LCENVS

Students in ENVS 220 recently learned how to georeference historical air photography in ArcMap; well, here are some other ways to do it with maps for eventual input into GoogleEarth!

In lieu of ENVS symposium, I'm very interested in how the physical environment shapes the people that live there. This article discusses the role of place in the recent Wall St. protests and other movements around the world.

On Tuesday, our ENVS 490 class (Culture and Environmental Conflict) will be touring Bonneville Dam, site of a major conflict over how to remove federally listed California sea lions, who have found the site a handy spot to dine on the endangered spring Chinook run (and others). The use of lethal force was approved, then court-retracted; what will happen to these pinnipeds come this spring?

Citizen science is science done, not by highly trained experts, but by your run-of-the-mill citizen on the street. Which makes a lot of sense, since science is conceptually a very simplistic, mindless, algorithmic process (in certain forms, granted) which makes it very powerful (for anyone doubting the power of simple, mindless, algorithmic processes see evolution) . This article highlights the use of video games to channel citizen science towards things that the science community struggles with. For reference as to how cool this is, a problem regarding the AIDs virus that scientists struggled with for over a decade was solved in 3 weeks via this system. Other neat programs like this include World Without Oil, designed to put people in the place of a post-peak oil society via a Role Playing Game, where they use their own lives as the basis. People actually enacted real world change, building gardens, biking instead of driving, and reporting on it to the public, as a result of the game. It is a really convincing way to generate change, and well worth looking at just for the concept. The same company is looking at creative ways to solve other global crisis by making "mini worlds" that encourage people to have a little more agency and creativity, so that those ideas can be translated to the real world. How neat is that?

done right, science is so not a mindless algorithmic process.

Two wolves of the Imnaha wolf pack in NE Oregon are planned to be killed due to livestock depredation. I talked to my mom, who works for ODFW in La Grande, and she informed me that no one involved has any desire to kill any wolves. However, in accordance to the management plan written in 2005, the wolves must now be killed because over 14 livestock have been killed by these wolves. The alpha male of the pack was radio collared, and the GPS locations were matched to the kill sites. Unfortunately, this means that there is a chance the whole pack will dissipate, with the alpha male gone. However, there is a second pack still unaffected in Imnaha, and another pack with pups was just caught on camera: http://www.dfw.state.or.us/news/2011/august/082211c.asp

A silicon solar cell was recently developed at MIT. This "artificial leaf" breaks down water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen gas, which can be used as a fuel source. I just thought it was really cool. And here's a video! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEEhxk-CiOQ&feature=player_embedded

This Nick Kristof op-ed on Occupy Wall Street is good in that he recommends three key policies protestors could advocate to clean up our major financial institutions, and all have been clearly specified by certain experts. What it left me wondering, however, was: what would a comparable enviro protest look like? Where would it occupy, and what exactly would it demand? Our ENVS 220 class will be discussing the recent ELF documentary soon, and I just saw a few flyers on campus of an old-growth logging campaign, yet my students who've visited Douglas County learn that these issues are much more complicated than they appear in Multnomah County. Is there anything today in contemporary environmentalism that's as clear an injustice as Wall Street wealth?

After getting some fairly audible gasps in class after questioning Silent Spring today, I wanted to justify myself a little bit lest I be burned at the stake as some sort of heretic. The paper above is a brief and neat explanation of American academia's role in legitimizing ecology as a science, and touches on how Carson (and other's) pushed it back towards being a values-oriented natural history built heavily out of ideas that one could perhaps fit under the framework of "romanticism." Just to back myself up further, here (http://onlineethics.org/CMS/profpractice/exempindex/carsonindex/kroll.aspx) is another article highlighting Carson's work as "subversive silence", i.e. very value/advocacy driven. Also highlights her focus on critiquing a certain type of laboratory science for being controlling - notably, one of romanticism's main tenants is a criticism of the rationalization of nature. Neither of this takes away from the fact that Carson was a) a decent scientist and b) wrote a book that did a lot of good. I'm not trying to dive into the "we could've stopped malaria" arguments she gets a lot, because I think that is a straw man argument. Nor do I think that it is bad to combine knowledge and values - quite the opposite. I simply think that a work that forced scientific depictions of its subject to change in response to public frameworks of thinking should be regarded as a great political work, not a great scientific one. I think it may be time to move beyond Silent Spring, certainly as a work of science, and perhaps even as a work of politics, and place it on the pedestal of history that it rightly deserves.

My main focus of what I think will be my concentration is the idea of how environment affects the continuation or elimination/transformation of indigenous culture verses the modern day. This piece begins to comment on that, showing examples of how modern day impacts are changing the natural environment in places like Columbia, which force the indigenous people living there out of their traditional lifestyles. This displacement of culture often results in an abandonment of ones culture--many youths are resettling in urban areas because their traditional way of life cannot adapt to the rapidly changing environment. The article brings up the question of old verses new, and the question of how can they remain in the same world peacefully--if that's even an option?

Gas companies resorting to flaring--questionable whether its efficient, or they are just lazy. It seems like the article is mainly trying to spark an interest by taking another view on an aspect of drilling for gas, and gas production. It seems crazy to partake in this, especially since the companies are too interested in the financial aspects than the practical. The product is expensive to bring to market which is why they burn it instead of take advantage of it. That seems crazy, especially now when gas production is such a popular and important topic.

At different public meetings in Kansas and Texas, the proposed oil pipeline that would run from Canada to the US received very different responses. The meeting in Texas was met with widespread support, mostly due to the number of jobs it would create as well as helping to decrease the United States' dependence on foreign oil, while the meeting in Kansas was met with harsh criticism, due to the potential for environmental devastation. This article shows an interesting contrast between the priorities of the two states, and how some are willing to look the other way when it comes to creating jobs.

"Rampant unemployment, rising food prices, a collapsed housing market, ballooning debt -- to Jeremy Rifkin, the American economist and president of the Foundation on Economic Trends , these are not simply symptoms of a temporary economic malaise. Rather, they are signs that the current world order -- long infused with and defined by fossil fuels -- is collapsing around us."

The Hanoi Zoo has admitted to auctioning off tigers to illegal animal traffickers, after reporting the animals had died of natural causes. Many of the tigers are then used in traditional Asian medicine, a very lucrative market.

In SOAN249 today we briefly touched upon genetically altered Salmon, I looked into it more tonight--here's what I read. It seems like a crazy idea, like we talked about in class the Salmon are eating and being treated not so much as fish but another species. Fish live in the ocean, and Salmon are carnivorious, the fact that we are feeding them corn and other plant based materials, furthers the absurdity of the idea. Its taking an animal and reconstructing not only the biological make up but reconfiguring the behavioral patterns and 'lifestyle'.

Our ENVS 490 class will be camping Saturday night right above the dam featured in the picture of this story, one of four slated to be removed for the sake of salmon runs, a plan bitterly opposed by some farmers in the area.

Is imported Western business strategies the best way to ensure the developing world is growing sustainably? There are already green businesses in the developing world, why not have their practices adopted by their peers? The article's last section is key, though. It raises the distinction between being successful because one is green, and going green because one is successful/wealthy enough to invest in those practices.

The ramifications for biology and ecology of life on other planets is neat - a science until now fundamentally based in one overarching context finding a whole new one? That's crazy. But the question I always hear from folks concerned about environmental issues when something like this pops into the conversation is "shouldn't we figure out how not to destroy our own planet before we start looking into moving onto others?" And so, technologically unfeasible tasks aside, presuming we could do this, I'm curious as to whether or not others think we should. Should we?

In ENVS 220, students discuss/debate the relative contribution to environmental studies of the sciences vs. the humanities; here is one position, dubbed naturalism, in which science is viewed as the only path to knowledge. As the author summarizes, naturalism "doesn't mean anyone should stop doing literary criticism any more than foregoing fiction. Naturalism treats both as fun, but neither as knowledge." To some, naturalism is just another word for scientism, but it's worth us asking: What would a naturalist environmental studies be like? In what ways would it be better/worse/different?

Thorium, a naturally occurring radioactive metal can be used to generate nuclear power without most of the problems associated with uranium reactors (i.e. high cost, toxic waste, and danger of meltdown.) Lately, it's been heralded as the solution to climate change and energy crisis concerns and some new start-ups are experimenting with reactors in the hope that thorium will be at the forefront of an energy revolution.

Not much to say, but a solid read for some of the conceptual problems that arise with the question of wilderness. Highlights the problems of thinking that something we do as a recreational vacation can be easily incorporated into being an ongoing, preferable lifestyle (anarcho-primitivism, I'm looking at you).