gas prices rise, we may be depending on her as well.

Leaf-cutter ants are some of the most successful animals on the planet. In the rainforests of South America, they rule. A single underground colony could fill a two-car garage, and the ants inside can outweigh an elephant.

They live by slicing up leaves and hauling them into underground chambers to feed the vast gardens of fungus they use for both food and furniture. In the process, each colony breaks down the cellulose of plant cell walls on a massive scale.

“The ants are doing what we’d like to be able to do,” explains Currie. “If we discover the enzymes they are using to break down plant cell walls, those enzymes could be integrated into an industrial process to make biofuel.”

The Department of Energy is banking on Currie’s speculation. In 2007, the DOE decided to invest big in biofuels, funding three bioenergy research centers around the country, including the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center at the UW-Madison.

Click HERE to read the rest.

CLIMATE CHANGE IN MY BACK YARD

When we see the video of polar bears pacing on a shrinking ice flow, we feel both empathy for the poor brutes and relief that the warming poles and their grisly realities are a long way from us.

I have been guilty of the smug feeling that, here in Wisconsin, I am far from the poles, far from the coasts.  No rising shorelines.  Hardly any scorching heat waves.  Lots of ground water and few cities to suck it up.

When I covered local government meetings for the Chicago Tribune, what always packed the house was a mob swelling with indignation over a NIMBY (not in MY back yard).

...Explore WICCI's interactive map at http://ccr.aos.wisc.edu/cwg/

Well Global Climate Change is looming over everyone’s back yard.  Here in idyllic Wisconsin, the toll is being recorded and predictions are being formulated.  Thanks to WICCI (Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts) this state is one of the first to look closely at what is coming and how our farmers, businesses, public health officials, resource managers, municipalities and the rest of us can brace for the impact.

This was the topic of  the cover story I wrote for this week’s Isthmus, Madison’s cutting edge newspaper that keeps our town in the know.  I’m very proud of this one.  Please check it out.

It starts out:

Remember June 2008?

Madison recorded almost 11 inches of rain that month, easily breaking the previous June record set way back in 1869. Flood damage to homes, businesses, roads, bridges and water treatment plants in southern Wisconsin totaled $766 million, making it the most costly natural disaster in Wisconsin history.

This drenching came as no surprise to Steve Vavrus, a senior scientist at the UW-Madison Center for Climatic Research and a member of the WICCI Climate Working Group. “That was not a rogue thunderstorm,” he says confidently. “We will be seeing more of these in the future.”

In fact, we already have.

Read more

Read a little more the editor’s page