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.