Blog 09

This past week we had The Nature Conservancy come in and give a presentation on their land acquisition and preservation organization. They have obtained many areas of land in the Keweenaw region to preserve from development. While I agree, a lot of the presentation was loaded down with the financial aspects of their struggles, I don't think that it was out of place. It's important to consider that many of their successes and struggles have been financially related as they try to pay and for these parcels of land. These financial successes have been a large part of their work, so it is very important to them. Personally I would have liked to have heard more about some of the actual areas of land that they had. She went into some brief descriptions, but I would have enjoyed hearing more about what specific things/trails there are at each park.

There was also a lot of discussion this past week on logging, logging methods, and new/old growth forest. A close family friend of ours works as a forest manager for Nicolet National Forest in northern Wisconsin. This Saturday I called him with a few questions regarding some of these issues and ideas surrounding foresting techniques. I summarized the information he gave me:

Forest management isn't operated in the same way that is it was in the earlier logging days. It was partially that people didn't know how the forests responded to large scale clearing, but also clear cuts were done out of convenience often. Many logging companies were removing all trees, so everyone else felt the need to do the same thing to keep up and profitable. From a conservation standpoint, clear cuts are rarely done now in many of our areas. Because of clear cuts, the composition and make-up of many of our forest has changed, a lot of the topsoil is often lost, leaving a dryer clay soil. So select cuts are often performed to help give sunlight to undergrowth (young trees) so that they have more of a chance in the different soil.

I found this interesting how previous clear cuts have caused some forest to almost require maintenance select cuts for regrowth. He mentioned how they do not select cut in older forests that are already sustainable. He also mentioned that some foresting is also done to stop the spreading of diseases such as oak wilt.

Blog 08

Before spring break, Chad Norman came in and talked with us about his experiences of living in India in the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains. In this resourcefully rich region, water is such an important ingredient in its ecological life. There were many stories about unfair ways people were abusing the environment and indigenous cultures in those areas, but there was one part that I found particularly interesting. When trees were logged off the foothills of the mountains, rainfall could easily wash the dirt and ground away with no roots to hold the soil in place. This causes all of the nutrients to wash away from an area, become more dry as rain just washes over the dense earth and rock. When this happens, it makes it extremely difficult ans sometimes impossible for an ecosystem to return to its original state, and this presents many problems for an environment whose resources are becoming fewer and farther between.

The next two days of class were spent watching a movie regarding water wars that are shaping our environment, foreign and domestic. While many of the points brought up were alarming and very interesting, there were many aspects of how they went about their arguments that I disliked and found to be unprofessional. When depicting courtroom trials between the individuals and the companies, they made their own "courtroom artist" representations of the people and had all of the company's people look big, mean, and scary. That's a cute little tactic but it just looks unprofessional. Also, when the guy went to Nestle's seminar about some of their water projects and expected an answer right away about the letter he received  how would those individuals talking about the projects have any idea about that situation? It makes sense to try to talk about that at the end of the presentation when they can find out more about the situation, as the suggested. I'm not saying that Nestle as a company wasn't doing anything wrong, there is just no way to expect those presenters who were likely engineers and other technical employees to have any idea about that situation immediately. And the crowd didn't sound outraged as they suggested. 

I understand with a film like this where you have strong feelings about something, some points or arguments may be a little biased, and sometimes this is necessary to get across a point. But using unprofessional tactics and typical "political moves" leads me to disregard their arguments and thoughts.

Blog 07

Water was a common theme this week in the classes and presentations. With a growing global population and a shifts in the balance of water extraction, water is becoming the new oil. That is, clean fresh water safe enough for drinking and other uses. Many indigenous societies seem to be losing their water supply as others who have to means to extract the water are doing so. But it doesn't even seem like advanced societies have a sustainable water supply. Many of the largest U.S. cities are struggling to maintain levels in their aquifers and water sources.

Even more scary, some water sources could be gone in a second. For example, Los Angeles and its entire metro area population of almost 17 million people receive a lot of their water from Owen Valley, an aquifer north of Los Angeles. This underground lake lies directly over a fault line, and if a large enough earthquake were to occur, millions of tons of magma would mix with the lake water, rendering this entire water source useless. Los Angeles currently does not have another large scale alternative for their water sources.



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Blog 06

This past week, Nancy Langston Skyped us from Sweden. There were a few things that I found particularly interesting with our talk with her. She went into detail regarding the effects of past and present chemicals on our environment, and our bodies. Her tone seemed consistent with her book, in that while we need to change how we do things, but we need to change things smartly. I did find some of the topics interesting, especially about how to get rid of chemicals that are in your system. Either getting liposuction or breastfeeding and passing it on to your infant don't seem like welcoming options. A lot of these types of problems are worse than we realize, we just haven't had enough lifespans to observe these types of problems.

Because of the time constraints of our conversation with her, i wasn't able to ask everything that I wanted to, specifically, what types of "green chemicals" that she talked about are they researching currently. We talk a lot in this class about trying to be more environmentally friendly, so I am especially interested in knowing about these new methods that are hoped to be less damaging to the environment. There also is the reoccurring thought that these new methods will have new unforeseen problems. It is the same idea of how medications are often later found to have negative effects on our body. For example, For some people that are low on iron in their body take medications for it, Indirectly it can also thin their blood making it hard for them to clot blood and stop bleeding when they get a cut or injury. Our environment works the same way; with so many factors and variables, it is nearly impossible to tell how things we put into it will change it in the long run.  

Blog 04

I found Mel Vissser's book, Cold, Clear, and Deadly to be very interesting. But what I found even more interesting was his presentation to our class. In his book, the tone seemed a little over the top, especially with parts that said, "rally the troops" for the environment, without providing alternative options for pesticides and insecticides that increase our crop yield. While these chemicals have many negative impacts that travel to many other regions of our globe (especially the poles), I didn't notice a clear alternative to help keep our food production up for a world that is having food shortages. Yes many Americans arguably over-eat but a sustainable food supply is crucial.

But to me, his presentation provided a lot more insight to his opinions towards theses issues. He made it clear that alternative methods would be necessary to keep crop yield higher without using pesticides and insecticides and other POP's, and that it is our generations job to solve these issues. Also his in-class presentation cleared up some of my personal confusions of how much of these POP's were in the water and animals in Arctic regions. But like he mentioned in his presentation; it is so hard to point the blame at a specific group.

Something else that became a topic during his presentation was, how new solutions have historically created new problems when trying to fix old problems. Historically chemicals such as Mercury and DDT were used to solve problems; but were eventually banned because of the observed problems they created that were not foreseen before their use. So then later other "safer" chemicals were used to replace the job of previous more harmful chemicals. But each new chemical had been later found to create different problems. So as we try to develop new solutions, we often wonder, will this product create problems that we can't envision now? To me this seems likely, not because we are ignorant, but because we live in a very dynamic world with a very dynamic ecosystem. With all of the different variables in motion though, it is almost impossible to tell how it might affect it. For example, if we start producing biologically altered food that bugs do not like to eat, it may affect patterns in bug behavior (there are trillions of bugs in our world) which in turn could change the habits and behaviors of animals higher on the food chains or even plants. This could potentially have effects on our ecosystem that are almost impossible to predict now. The point is, everything has effects, some positive, some potentially negative. In a dynamic world, our perception of these effects is determined by the way we live and how we approach these issues.

Blog 03

          There was a lot of interesting information regarding Native American lands in the Keweenaw and how mining  has played a role. Historically, mining companies would start mining on these "unclaimed lands" and force the people living there to move out. They would pollute the land and water and deplete the surrounding wildlife. Thanks to advanced technology and a better understanding of our environment, the polluting methods of mines have been reduced and clean-up activities have been a bigger part of these mining companies. It isn't ideal, but it is much better than it used to be. Fortunately, more regulations have also been put in place to determine where mines can be put as well, although as we found out this last week, there are
still some issues as to where they are being opened up.

          The issues with mining really put into perspective how fragile ecosystems can be. All of these materials and elements are ones that occur on our planet in large quantities, but once these materials are moved around  ecosystems become unbalanced. Ecosystems and micro-environments typically only experience change over long time periods, so when land is completely altered, it affects the plants and animals that inhabit the region.

          It is hard to enforce environmental justice to the old, abandoned mines, when many of the companies don't even exist anymore. But for many of the new mines, the clean-up for their mining operations should be there responsibility. And thankfully that has become a larger part of their operations in the 21st century. It isn't like we can just say that we shouldn't mine anymore; that isn't a viable solution, but it is nice to see that more is being done to preserve the environment.

Blog 02

          This week, the main topics were based on energy use, energy choices, and the results of these choices that we make. The United States has been using large quantities of energy, roughly 20% of the world's energy consumption is done by the United States. But as we move forward, many countries countries such as China and India are developing and have and increased demand for energy in their developing nations. This seems like it will tip the balance of energy use towards those nations; not that the United States is predicted to consume much less energy in the foreseeable future, but these other nations have such large populations that will require energy. It also most likely that the energy will be, in these developing nations, obtained by methods that are harmful to the environment, as was the case in the United States during our development. With this, there doesn't seem to be anything slowing down the world's increasing use of energy.
          Our energy choices affect the environment around us in many ways; our methods of obtaining energy can change the surrounding ecosystems, affect our air quality, and emit greenhouse gases into our atmosphere and presumably raise the temperature of our planet. But this has been a highly debated topic due to the uncertainties that lie within it. Most people agree that greenhouse gases could raise the temperature of our planet, but it is hard to tell how much. This is because the planer shift in the Earth's orbit causing Milankovitch cycles that we have always gone though. These cycles are what causes the ice ages and the warm periods between ices ages. We are still in the warming cycle, so the world's temperature will increase naturally(slowly) without any human involvement. So this makes it impossible to predict how much the temperature is increasing from greenhouse gases, and how much of the temperature change is part of our natural climate shift.