Dont waste time on the internet

Want to contribute to science without donating a body part or spending years of your life trying to find meaning in inscrutable sets of numbers? Then I can help! A group of OSU students are designing a sustainable landscaping WebApp to compete in a sustainability design competition sponsored by the EPA. By taking a few moments to complete our online survey you can provide us with information that will inform our design process and help make our WebApp as useful and relevant as possible. If you are interested, please follow this link to the online survey as well as more information about the project:
http://oregonstate.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_8oVpoM9V89ske1f

The Dust Bowl

A couple weeks ago I  asked you to watch a documentary on the Dust Bowl that aired on the American Experience.

Tonight PBS is airing another documentary on the Dust Bowl, this one by Ken Burns.  As Donald Worster says in the preamble to the movie, the Dust Bowl is one of the greatest human caused ecological disasters of all time.  It is a good idea for all of us to learn its lessons.

What's on Tap for Week 7

I am currently in Tokyo, one of the most densely populated and resource use intensive cities on the planet.  But much like Chicago, where I was a couple of weeks ago, Tokyo is a leader in developing a sustainable urban life.  One example of this public transportation.  The Tokyo Metro is but one part of of one of the most comprehensive and integrated systems on the planet.  I have so far not had to wait more than five minutes for a train!

We will talk a bit more explicitly about urban systems in the next week.  This week, we take a closer look at pest management.  We spend a considerable amount of effort dealing with pests....effort which translates into energy use and many practices that have a profound impact on the ecology of the planet, not to mention our own health.  The  lectures this week explore the ecological concepts that are fundamental to pest management, and they also explore ways that we can use an understanding of ecology to lessen the resource use and environmental impacts associated with pest management.  The readings carry on that theme....and include some fun videos about parasitoid wasps!

In the homework assignment I have you explore a simple mathematical model that describes populations of predators and their prey.....the basic thing we are trying to manage when we do pest management.  You should go over the lectures before trying the homework.

What's on tap for week 5

No video this week.  I have a nasty cold that involves laryngitis.  The laryngitis and the fact that I am barely presentable even when I am fit and hale made me refrain from showing you my sickly mug...here is a shot of me in healthier, happier times.

This week we continue our exploration of the nebulous concept of sustainability.  Last week I gave you a definition of what sustainability is using broad ecological concepts.  But can we translate those broad concepts into something more practical….something that could say help us design a more sustainable agricultural system?  The lectures this week explore this more practical side.  While it is only a brief overview, I hope the lectures give you a sense of some of the ways that people are trying to apply the sustainability concept…as well as some of the challenges.  The lectures conclude with a discussion of perhaps the most practical agricultural sustainability consideration of them all: soil conservation.  The documentary “Surviving the Dustbowl” continues that theme.  It is a loose adaptation of this fantastic book: “The Worst Hard Time”

The other readings consider different ways of achieving agricultural sustainability.  Note the longish webinar on no-till systems is optional.

For the homework assignment I have you set up an outline for doing a Life Cycle Assessment. 

Have a great week, and I hope nobody is sick!

Cool Canadian Roof

I saw this video today at the Green Roofs for Healthy Cities Conference in Chicago.

I also visited the Laurie Garden, a wonderful bit of Millennium Park

Keystone of Cuteness

The story of how the decline of sea otters caused dramatic changes to one of the world's most productive marine ecosystems has become the classic example of a trophic cascade, told to nearly all ecology students (including those in Hort 318!)   But becoming a classic textbook example doesn't mean that we know everything.  This paper, by UC Santa Cruz researchers describes the role the cute little critters play in the global carbon cycle.  To access the paper you will need to do it through your OSU library account (or have a membership to the ESA), but you can read a press release about the story here.

A [Soylent?] Green New World

This week the Wall Street Journal has an in depth report titled "Innovations in Agriculture".  Although most of the WSJ is behind a paywall, I think the whole report is available for free (for now).   The stories are wide ranging, but focus largely on technological innovations to improve the efficiency, and perhaps arguably--the sustainability of agriculture.  The picture above is from a story on large scale vertical farming in cities.  There are also stories on robotic field hands, the most effective no-till strategies, developing perennial versions of wheat, using water more efficiently, as well as a number of other stories. 

There is a long tradition of using technology to achieve sustainability, even among "hippies".  See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Catalog

But many folks harbor mistrust of technological approaches, particularly when applied to agriculture.  These suspicions have perhaps been most notably apparent in the debate over GMO technologies.  For these folks, parts of the WSJ report may read more like something out of Soylent Green.What do you think should be the role of technology in developing a future agriculture?  How about the related question of the role of "capital" in agriculture....exemplified by the industrialists, bankers, venture capitalists, and stock traders who form the bulk of the readership of the WSJ?

What's on Tap for Week 4

What's on Tap for Week 3

Wrecked Reef

This disturbing article in the Washington Post, describes this research report in PNAS that concludes the Great Barrier Reef has lost half its corals since 1985.

Besides, being noteworthy in its own right, this story relates to our class in a couple of ways.  First, in this week's lecture I point out that the Odum brothers attempt to understand the immense complexity of Pacific Coral reefs played a significant role in their development of the modern ecosystem concept.  Also, as the Washington Post article points out: "[the PNAS study] highlighted how even the world’s most protected marine areas are under assault from natural forces and causes linked to the human activity that is resulting in climate change."  This is another example that points the ubiquitous reach of human impact, as well as the challenges of managing even seemingly "pristine" or "wild" systems.

What's on Tap for Week 2

Material World

Although it was pretty dull and square, the advice Dustin Hoffmann got in the Graduate was probably not too far off the mark.  Plastics are a ubiquitous part of our lives, both in good ways, and in bad.  Even places as down to earth and natural as organic farms can use a surprising amount of plastic.  This informative film talks about the use of plastics in farming and about what becomes of that plastic.  It was  produced by a student team here at OSU that participated in the EPA People, Prosperity, and the Planet (P3) student design competition for sustainability.  They were selected last April at the national competition for Phase II funding for a project designing a biodegradable natural fiber based mulch that will serve as an alternative to plastic (polyethylene) mulch film.

Raucous Spring

Rachel Carson is one of the people that you can choose to profile for this week's homework assignment.  Timely enough, there was a very nice profile of her in last Weekend's New York Times Magazine.  In an age when problems like global warming or the challenge of feeding an ever growing and seemingly insatiable human population can seem hopelessly insurmountable, I think Rachel Carson's legacy is a powerful beacon of hope.  A number of environmental....or really human....success stories such as the return of Bald Eagles and other birds of prey from the brink of extinction are a direct result of the awareness that Carson raised.  It is a reminder that we can wisely manage our interaction with the planet if we put our mind to it.

What's on tap for Week One

The Other Inconvenient Truth

Check out this interesting talk by Jonathan Foley on what he calls "The other inconvenient truth"

Oysters on the Thin Shell

Climate change is not the only worrisome potential consequence of releasing large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.  As the atmospheric concentration of CO2 increases, the amount that dissolves into the world's oceans also increases making ocean water more acidic.  It is an introductory chemistry lesson on a giant scale.  You can read a nice synopsis of the process here.  This acidification can have a range of disquieting, but not very well understood impacts.  This story in today's Oregonian describes one of them: declines in shellfish populations.

The Corner Greenhouse

As we will talk about in the later weeks of the course, there has been a recent resurgent interest in urban agriculture in the U.S.....everything from household scale gardens and poultry raising to commercial scale production of a sometimes surprising scale.  Check out this interesting story from the NYT

Keeping Food on the Table

This New York Times Op-Ed piece draws attention to a new report called called “Achieving Food Security in the Face of Climate Change”  It is a compelling read (for a report!), and although it takes as its theme the threat climate change poses to our food supply, many of the issues it discusses are more systemic....such as the meat loving diets of wealthy countries.

Where have all the flowers gone?

Check out this  interesting story that was on NPR recently.  It illustrates the challenges we increasingly face as the dominant management stewards of the planet.  Almond growers in CA rely on large numbers of domesticated honeybees to pollinate their crop.  Their reliance on this one species is partly a function of the giant almond orchards themselves.  The orchards replaced the diverse vegetation that supported large numbers and diversity of local native bees, requiring the farmers to turn to commercially supplied replacements.  However, once the almonds stop flowering, the region suddenly becomes a floral desert for bees.  So bee wranglers move the bees to where there are flowers.  Amazingly, all the way to North Dakota!  However, as commodity prices have risen for things like corn, Dakotan farmers are replacing flowers with corn.  This is beginning to put the bee wranglers in a bind.

The story itself is brief, but there are a lot of issues embedded here, from payment for ecosystem service schemes, to the impact of large scale agriculture on biodiversity, to our reliance on a handful of species and their expert management for our global food supply.

Complete Makeover

Episode 1: Retrofitting Suburbia (preview all episodes here) from MPC on Vimeo.

Style and design seem to age in one of two ways.  Things either become retro chic classics or they turn into cautionary tales of wrong headed thinking.....case in point: leisure suits.  A number of scientists and public policy specialists are arguing that the design of our cities since WW II is definitely in the leisure suit category.  But unlike the aesthetically odd,but mostly harmless leisure suit, they argue that the recent design of our cities has contributed to a host of serious problems including the epidemics of obesity, diabetes and stress, the social isolation of teenagers and the elderly, and the loss of ecosystem services.   This interesting series explores these issues and looks at some of the ways people are rethinking the design of our urban spaces.  From the website:

A provocative new 4-hour series, "Designing Healthy Communities." Host/Narrator Richard Jackson, MD, MPH, looks at the impact our built environment has on key public health indices – obesity, diabetes, heart disease, asthma, cancer and depression. Dr. Jackson connects bad community design with burgeoning health costs, then analyzes and illustrates what citizens are doing about this urgent crisis by looking upstream for innovative solutions.

9 Billion Mouths

Check out this great website put together by the Center for Investigative Reporting.  From the website:

"Food for 9 Billion" is a yearlong examination of the challenge of feeding the world at a time of growing demand, changing diets, rising food and energy prices, shrinking land and water resources, and accelerating climate change. It is a collaborative project of the Center for Investigative Reporting, Homelands Productions, PBS NEWSHOUR and American Public Media's Marketplace.

Conservation Crossroads

Both the science and practice of conservation seem to be sitting at a crossroads.  In one direction is a preservation path that has helped save some precious parts of  our world's biodiversity legacy.  Preservation tools include creating biodiversity preserves,  restoring degraded habitats and landscapes, and as a last resort preserving germplasm in captive breeding programs.  However, in recent years a number of people have started to argue that preservation alone is not sufficient...or even in many cases a misguided  approach.  They argue that conservation (and the environmental movement in general)  needs to take a less idealistic and more pragmatic path that is focused more on achieving functional goals and less on broadly preserving past natural history.  Clearly, reality is not as dichotomous as that, but there does seem to be a subtle yet profound shift in thinking and outlook going on.  Two recent articles describe this new thinking.  This op-ed piece in the New York Times provocatively titled "The age of Man is not a disaster" is co-authored by Peter Kareiva, the chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy.  This nice article in the Washington Post also provides a nice summary of the new ideas.

Also, in book club this term we are reading "Rambunctious garden: saving nature in a post-wild world" by Emma Marris" (the lead author of that NYT op-ed piece.  Check out the short video by Emma.