Rhinos in Trouble: A Proposed Market Solution

Biodiversity
Sustainability
Environmental & Science Education
Edward Hessler

It is widely believed that rhino horn has healing and aphrodisiac value.

The result is that rhinos are under assault from poachers which has led them to to the brink of extinction.  According to Save The Rhino, "At the beginning of the 20th century there were 500,000 rhinos across Africa and Asia. This fell to 70,000 by 1970 and further to just 29,000 in the wild today."

Rhino horn

Rhino horn currently sells for approximately $65,000/kilo. Gold, on the other hand, sells for approximately a measly $40,000/kilo.  Well, maybe not measly but a smaller amount.

So, the question is how can the rhino not only be saved but in some limited sense thrive?

The Continental Court of South Africa is considering a case that offers a market solution. The case was brought by two commercial rhino breeders and if the court decides in their favor it would allow for the domestic sale of rhino horn.

Rhino horn can be removed "painlessly," at least based on what is observed following removal. It grows back so could be a sustainable source of horn.  But is this responsible?  Ethical?  What is the likelihood that it would be successful?

In the end, is it one more step on a path to a "precedent for conservation of all species based solely on their economic utility?" 

The Last Rhinos is a film about this case as well as a provocation to consider what it means to live with wildlife today and in the end, with nature.

Friday Poem

Poetry
Art and Environment
Edward Hessler

Friday came a day late this week!

I don't look especially for poems by writers who have some connection to Minnesota. The connection might be home, college/graduate work or teaching. I enjoy finding and then posting them, though.

Navajo Nancy Bo Flood, a well-known children's author, did her Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota.  Dr. Flood currently lives in the Navajo Nation.

Barrel Racer is exuberant, joyful, a poem with muscle.

Here is a short biography.

Environmental Studies Field Trips: Ramsey County Waste Diversion

CGEE Student Voice
Environmental Studies Field Trip Series
by Jenni Abere


This week, we went to two different sites that are part of Ramsey County's waste diversion efforts. First, their household hazardous waste drop-off site, then the Midway yard waste and organics drop-off site on Pierce Butler.

Household Hazardous Waste

Household hazardous waste refers to anything that might be particularly harmful in a landfill, such as toxic and flammable items. Some examples are batteries (vehicle, rechargeable, and button), oil and gasoline, paint, cell phones, and cleaners. Liquids are also undesirable in landfills, even if not "hazardous." 

Most of these items are not illegal to throw away, so the drop-off program is on a voluntary basis. It has good participation, however. Last year, there were 29,000 visits to the drop-off center, and this number has been increasing every year. 

637 tons of waste were collected last year. 57% of this was recycled. 35% was reused, in the free reuse center. 7.2% was incinerated at the Alexandria site, and 0.8% was landfilled. This drop-off site is run by a private contractor, Bay West. This company started in Duluth, and now does work nationally with the military, emergencies, and superfund sites. 

Private contractors such as Veolia Environmental Services are involved in the recycling of the materials once they have been collected. 

The free reuse center, at the same location as the drop-off site, is a great place; a lot of half-full cans of paint come in, and instead of being wasted, other people can take whatever they have a use for. 66,000 pounds of materials flowed through this center last year. 

It's not just paint: The shelves are also stocked with cleaning products, fertilizers, and other chemicals. Reuse centers like this exist in many counties, and some are much larger than Ramsey County's. Before you go to Home Depot, shop here!

Yard Waste and Organics

Next, we visited the yard waste and organics drop-off site on Pierce Butler. The fall is a busy season for yard waste, which has now been banned from landfills due to capacity and leachate concerns. This is a drop off site only: the material is composted elsewhere. 10% of the what's collected is composted at a county-owned site, and then this compost is given away for free in the spring. The majority of material (there is way too much for the county to handle) is taken by private composting companies. 

This large mulch pile represents one day of collection. Not pictured: the even larger brush pile. 

Some of the brush is ground up and taken by District Energy, a non-profit utility that provides heating for downtown St. Paul mostly through burning wood waste. 

This site also has 3 4-cubic yard dumpsters for organics collection. Drop off sites like this are a bridge to curbside composting, which we may see in St. Paul as soon as 2018. The program expanded rapidly for a while, but now has leveled out at about two thousand homes participating. 

These three dumpsters fill up in a week.

Free bags!

The city was concerned about odors and pests and about people putting their trash in the dumpsters. There have not been problems with odors or pests, thanks in part to the program providing free compostable bags to participants (free compostable bags!). They haven't seen many issues with contamination either; the education has been effective and the people participating have been responsible.

These concerns are very familiar to me, since they have been expressed in regards to Hamline's composting pilot. It's always good to hear that these concerns have not been validated. 

Currently, Ramsey county contracts with Sanimax to haul the organics. At the time the program started, this was really the only company in the organics composting business. However they will soon switch to Waste Management, who has recently begun composting. 

At Hamline, our composting program hasn't taken off yet, but we are contracting with Sanimax, a company that does business primarily in Canada and the northern U.S. 

Organics composting today is where recycling was 20-30 years ago, but it seems to be on a good trajectory. 

A Deserving Nobel in Physics Missed Again

History of Science
Environmental & Science Education
by Edward Hessler

The announcement of theNobel awards are invariably bittersweet especially when those who know, specialists in the various award areas, point out very deserving candidates who were overlooked. Some have been overlooked for years.
By the way, I am not disappointed with the selection of Bob Dylan for his award in literature. Joan Baez noted that emerging talent long ago in her haunting love song, Diamonds and Rust. On the other hand there are many writers -- prose and poetry -- who were overlooked.  The world is a big place and there are fine writers in countries, most of whom we've never read or heard of but probably should.
Most of the winners in the sciences are invariably men and we need reminders, prods about the contributions of the so-called other half: women.  Physics, for example, has made significant progress because of ground-breaking work by women, most of whom have worked against the odds -- the system and the workplace.

Sabine Hossenfelder

This year (2016) was no different. Men again (in ALL areas). I have no intention of distracting from their accomplishments. It was painful to learn of a candidate who was passed over again. Sabine Hossenfelder is a theoretical physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies. (She is also known as Bee.) She wrote about this on her first-rate blog, Backreaction.
Bee's blog, if I may, is mainly for physicists. Sometimes I understand (some of) it; sometimes I don't but she is a favorite who explains well and with spirit, a book reviewer, insightful and provocative commenter on new papers and more, including writing about her growing children.
I make no attempt to explain the concept of back reaction. Even the next few words might lead you astray! It has to do with an effect on gravity due to long-range gravitational interactions, a very fertile field for theoreticians.
Hossenfelder wrote, "Another year has passed and Vera Rubin was not awards the Nobel Prize. She's 88 and the prize can't be awards posthumously, so I can't shake the impression the Royal Academy is waiting for her to die while they work off a backlog of condensed-matter breakthroughs."
I first learned about Rubin from a Carnegie Institution pamphlet. From an early age she was fascinated by the night sky. Rubin was the only astronomy major to graduate from Vassar, was denied admission to Princeton for graduate studies because of Princeton's policy of not accepting women, so went to Cornell instead and worked with some notables (Philip Morrison, Richard Feynman and Hans Bethe), then off to Georgetown for her Ph.D. with George Gamow, another renowned physicist.
Fritz Zwicky was the first to notice that a cluster of galaxies rotated faster than their visible mass. It was Rubin who nailed the evidence that galaxies misbehave, i.e., the rotational velocities don't flatten at distance. Stars distant from the galactic center, even in the wispy tips rotate as fast as stars closer to the galactic center. Matter is missing -- not just a little, either. It turns out that some 80% of all the matter in the universe cannot be accounted for. That material is known as dark matter, a term coined by Zwicky.
It is still not known what this stuff is all about. Some physicists talk about their embarrassment by not being able to explain this. One day, though, they will.

Vera Rubin

In her post lamenting the overlooking of Vera Rubin, Dr. Hossenfelder wrote about one of the possibilities for dark matter other than WIMPS, axions (always sounds like a detergent to me), neutralinos, etc. She raises the question and then like a theoretician pursues it: what if dark matter isn't a particle?
I must add a note on how science is conducted. Theoretical physicists do not make stuff up. This is not what theoretical means. Bee wrote a splendid post on whether you can make up anything you want in theoretical physics. No! She noted that theoreticians are contrained by a long record of data, very precise data. There is also a rule (unwritten but practiced and enforced) that it must be mathematical, the language of physics and one of the reasons that most of us don't understand physics at this level. We don't know the language and other languages can't map it one-for-one. To do physics, you have to be able to sling maths like a short order breakfast cook breaks eggs.
Dr. Rubin has been recognized by the scientific community, e.g., election to the National Academy of Sciences as well as receiving the National Medal of Science. Still, she is a deserving Nobelist and I wish this year's award were otherwise.
If you wonder what has motivated Rubin, the short answer is that she did. She is an autonomous learner. In one of the links above Steven Soter and Neil deGrasse Tyson call attention to her drive with a powerful quote: "We have peered into a new world and have seen that it is more mysterious and more complex than we had imagined. Still more mysteries of the universe remain hidden.  Their discovery awaits the adventurous scientists of the future. I like it this way." [emphasis added]
The answer of a scientist.
h/t Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder aka Bee

Chemistry is Beautiful

Art and Environment
Environmental & Science Education
Edward Hessler

Most of the colors, shapes, and patterns that result when molecules go bump in the night (and day) elude us.

They are too easy to miss. They may occur too quickly, too slowly or at a scale we can't see with the naked eye.  And sometimes we simply lack the patience to notice them.

The purpose of Beautiful Chemistry, a collaboration between the University of Science and Technology of China and Tsinghua University Press, is to introduce us to the beauty of chemistry through beautifully produced videos.

Beautiful Chemical Reactions, Crystallization^2, Beautiful Reactions and Beautiful Chemical Structures are four short, delightful videos filmed to play with your sense of wonder.

2016 Zero Waste Summit

CGEE Student Voice
by Jenni Abere

Eureka Recycling's second annual Zero Waste Summit was held Saturday, October 23rd, at St. Paul Neighborhood Network. I had a community outreach internship with Eureka over the summer, so I had spent a lot of time telling people about the Summit and why they should go — but I almost didn't go myself! I bought a ticket the day before the Summit, and I'm very glad I did.
On my way there, I walked past West Rock. West Rock, formerly, RockTenn, is where all the paper in the Twin Cities is recycled. I arrived at the Summit, already thinking about waste, and ready to learn.
The Summit went far beyond just recycling and composting, however; in fact, a common theme was that we can't recycle and compost our way to zero waste. Zero waste — yes, really, not waste whatsoever! — requires us to actually change the way we live and the way we think, change our laws, and change our industries.
However, zero waste is not a new or radical concept. Humans invented the concept of waste. In the natural world, there is no such thing. Everything becomes a resource for something else.
The summit was structured around 15 local and national speakers who would expand our idea of waste by talking about how it relates to their work.
To keep this post a manageable length, I will share one interesting point raised by each speaker.

Bryant Williams, Rebuilding Exchange, Chicago

Bryant said that he doesn’t like the term “waste management” and prefers “materials management.” This language was quickly adopted by the rest of the speakers. It conveys that nothing is actually waste, and stresses the value of the materials that we should find a way to utilize.

Ginny Black, Minnesota Composting Council

Ginny mentioned that one of the biggest barriers to commercial composting is the end-market, or rather lack-thereof. Organic waste and finished compost are both very heavy materials — this can be a barrier to transport. However, it also ensures that composting is a local business.

Tool Library, image from Institute for a Resource-Based Economy (IRBE)

Thomas Ebert, NE Minneapolis Tool Library

A tool library is just what it sounds like — a place with an annual membership fee ($55 in this case) where you can borrow tools for home and community projects. There is also workshop space and classes offered on carpentry, plumbing, etc. (A St. Paul tool library is opening in 2017!)
Thomas spoke about challenging the conception of what you actually need to own. Does every home need a screwdriver? You probably only need to use it a few times a year, so why not share one with the community? This reduces extraction and waste, and increases access, especially among lower income people.

Melanie Stovall and Craig Johnson, AIGA and Agency F

Melanie and Craig discussed their work in sustainable design. They shared two projects in particular: paperless posters and #StrawsSuck. The paperless posters are essentially screenprinted on glass, which draws more attention to the message while saving paper at the same time. #StrawsSuck was a campaign against the use of straws. Instead of using a paper pledge, they used hand stamps and then encouraged people to share pictures on social media.
This is very creative answer to a traditional pledge, where people may just sign it and walk away. The stamp solution was zero waste, but was also more effective.

Sharonda Williams-Tack, Sierra Club

Sharonda's work with the Sierra Club has specialized in banning toxins, such as BPA. This relates to waste because landfilling and especially incinerating leads to the release of toxins in the environment. Sharonda mentioned that Minnesota is a leader in reducing toxins in the US; however, we are still far behind Canada and Europe.

Image from Black Rock Solar.

Timothy DenHerder-Thomas, Cooperative Energy Futures

Timothy started by relating energy to waste (or, materials): energy is how we do stuff with stuff, and we shouldn't think of energy and matter as being separate. He focused his talk on one specific project: Community Solar Gardens.
This is a way to make solar energy more accessible to people, so that you don't need a large sum of money upfront or to own property. All you need is an energy bill. Then, you become a member of the solar garden, the energy produced is sold into the grid (in this case, to Xcel), and the members receive a credit from Xcel.

Janiece Watts, Neighborhoods Organizing for Change

Janiece focused on social justice, a common theme for many of the speakers. She said that zero waste has been an economic necessity and a tool for survival for low income people and people of color. Environmentalism and the zero waste movement must account for class and race, or else we get "solutions" like HERC — burning garbage in poor communities of color to produce minimal amounts of energy, and then labeling it as renewable or even green.

Dianna Kennedy, PlayItSafe Minneapolis

Dianna leads this parent group that campaigns to remove tire mulch and crumb rubber infill from playgrounds and fields. This material is known to include toxins that harm children and the environment. So, why are we using it? Dianna explained that this is one area where concerns about waste have trumped safety. The EPA was concerned about tire stockpiles, so invested in tire mulch and funded playgrounds.
The road to zero waste should not harm anyone, least of all children!

Destiny Watford (Free Your Voice) and Greg Sawtell (United Workers)

Destiny Watford

Destiny was the star speaker of the night. As a high school student in Baltimore, she led a fight to stop the construction of what would have been the nation's largest waste incinerator — less than a mile from her high school. After four years, Destiny and the community were successful.
Destiny and Greg both addressed the question of: what comes next? As Destiny said, it's not just about what the land shouldn't be, but what the land should be. Greg framed it as a power issue. This community has been held hostage by development, and become a dumping ground. He sees community land trusts as a potential solution, where the community collectively owns land and is able to build affordable housing, and other valuable developments.

Allyson Green and Marisa Benasutti, Campus Kitchen Augsburg

Campus kitchen is a program that brings campus and community together over food, through education, food recovery, community gardens, and an on-campus farmer's market. Allyson and Marisa spoke about the importance of considering culture in relation to food, especially with Augsburg's location in the Cedar Riverside neighborhood in Minneapolis.

Cliff Martin, Northfield Community Composting

Cliff was the only speaker representing rural communities, and he discussed how rural poor are also affected by waste: usually landfills instead of incinerators. He is starting curbside composting pick-up in spring 2017 in Northfield.
His company is a worker-owned co-op that democratizes ownership. Like previous speakers, he said that the working class practices environmentalism everyday, even though it is usually associated with upper middle class white people.

Northern Spark 2016

Erin Lavelle, Northern Spark 

Erin, the final speaker, asked the question: is art wasteful? Particularly, art created for Northern Spark, the all-night art festival in the Twin Cities. Is is wasteful to create art for one night? The answer seems to be, yes.
At the previous Northern Spark, the theme was "Climate Chaos." With this environmental theme, it was fitting to challenge artists to curb waste. Erin encouraged the artists to use salvaged materials, or materials that could be reused after the art was taken down and disassembled.

Happy Birthday National Park Service!

Environmental & Science Education
Sustainability
Edward Hessler

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the U. S. National Park Service. It has been a while since I read the enabling legislation which President Woodrow Wilson signed on August 25, 1916. It is a surprisingly short piece of legislation and worth reading.

The legislation sponsors were Representative William Kent (I - Progressive Party) and Senator Reed Smoot (R) of Utah. It begins,

"The National Park Service Organic Act (16. U. S. C. 123, and 4), as set forth herein, consists of the Act of Aug. 25. 1916 (39 Stat. 535) and amendments thereto."

The first director of the National Park Service was Stephen Mather (May 16 1917 to July 8 1929). Jon Jarvis is the current director and was appointed on October 2, 2009. For a list of all eighteen directors with short biographies see here.

The term "Organic Act" is a defined legal term. According to Wikipedia "an Organic Act, in United States law, is an Act of the United States Congress that establishes a territory of the United States or an agency to manage certain federal lands."

For more information about organic acts see the Wikipedia entry.  This entry comes with an alert because it does not include any source references.

Historian Robin Winks wrote a special centennial essay for the George Wright Society on the evolution and meaning of the Organic Act.  There is an apparent contradiction in the Act ("to conserve..." and "to provide for the enjoyment...."). Winks provides the view of a historian not that of a legal scholar.

The George Wright Society is a nonprofit association founded in 1980.  It is dedicated "to the protection, preservation, and management of cultural and natural parks and resources through research and education."

The Society is named in honor of George Melendez Wright, the first chief of the wildlife division of the United States National Park Service.

A Deadly Path

Environmental & Science Education
Ethics
by Edward Hessler

Cobalt.

Batteries.

They are everywhere in our device-filled world.  Most of us don't see them or even think of them except when they fail or need a quick re-charge. They are made with incredible human costs.  And like many human costs in this world, they are hidden from our view, even our awareness.

The Washington Post has a carefully reported article that traces the path of cobalt from the hand-dug mines in Congo to us... to our phones, laptops, and other electronic devices.

The essay includes compelling photographs and a video.

Cobalt was discovered by Georg Brandt (June 26, 1694 to April 19, 1768). This Wikipedia entry notes that he "was the first person to discover a metal unknown in ancient times."  Brandt was able to show that it was cobalt, not bismuth, that imparts the blue color to glass.

Friday Poem

Poetry
Art and Environment
Edward Hessler

Today's poem is by John Ashbery about whom you may learn more here.

Ashbery, born in 1927, is one of the most highly regarded American poets of the 20th century.

Darwin's Idea in Photographs

Biological Evolution
Environmental & Science Education
History of Science
Edward Hessler

Want to see evolution up close in glorious images that pop from the page? You can in a National Geographic picture story about this new book.

A prototype of what Robert Clark wanted the book on evolution to look like is available, too. It is a quick tour as he places his thumb on the pages and flips through them.

Mr. Clark took many of the pictures while on assignment for National Geographic. Evolution: A Visual Record may be pre-ordered.

h/t Lee Schmitt who sent me a link to the story.

Environmental Studies Field Trips: Street Maintenance

CGEE Student Voice
Environmental Studies Field Trip Series
by Jenni Abere


This week, my class went to the street maintenance yard for St. Paul to learn about the work that is done at different times of the year, such as leaf sweeping, snow and ice removal, and storm water management. We learned about the common practices as well as what can be done to reduce the impact on the environment.

Street Sweeping

While busy roads are swept more frequently, all the streets in St. Paul are swept once in the spring and once in the fall. In the few weeks of sweeping, 10-15 thousand cubic yards of leaves are collected. This is an important task. Leaves are a major source of phosphorous pollution in water. Once the leaves are collected, they are composted or put on farm fields.

The streets around Hamline's campus were swept this week!

This subject was very topical for me. For the past month, I've been working on Adopt-a-Storm-Drain, to raise awareness that streets are directly connected to lakes and rivers. We encourage people to rake up leaves, pick up trash and dog poop, and use less salt in the winter. Recently, we have been in the Hamline-Midway neighborhood and Lake Hiawatha area. The fall is a good time for outreach because the leaves are falling.

City-wide street sweeping has a huge impact, but it can only be done a few times a year. For all the other times, it's up to citizens to keep the streets -- and rivers -- clean.

Snow and Ice Control

Snow removal is a huge part of street maintenance in Minnesota. For this field trip, we looked at the snow plows and discussed the different ways salt is used. Regular rock salt is only effective when the road temperature is about 15°F. There are ways to make the salt more effective, so that less is needed. Chloride pollution is an emerging concern for waterways, so we need strategies to reduce salt use.

A mountain of salt in the storage shed.

Pre-wetting the ice with salt brine makes the rock salt more effective. There are also preventative measures, where liquids are applied before it snows and this prevents ice from forming. Magnesium and calcium chloride can be used with salt to make it effective at temperatures as low as -10 to -20°F.

Of course, a lot of salt is still used, and this salt ends up in waterways and vegetation. One alternative to salt is "abrasives," or sand. This usually has some level of salt in it as much, but not enough to really melt the ice. It just provides traction. This is a good alternative for sidewalks and home driveways. However, for roads it is not really a viable option. Sand will also enter into waterways in the spring.

Storm Water Management

Before and after the visit to the maintenance yard, we saw some storm water retainment features, including a rain garden by the Hamline Church and plants along the Green Line. The goal of these features is to prevent the runoff from streets from going into storm drains and then into the river.

A rain garden by the Hamline Church.

One of the problems with preventing runoff is that the groundwater can become contaminated with phosphorous and chloride and other pollution. Plants can help absorb some of this, but salt and other pollution can be harmful to the plants. The gardens along the Green Line are experimental -- time will tell if these plants can withstand high levels of runoff and pollution.

Manchester, New Hampshire: First Lady Michelle Obama's Speech

[Image source Wikipedia]

Sustainability
Speeches
Literacy
by Edward Hessler

First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama speaks about basic human decency and dignity in New Hampshire.

It is powerful, clear, emotional and deeply informed.

Friday Poem

Poetry
Art and Environment
Sustainability

Today's poem is by Geary Hobson.  I love where this biography is published: "Native Jewelry."  He is a gem.

I've included this poem before in a post about national parks but it could have been easily missed.

Bison, image from Wikipedia.

BUFFALO POEM #1

ON HEARING THAT A SMALL HERD OF BUFFALO HAS "BROKEN LOOSE" AND IS "RUNNING WILD" AT THE ALBUQUERQUE AIRPORT -- SEPTEMBER 26, 1975

-- roam on, brothers...

Geary Hobson

The Art of Alma Thomas

Art and Environment
Edward Hessler

In his columns in The New Yorker under the heading "The Art World," Peter Schjeldahl always informs me about art. He has introduced me to many artists and their work in columns for The New Yorker.  Schjeldahl was born in Fargo, grew up in small towns in Minnesota and attended Carleton College.

In the July 25, 2016 issue Schjeldahl writes about an Alma Thomas retrospective currently at the Studio Museum, Harlem.  I'd never heard of her (alas! but now I have!).

Alma Thomas, from Wikipedia.

Thomas, an African-American, was born in Columbus, Georgia in 1891.  Her family moved to Washington, D. C. in 1907.  Good at mathematics, she hoped to become an architect but she was black and female which limited, no excluded, possible career choices.  She ended up teaching kindergarten. Following several years of teaching she attended Howard, first in home-economics, then as a student in the art department where she became the first graduate of the art program. Following this, Ms. Thomas became a junior-high-school art teacher in Washington, D. C.

It was only when she retired in 1960 that she took up color-intensive abstraction, "moved to paint abstractions, " according to Schjeldahl, "after studying the shapes of a holly tree in her garden, and that she based her color harmonies on her flower beds...".

I love the titles she gave her paintings, e.g., "Snoopy Sees Earth Wrapped in Sunset," "Wind, Sunshine and Flowers," "Stars and Their Display," "Arboretum Presents White Dogwood," and "Hydrangeas Spring Song."

You may see several of her paintings currently on view at the Studio Museum here. In addition, for more see the Tang Teaching Museum.  Hilarie Sheets has a useful editorial about her with more art in Artsy.

Ms. Thomas is an artist whose exuberant art is about beauty and happiness.

A Poem for October 10

Poetry
Art and Environment
by Edward Hessler

Sycamore tree, from Wikipedia.

Yesterday, the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area hit 60 degrees F (16 degrees C), one degree less than average (15.5 degrees C). Today is to be a really warm day — 70 degrees F (21 degrees C).

I've never thought much about months as being particularly fecund periods for poetry, until October arrives. There are many October poems that I like a great deal.

Here is one for this date by Wendell Berry. It is titled October 10.

I grew up in Sycamore tree country — favorite and imposing climbing trees — and miss their bleached and mottled limbs. Collecting and throwing their buttonballs — the tree is also known as buttonwood--was also a great pastime.

Friday Poem

Poetry
Art and Environment
Edward Hessler

Today's poem is by poet and critic Joseph Robert Mills. He teaches at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts where he is the Susan Burress Wall Distinguished Professor.

The question that the poem is about is one that is asked mostly by young people. I really like Mills's answer, alive as it is with humor and love.

Light Pollution

Environmental & Science Education
Sustainability
by Edward Hessler

Light pollution map from Wikipedia.

In a short film Lost in Light, Sriram Murali uses time-lapse photography to show eight different light "levels" in locations in California and Oregon.
Way too much is lost when what's overhead on a clear night is hidden by light from below.

Environmental Studies Field Trips: Field Studies

CGEE Student Voice
Environmental Studies Field Trip Series
by Jenni Abere

This week, we returned to Frogtown Farm with artist and botanist Sarah Nassif to look closer at one particular element of the farm/urban park: the fruit trees.

My group evaluated some apple, cherry and plum trees.

A young cherry tree in the berm.

These little trees are planted in the berms, and are a big part of the water retainment efforts at Frogtown Farm. Plus, they are apple, cherry, plum, and pear trees, so as they grow they will become a food source as well.

After learning some tree identification skills and measuring methods, we evaluated these young trees. We identified them based on their leaves and bark, then measured their height and diameter at breast height.
Then, we left the park and went out into the surrounding neighborhood. Each group was assigned a couple fruit trees to find, identify and evaluate in the same way. These trees were donated, so we knew where they were located, but we also marked down other fruit trees we came across.

The Question of Sharing Data

Our main take-away from the class was to consider how we can use field data in a meaningful way, and how we can share it. What's the point of mapping the location of fruit trees in the neighborhood? Could it be used to create some sort of crowd-sourced field guide?
Public fruit trees are gaining popularity as a way to feed a community. Last fall, my Environmental Studies class met with a fruit gleaning organization that collected fruit from around the city and donated it to food banks. That day, we helped pick apples on privately owned land. Fruit trees in public places could go even farther in feeding people.
As we tracked down fruit trees in the neighborhood, I thought it would be cool to use this data in an app: Find the nearest in-season fruit tree!
Gathering data is often the first step in environmental education, but sometimes using the data is left out -- and this is the most important part. In my work through the Sustainability Office at Hamline, we've been gathering data on campus waste streams. However, presenting this data to everyone else on campus in a meaningful way remains a challenge. Should we create a website? Build a giant bar-graph in Anderson? What part of our data is most important to share?
It's always helpful to take some time to consider the question of sharing data, whether it's for fruit trees or recycling rates.

At the Seashore

Biodiversity
Behavior
Environmental & Science Education
by Edward Hessler


Among my favorite places (alas, least visited) are the edges of the seas, especially rocky ones with intertidal pools.

These edges -- you may recall Rachel Carson's book, The Edge of the Sea -- are fascinating and have also been responsible for some significant research on how communities are regulated (cf. Robert Paine's work on starfish and sea urchins).

Photo of a tide pool from Wikipedia.

Deep Look, the series of short documentary videos produced by KQED and PBS, shows part of the life cycle of sea urchins (aka sea hedgehogs) which live in sea edges.

The early life of sea urchins is tumultuous and chancy, beginning in the open ocean and ending up, when they are successful, on seashores where they grow to maturity and live in the relentless cycle of tides and endless waves.

John Steinbeck dedicated Cannery Row to marine biologist and intertidal ecologist, Ed Ricketts, the "Doc" in the book. Ricketts lived in as well as stored specimens he collected at the shore and tide pools in a building known as Pacific Marine Laboratories. Here is Steinbeck writing about the richness of the shore.

Doc was collecting marine animals in the Great Tide Pool on the tip of the Peninsula. It is a fabulous place: when the tide is in, a wave-churned basin, creamy with foam, whipped by the combers that roll in... But when the tide goes out the little water world becomes quiet and lovely. The sea is very clear and the bottom becomes fantastic with hurrying, fighting, feeding, breeding animals. Crabs rush from frond to frond of the waving algae. Starfish squat over mussels and limpets, attach their million little suckers and then slowly lift with incredible power until the prey is broken from the rock. And then the starfish stomach comes out and envelops its food.