Can We Restore Everything?→

Bob Lalasz, for the Science Blog of the Nature Conservancy:

“Beth Tellman: Seeking to return to “the historical trajectory of ecosystems before human activity” (if we actually knew what that was) would require the dislocation or livelihood transformation of hundreds of millions of people in places like Bangladesh, Haiti or Latin America. If we care about people as much as other species, this line in Murcia et al — “all ecosystems should be considered candidates for restoration, regardless of the requisite resources” — should instead be about restoring socio-ecological systems for their ecosystem services. Novel ecosystems like urban wetlands and rain gardens will be critical to restoring such services as watershed infiltration capacity (Tellman et al). ”

Spiny Water Fleas and Green Water→

UW-Madison Center for Limnology

“The spiny water flea could be making Lake Mendota greener through eating algae-grazing Daphnia, compounding a problem that stems from manure and fertilizer run-off into the lake. It’s really difficult to understand when and where the spiny water flea will be abundant and have negative effects on ecosystems.”

Let Fallen Trees Lie→

Tom Spears, reporting for the Ottawa Citizen:

Macomb Paynes; Flickr

“Jereme Gaeta and his research group at the University of Wisconsin were studying what biologists call coarse woody habitat — trees that die and fall into the water near shore, where they become waterlogged and sink. Property owners often get rid of these slimy old logs. They get in the way of swimmers and boats. They look messy.

But Gaeta’s team says it’s better to let fallen logs lie. This is going to do bad things to fish. In their little lake just south of Lake Superior, the Wisconsin group watched as species either became more rare or disappeared completely. “When lake levels go down,” Jereme Gaeta says in a news release, “they lose all that refuge, so they’re pretty much forced to live in the foraging arena, where they’re directly interacting with their predators — in our case largemouth bass.” He said the vulnerability of the small fish goes “through the roof.””

Drought-driven lake level decline: effects on coarse woody habitat and fishes by Jereme W. Gaeta, Greg G. Sass, Stephen R. Carpenter

The Miracle of Minneapolis→

Derek Thompson, writing for CityLab - The Atlantic:

Matthew Paulson

“How has the city stayed so affordable despite its wealth and success? The answers appear to involve a highly unusual approach to regional governance, one that encourages high-income communities to share not only their tax revenues but also their real estate with the lower and middle classes.

In the 1960s, local districts and towns in the Twin Cities region offered competing tax breaks to lure in new businesses, diminishing their revenues and depleting their social services in an effort to steal jobs from elsewhere within the area. In 1971, the region came up with an ingenious plan that would help halt this race to the bottom, and also address widening inequality. The Minnesota state legislature passed a law requiring all of the region’s local governments—in Minneapolis and St. Paul and throughout their ring of suburbs—to contribute almost half of the growth in their commercial tax revenues to a regional pool, from which the money would be distributed to tax-poor areas. Today, business taxes are used to enrich some of the region’s poorest communities.

Never before had such a plan—known as “fiscal equalization”—been tried at the metropolitan level. “In a typical U.S. metro, the disparities between the poor and rich areas are dramatic, because well-off suburbs don’t share the wealth they build,” says Bruce Katz, the director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. But for generations now, the Twin Cities’ downtown area, inner-ring neighborhoods, and tony suburbs have shared in the metro’s commercial success. By spreading the wealth to its poorest neighborhoods, the metro area provides more-equal services in low-income places, and keeps quality of life high just about everywhere.

For decades, Minneapolis was also unusually successful at preventing ghettos from congealing. While many large American cities concentrated their low-income housing in certain districts or neighborhoods during the 20th century, sometimes blocking poor residents from the best available jobs, Minnesota passed a law in 1976 requiring all local governments to plan for their fair share of affordable housing. The Twin Cities enforced this rule vigorously, compelling the construction of low-income housing throughout the fastest-growing suburbs. “In the 1970s and early ’80s, we built 70 percent of our subsidized units in the wealthiest white districts,” Myron Orfield said. “The metro’s affordable-housing plan was one of the best in the country.””

Environmental Chemicals are Wreaking Havoc to Last a Lifetime→

Elizabeth Grossman, writing in Ensia:

BrianAJackson; iStockPhoto

“Some chemicals — lead, mercury and organophosphate pesticides, for example — have long been recognized as toxic substances that can have lasting effects on children’s neurological health, says Bruce Lanphear, health sciences professor at Simon Fraser University. While leaded paint is now banned in the U.S., it is still present in many homes and remains in use elsewhere around the world.

Children can also be exposed to lead from paints, colorings and metals used in toys, even though these uses are prohibited by U.S. law (remember Thomas the Tank Engine), and through contaminated soil or other environmental exposure as well as from plastics in which lead is used as a softener. Mercury exposure sources include some fish, air pollution and old mercury-containing thermometers and thermostats. While a great many efforts have gone into reducing and eliminating these exposures, concerns continue, particularly because we now recognize that adverse effects can occur at exceptionally low levels.”

People Post Pictures of Clear-Water Lakes More Than Turbid Lakes→

Roberta Kwok, writing for Conservation Magazine:

Shutterstock

“People were more likely to visit bigger lakes with clearer water, the researchers report in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. For every additional meter of water clarity, visitors drove nearly an hour longer to get to and from the lake, spending about $22 more in travel costs. Lakes with boat ramps also were more popular.

The study authors estimate that improving a lake’s clarity by one meter would bump up the average number of visits by 1,389 per year. The overall number of lake visits in a region might not increase, since the number of people travelling to the murkier lakes could drop. But if people opted to visit a lake rather than, say, a pool, the total number of visits could rise.”

Recreational demand for clean water: evidence from geotagged photographs by visitors to lakes By Bonnie L Keeler, Spencer A Wood, Stephen Polasky, Catherine Kling, Christopher T Filstrup, and John A Downing

Farmers Need to Plant Cover Crops to Reduce Nitrogen Pollution→

Dan Charles, reporting for NPR:

Paul Jasa/University of Nebraska-Lincoln

“Here’s the bigger picture, Carlson says: During the summer, when crops are growing on those fields, they scarf up most of the soil’s available nitrate. The plants need it to grow. And as a result, during that period, there’s usually not much nitrate flowing into streams and rivers.

”Our problem is, we only grow plants for five months out of the year,” she says.

Most Midwestern farmers grow corn and soybeans, which are warm-season plants. And after they’re harvested, for seven long months, from fall until the following spring, nitrate continues to form naturally in the soil. It can be released from decaying plant roots or from microbes, “and if there’s nothing to suck it up, to scavenge it, then it’s going to move,” Carlson says.

Rainfall and melting snow will carry it downstream to Des Moines and beyond. It damages wildlife and fisheries all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Many other rivers and estuaries suffer from similar problems.

We won’t fix this mess by using less fertilizer, Carlson says. “The way to fix this is, we need to have something growing from October to May.””

Minnesota Shoreland Buffer Laws Inconsistently Enforced→

Doug Smith, reporting for the Star Tribune:

Dakota County Photo

“Farmer Ken Betzold has planted 50-foot-wide buffer strips on more than 1½ miles of riverland he owns in Dakota County.

And not entirely for charitable reasons. A state law requires such buffers along some lakes, rivers and streams in agricultural areas. And unlike some Minnesota counties, Dakota County strictly enforces it.

Though the requirement means taking some cropland out of production, Betzold, 72, of Castle Rock Township, sees the benefit of the buffer strips.

“It stops dirt from running into the river, and cleans the water,’’ he said. “There’s a cost, but you have to weigh that with the benefits to the environment.””

What is the Best Urbanization or Conservation Strategy?→

Dave Levitan, writing for Conservation Magazine: Conservation this Week:

Scorpions and Centaurs; Flickr

“Cities are going to get bigger. With more than half the world now living in urban areas, and that percentage growing steadily, that means the concrete and steel will have to stretch out into areas that are currently forest and farm and grass. But just letting that process happen without a plan is likely to be a very bad idea.

A study published in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning simulated the urbanization process in the Piedmont region of North Carolina out to 2032. The question the authors posed was, essentially, what land will suffer in favor of the ever-growing city?

“The application of conservation planning scenarios in land change modeling is often implemented by simply treating priority areas as protected, essentially removing them from eligibility for development,” the authors wrote. “However, full protection of all priority resources is highly unlikely in urbanizing areas.” By understanding what types of policies are likely to result in the best use of land, that type of failed prohibition might be avoided.”

Simulating urbanization scenarios reveals tradeoffs between conservation planning strategies

“Monica A. Dorning, Jennifer Koch, Douglas A. Shoemaker, and Ross K. Meentemeyer

Abstract
Land that is of great value for conservation can also be highly suitable for human use, resulting in competition between urban development and the protection of natural resources. To assess the effectiveness of proposed regional land conservation strategies in the context of rapid urbanization, we measured the impacts of simulated development patterns on two distinct conservation goals: protecting priority natural resources and limiting landscape fragmentation. Using a stochastic, patch-based land change model (FUTURES) we projected urbanization in the North Carolina Piedmont according to status quo trends and several conservation-planning strategies, including constraints on the spatial distribution of development, encouraging infill, and increasing development density. This approach allows simulation of population-driven land consumption without excluding the possibility of development, even in areas of high conservation value. We found that if current trends continue, new development will consume 11% of priority resource lands, 21% of forested land, and 14% of farmlands regionally by 2032. We also found that no single conservation strategy was optimal for achieving both conservation goals. For example, strategies that excluded development from priority areas caused increased fragmentation of forests and farmlands, while infill strategies increased loss of priority resources proximal to urban areas. Exploration of these land change scenarios not only confirmed that a failure to act is likely to result in irreconcilable losses to a conservation network, but that all conservation plans are not equivalent in effect, highlighting the importance of analyzing tradeoffs between alternative conservation planning approaches.”

Downtown is for People→

Jane Jacobs's 1958 essay in The Exploding Metropolis:

“This year is going to be a critical one for the future of the city. All over the country civic leaders and planners are preparing a series of redevelopment projects that will set the character of the center of our cities for generations to come. Great tracts, many blocks wide, are being razed; only a few cities have their new downtown projects already under construction; but almost every big city is getting ready to build, and the plans will soon be set.

What will the projects look like? They will be spacious, parklike, and uncrowded. They will feature long green vistas. They will be stable and symmetrical and orderly. They will be clean, impressive, and monumental. They will have all the attributes of a well-kept, dignified cemetery. And each project will look very much like the next one: the Golden Gateway office and apartment center planned for San Francisco; the Civic Center for New Orleans; the Lower Hill auditorium and apartment project for Pittsburgh; the Convention Center for Cleveland; the Quality Hill offices and apartments for Kansas City; the downtown scheme for Little Rock; the Capitol Hill project for Nashville. From city to city the architects’ sketches conjure up the same dreary scene; here is no hint of individuality or whim or surprise, no hint that here is a city with a tradition and flavor all its own.

These projects will not revitalize downtown; they will deaden it. For they work at cross-purposes to the city. They banish the street. They banish its function. They banish its variety...”

Jane Jacobs received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to expand this critique of modernist planning and design on downtowns into a book, and in 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities was published.

Drug Runoff→

Sam Machkovech, reporting for Ars Technica:

“Last week, the American Chemical Society released the results of a 2011 study that analyzed water contamination levels measured before, during, and after a massive music festival in Taiwan. In news that shocked roughly 27 parents, the 600,000-plus crowd of young people who stormed that year’s Spring Scream fest introduced considerable amounts of MDMA (ecstasy), caffeine, and antibiotics into nearby rivers, along with a range of over-the-counter, prescription, and illegal drugs.

What was less obvious, according to the study (which was coordinated by multiple medical research facilities in Taiwan), was the intense impact an isolated, highly attended event could have on a region’s ecology. “To our knowledge, up to now no study has comprehensively dealt with Emerging Contaminants (ECs) residues and demonstrated the impact of tourism—especially of a time limited mass event,” the report stated.”

Impacts of Emerging Contaminants on Surrounding Aquatic Environment from a Youth Festival

Always two there are, no more, no less: a human and a consequence.

Minnesota Governor Proposes 50-foot Shoreline Buffer Enforcement→

Dave Orrick, reporting for the Pioneer Press:

Dave Orrick

“Gov. Mark Dayton said Friday that he will ask the Legislature to expand the law protecting Minnesota streams and ditches against erosion and chemical runoff.

At an annual Department of Natural Resources meeting on outdoors issues in Brooklyn Park, Dayton said he wants a minimum 50-foot buffer strip protecting every stream, drainage ditch and river in the state...

Current state laws mandate vegetative buffers of 50 feet or 16.5 feet around many waterways in agricultural lands, but the laws aren’t uniformly enforced, and many waters are exempt.

As a result, crops often are planted up to the edge of those waterways and runoff polluted with fertilizer and pesticides can spill into the water, eventually reach the Mississippi River.

”The rules are inconsistent, and they’re enforced inconsistently,” Dayton said. “I would propose that a 50-foot buffer be required on all riparian lands in Minnesota, and that 50-foot buffer be enforced, and I mean enforced.”

American's Suburban Experiment→

Charles Marohn, writing for Strong Towns:

“Concurrent with the advent of the automobile came many other technological and social changes that allowed modern humans to dream big. Cheap fossil fuels. Advanced communication technology. Centralization of decision-making. Proactive management of the national economy. We attacked the problems of the traditional city with the fervor of a great nation empowered to think differently.

We developed different building types. Different building styles. We came up with different ways of arranging things on the landscape and different ways of connecting these places. We developed an entirely new system of regulation to rapidly replicate this new pattern along with the financing mechanisms and economic incentives to make it happen.

This all seems normal to us today – for most of us, it is all we have ever known – but it is critical to understand that, in the course of human history, the American development pattern is one of the greatest social, cultural and financial experiments ever attempted. The knowledge we apply daily in this experiment wasn’t developed by trial and error over the slow grind of centuries. ”

If into a social experiment you go without adapting, only pain will result when the experiment becomes unsustainable. Then the dark side will cloud everything.

Suburbs and Poverty→

Alana Semuel, reporting for the Atlantic:

Alana Semuel

“Fully 88 percent of Atlanta’s poor live in the suburbs, according to Confronting Suburban Poverty in America, by Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube of the Brookings Institution. Between 2000 and 2011, Atlanta’s suburban poor population grew by 159 percent, while the city’s poor population remained essentially flat.

It’s not just Atlanta—across much of the country, poverty is increasingly a problem found in the suburbs. The number of poor in the suburbs surpassed the number of poor in the cities in the 2000s, and by 2011, almost 16.4 million suburban residents lived below the poverty line, according to Kneebone and Berube.”

Once you start down the path of decline, forever will it dominate your destiny, drain your coffers it will.

Our Clothing Fibers are Getting into Our Lakes→

John Flesher, writing for the AP:

Star Tribune

“Scientists who have reported that the Great Lakes are awash in tiny bits of plastic are raising new alarms about a little-noticed form of the debris turning up in sampling nets: synthetic fibers from garments, cleaning cloths and other consumer products.

They are known as “microfibers” — exceedingly fine filaments made of petroleum-based materials such as polyester and nylon that are woven together into fabrics.

”When we launder our clothes, some of the little microfibers will break off and go down the drain to the wastewater treatment facility and end up in our bodies of water,” Sherri “Sam” Mason, a chemist with the State University of New York at Fredonia, said Friday.

The fibers are so minuscule that people typically don’t realize their favorite pullover fleece can shed thousands of them with every washing, as the journal Environmental Science & Technology reported in 2011...

Ominously, the fibers seem to be getting stuck inside fish in ways that other microplastics aren’t. Microbeads and fragments that fish eat typically pass through their bodies and are excreted. But fibers are becoming enmeshed in gastrointestinal tracts of some fish Mason and her students have examined. They also found fibers inside a double-crested cormorant, a fish-eating bird.

”The longer the plastic remains inside an organism, the greater the likelihood that it will impact the organism in some way,” Mason said, noting that many plastics are made with toxic chemicals or absorb them from polluted water. She is preparing a paper on how microplastics are affecting Great Lakes food chains, including fish that people eat.

There’s also a chance that fibers are in drinking water piped from the lakes, she said. Scientists reported last fall that two dozen varieties of German beer contained microplastics.”

Looking? Found something you have, eh? Our stuff keeps moving with negative consequences. Happens to everything we create sometimes this does.

Plastic, Plastic, Plastic→

Marcus Eriksen et al., research reporting in PLOS ONE:

“Plastic pollution is ubiquitous throughout the marine environment, yet estimates of the global abundance and weight of floating plastics have lacked data, particularly from the Southern Hemisphere and remote regions. Here we report an estimate of the total number of plastic particles and their weight floating in the world’s oceans from 24 expeditions (2007–2013) across all five sub-tropical gyres, costal Australia, Bay of Bengal and the Mediterranean Sea conducting surface net tows (N = 680) and visual survey transects of large plastic debris (N = 891). Using an oceanographic model of floating debris dispersal calibrated by our data, and correcting for wind-driven vertical mixing, we estimate a minimum of 5.25 trillion particles weighing 268,940 tons. When comparing between four size classes, two microplastic <4.75 mm and meso- and macroplastic >4.75 mm, a tremendous loss of microplastics is observed from the sea surface compared to expected rates of fragmentation, suggesting there are mechanisms at play that remove <4.75 mm plastic particles from the ocean surface.”

George Carlin

“We’re so self-important. Everybody’s going to save something now. Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails. And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. Save the planet, we don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet. I’m tired of this shit. I’m tired of f-ing Earth Day. I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren’t enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don’t give a shit about the planet. Not in the abstract they don’t. You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They’re worried that some day in the future they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn’t impress me.

The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are!

We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.

The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, ‘Why are we here?’

Plastic… asshole.”

— George Carlin

Thinking of One's Legacy Produces an Environmentalist→

Tom Jacobs, writing for the Pacific Standard:

Stuart Monk/Shutterstock

“Most Americans believe that climate change is occurring. But as a recent Pew survey confirms, we don’t view it as a high-priority problem. After all, we reason, its most severe impacts won’t be felt for decades. So why change our behavior now?

New research points to a simple way to shift this maddening mindset. A team led by Columbia University psychologist Lisa Zaval finds people take the issue of environmental sustainability much more seriously if they have been thinking about their legacy.”

In a dark place we find ourselves, and a little more thought of the future lights our way.”

Great Lakes Polluted More By Land Activities and River Sources

Newswise:

US EPA

“A chemical oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island who measured organic pollutants in the air and water around Lake Erie and Lake Ontario has found that airborne emissions are no longer the primary cause of the lakes’ contamination. Instead, most of the lakes’ chemical pollutants come from sources on land or in rivers.

According to Rainer Lohmann, professor of chemical oceanography at the URI Graduate School of Oceanography, water quality in the Great Lakes has been slowly improving for many years. Historic studies of the lakes has usually pointed to atmospheric deposition as the primary cause of pollution in the lakes – from industrial emissions, motor vehicle exhausts and related sources. But as air pollution has decreased, he has found a shift in the source of Great Lakes chemical pollutants.

“Some contaminants still come from the atmosphere, but it is now mostly from wastewater plants, contaminated industrial sites and inputs from major rivers,” Lohmann said. “It’s quite a bad mix, but it’s getting better. And hopefully the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative will improve things even more.”

His research was reported today at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. Lohmann and a team of volunteers deployed passive samplers – sheets of polyethelene that absorb pollutants – in the air and water at more than 30 sites around Lake Erie and Lake Ontario from 2011 to 2014. Following chemical analysis, he determined the quantity and source of a variety of pollutants in the lakes.

Legacy pollutants – those that have been banned for decades but still are detected at relatively high levels, like pesticides and PCBs – have declined considerably in the lakes, except near the outflows of the Detroit River and the Niagara River and, to a lesser extent, near Erie and Rochester. The waters around Cleveland, however, have lower concentrations of these legacy pollutants.

“Because these pollutants have been banned for such a long time, they’re no longer in the atmosphere in high concentrations and so aren’t entering the lakes that way,” said Lohmann. “But we still see evidence of them coming from Superfund sites and old industrial sites. And the lakes are now cleansing themselves by releasing these old pollutants back to the atmosphere.”
Of increasing concern, according to the URI professor, is a group of what he calls “emerging contaminants” that are increasingly being detected in water bodies around the world. These include personal care products, like synthetic musks, and industrial flame retardants, among others.

“Musks come from products like deodorants and shampoos, so they are primarily detected near where lots of people live, since they don’t get broken down in wastewater treatment facilities,” Lohmann said. “As the lakes are slowly being cleaned of old organic pollutants, they are replaced by all kinds of compounds of emerging concern.””

Big Farms and Groundwater→

Kate Golden, reporting for WisconsinWatch:

USDA; Flickr.com

“Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources Secretary Cathy Stepp on Tuesday declined a large dairy farm’s request that she overturn an administrative law judge’s ruling on its water discharge permit.

Among those watching the case for potential statewide impact are rural residents, groundwater advocates and farmers — including Kinnard Farms co-owner Lee Kinnard, whose permit is at issue. “It doesn’t affect Kinnard Farms. This affects the dairy industry,” Kinnard said. “This is much bigger.” The Kewaunee County farm plans to expand by 55 percent to about 6,200 cattle. But neighbors challenged its permit. They wanted the DNR to impose groundwater monitoring and a cap on the number of cattle.

After a four-day hearing including testimony from both sides, Judge Jeffrey Boldt ordered those conditions. In his Oct. 29 ruling, Boldt blamed widespread well pollution in the area on what he called a “massive regulatory failure.””

When you fail to consider groundwater, careful you must be. For the loss of groundwater bites back.

Bad Engineering Leads to Excessive Roads→

Eric Jaffe, writing for CityLabs: 

Alan Parker, Flickr.com

“Some of the most trusted planning tools used to manage vehicular traffic have shown themselves to be pretty harmful to city life in certain ways. A metric known as Level of Service, which aims to minimize automobile delay at an intersection, can act as a huge obstacle to public transportation projects. A design book calling for 12-foot lanes, an engineering staple across the country, can speed up car flows and endanger public safety as a result.

It might be time to add one more established tool to the questionable list: the Trip Generation Manual from the Institute for Transportation Engineers, a common guide that tells traffic planners how many car trips will be generated by a new commercial or residential development project.”

In a dark place we find ourselves, and a little more knowledge with a little less dependence on assumptions lights our way.