Earth Hour 2008

Accouncements of this fun activity have been popping up all over the 'net, but perhaps you haven't heard of it yet, so I figured I'd give it some coverage.
Last year, folks in Sydney Australia gathered together and made announcements for everyone to turn their lights off city wide for an hour. The event was to document how much energy was saved during that time and to send a message to the world about the need for action to slow global warming.
This year's event is worldwide, with cities from around the globe joining in, like Copenhagen, Toronto, Chicago, Melbourne, Brisbane, Tel Aviv, and yes, San Francisco.
Even if you do not live in SF, you can participate in sending the message. First, check out the website, and second, find out events near you.
For those of us here in the Bay, lights out 8 pm on Saturday the 29th. Make a party of it, and then, go outside and up look at all those bright stars.
For the Earth Hour website

Sudden Oak Death is Spreading into our National Parks

One of my clients, Dave Deppen, tipped me off to this article a few days ago. For those of you folks out there who haven't yet heard about Sudden Oak Death (SODs), this is a good place to start learning.
Point Reyes National Seashore is a 71,000-acre preserve on a peninsula that juts out from the San Andreas fault, the western-most tip of the lower 48 states. This spot is a favorite destination for whale watchers, bird lovers, and hikers. Unfortunately, these same visitors are inadvertently spreading a deadly fungal disease into pristine oak forests, on the bottoms of their shoes. So far the park has seen a 75% mortality rate in tan oak forests, the most susceptible to SODs. Park officials warn that the loss of these oaks has far reaching effects, from reduced habitat for animals to increased fire risk. One solution is to close the park during wet winter months when the disease is most likely to spread, according to researchers.
Sudden oak death was first discovered in Mill Valley in 1995, reportedly through infected nursery stock from Europe. SODs is a fungus that oaks of Europe are resistant to, but the genetics of our American live oaks are of a different enough lineage that it has proven fatal. Since its discovery, the disease has spread to 14 California counties, a few in Oregon and California, and cases have been reported in other states as far as the midwest. As of yet there is no known cure for the disease.
There are simple things we can all do to help prevent the spread of SODs, most importantly by not introducing it on our hikes. Shoes, tools, tires, and anything else that come into contact with the soil can and should be disinfected before travelling to a new place. Being careful not to transport infected wood is important. Also, being sure to buy plants from reputable nurseries that have passed inspection can prevent you from bringing it home to your own garden. Remember, plant material and soil are vectors for the disease, and there are many carriers of the disease, including a long list of native plants.

For starters, check out the Marin IJ article here
Then, if you'd like to know more, go to the Wikipedia site, with photos and links to more sites, including host plant lists and maps.

Biomimetics: Design by Nature

"What has fins like a whale, skin like a lizard, and eyes like a moth? The future of engineering."

This article was sent to me from Nick Beck, friend and fellow Biologist at the Design Table (BaDT- pronounced BAT). National Geographic's Tom Mueller follows acclaimed evolutionary biologist Andrew Parker as he scours the globe looking for nature's solutions to some of our most pressing problems. We start out in the deserts of Australia, studying a tiny lizard that absorbs water through its skin and funnels it into its mouth at a stunning rate. Marvels such as this give engineers a clue as to how to solve the issue of clean drinking water where that resource is scarce.
He is but one of many biologists who practice Biomimicry, myself included. Researchers in Biomimicry have made cell phone screens easier to read, improved solar panels, revolutionized industries such as carpetting, made buildings that cool themselves, and changed the way engineers think about transportation. And that's just the beginning.

For the entire article, link here

Happy Solstice Everyone!

Special Announcement: Solar is Now Cheaper than Coal

Yes, that's right. The race has been on for the company who could break the United States of their coal addiction, with even Google jumping in to get it started. A Silicon Valley start-up called Nanosolar has cracked the code and developed what the blog Solve Climate is calling "the iTunes of solar." They shipped their first solar panels at $1 a piece. How did they manage to make solar panels so cheap? They focused on the manufacturing process instead of working on the technology, as so many others who are trying to lower the cost. Nanosolar had developed a way to speed up the manufacturing process, by printing solar cells on sheets of aluminum. Bot only does this breakthrough speed up the process by a hundred fold, it also reduces the amount of material by as much. Nanosolar CEO Martin Roscheisen is reserving the first three commercially-viable panels. One is staying on display at company HQ; one has been donated to San Jose's Tech Museum of Innovation. And the other is on sale at eBay, according to the article.
Check out the original story in Solve Climate, and have a chuckle at how much people are willing to pay on eBay for the limited edition release of the $1 solar panel.

The Value of a Tree

I asked in the last article the question "How much is a tree worth?"
A few weeks ago I found myself asking that very same question while working on a project just west of Yosemite, in Tuolomne county. I have been working as an ecological consultant on a 5 building college facility, nestled beneath a mature oak forest. We've been designing what we hope will be the coolest Child Care Facility ever, where kids will have a connection to nature and a desire to protect it when they get older.
We're shooting for LEED certification on this, and the oaks are a key aspect of the project. In fact, without them, our goal of eliminating the need for summer air-conditioning, would never be possible.
These are amazing trees, most sporting trunk diameters of three feet of more, and canopies that stretch out as far as 50 feet! Many of the trees are spaced so closely together that they have combined their shapes to form single arching canopies, their roots surely as equally entwined with each other. With summer temperature reaching sometimes in the hundreds for days at a time, these oaks will provide much needed shade for the buildings.
Building a structure in a mature forest is no easy task. There are many different professionals who work as a team when planning any building project, and this one has the added responsibility of ensuring the health of these oaks. Normal projects involve altering the land dramatically, as when trenching to lay utilities, grading to make flat surfaces for foundations and handicap accessibility. Here we are not able to do any of that without first considering the effect on the oaks. Our buildings will be unique and attuned to their habitat, with special features such as piers over roots, which I like to think of as buildings on their tiptoes.
We are now in the process of awaiting permitting, and eventually the plans will go for public bid. It is an unfortunate fact that in the contracting world, the low bidders are the ones who get the contracts. This often means cutting corners wherever possible, including 'accidentally' losing trees to reduce labor costs. With all this special design put into being so careful, I found I was crouched over my specifications asking myself, "How much are these trees worth if we had to replace one?"
I started reviewing the tree protection specification from other LEED projects. The numbers I came up with, when applied to my project, gave the average value of these oaks about $25,000 each, a negligible loss considering the value of the project itself. I got some figures on replacement of the trees, and was astounded to find the price of a mature oak at half the size would cost $36,000. This is just the price of tree and installation, without any of the administrative costs and the loss of the tree's benefit to the building it was supposed to shade.
In the end, the architects and I decided on a number that would make each tree worth around $100,000. I wince to think of any value attached to an organism that has taken so long to reach this size. I think of the Miwok Indians who must have planted these trees and then nursed them to maturity, knowing that future generations would be able to harvest the acorns to make food. Will they survive to nurture the next generation of children who will tumble across play yards to find acorns of their own?
In the end, I know that if I have done my job, no one will ever know I was there, but they will simply think, "What a beautiful place to be a kid."

How Much is a Tree Worth?

It's been a while since I've written anything, I know. I've been up to my elbows in work here, folks! It seems there is much to be done for an ecologist these days.
Today while perusing my blogs I found this short piece on Costa Rica and their new program to reduce their carbon emissions to zero by the year 2021. An ambitious plan for a country that has lost more than a dozen amphibians due to habitat loss.
Costa Rica is a land known for its natural beauty, rainforests, and 5% of the world's species. Ecotourism is one of the leading industries in this tiny country, but one must not forget that the main economic force guiding this country is agriculture.
According to the article in Treehugger, "Just days ago, Costa Rican President Oscar Arias planted the 5 millionth tree of the year near his office in the capital San Jose...By the end of 2007, Costa Rica will have planted nearly 6.5 million trees, which should absorb 111,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year."
While this may be a wonderful idea, one must ask: What kind of trees are they planting, and how could they possibly take place of all the trees felled each year to make way for soybeans and other crops?
"Costa Rica is facing a wood shortage and must now import wood from other countries to meet domestic demand. And currently, there are no incentives for allowing abandoned agricultural land to regrow naturally into forest, so farmers are either shifting their agricultural land use to or planting native or exotic tree species for reforestation incentives," according to rainforest advocates at mongabay.com
And just how much carbon can a new tree absorb in comparison to a mature forest? The EPA, who I trust as the right arm of the Bush administration, claims, " Carbon sequestration rates vary by tree species, soil type, regional climate, topography and management practice. In the U.S., fairly well-established values for carbon sequestration rates are available for most tree species. Soil carbon sequestration rates vary by soil type and cropping practice and are less well documented but information and research in this area is growing rapidly. Pine plantations in the Southeast (US) can accumulate almost 100 metric tons of carbon per acre after 90 years, (Do we have 90 more years?) or roughly one metric ton of carbon per acre per year," and they go as far as to say that carbon sequestration capabilities are reduced as a forest matures, as if to say plantations are better than natural forests. Costa Rica and the US aren't the only countries with faulty logic.

Officials from the Indonesian ministry of agriculture and the palm oil industry have been touting that palm plantations sequester more carbon than native rainforests. Not so, according to Mongabay.
" As is the case with any plant, oil palm trees do sequester carbon sequester carbon as they grow -- carbon is a basic building block of plant tissue. Nevertheless, the process of clearing forest in order to establish a plantation releases more carbon than will be sequestered by the growing oil palms. So while a new oil palm plantation may grow faster -- and sequester carbon at a higher annual rate -- than a naturally regenerating forest, in the end the oil plantation will still store less carbon (50-90 percent less over 20 years) than the original forest cover."

Not to mention that fact that these trees planted will not match the loss of habitat due to clear cutting of the rainforests.
Nice try, Costa Rica, but you still have a long way to go.

For the abbreviated article on Costa Rica in TreeHugger

Hair and Mushrooms Help Volunteers Clean OIl Spill in SF

http://tinyurl.com/3457eo

DNA increases LED power

Andrew Steckl has revealed an intriguing new piece of evidence that nature has more power than humans have yet to imagine. His work on photonics at the University of Cincinnati has focuses on intensifying the light produced by LEDs with biological material.
“Biological materials have many technologically important qualities — electronic, optical, structural, magnetic,” says Steckl. “DNA has certain optical properties that make it unique. It allows improvements in one to two orders of magnitude in terms of efficiency, light, brightness — because we can trap electrons longer.”
His big idea- using salmon sperm. His main focus is on creating products that are more environmentally sustainable. This material is a readily available bi-product of the fishing industry, and is thrown away by the ton.
Steckl believes that the use of biological materials has the potential to improve all our current electronic technologies, plus close the loop between industry and waste.
For the original article link here
For the hype at Tree Hugger and ignorant comments from the peanut gallery link here

Fungus Reveals New Forms of Energy Production

A surprising discovery published back in May reveals that some fungi can create energy with the help of melanin, a pigment also found in human skin. The fungi was first discovered within the contaminated chambers of the Chernobyl reactor, where the flourishing black masses were first observed by scientists Ekaterina Dadachova and her colleagues at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in New York City.
In laboratory conditions, it was found that the fungi Cryptococcus neoformans, when exposed to radiation, uses this energy as a plants would use light, to produce growth. Scientists have long known certain fungi can digest plastics, oils and asbestos. Now they are hopeful that this breakthrough could provide insight as to how to deal with nuclear waste and produce food in conditions with high radiation levels. But this discovery is also important in that so far it was thought that only plants could make food through photosynthesis.
And what does this mean for the melanin in our bodies- is it possible that this plays some unknown role in humans?
Dadachova pointed out to Technology Review that "The mechanism of this process needs to be established. It took at least two decades and the work of several research groups to determine the mechanism of photosynthesis."

For the abstract in PubMed.com
Check out the interview with Dadachova in Technology Review

Nuclear Energy Revisited

Friday I attended a lecture on Nuclear Energy as a green power source, hosted by the Long Now Foundation. Nuclear energy is green? So say the experts, Dr Gwyneth Cravens and Dr. Richard Anderson.
Coal is the largest source of energy in our country, accounting for 51% of the total production. Nuclear is at 20%, hydor is 7%, and alternatives make up the rest of the whole. Hydro is currently maxed out, and coal accounts for an estimated 24,000 deaths in the United States per year, in addition to the damage atmospherically.
According to the experts, when comparing the environmental advantages of nuclear energy over coal, there is no doubt that nuclear energy is a safe and viable alternative. Uranium is plentiful and readily available. The size of the power plants is extremely small compared to the vastness of coal plants. Nuclear can provide the base load required of power plants, the available power so when demands spike, there is enough power to meet immediate demands. Unfortunately, wind and solar cannot provide the base loads. And nuclear energy creates virtually no atmospheric pollution, in fact, it creates hardly any waste at all. The amount of spent energy left over if a person received their power from nuclear their entire life could fill one coke can. With coal, a person would fill nine train cars full of waste in their lifetime. Now multiply that by the number of people out there. Where will we put all that waste?
One of the big concerns about nukes is their potential to expose people to radiation. The lecturer said she had her fears, and researched this possibility quite extensively. The Three Mile Island accident resulted in successful containment and cleanup, and injured no one. The nuclear plants she visited emit approximately .09 millarems per year (millarems is a factor that calculated human safety). She pointed out an interesting fact- there are .1 millarems in a banana. In some urban areas in the United States, the Bay Area for example, people are exposed to thousand times more millarems per year, from naturally occurring radiation.
Cigarettes expose humans to astounding amounts of radiation, and the lecturer claimed that most nuclear scientists would recommend quitting smoking as the number one way to reduce your radiation exposure.
Chernobyl seems to be the best example of a bad accident involving nuclear power. Indeed, Chernobyl is not a good example of potential accidents, as it was built without any containment fields, without the proper subterranean design found elsewhere, built from inferior materials, and without the proper safety features. It was the worst of the worst, and when the reactor began to malfunction, workers who were not properly trained interrupted the only safety measure that would have prevented the meltdown- they turned off the water.
The threat of terrorism is negligible, according to the experts. They pointed out the incredible safety meausres at plants, the building construction that would stop any air attack, and the fact that stealing the enriched fuel for making bombs would be impossible to accomplish, as the sheer weight of the material and the immediate personal danger alone are too gargantuan.
Its not life someone can slip a piece of enriched uranium in their pocket and sneak off with it.
The last point of the lecture was the disposal of nuclear waste. First off, nuclear engery is now 98% efficient when spent fuels are reprocessed. This means that previously disposed materials could be reclaimed and reused. That technology is always improving. A new storage facility in New Mexico, located in a salt deposit thousands of feet below the earth's surface has been created by the military, and the only thing stopping us from safely storing material here is politics.
It seems the biggest obstacle to creating more power plants and reducing the effects of coal and global warming are public opinion and the fact that we are producing no young nuclear physicists. We simply cannot ramp up quickly enough to slow global warming.
While I must admit I was surprised, and still hold some skepticism about the safety of storing spent nuclear waste, I found myself imagining a world where the power was nuclear. It seems like something we greenies should definitely start looking into, instead of immediately rejecting the idea, as I did once.
For a link to the Long Now Lecture Series
For the Wiki on Three Mile Island

Animals Can Smell CO2

There are folks out there who swear that ticks are some of the most fascinating creature on the planet in terms of their specialized adaptations and cool body gadgets, but I'm starting to have a real appreciation for mice these days.
This article in today from Nature features a group of scientists who have discovered that mice can smell Carbon Dioxide as keenly as humans smell sulpher gas. In experiments where mice could make choices on where to run, they chose those areas with lower concentrations of CO2, and when exposed to extreme levels, actually exhibited distressed and aggressive behavior as a result.
Though the article doesn't say exactly why mice detect CO2, they do say that the sensitivity is great enough to be able to detect the carbon in human exhalation. I imagine these stealthy little creatures actually seeking out the dwellings of people in search of food.
There aren't any plans in the making yet for using the CO2 mouse detection in any practical application, but this is nonetheless an important discovery.
For the original article in Nature (get it while it's still available!)

Can an Event Like Burning Man Go Green?

Ok, so I've been bad lately, leaving my readers hanging and not writing. But I have a good excuse: I'm working too hard in preparation for going to Burning Man!
I hope you all have heard about it by now, since I seem to be the last BM virgin on the planet here in the Bay Area. Now why would a sensible woman like me go to a crazy pagan orgy with tons of people, drugs and art in the desert, you ask? It's not just the party that intices me, you can be sure of that!
I've written in the past about the new urban revolution going on, with folks who believe we can revitalise our cities, making them walkable communities with less impact on the environment. It seems the cities of history benefited from the lack of planning and architects, growing slowly over time and organically, making them better places to live.
It may sound crazy, but this is my reason for being interested in Burning Man and Black Rock City, the ultimate temporary city. I'm curious as to how a place can be built in a week with little planning and permitting, a place that is filled with 40k people, yet still walkable, with a central meeting place and organized events. It sounds like a blast, and what better way to test the limits of new urbanism?
So I'm headed east in 10 days, with plenty of water and costumes. I've borrowed all I can in an attempt to curb my consumption, and I'll be decorating my bike with crepe paper instead of fake fur. I'll recycle everything I can, of course, and offset the carbon from my trip through TerraPass. I've made arrangements with a photographer friend of mine, and the two of us are going to document the event. More to come on that later....
In the meantime, for all you Burners out there, check out the official BM Environmental Blog, with tips on how to make your experience more eco-friendly.
If you're going, I will be camping with a group at 6:30 and B, with a big shiny Airstream trailer in the corner of our site. My name is June Bug on the Playa, so come look me up, and we can talk ecology.

Frito Lays and Chip Carbon Count

Frito Lays sells under the name Walkers in the UK, where chips are called crisps. The biggest difference you'll find these days between the two names is the carbon rating on the Walker's bag, letting consumers know the amount of carbon created in producing the snack.
According to Terra Pass, "Walkers have been working with a government-funded organization called The Carbon Trust to calculate the carbon emissions caused by one bag of chips. It is the first company to begin carbon-labeling as part of a pilot scheme to label products with their environmental impact."
The shocking news is that to produce a 34.5 gram bag of chips, 75 grams of carbon are produced.
Check out the rest of the article for more statistics and pretty charts.
TerraPass newsletter link here

Fish Populations Controlled by Sex Changes

Florida has been inundated with invasive species. Since the 60's, Florida's rivers have been slowly filling with an Aquatic plants called Hydrilla. To combat the invader, Tilapia fish were brought in, along with two species of snail. Unfortunately, these exotics preferred the native species of vegetation over the Hydrilla, sending the biodiversity of Florida's rivers into further turmoil.
Now Juan Gutierrez, a bio-mathematician at Florida State University, thinks he can solve the problem. Gutierrez has developed a mathematical model of a population in which males carry two different sex chromosomes (XY) and females are XX. Unlike humans, the sex of a fish can be changed by exposure to different sex hormones. According to this week's Nature,
"By exposing genetic males to female hormones, or vice versa, it is therefore possible to create a male that is genetically XX, or a female that is XY or even YY. Such individuals, with the genetics of one sex but the physical characteristics of the other, are referred to as carriers of 'Trojan sex chromosomes'."
After simulated generations with the model, it was shown that when there was an introduction of YY females, the subsequent offspring were predominantly male, and that this male dominance only strenghtened with each new cycle. Eventually there were only males left in the population.
Gutierrez stresses that this only a model, and further study will have to be made to determine if this technique would truly work in a real environment. However, the potential could be the final solution to the problem, as this is not introducing genetically modified organsims or new potentially invasive exotics into the rivers.
I wonder if any thought has been given to whether introducing these altered fish runs the risk of increasing their fertility rates and creating a population explosion.
For the article in its entirety in news@Nature

The Latest Online Interactive Craze

I stumbled on this old article today from April, but I think many of you would still find the info relevant. Craig Newman of Craiglsist and researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and Texas A&M have developed a technology in hopes of attracting gamers and nature- enthusiasts, one in a series of webcam projects planned around the globe. Craig has set up a webcam from his window out to Sutro Forest in San Francisco. Users can operate the camera to watch for birds. They're hoping that online viewers will help him spot the elusive Ivory Billed Woodpecker, and that in the future other web cam projects will help conservation efforts and allow people to view nature from their homes.
I found this post while trying to sync my iPhone browsers to my laptop. Remote control webcams, laptops, and iPhones, desk-surfing wildlife videos- what next?
Wired Article

Installation Uses Free Energy

Love it! A small group of artists calling themselves Thoughtbarn have created another work of art that is both beautiful to look at and environmentally conscientious. The piece is called CO2LED, and features solar powered lights and recycled plastic bottles that illuminate an otherwise boring median strip in Arlington Virginia. The installation was one of the temporary art pieces for the 2007 Planet Arlington World Music Festival.
On their website are a few pdfs documenting the proposal process, fundraising and installation, for all of you struggling artists out there!
The CO2LED website and slide show

The Energy Debate is Heating Up

As I perused through my greenblogs and news mags this morning, I kept seeing a theme emerging among the articles- the power play. How are we going to create the energy to meet our demands without contributing to global warming? Once again, the nuclear debate is floating to the surface.
As a Gen-Xer (hey, how come nobody uses that phrase any more?) I was taught that nuclear energy was bad stuff. Dangerous, expensive, and most importantly, bad for the environment. Californians agreed, and put a moratorium on new nuclear plants some decades ago. Countries around the world and especially Europe banned new plants or completely blocked the use of nuclear power after the Chernobyl incident.
Last year I attended a debate on nuclear energy here in San Francisco. The two speakers were Peter Schwartz and Ralph Cavanaugh, old friends who considered themselves on the same side in the fight against global warming, but differed in their opinions on how to fuel the future.
I entered the debate with a strong feeling about nuclear energy as evil, and left thinking that it may be a possible option. How could this be? Now, before any of you out there rip my blog from your bookmarks folder, hear me out.
Remember that nuclear energy is a technology. Technology is defined as a development that changes over time, improving as it progesses. Look at computers and how they've developed over the years. We banned the technology in California because at the time it was dangerous and inefficient, but since then nuclear technology has made significant improvements in the amount of energy extracted from the process, in reducing the waste left over, and in safety. When you look at the amount of raw material required to generate the power, it out performs any other sources of energy except the sun.
I'm not the only one reexamining nukes.
Jesse Ausubel of the Rockefeller University in New York recently wrote an article claiming that renewable energy will further degrade the environment. "Nuclear energy is green," he claims, "Considered in Watts per square meter, nuclear has astronomical advantages over its competitors." He sites proportions of scale as a big reason wind farms and biofuels simply won't work.
The Long Now Foundation has a lecture on the cue for September 14th with Gwyneth Cravens and Rip Anderson to discuss the nuclear power debate.
And while they aren't necessarily pointing directly towards nukes, many environmentalists like myself are starting to get uneasy about the potential disasters we may face when our depleted agricultural lands are put into overdrive with the growing biofuel demands.
I haven't yet satisfied my desire for clarity before I make any proclamation to be pro-nuclear. But I encourage you all to get yourselves up to date on the issue if you haven't looked at it recently, so you can make informed decisions in the subject. (Even if I can't get off the fence.)
Places to start:
Wikipedia, of course! Nuclear Power
The Long Now and Nuclear Power, Climate Change and the Next 10,000 Years
The CSM looks at nuclear power in light of recent earthquakes near power plants
The Sydney Morning Herald looks at the hazards of coal plants
And check out my previous articles on the subject of alternative energy for more links
May 14th, More Warnings on the Push for Biofuels
May 5th, Wind Power and its Effects...
April 30th, Why Care About the Farm Bill?

And the Largest Crop in the United States is...

Turf grass.
When Christie Milesi moved from Italy to the United States, she was immediately smitten with our lawns. She loved the way the green grass of our urban lawns stayed defiantly lush, long past the browning hillsides of native Montana prairie. While finishing her PhD, she enrolled in a business class, where students were expected to come up with viable business ideas. Her idea was to create a service that monitored rain and let people know when and how much to water their lawns. That was when she made an important discovery- the total amount of lawn in the United States was unknown.
So she submitted a research proposal to NASA Earth System Science Fellowship Program to produce a national estimate of lawn area and the impact of those lawns on ecological factors like the carbon and water cycles.
What she found was astounding. When most people think of fertilizer and irrigation, do they think of agriculture or our landscapes? It turns out that there is more lawn than corn grown in the US, a crop that creates no food, yet uses untold amounts of water, fertilizer and other resources.
Check out the story at the NASA Earth Observatory website. Then zoom around a little- this is a great source for cool info.