Procrastination on Global Warming Means Coasts Will Continue Flooding→

Simon Buckle, writing for IFLScience:

Pete Markham, CC BY-SA

“In terms of the physical science, there are perhaps three key headline messages: human influence on the climate system is clear; warming of the climate system is unequivocal; limiting the risks from climate change will require substantial and sustained reductions of GHG emissions.

Mitigating our use of fossil fuels lies right at the heart of an effective response to climate change. While a 2°C target remains technically feasible, achieving it will be extremely challenging. The IPCC’s mitigation report compared hundreds of energy modelling scenarios that strongly suggest that to achieve a 2°C target, global GHG emissions would need to be around 40-70% lower than 2010 levels by 2050 and near zero by 2100.”

Fifth Assessment Report (AR5)
AR5 provides a clear and up to date view of the current state of scientific knowledge relevant to climate change. It consists of three Working Group (WG) reports and a Synthesis Report (SYR). 

Many aspects of climate change and associated impacts will continue for centuries, even if anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are stopped. The risks of abrupt or irreversible changes increase as the magnitude of the warming increases.

If into the reasons for our procrastination you go, only pain will you find. Greed, denial, and delusion. Your science, save you it will not in a world of corruption and immediate profit.

Why Minneapolis Has Beautiful Bike Freeways→

Heather Smith, writing for Grist:

Heather Smith

“I had been biking around Minneapolis for several days before I realized what was missing. It was a pleasant city, even though I was lost a lot, because most of the bike routes have very tiny signs that are hard to read, if they have signs at all. At night the bike paths were so dark that I worried I might not see an obstacle in the road, even with my headlight on, and I got even more lost, until I just gave up and biked very slowly with my phone in one hand, watching the blue dot that was myself on the map to make sure that I didn’t drift off the path, fall off my bike, and get eaten by bears. Not that there are any bears in Minneapolis.

But none of that mattered, really. Here was the thing that was missing for the first time since I became a bicycle commuter: fear.”

Hmm. In the end, people against bikes and public transit are those who follow the dark side.

Power Line Rights of Way: Opportunities for Cost Savings and Habitat→

Richard Conniff, writing for Yale360 Environment:

dalioPhoto, Flickr

“The open, scrubby habitat under some transmission lines is already the best place to hunt for wild bees, says Sam Droege of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland, and that potential habitat will inevitably become more important as the United States becomes more urbanized. He thinks utility rights-of-way — currently adding up in the U.S. to about nine million acres for power transmission lines, and another 12 million for pipelines — could eventually serve as a network of conservation reserves roughly one third the area of the national park system.

Remarkably, some power companies agree. Three utilities — New York Power Authority, Arizona Public Service, and Vermont Electric Power Company — have already completed a certification program from the Right of Way Stewardship Council, a new group established to set standards for right-of-way management, with the aim of encouraging low-growth vegetation and thus, incidentally, promoting native wildlife. Three more utilities, all from Western states, are currently seeking certification.”

Many of our solutions depend on changing our point of view.

Nature Makes Better Students→

Dave Levitan, Conservation This Week:

“It shouldn’t be surprising anymore that green spaces make us happier, healthier, and just generally better, but every time a hard finding on the topic pops up it seems incredible once again. Just being near nature is enough to bump up kids’ grades—though we’ll need more data to back this up, it probably can’t hurt to head out and look at some trees any chance you and your kids can get.”

We must unlearn what we have learned. Nature makes us great, factory schools not.

Sauk River Chain of Lakes Face Pollution →

Kirsti Marohn, reporting for the St. Cloud Times:

Kimm Anderson, St. Cloud Times

“An active watershed district and lake association have taken ambitious steps to curb pollution entering the lakes. By most accounts, the lakes’ clarity has vastly improved and fish are more abundant. “The condition of the chain was dramatically worse water quality than it currently is,” said Greg Van Eeckhout, environmental specialist with the MPCA.

But the chain still faces many challenges. It’s fed by the Sauk River, which drains a huge area of largely agricultural land. Most of the chain’s lakes are considered impaired because of high nutrient levels. Algae blooms still make the water murky at times. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency is proposing new standards for the lake that would aim to reduce those nutrient levels and improve the clarity of the water. But one environmental group says the standards are too lenient.

As the debate over the Sauk Chain’s future heats up, nearly everyone seems to agree that much progress has been made in the past few decades.”

If no mistake have you made, yet losing you are … a different game you should play. Change standards without changing system, skeptical we are.

Public Transit Support High, Use Not So Much→

Eric Jaffe, writing for CityLab:

Chris; Flickr

“Enthusiasm for public transportation far, far outweighs the actual use of it. Last week, for instance, the American Public Transportation Association reported that 74 percent of people support more mass transit spending. But only 5 percent of commuters travel by mass transit. This support, in other words, is largely for others.

What’s more striking about the support-usage gap is that it doesn’t just exist on paper. In addition to saying they support transit funding, Americans back up that support with their own pocketbooks. Time and again at the polls, people are willing to raise local taxes to maintain or expand the transit service that so few of them actually use. According to the Center for Transportation Excellence, there were 62 transportation measures on ballots across the country in 2012—many with a considerable transit component—and nearly 80 percent of them succeeded.”

Through the Force, things you will see. Other places. Other forms of transportation. The future…the past. Old streetcars long gone.

Poverty Moving to the Suburbs→

Reihan Salam, writing for Slate:

Jim Rees, Flickr

“You might be wondering why poor families are moving to the suburbs in large numbers—the number of suburban poor grew more than twice as quickly as the number of urban poor between 2000 and 2011—if they are such hard places for poor people to get ahead. Part of it is that as middle- and high-income households moved to the suburbs, the low-wage workers who look after their children had little choice but to follow. Then there is the fact that as America’s most productive cities experience a revival, gentrification is displacing low-income families to outlying neighborhoods and towns.

Before we can understand what makes some suburbs so miserable, we first have to understand what makes others succeed. The most successful suburban neighborhoods fall into two categories. First, there are the dense and walkable ones that, like the most successful urban neighborhoods, have town centers that give local residents easy access to retail and employment opportunities. These neighborhoods generally include a mix of single-family homes and apartment buildings, which allows for different kinds of families and adults at different stages of life to share in the same local amenities. The problem with these urban suburbs, as Christopher Leinberger recounts in his 2009 book The Option of Urbanism, is that there are so few of them, and this scarcity fuels the same kind of gentrification that is driving poor people out of successful cities.”

Density matters, ... Look at the suburbs. Judge them by walkability, do you? Save them you can't. 

Questions About the Water Supply Plan→

Brendon Slotterback, writing for Streets.mn:

MPR

“White Bear Lake is looking less like a lake all the time. The Met Council has released a report with a few solutions to this issue, all which involve relying more on surface water (rivers) and less on groundwater. The proposed solutions range in price from $155 million to over $600 million. The options are myriad, but all involve long pipes to existing or new water treatment plants that use water from the Mississippi River. Options for areas served vary, but the study area includes communities totaling 157,823 people in 2010 (208,580 projected in 2040).

However, the report seems insufficient to me. It lacks answers to lots of important questions that members of the Metropolitan Council (and residents of the region) should be asking. Here are a few I came up with as I was reading:”

Brendon has 6 questions then asks one more:

“Where is the conservation alternative? The cost and feasibility of reducing water use are not analyzed as part of the report. Building nothing and simply asking/incentivizing/requiring people to use less may be the cheapest option. ”

— http://netdensity.net/2014/07/28/3312/

Conservation matters, ... Look at the waste on lawns. Judge conservation on no change in potable water use, do you?

Great Lakes at a Crossroads→

Dan Egan, reporting for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 

“Despite their vastness, for thousands of years the inland seas above Niagara Falls were as isolated from the outside world as a Northwoods Wisconsin pond. That all changed in 1959. The U.S. and Canadian governments obliterated the lake’s natural barrier to invasive fish, plants, viruses and mollusks with the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway, a system of channels, locks and dams that opened the door for ocean freighters to sail up the once-wild St. Lawrence River, around Niagara Falls and into the heart of the continent.

Small boats had access to the lakes since the 1800s thanks to relatively tiny man-made navigation channels stretching in from the East Coast and a canal at Chicago that artificially linked Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River basin.

But the consequences of opening a nautical freeway into the Great Lakes for globe-roaming freighters proved disastrous — at least 56 non-native organisms have since been discovered in the lakes, and the majority arrived as stowaways in freighter ballast tanks.”

New species additions are a natural part of ecosystem life. Rejoice for those around you and admire the beauty of all organisms. Mourn a changed ecosystem do not. Miss them do not. Attachment leads to jealously.

A City in Denmark with Low Waste→

William F. Hewitt, writing for ENIA:

Symbiosis Center

““In 2006, 85 percent of our production was coming from, you can call it ‘black’ fossil fuels, the rest from green sources,” says Niels Christian Kjær, a top executive at DONG Energy and past president of the Kalundborg Symbiosis. “By 2040, we will switch that number: 85 percent will be green energy.”

With support from the central and municipal governments and the European Union, along with the companies, Kalundborg has attracted the attention of business people and investors, policy makers and students from all over the world who come to learn how they can create their own industrial symbiosis. In 2014 alone, it’s had visitors from Turkey, Thailand, Finland, Sweden, Kenya and Denmark, representing a farmers’ association, a development agency, an industrial think tank, an environmental institute, a waste management company, and several universities and high schools.

“What is excellent about Kalundborg is that the town hall has full focus in this,” says Kjær. “They want to be the leading town, number one in innovation. They want to have people come from all over the world to learn and say, ‘Wow.’””

To be Sustainable is to face the truth, and choose. Capture energy, or light. Be a recycler, or eliminate waste.

Lake Erie is Polluted→

Behind Toledo’s Water Crisis, a Long-Troubled Lake Erie
By Michael Wines, The New York Times:

Haraz N. Ghanbari/AP

“It took a serendipitous slug of toxins and the loss of drinking water for a half-million residents to bring home what scientists and government officials in this part of the county have been saying for years: Lake Erie is in trouble, and getting worse by the year.

Flooded by tides of phosphorus washed from fertilized farms, cattle feedlots and leaky septic systems, the most intensely developed of the Great Lakes is increasingly being choked each summer by thick mats of algae, much of it poisonous. What plagues Toledo and, experts say, potentially all 11 million lakeside residents, is increasingly a serious problem across the United States.

But while there is talk of action — and particularly in Ohio, real action — there also is widespread agreement that efforts to address the problem have fallen woefully short. And the troubles are not restricted to the Great Lakes. Poisonous algae are found in polluted inland lakes from Minnesota to Nebraska to California, and even in the glacial-era kettle ponds of Cape Cod in Massachusetts.”

If you don't advance new pollution control efforts now — if you choose the quick and easy path — you will become an agent of darkness.

Public Transit Rankings→

Reuben Fischer-Baum, reporting for FiveThirtyEight:

“New York is the only U.S. system to register on the international level. Most of New York’s trips were on the MTA subway (62 percent), followed by MTA buses (21 percent), NJ Transit buses (4 percent) and LIRR commuter trains (3 percent).

New York, Washington, Boston and Philadelphia — the urban centers of the “Northeast Corridor” — all fall into the top 10 in trips per resident. They also fall into the top 10 of urban population. Do certain regions tend to support better public transit, or is this just a product of city size and density?

Among all 290 cities, there’s a clear relationship between trips per resident and both total population (the r-squared is 0.41) and population density (r-squared = 0.21). ”

Brent Moore

Size matters, ... Look at New York and D.C. Judge them by size, do you?”

Rewilding Europe: reconstructing ecosystems by looking mostly forward→

Elizabeth Kolbert, writing for The New Yorker:

“The newest land in Europe could be used to create a Paleolithic landscape. The biologists set about stocking the Oostvaardersplassen with the sorts of animals that would have inhabited the region in prehistoric times—had it not at that point been underwater. In many cases, the animals had been exterminated, so they had to settle for the next best thing. For example, in place of the aurochs, a large and now extinct bovine, they brought in Heck cattle...

Perhaps it’s true that genuine wildernesses can only be destroyed, but new “wilderness,” what the Dutch call “new nature,” can be created. Every year, tens of thousands of acres of economically marginal farmland in Europe are taken out of production. Why not use this land to produce “new nature” to replace what’s been lost? The same basic idea could, of course, be applied outside of Europe—it’s been proposed, for example, that depopulated expanses of the American Midwest are also candidates for rewinding....

As more aurochs remains have been unearthed and more sophisticated research has been done on them, it’s become clear that the Heck brothers’ creation is a far cry from the original—Heck cattle are too small, their horns have the wrong shape, and the proportions of their bodies are off. All of which has led to a new, de-Nazified effort to back-breed the aurochs. This project is based in the Dutch city of Nijmegen, about fifty miles southeast of Amsterdam, and is entirely independent of the Oostvaardersplassen. Still, it reflects much the same can-do, “what is lost is not lost forever” approach to conservation. ”

We should increase the biodiversity of our domesticated places and conserve species diversity in our wild places. With regard to 'New Nature', we can admire the beauty of organisms regardless how they arrived in the dynamic, very changing world we also live in.

May you be with Nature. May Nature be with you.

Let 'Em Eat Dirt→

Timothy Egan, writing for the New York Times:

“Today, serendipity is something that’s penciled on a kid’s busy, busy, busy calendar. But let that kid wander outside the parental orbit, or explore beyond the bounds of controlled play — God forbid. Twenty-first century Huck doesn’t light out for the country. He plugs into it. And a frog, or a snake, or a spider — ewwww! You’ll never understand what robin’s-egg blue is until you see the color, in a nest in a tree.

What’s wrong with our boys? So goes the lament. They’re insecure, falling behind, unsure of their role. Maybe letting them have a day without a GPS would help.

When you push parents about being too wussy, they bring up a couple of things. Safety, of course. Seatbelts, life jackets, sun screen and bike helmets are great leaps forward. No argument there. But beyond the common-sensical, how long should the leash be?”

Alba Soler

Nature is part of life. Rejoice for those around you who immerse into the full Force of Nature. Mourn those that do not. 

Quest to Save Groundwater→

Elizabeth Dunbar, reporting for MPR:

“Summer water bills that spike and cities that scramble to pump enough groundwater to keep neighborhoods lush and green, even during droughts, are nothing new in the Twin Cities.

But fresh doubts about groundwater supplies are testing long-held assumptions that water is both cheap and plentiful. New technology, more aggressive pricing structures and shifting attitudes are beginning to change how some Minnesotans view and care for their lawns.”

Rachel

Named must your insanity be before banish it you can. The waste of drinking water that is.

Lake of the Woods Algal Blooms are Worsening→

Ron Meador, reporting for MinnPost:

Lee Grim

“Key points from the International Joint Commission’s second “State of the Basin” report, released on Tuesday:

- Massive blooms of blue-green algae are on the rise in Lake of the Woods, despite reductions in flows of phosphorus into upstream lakes and streams from industrial polluters; some of this seems to be driven by phosphorus releases from lake sediments, and some by climate change.
- Rivers in the basin are showing improved water quality, primarily because of controls on paper mills and other industrial sources.
- Walleye, lake trout and sturgeon populations have been recovering as a result of special management efforts, and certain bird populations have returned to healthy levels thanks to reduced pesticide use.
- Mercury levels in fish remain high in many lakes, such that anglers are advised to check the status of public-health advisories before eating any fish caught anywhere in the basin.”

IJC State of the Basin Report

We always find what we dumped in.

Define “Beneficial”, Define "Harmful"→

Dave Levitan, writing for Conservation:

grafvision - shutterstock.com

“When we discuss invasive Asian carp, we’re usually just talking about a few specific species of carp, the silver, black, and the bighead. This is with good reason—in some parts of the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers those fish now make up 97 percent of the total biomass, with no predators around to hold them back. The grass carp, meanwhile, though found in all of the Great Lakes and plenty of other places, was actually introduced—theoretically, this was done quite carefully—and has not been considered a nuisance species at all. But new research suggests that even those invasives we think of as beneficial, often aren’t.”

You will find only what values you bring in.

Urban Walkability→

Nyla Hughes, writing for the Great Lakes Echo:

“Despite recent economic challenges, Detroit’s future as a walkable city is promising, according to a recent study by George Washington University.

Significant improvement is expected due to the investment in 40 office, retail, and residential structures by Quicken Loans, according to the study by Chris Leinberger and Patrick Lynch at the university’s school of business. Also, Detroit’s suburbs of Ann Arbor, Ferndale, Royal Oak, and Birmingham are making strides in walkable urbanism.”

Michigan Municipal League; Traverse City, Michigan: 

Foot Traffic Ahead: Ranking Walkable Urbanism in America’s Largest Metros

Quantify must your amenity be before cherish it you can.

Lakes Legacy→

Tony Randgaard, writing for MinnPost:

Joe Bielawa

“Last week, Mound Mayor Mark Hanus and state Sen. David Osmek, R-Mound, went on the offensive to blame the Met Council for the disastrous recent overflow of raw sewage into Lake Minnetonka and three other lakes. The Met Council fired back, stating that its sanitary sewage systems worked normally during the record weekend rainfall and were not the cause of the overflow. While this is sorted out, it might be instructive to look back at how we once worked together to clean up our landmark city lakes.”

Control, control, you must learn control! To be Honorable is to face the truth, and choose. Give off light, or darkness. Be a candle, or the night.”

Classic Charles Marohn Articles→

Quantification is the path to the light side. Information leads to action. Action leads to change. Change leads to Strong Towns.