I just finished reading
this article in last month's National Geographic. If you haven't figured it out yet, yes, I unashamedly love that magazine. In short, we are introduced to a program called the
Watershed Organization Trust (WOTR), who works with villages in India to reclaim their land by reshaping their watersheds and capturing the rain on which their life depends.
India, like most of the world, including the US, has fallen victim to the fatal combination of changing climate patterns, development, and associated human over-exploitation of resources. Most villages rely on farming, which in turn, relies on water, in order to survive. However, as water is sucked up by development in cities and water tables are drained while less rain falls due to climate change, wells dry up, crops fail, land parches, and hope withers and blows away on the dusty wind.
From the article: "Our lives are wrapped up in the rain," explained a woman named Anusayabai Pawar... "When it comes, we have everything. When it doesn't, we have nothing."
WOTR works with villages, getting everyone invested by requiring that all parties, including women, lower caste members, and children contribute to the work of planting vegetation, digging ditches, capturing runoff, everything that slows down the monsoon rainwater and allows it to soak into the soil, replenshing wells and reviving both the land and the people's futures.
If you are thinking, "Oh, this is India, they just have lots of poor hungry people, and deserts, I am just fine in my snug suburban home in my western nation," think again. We are not unspeakably far from a similar predicament in the US. Our water tables are dropping steadily as it is impossible for rainfall to replace the massive quantities we suck out for ridiculous things like golf greens and car washes. Wells must be drilled deeper and even then, they are frequently in danger of contamination or drying up in droughts, which we are beginning to see more of. Full on legal wars broke out all over the country during our most recent dry-up in 2007 pitting state against state in a battle over a scarce resource.
We don't do a good job of using water wisely, as I discussed
here. We don't do a good job of keeping the water we drink clean (
here and
here). But that doesn't mean we can't change. That doesn't mean we can't take a hint from WOTR and from some hardworking villagers in India who have discovered that not only does taking care of your watershed benefit you directly by ensuring that you have water to use, it builds your community via people working together, talking to each other, and enterprising new solutions for a better, brighter future.
Looking at the picture in yesterday's post, I am reminded that the the conflict between agriculture and habitat is nothing new. Neither is the demand for people with the passion and conviction to stand in the face of the status quo.
"Ding" Darling (1876-1962) is a name most of us in wildlife biology are familiar with but one that I think the rest of society has missed out on. He was a gifted editorial artist (his cartoons grace this post), which garnered him two Pulitzers. But even more important was his skill and dedication for conservation education. He founded the
National Wildlife Federation as well as the
US Duck Stamp program, just to name two of his lasting legacies.
Leadership and education like his are priceless in our rapidly changing world. People are bombarded with information and MISinformation from every direction at once on a daily basis. The long term consequences are lost among the trees of the short term gain. More than ever we need voices of reason and compassion, like Darling's to cut through the noise of the everyday.
It is at once hopeful and heartbreaking that even then, over 50 years ago, Darling and others like him saw that without our natural resources, we are nothing. Without clean water and air, without the richness of our global fauna, our future is lost. Darling also understood, in a way so beautifully illustrated in the cartoon above, that conservation and economic development are NOT mutually exclusive. It's not all or nothing, either or, as the naysayers would have you believe. All it takes is some thoughtfulness, common sense, planning and a dash of love to hold on to our invaluable "natural capital" on which our lives are built.
If we can just do that, we can avoid ending up with this:
You stand on it, live in it, work in it, play on it, anchor things with it, and drive on it. It's concrete and it's ubiquitous and unavoidable. Its production also puts out more carbon dioxide (CO2) than the whole of the aviation industry. Ouch. That hurts even more than stubbing your toe on a block of it...
Why is it so gassy? Well, it's made from clay and limestone, both of which are usually strip mined. So you have emissions from heavy mining equipment, plus the abysmal destruction associated with strip and open pit mining, then transport to the concrete production facility. There, these materials are heated up to hellacious temperatures, producing even more CO2 during combustion.
Each ton of concrete CAUSES EMISSIONS OF 1.4 tons of CO2
That's not an equation we should accept. But getting rid of concrete...well, not such a realistic goal at the moment. Or any time in the foreseeable future.
Happily, some engineers in London jumped on the problem and came up with a new way to make concrete using some non-carbon-based materials. Not only that, but these can be processed much cooler and so require less energy to become the concrete itself.
New equation:
One ton of concrete SOAKS UP 1.1 tons of CO2
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh.................that is my sigh of contentment -- are we producing this stuff worldwide yet?? Hurry up already!
Check it out at
the creators' website.
So who knows what the #1 pollutant in the US is?
I'll give you a hint:
Figured it out yet?
Yep, it's sediment. Dirt. Earth. Soil. Mud. Whatever you want to call it, it is carried by runoff and pulled from banks by erosion and our streams are FULL of it.
But, you say, dirt is part of nature, that's no pollutant! Well, you know the saying, "all things in moderation?" Well, that applies to ecology too.
Because of a variety of factors that have to do with channel shape, current speed, and stream path, a running body of water has a limit to the amount of sediment it can carry and move without becoming overloaded. Each stream, therefore, does have the ability to clear sediment out by carrying it and depositing it either along the bottom, on a bank or bar, or at its mouth. Likewise, the animals that live in the stream, mussels, fish, bugs, etc, each have their own tolerance to limited amounts of sediment for short periods of time.
It's when those tolerances are exceeded that this sediment becomes, in fact, a pollutant. When streams are frequently running muddy, when the bottom is nothing more than shifting mud or unconsolidated sand, when the banks are cut by erosion, dumping their clay into the water itself, problems abound.
Sediment smothers mussels so they cannot feed or breathe. Fish gills get clogged so the fish can no longer absorb oxygen. Many fish also rely on their excellent eyesight to find food; in muddy water, they are hungry and helpless. By blocking light, sediment also suffocates plant life beneath the surface that may be vital to fish and insect life. When all of this happens, it is an ecosystem in chaos and it also means the water supply is in trouble.
I mentioned that this sediment can come from bank erosion -- this erosion is often caused by a stream trying to channel more water than it is built for. This is usually due to our compulsion to pave and cover everything we can. Every square inch of ground we pave or harden with a rooftop is one less square inch that can absorb water. Thus, every drop of water that hits there will become runoff and we all have seen what a powerful force runoff can be.
In developed areas, most of the time, runoff is channeled into storm drains. Which usually then lead directly to a stream or other body of water, they ARE NOT filtered or cleaned in any way. This water also usually enters the stream at a single point -- it's like turning a fire hose on and blasting sediment right off of the banks, that's what kind of power this water has, especially during rain events. I remind you again, streams are your water supply, so anything you dump down that storm drain, you are effectively pouring into your glass of water. Sediment often enters the water supply here, running off from construction sites and yards. Most counties do have regulations about sediment control on construction sites, but the problem is that, even if these regulations are enforced (the enforcers are often far too few), the conventional technologies they require (silt fences, stormwater ponds) are very ineffective.
If you see a stream choked with sediment, especially if it is not raining, you can and should notify your county and notify your state water quality agency. A simple Google search can direct you right to them. Notice silt fences around a construction site are collapsed or leaking mud everywhere? Call and report it to your county, contractors and developers ARE required by law to maintain those. You have a right to clean water, wanderers, and it is up to each of us to stand up for that!
In the vein of the "biofuels" theme, let's talk briefly about palm oil. This goop is one of the primary ingredients of "biodiesel." Well, a perfect place to grow palm plantations is Indonesia, especially Borneo (home of the much-loved orangutan) -- they've got 15 million acres of previously incredibly diverse rainforest that are now under cultivation as palm monocultures. And a monoculture has virtually no value as wildlife habitat, carbon sink, food source, and is very vulnerable to disease -- when these large areas consisting of a single species take over, you can kiss the rest of the system goodbye. In addition, massive fires set annually to clear land for palm oil plantations have release HUGE amounts of carbon stored in the area's deep (up to 60 feet) peat soils.
From 1985 to 2005, a third of Borneo's rainforests, which contain a staggering 15,000 plant species and could be considered the most biodiverse in the world, have been mowed down for oil extraction, palm plantations, and mining. Large timber and resource extraction companies rape and pillage the landscape, stealing resources from hungry people knowing that, even if they get caught, there will be no one to hold them accountable or mete out punishment.
You can, at the least, reduce the demand for this type of product with your own use choices. Don't choose "biodiesel" for your truck and tell this industry that you are not willing to accept their short-sighted greed. Want an alternative to regular diesel fuel? Opt for a retrofit that will allow your engine to burn used vegetable oil, a recycled product that has virtually no additional impact between the restaurant fryer and your truck.
So I'm sitting at a public hearing last night about updates to wildlife regulations. I learned that now we are instituting a permit system for allowing people to kill species listed as Species of Concern (one notch below Threatened) if they are "depredating" (read: eating landscaping, etc) your property. You could already kill them anyway, but a permit system will allow for tracking of who's massacring what. It was explained that this regulation was designed especially for people who are having "elk problems" in the mountains (elk are currently a species of concern here).
WTF???!!!!!
If you don't like elk wandering into your yard, DON'T LIVE IN THE BLOODY MOUNTAINS. Stay in your damn suburb. And don't tell me you have to move there because of a job, because there are no jobs up there. Don't build your stupid McMansion in the woods and then start whining because the animals that live there happen to wander through and munch on the tasty buffet of plants you had your landscaper put out.
These people want to live in places that are "scenic." So they buy part of a mountain, build some ridiculous house, go up there for a couple weekends out of the year. But all that wildlife and dirt and quiet and darkness and disorder is just way too damn far outside of their comfort zone and they want it to look like their little manicured, sterile yards in the subdivision. So they expect us to let them kill the elk, introduce invasive plants, install 50 "security lights," cut down the trees to improve their view, build and pave roads, and erect police stations, fire houses, hospitals, Starbucks, and a Target for their convenience and comfort. Well, congratulations, you just turned your scenic mountainside into the ugly suburban hell you came from. And in the process, killed or drove out all the nature that you supposedly came up there for.
So do us all a favour: if you want to live somewhere with the above list of amenities, don't come to our wild places and expect us to domesticate them for you. For five seconds, experience a moment outside of your egocentric world and leave a place or two for the wildlife because they have nowhere else to go. You are welcome to come and visit and take pictures.
I just finished reading this article in last month's National Geographic. If you haven't figured it out yet, yes, I unashamedly love that magazine. In short, we are introduced to a program called the Watershed Organization Trust (WOTR), who works with villages in India to reclaim their land by reshaping their watersheds and capturing the rain on which their life depends.
