LCENVS

The new up-and-coming trend in landscape architecture? Redesigning streets and sidewalks to be more "people-friendly" by creating public spaces. This article focuses on Viva Vancouver, an organization advocating for the creation of mini-parks in urban areas and whose most recent accomplishment is transforming two parking spots into a shiny new deck with seating for 4-8 people. Portland organizations like City Repair have been into this idea of placemaking for a long time, touting the benefits of creating public spaces to facilitate gathering between strangers and to make the rough urban landscape a bit more homey. Good idea? Or is spending $18,000 to make a wood structure in a parking lot absurd?  

an examination of the issue of resource overconsumption in our modern agrifood system

What do you think of this decision by the OR legislature not to fund the Oregon Sustainability Center? Though certain key figures downplay the decision, this could be the end of that dream -- which some say was not a worthwhile dream anyway.

This is a post from a really great blog called Secret Republic about urban design and green building. The blogger is currently in Sweden and visited a school with some really innovative ideas about environmental education, and they're employing some cool eco-design strategies too!

Farmers in India are being paid by BioCarbon Fund to plant trees in over 4000 hectares. These trees are being planted to offset the 839,582 tons of carbon dioxide. One of the conditions the landowners must meet is the tree density must be no less than 1100 plants per hectare. Article published on September, 13th 2011 on indiatogether.org

Car batteries sent for recycling are increasingly being sent to Mexico where their lead is often extracted by crude methods that are illegal in America, exposing plant workers and local residents to the toxic metal. Just goes to show another imperfection in the recycling system.

What if it's true that the effects of the BP oil spill are far less serious than originally predicted?  It would not mean that nothing bad happened at all, nor that no changes are needed to business as usual , but maybe we need to reconsider the perennial sky-is-falling rhetoric of environmentalism.

This bill just recently came to my attention. I havent had much time to research it further, but it sounds rather frightening. This YouTube video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOups0dfdwM&feature=channel) captures the fear based objections to the bill, and though it is propaganda, these are definitely issues we ought to be worried about! The "official summary" of the bill on this posted web site is long but seems to line up with the YouTube clip. Yikes! I propose more research.

One of the cornerstones of the early modern environmental movement, the Clean Air Act is now forty years old.  This brief article reviews events around the 40th anniversary and discusses controversial extensions to control carbon dioxide emissions.

The idea of Ecofeminism is that the domination of women and of nature are intrinsically linked. Focusing on womens lives and roles in cultural society helps identify the ways in which their roles are similar to the environment under the umbrella of patriarchal capitalism. In this article, globalization is defined as an outgrowth of patriarchal capitalism. And the basic biological differences of our genders determines social organization.

No, this not a Mac vs. PC rant. According to Jobs' biographer, he lacked the sheer brainpower of a Bill Gates, but had something far greater in many ways: genius, or at least ingenuity. And this knack is described in ways that resonate with our ENVS Program learning goals, including a creative blending of the humanities and sciences and attention to visual modes of thinking. So if you are still worried about your physics friends getting jobs and you getting nowhere, this Jobs may have a lesson for you.

For those who attended the recent presentation at LC by the beehive collective, or for those who weren't able to make it, here's some followup information on their coal mural. Check out the "Narrative Book" link at the bottom of the page for an in-depth description of the stories in the picture. Here's more about the group in general: http://www.beehivecollective.org/english/aboutus.htm

Mainstream environmentalism is trying to modify both its image and its approach - some focuses included radicalizing actions, localizing focuses, and antagonizing political and corporate opponents. It also focuses on how information is conveyed, focusing more on quick, easy to interpret, pretty imagery and less on pessimistic facts and figures. Bill McKibben is cited as one of the acclaimed leaders of this approach, particularly given the Keystone XL Pipeline issue (discussed earlier in the year in 220). Notably, another headline sharing the papers this week is on that very pipeline - a recent payroll tax move passed by the senate requires a final decision on the project within 90 days. Given that the success was for the decision to be postponed until after the elections, that has been largely undone. It will be interesting to see how that success plays out, and if that reflects on the themes of this article. It bears the question: if you were the political adviser to the environmental movement, what advice would you give?

This article highlights the efforts to make Asian Carp, the next big threat to the Great Lakes (and the multi-million dollar fishing and tourism industries there) the next big food hit (or at least big enough to get people to fish them out). After all, as one expert says, "there's a worldwide need for cheap protein, and I think it's one of those things that fit the bill." But I have to say, I'm a little concerned. One, I know this is not a new strategy - people tried to turn garlic mustard into the next major salad ingredient, without much luck. But I think it could end up creating even greater threats in the long run. For example, if the idea is to get rid of the fish, it isn't a sustainable model for a business to follow. Why build a plant for a fish we're trying to get rid of? When the plants are built, the question changes: why get rid of the fish? In Darwin's Nightmare we saw how an invasive fish became a boon and blessing to the local economy. The Midwest is different, but some of the same forces are at play. Second, in my eyes the most legitimate argument against invasive, non-native species is that they don't provide ecosystem function. The ecosystem concept is rooted in relationships that help carry out nutrient/energy flow, etc... and these species don't really relate to others. By giving them a functional role as a food source, we give them a little more function to a species we really care about - us. Again, the plan to actually get rid of them may backfire as their benefits appear to outweigh their costs. The question does remain, is that a bad thing?

Some researches are claiming that a lot of methane disappeared very quickly after the oil spill. Their hypothesis? Bacteria did it. While clearly controversial, it is an impressive testement to ecosystems ability to respond to surprises (though hardly a reliable one). Could it also lend some new ideas to efforts to figure out how to deal with the next big oil spill? While I don't pretend to know whether or not its a good idea, one critic mentioned that other limiting factors may have inhibited population growth of presumably beneficial bacteria. Could intentional actions towards removing those limiting factors in other spills allow bacteria to consume methane more rapidly? And if we pluck that strand, what would we find it connected to? Of course, that all depends on the accuracy of the study.

The title phrase is a well-known book title as well, from Robert Heilbroner's Worldly Philosophers of 1953. Both this article and Heilbroner's book, however, are talking about economics. These authors argue that economics has, over the last several decades, approached problems much like dentists, "modest people who look at a small part of the body but remove a lot of pain." For all its virtues, this approach provides no nuance nor guidance when everyone plainly realizes that our economic system is a mess, and we need informed people to ask big questions about it. They see the Occupy movement as asking these questions, and call on economists to offer answers. This recommendation rings at the heart of a liberal arts education, and is why in ENVS 220 we collectively struggle to connect the data and methods we work with to larger theories and frameworks, larger philosophical stances that remind us there are choices to be made in how to understand and fix this world.

At face value it appears China is trying to improve its clean energy reputation. By becoming the World's leader in wind turbine and solar panel exporters, it looks as though the country is paying attention to the environmental crisis at last. Though it may appear like this industry is doing good for the world, however, it is wrecking havoc in the political and economic spheres. Therefore this article, juxtaposed to Maniates' "Individualization" raises interesting questions regarding the limitations of "good intentions" in helping the environment. Sometimes doing good in one sense can be detrimental in another. "China Takes Lead" also illuminates the complexities regarding clean energy technologies due to their economic ramifications and political biases. 

Columnist Charles Blow begins by comparing the haves and have nots to climate change: "Is income inequality becoming the new global warming? In other words, is this another case where the facts of an existential threat lose traction among a weary American public as deniers attempt to reduce them to partisan opinions?" I suspect you can guess how he answers that question: as he gloomily concludes, "If denial is a river, it runs through doomed societies." Maybe it's time to better understand denial in all its forms, not just denial of anthropogenic environmental change, if we want to understand why such serious threats receive so little action.

Puzzling headline, no? But truly, this was an important study involving golden shiners (a common minnow), and the conclusions the researchers reached concerned how "uninformed agents can promote democratic outcomes in collective decision problems," or in less technical jargon, how "ignorance can promote democracy." Certainly intriguing in terms of boundary-crossing between the natural and the human sciences! But not without dispute over its relevance to the world of human politics, as noted at the bottom of the article. Relevance to ENVS is clear: we welcome ideas that cross the natural/social sciences, but we subject them to scrutiny too. (And, we worry about ignorance as much as anyone else does.)

[A repost...didn't work first time...] For those of you considering ENVS-ish winter break reading, here's an informative interview of Naomi Klein, whose November article "Capitalism vs. the Climate" in The Nation (by no means some right-wing rag) argues that "passionate corporate and conservative foes of curbs on greenhouse gases are *right* [my emphasis] in asserting that a meaningful response to global warming would be a fatal blow to free markets and capitalism." Revkin's helpful interview links to a number of recent sources in the climate policy debate.