Lakeshore Living. News on lake ecology, lake pollution, land use, natural resource management, community, and lakeshore living.
Jason G. Goldman, writing for Conservation:
“Fish rely on forests for their very survival. That’s because, in a way, they eat them. Debris from forests finds their way into rivers, lakes, and streams. The bacteria in the water break down the leaves and bits of tree bark and dead animals. Then the zooplankton eat those bacteria, and the fish eat the zooplankton.”
Matt Tillett
One can eat only what is brought in.
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.”
Jason G. Goldman, reporting for Conservation This Week:
Pahz
“In the urban parts of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, around three hundred thousand tons of salt are dumped onto roads each winter. That’s because sodium chloride lowers the freezing point of water, making the formation of ice on the surface of roadways less likely. It keeps drivers safer, since car tires can hold onto imperfect road surfaces better than they can grip slippery, wet ice.
But dumping all that salt into the ecosystem doesn’t just keep drivers safer. It also changes the chemical composition of the soil near roadways, and that added sodium chloride finds its way into plants, into bodies of water, and into animals. And all that added salt could shift the dynamics of natural selection and the animals’ fitness, altering the course of evolution. That’s how natural selection works – it’s neither good or bad – but it’s worth at least being aware of the sometimes nuanced effects that human behavior have on natural ecosystems.”
Mudhole? Slimy? Salty? My home this is!
Eric Peterson, writing for Elevation DC:
“Most of Denver’s 4,000 alleys have been paved, and there are plans to pave the remaining 150 unimproved alleys by 2016. But the alleys are home to tens of thousands of dumpsters, which in turn attract illegal dumping, which in turn means plenty of scavenging.
But change is afoot. Last fall, the Rialto Cafe organized Brewer’s Alley, a beer-tasting event, in the alley behind the restaurant. Several plans are in the works to activate downtown alleys...”
somenametoforget
Garrett Coakley
[You] I can’t believe it. [Me] That is why you fail.
USGS news room:
“Methylmercury contamination is decreasing in some lakes in northern Minnesota as a result of reduced mercury pollution, according to a U.S. Geological Survey study. Mercury from man-made pollution is converted in lakes and wetlands to methylmercury, a toxic form of mercury that accumulates in fish.
The study also found that levels of mercury, sulfate and hydrogen ion in precipitation decreased from 1998 to 2012 in northern Minnesota. These decreases likely resulted from reduced atmospheric pollution in the U.S. and Canada, and may have contributed to the reduced methylmercury contamination in the [Voyageurs National] park’s lakes.”
J Stephen Conn
Do or do not. There is no try.
Kate Prengaman, writing for Ars Technica:
“The massive migration of monarch butterflies is amazing—the insects go from grazing on milkweed plants as caterpillars in the midwest to spending winters in Mexico. But Monarch populations have been on the decline for some time, with a variety of factors being considered: lost habitat in Mexico, damage from pesticides, or climate change.
Conservation strategy for a species that traverses thousands of miles is complicated business, so a team of scientists from the University of Guelph decided to sort out which factors were the most responsible for the monarch’s population declines—changes at the breeding grounds, the wintering sites, or climate changes.
Their conclusions suggest that we can’t blame deforestation in Mexico for this environmental problem. The monarchs are suffering from a lack of milkweed, the only plant the caterpillars eat. In fact, a model built by the researchers suggested that monarch populations were four times more sensitive to the loss of milkweed on their breeding grounds than the loss of the forested habitat in which they spend the winters.”
William Warby
When you look at the dark side, careful you must be. For the dark side looks back. Nature surrounds us and binds us. Help it we must. Neglect and indifference to nature leads to the dark side.
Quantification is the path to the light side. Information leads to action. Action leads to change. Change leads to Strong Towns.
Henry Grabar, reporting for Salon:
“When Bill Drayton looks at New York, he sees a tremendous missed opportunity. The structural skeleton of this metropolis, as in other American cities of its age, is the hollow block: a group of homes, row houses or low multi-family buildings grouped around an open middle space. Former New York City Mayor Robert Wagner once estimated that 60 percent of the city’s 3,000+ blocks were “hollow.”
Drayton would like to see every one of those hollows transformed into a private park for surrounding residents. Each core is nearly an acre and a half — twice the size of a playground at an NYC primary school; one-and-a-half times the size of the median NYC park. As an open expanse of grass beneath great trees, a shared backyard would be large enough for soccer games, picnics and barbecues, but secured from the surrounding city by the walls of neighbors. A checkerboard of private backyards is, he believes, a squandered resource.
In cities where large parks are few and far between, the future of parkland is right in front of us (or behind us, as it were): thousands of shared parks, playgrounds for the city’s children, meeting places for its adults, and crucibles for building community ties.”
You will know the good from the bad when you are calm, at peace. Passive. A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and green redevelopment, never for destruction.
Jay Walljasper, writing for MinnPost:
“As to improving life for those who are struggling economically, Penalosa recommends: “There is nothing that government could do that would have a higher impact on middle-class families than to enable them to switch from two cars to one, and for poor families to switch from one to none.” In a region like Minneapolis-St. Paul, he says, two-car suburban families typically spend 27 percent of their income on transportation.”
Jeremiah Peterson
Yes, a city's strength flows from public transportation. But beware of the dark side. Sprawl, suburbia, lack of transportation options; the dark side of the Force are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will, as it did most cities in North America.
Maciej Ceglowski writes and presents about the shortcomings of the internet and along the way uses our car dependence as an analogy:
“The Interstate made it possible to build things no one had imagined before. Like McDonald’s! With a nationwide distribution network, you could have a nationwide, standardized restaurant chain...
Postwar car culture also gave us the landscape we call suburbia. To early adopters, the suburbs were a magical place. You could work in the city while your spouse and children enjoyed clean living in the fresh country air. Instead of a crowded city apartment, you lived in a stand-alone house of your own, complete with a little piece of land. The suburbs seemed to combine the best of town and country.
And best of all, you had that car! The car gave you total freedom.
As time went on, we learned about the drawbacks of car culture. The wide-open spaces that first attracted people to the suburbs were soon filled with cookie-cutter buildings. Our commercial spaces became windowless islands in a sea of parking lots.
We discovered gridlock, smog, and the frustrations of trying to walk in a landscape not designed for people. When everyone has a car, it means you can’t get anywhere without one. Instead of freeing you, the car becomes a cage.”
Your cars, you will not need them.
Rachel Cernansky, writing for ENSIA:
“Today, due mainly to increasing drought conditions and groundwater depletion, nonpotable uses are expanding. Municipalities are figuring out more ways to treat sewage less like waste and more like a resource. In addition to watering golf greens, recycled water is being used for street cleaning, fire-fighting, geothermal energy production, preventing seawater intrusion into freshwater aquifers, industrial processing, commercial laundering, restoring natural wetlands and creating constructed wetlands.
“Everything that goes down the drain here is treated and reused,” says Greg Flores, vice president of public affairs for the San Antonio Water System, citing university campuses, the San Antonio River Walk, and Toyota and Microsoft facilities as examples.
The more notable change, however, is that a growing number of municipalities are shifting toward or considering “potable reuse” — recycling wastewater into drinking water.”
Steve Crise, AWWA
Do not assume anything. Clear your mind must be if you are to discover the real benefits of water reuse.
From Conservation This Week:
Jan nijendik
“The world’s predators – mammals such as gray wolves, jaguars, tigers, African lions, European lynx, wolverines, and black and brown bears, along with sharks – are declining at an alarming rate. While those species are suffering for a variety of reasons, one of the main sources of mortality is human in origin. It’s a bit counterintuitive, since predators are some of the more charismatic of species. And charismatic critters are the easiest ones about which to convince people to care.
...since hunters at one time helped to conserve game species (like deer and ducks), then hunters would also help conserve predators who are designated as legal game. One program in Wisconsin was designed explicitly to increase tolerance for wolves by allowing 43 of the endangered canids to be killed each year. And yet while the program was in place, researchers found a decrease in tolerance and in increase in the desire to kill wolves. Legalizing the hunting of predators, even in a restricted way, didn’t have the intended outcome.”
In a dark place we find ourselves with regard to sharing the world with predators, and a little more knowledge lights our way.
Kate Shaw Yoshida, reporting for Ars Technica:
“Invasive species take a toll on their surroundings. But that doesn’t mean that invaders are universally destructive. Ecosystems are dynamic, and once an invasive species arrives, it can develop intricate relationships with other organisms. Sometimes, an invader becomes an integral link in a delicate ecological web, complicating efforts to eradicate it...
In most cases, the overarching goal of conservation efforts should be a healthy and well-functioning ecosystem, rather than the complete and immediate eradication of an invader.”
Clapper Rail - USFWS
To answer power with power, the Jedi way this is not. In war, a danger there is, of losing who we are. War with new arriving species, win you will not. A different game you should play.
Environmental News Service:
“For the first time, monthly concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere topped 400 parts per million in April throughout the Northern Hemisphere, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reports.
This threshold is reinforces evidence that the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities are responsible for the continuing increase in heat-trapping greenhouse gases warming the planet said the WMO.”
Curt Carnemark / World Bank)
Severely altered an atmosphere, we has. How embarrassing. How embarrassing.
Michael Bryson, writing for the Center for Humans & Nature:
“As someone who often yearns to travel and seek adventure in distant and topographically complex locales but rarely gets such opportunities, I also am drawn to Dubkin’s forthright and instructive “credo” in the book’s introduction (The Natural History of a Yard):
It seems to me that people are forever traveling great distances, and journeying to strange countries, to see things that, if they only knew it, exist beside their own doorstep. The common animals, birds and insects that are found in a little yard in the city are as fascinating to watch, and as fruitful in affording the careful observer a glimpse into some of the mysteries of nature, as are the rare and uncommon creatures of some far-off land. Whether one goes to nature for truth, or for beauty, for knowledge or for relaxation, these things can be found in a yard in the city as well as in a tropical jungle, for they exist in the common, simple, everyday things all about us, as well as in the rare and exotic. (p. 6)
Notable here is the argument that commonplace nature—the familiar (and, implicitly, unloved species)—holds as much interest and value as the charismatic species endemic to foreign locales.”
Always in motion is the yard. Blind we are, if beauty of the common animals we do not see.
Rebecca Kessler, writing for Yale Environment 360:
“In North America, a few nature-like fishways were completed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the approach has gradually gained popularity since, particularly in New England, the Pacific Northwest, Minnesota, and parts of Canada. Nature-like fishways — which also go by names like “roughened channels” and “stream-like fishways” — are catching on elsewhere, too, including Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. ”
Sarrancolin Dam on France's Neste River (Photo credit: FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Department)
Size matters. Look at this, Judge the fish passage by hydrology, do you?
Brooks Miner, reporting for FiveThirtyEight:
“Acid rain was rare among environmental problems in that it had a viable solution, and these days it’s often hailed as an environmental success story. The market worked as intended, sulfur and nitrogen emissions declined and rain became less acidic. And just two weeks ago, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision upholding the federal government’s authority to regulate power plants in this manner.
But what about the lakes and streams that were already so acidic? Nearly 25 years since those changes to the Clean Air Act, water bodies in the Northeast have recovered, while those further south have not.”
Flickr - Rainforest Action Network
Decrease the burden on lakes affected by past emissions, lower pollution in the present would.
The Capital Times and Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism collaborated on a four-part series to examine threats to the quality of the Madison area’s spectacular lakes, and ambitious new efforts that seek to improve them.
Part 1:
WisconsinWatch
“The Yahara lakes — Mendota, Monona, Wingra, Waubesa and Kegonsa — are no clearer than they were 30 years ago, despite intensive efforts to improve them. During that time, lake scientists said, the increased heavy rainfalls that are part of climate change most likely offset gains from better land use practices, by washing giant volumes of pollution into the lakes.
“They are flatlining,” said Steve Carpenter, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who has studied the Yahara lakes since the 1970s. “There are no trends in the lakes. The lake water quality is not getting better. It’s not getting notably worse. It’s as if the interventions we’re doing are just holding the line, running in place like the red queen in Alice in Wonderland.””
Part 2:
Mike DeVries -- The Capital Times
“According to experts, agriculture accounts for roughly 70 percent of the phosphorus runoff in watersheds across the state, with urban runoff accounting for the remaining 30 percent.
It is closer to an 80-20 split in the Yahara Watershed in Dane County, said Carpenter, who hopes to find a way for the dairy industry to thrive while protecting water quality.
The agricultural runoff that often turns Madison’s lakes unpleasant by creating algal blooms that look and smell bad, clog boat motors and close beaches is expected to only get worse.”
Part 3:
City of Madison Engineering Department
“A Milwaukee scientist who has found sewage migrating from old pipes through soil and into the stormwater lines that drain to lakes or streams says the problem is likely to occur in Madison and cities nationwide.
“In any urban area, this is going to be an issue,” said Sandra McLellan, professor and senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences.
From 2008 to 2012, McLellan and colleagues from her laboratory analyzed more than 1,300 water samples from stormwater outfalls in six Milwaukee-area watersheds, looking for a bacterium called Bacterioides that indicates the presence of human sewage...
They found the marker in every watershed. In the Menomonee River watershed alone, more than half of the outfalls were chronically contaminated with sewage.”
Provided here to explain consequences on lake water quality, a lot of information is. Hmmmmmm.
Grace Hong
From National Science Foundation Discoveries:
“Scientists engaged in a study of long-term water quality trends in Midwestern lakes found some good news: little change in water clarity in more than 3,000 lakes. Look deeper, and the research becomes something more: a chronicle of a new source of data for scientists, data from residents of towns and villages surrounding the lakes.
The results are published this week in a paper in the journal PLOS ONE. The paper co-authors analyzed almost a quarter of a million observations taken over seven decades on 3,251 lakes in eight Midwestern states.”
Adam Hinterthuer, writing for University of Wisconsin - Madison:
“What the authors found was that, on an individual scale, some lakes were getting clearer while others were not. However, says Lottig, combining all that data together indicates that there is a slightly increasing trend in water clarity at a regional scale. “Unfortunately,” he says, “the data don’t exist to explain those patterns.” Lottig hopes efforts like the “Cross-Scale Interaction” or “CSI Limnology” project, an international team of scientists that he’s a part of, can collect global data on things like water chemistry and aquatic biology that will add context to the data generated by citizens.
Though the citizen scientist dataset limited his team’s ability to explain the patterns they observed, Lottig says it suggests that such information can play a role in shaping future research — a possibility that has some scientific organizations taking notice.”
Remember, science's strength flows from the sample size. But beware. Controls, randomization, replication, and statistical inference. The light side are they. Once you start down this path, forever will it dominate your destiny.
Sean Nealon, writing for University of California - Riverside:
“In a first-of-its-kind study of how a material some think could transform the electronics industry moves in water, researchers at the University of California, Riverside Bourns College of Engineering found graphene oxide nanoparticles are very mobile in lakes or streams and therefore likely to cause negative environmental impacts if released...
As production of these nanomaterials increase, it is important for regulators, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, to understand their potential environmental impacts, said Jacob D. Lanphere, a UC Riverside graduate student who co-authored a just-published paper about graphene oxide nanoparticles transport in ground and surface water environments.
“The situation today is similar to where we were with chemicals and pharmaceuticals 30 years ago,” Lanphere said. “We just don’t know much about what happens when these engineered nanomaterials get into the ground or water. So we have to be proactive so we have the data available to promote sustainable applications of this technology in the future.””
Do not assume anything. Clear your mind must be, if you are to discover the real issues behind this product.
Lakeshore Living and Walleye. This blog builds upon these books, which provides insight into relevant aspects of environmentally-sensitive lakeshore living and the life of walleye. This blog may provide some meaning for people interested in improving lakeshore living and understanding walleye and fisheries management.
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