Sustainability

Next week, senior concentrators in Environmental and Technology Studies (ENTS) will present their capstone projects. As always, the capstone projects this year vary greatly in topic, reflecting the rich diversity of academic disciplines with which the ENTS program is engaged. This event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

Here is the schedule:

ENTS Capstone Symposium
May 22-23, 4:30-6:15
Willis Hall 205

Thursday, May 22

4:30 "In Search of Darwin," Amanda Smith
4:50 "Examining How We Think About Technology," John Heydinger
5:10 "Commuting to Carleton: The Present, the Possible, and the Impacts," Amy Wilson
5:30 "Incorporating Stakeholders into Ecosystem Service Conservation," Bessie Schwarz

Friday, May 23

4:30 "Using GIS Technology to Resolve Land Use Conflict:
A Case Study of Development in the Moosehead Lake Region," Emma Glidden-Lyon
4:50 "The Ames Mill Today: Policy Suggestions for the Northfield City Council," Shannon Carcelli
5:10 "Jatropha Production in Koulikoro, Mali: A Proposed Study of
a Weed and its Agricultural, Economic, and Energy Benefits," Tim Singer
5:30 "Discovering Trash," Dylan Welch
5:50 "Uganda: An Exploration of Urban Agriculture," Natalie Coleman

This past Saturday, Irwin Hall at St. Olaf was full of St. Olaf students and faculty along with a handful of Carleton students eagerly waiting to hear what Amy Klobuchar had to say on climate change. She began by showing some fun video clips about her visit to Greenland last summer in which, decked out in rain gear, she floats in fishing boats around icebergs. As the video is geared towards kids, Klobuchar frequently uses it when she speaks at schools about climate change.

Though Greenland’s melting ice sheets may not seem directly linked to the lives of Minnesotans, Klobuchar made the issue if rising global temperature hit home by drawing a connection with the decreasing water levels that we are currently experiencing in the Great Lakes. She explained that barge traffic is an essential part of the economy and supplies many jobs in northern Minnesota. The dropping water level of Lake Superior has already done damage to the barge traffic industry.

When Klobuchar approached the issue of what is being done to address such problems, she made it clear that leadership is coming from individual states, not Washington. It was evident that she feels that Minnesota is doing its part to be a leader on climate change. She was beaming as she referenced Minnesota’s renewable energy standard which commits the state to using 25% renewables by the year 2025.

At this time of year, the arb serves as an important stopover point for many migrant bird species.  Check them out soon, before they continue northward, or are obscured by spring foliage!  Among the species recently reported in the arb are Yellow-rumped Warblers, Orange-crowned Warblers, American Redstarts and Blue-gray Gnatcatchers.  Most of these small, colorful birds are neotropical migrants which have spent the winter in Central or Southern America, and are currently en route to their nesting grounds in Canadian boreal forests.

In addition to these temporary visitors, the arb is also full of recently returned birds here to stay for the summer.  Baltimore orioles can be spotted in pairs, beginning the process of constructing their distinctive, hanging nests.   Male Red-winged Blackbirds are staking claim to pieces of marsh and shore-line, hoping to attract females with their territory and song.  Eastern Bluebirds have colonized many of the bird boxes established in the arb.  And now for a piece of bird trivia: Bluebirds (and, for that matter, all birds that appear blue in color) don’t actually have any blue pigments in their feathers.  The blue that we perceive when looking at these birds is actually the result of structural color, or the physical alteration of light achieved by certain feather structures.  If you looked at a backlit Bluebird feather, it wouldn’t appear blue at all, instead it would be a dull brown.

Just as a reminder, this Saturday is Carleton’s annual arboretum bird count, and everyone is welcome to participate!  Meet at the tennis courts parking lot in the lower arb at 6 am with your binoculars and field guide, if you have them.  Email arb director Nancy Braker (nbraker) with any questions.

Last Thursday, Dale Jamieson returned to Carleton to give a talk on climate change and environmental justice. Jamieson, who was formerly the Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Dimensions of Global Change at Carleton and is now the chair of the Environmental Studies Department at NYU, called climate change the “most complex, profound, and important” environmental justice issue that exists today.

To continue reading, click the link below. To see the video of Dr. Jamieson's talk, click here.

This summer, Carleton’s dinning halls will switch to a new dinning service, Bon Appétit.  Bon Appétit advertises its “food services for a sustainable future”.  While it will be up to Carls to see for themselves just how environmentally sustainable Bon Appetit’s food is, they sure do have a very cool website related to determining the environmental impact of meals.  Simply drag each dish or food item into a digital frying pan and the site will calculate carbon dioxide equivalent points (grams of carbon dioxide equivalent greenhouse gases emitted to put that food on your plate).  I used this handy tool to determine that I can cut my carbon emission in half by choosing a veggie omelet over a meat and cheese omelet.  And, it is very specific.  For example, when selecting fruit you can select whether fruits are seasonal or tropical and when selecting meats, you can specify the cut (deli slices, tenderloin, prime rib, etc).  Through testing out various combinations of food, I learned that a grilled tenderloin beef dinner has one of the largest carbon footprints of all meals.    The sight also includes meal specific tips on how to go on low carbon diet (such as, “lose the cheese on that burger”) 
To begin exploring the carbon impact of your own diet, check out:
http://www.eatlowcarbon.org

The World Bank reported that worldwide, food prices have gone up 83% and the developing world is being hit the hardest.  On April 10, Haitians took to the streets demanding the resignation of their president when the price of food staples like rice and beans increased more than 50%.  In addition, in the last few weeks there have been protests related to food in Egypt, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Mozambique, Senegal, Burkina Faso and Cameroon.  Developed countries are not immune—in the U.S. food costs increased 4% last year and are expected to rise at the same rate in the coming year.  There is no doubt that this is a complex problem with no easy solution.  Droughts conditions (particularly in Australia, normally one of the world’s largest wheat producers), rising oil prices (making petroleum based fertilizers more expensive) and new food policies discouraging large food reserves all contribute to the food shortage that has led to this world-wide price increase.

Another factor related to food shortage seems relatively preventable: the move from food production to biofuel production.   Despite the fact that U.S. is one of the world’s top producers of wheat, a staple food throughout much of the world, pressure is growing for many American farmers to switch from crops such as wheat to corn to be used for biofuels. And, this pressure is coming from the government.  In President Bush’s 2007 State of the Union address, Bush called for biofuels to replace 15% of gasoline used in the United States.  In an attempt to pass supposedly environmentally friendly legislation, the US has made it its policy to subsidize biodiesel and ethanol.  As a consequence more and more of the corn, soybeans and palm oil once produced for food as now being produced for biofuel. 

It seems fairly obvious that the United States needs to rethink its “green” policies if they threaten the food security of the rest of the world. 

This past Friday evening, the Arb Naturalists enjoyed the opportunity to watch the mating display of the American Woodcock, a brown mottled seagull-like bird with a long bill. The complex “sky dance” of the male woodcock takes place during sunset each evening starting in April and commencing in May. The display is best described by Aldo Leopold in an essay from A Sand County Almanac:

"Knowing the place and the hour, you seat yourself under a bush to the east of the dance floor and wait, watching against the sunset for the woodcock's arrival. He flies in low from some neighboring thicket, alights on the bare moss, and at once begins the overture: a series of queer throaty peents spaced about two seconds apart, and sounding much like the summer call of the nighthawk... Suddenly the peenting ceases and the bird flutters skyward in a series of wide spirals, emitting a musical twitter. Up and up he goes, the spirals steeper and smaller, the twittering louder and louder, until the performer is only a speck in the sky. Then, without warning, he tumbles like a crippled plane, giving voice in a soft liquid warble that a March bluebird might envy. At a few feet from the ground he levels off and returns to his peenting ground, usually to the exact spot where the performance began, and there resumes his peenting."

Last week, over 400 members of the Carleton, St. Olaf, and Northfield communities celebrated Earth Week at over 20 events and activities at Carleton. On Monday, Gary Yohe got the festivities started, providing an economist's insights into the workings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. On Earth Day, over 40 people turned out for the first annual Turbine Trot, a run from the Rec Center to Carleton's wind turbine and back. There was also a bicycle-made smoothie stand outside of Sayles. Throughout the week, students and faculty participated in dinner discussions at interest houses across campus. Themes discussed ranged from case studies of grassroots environmental actions in Asia to a reflection upon the value of ecological intimacy. The weekend brought snow and cold temperatures, but a number of brave volunteers braved the weather to aid in honeysuckle removal and trash cleanup in the Arboretum and along the Cannon River. Earth Week at Carleton finished up with the second annual community contra dance, where students and members of the Northfield community came to the Sayles-Hill Great Space and danced to the music of Contratopia. This year's Earth Week was a great success and a big thank-you goes out to all of those who participated in these events. (More photos to follow)

Despite the less than desirable weather that has characterized the first half of the term, spring in the Arb is in full swing!  The Cannon River is experiencing a discharge rate (~2500 cubic feet per second) that is significantly higher than the average value (868 cubic feet per second) for this time of year.  This combined with runoff from the surrounding landscape has created patches of seasonal flooded forest habitat that is used by a variety of species.  Look for herons and many species of both migratory and resident waterfowl including wood ducks, blue-winged teal, mallards, coots, and mergansers occupying this unique and ephemeral niche. 
Unfortunately, the common carp (Cyprinus carpio), an invasive species, exploits these flooded areas as well—often in such large numbers that they can be caught by hand! C. carpio, introduced from Europe and Asia in the 1880s as a game fish, has the ability to dramatically alter the dynamics of the floodplain forest by disrupting the shallowly rooted plants on which it feeds.  Additionally, in non-seasonal aquatic environments, carp alter the feeding ecology of waterfowl and other fish by muddying the water and releasing phosphorous which causes changes in algal population dynamics. So please, do your part to reduce Minnesota’s prolific carp population—provided that you have a fishing license of course.
In the weeks to come, stay tuned to this column and to the Arb website (http://apps.carleton.edu/campus/arb/seasonal/) for updates on other exciting spring events—like wood warbler migration and May wildflowers!  Meanwhile keep your eyes out for droves of yellow-rumped warblers (easily identifiable by their yellow rump and sides), bloodroot (a white six-petaled wildflower found in Best Woods) and Dutchman’s breeches (white-pink wildflower shaped like upside-down pants found in the floodplain and in Stork forest in the Upper Arb).

Your student naturalists are Mira Alecci, Amy Alstad, Chelsea Clifford, Jeremy Hayward, Emily LeGrand, Lindsey Nietmann, David Smith, Hannah Specht, John Vigeland, and Spencer Wigmore

For many environmentalist communities, the 2008 election is the last hope for solving the climate change crisis. Yet, as Evan Thomas points out in Newsweek this week, the presidential campaign has been curiously silent about the issue. According to Congressman Rahm Emanuel (D-IL), global warming is an "elitist issue" rather than a concern of the average voter. Polls continue to show the environment low on a list of voters' priorities. In my home state of Pennsylvania, exit polls did not even bother to measure the environment among voters' issues.

As the mainstream media (as Thomas points out, the traditional news source of the upper middle class) increasingly brings climate change to front page news, analyzing which candidate will be greener and showing readers how to measure their carbon footprints, most voters remain concerned with the availability of jobs and the cost of fuel. The difference between worrying about sustaining your own life and sustaining the planet reveals an enormous class divide, as Thomas observes, and the truth is that solving the climate crisis will be costly.

So if only an elite few voters are prioritizing climate change, is the problem with the "few" or the "elite"?

Education is an important tool to make environmentalism more accessible, but it won't overcome the immediate fears of an unstable economy and job insecurity. We must be careful to avoid the trap that our issue matters most, or we will continue to be seen as distant and elitist. Without understanding the concerns of people who aren't voting green, we will not learn how to include them in our movement. And that's an exclusiveness we can't afford.

On Earth Day yesterday the dining halls were rainbows of fresh flavor and color. In honor of Earth Day, Dining Services offered many local, organic, Earth Day-friendly foods for lunch. The salad bar included many organic vegetables, the baked potato bar featured local potatoes from, the vegetarian mushroom stew featured local mushrooms and potatoes and the spaghetti and marinara sauce was entirely organic. Additionally, the fresh baked breads were made with local, organic flour.

As spring has finally arrived, the time to consider being a localvore is NOW! Localvores are people who are committed to eating food grown only within their foodshed—a region often defined by each localvore individually. Such eating practices came to my attention several years ago when I discovered the blog of Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, a Canadian couple who, after being stranded and fending for themselves at their cabin in the Canadian wilderness, decided to attempt to eat hyper-locally for an extended period of time, thus: the 100 Mile Diet.

Smith and MacKinnon restricted themselves to eating food produced within 100 miles, but others may define “local” differently. In southern California, you may be able to find all the locally-produced food you need in a much smaller region. In Minnesota, perhaps you would restrict yourself to the 5-state area during most of the year, but focus even more locally during the summer growing season. But why eat locally in the first place?