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Leaping for Joy

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on November 21, 2012| 4 Comments »

Everyone is getting ready for Thanksgiving around here. John’s family has left for Syracuse to join culinary forces with my daughter-in-law’s family. My husband and I just arrived in Providence, where we will celebrate with Suzanne, Erik, my sister, and my brother-in-law.

Big cooking starts early tomorrow. But I already made the From Scratch Club’s cranberry sauce that was such a hit last year. (I found it on their WordPress blog.)

So as not to repeat myself too much, I am just going to share a link John sent me that captures the leaping-for-joy spirit that should be the essence of a holiday that is basically about eating a lot of food with people you like. And then maybe taking a nap and dreaming you are flying.

Check out the wonderful pictures at http://imgur.com/a/NAwjl

This is just one.

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Vets Helping Vets

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on November 20, 2012| Leave a Comment »

In a Sun Sentinel article called “Battling back: US veterans help each other,” Diane C. Lade writes about the most logical people to help “veterans who have ended up on the wrong side of the law.

“Some former soldiers appearing in the new veterans’ court in Broward County, Fla, aren’t just getting fines, probation, or counseling. They’re getting mentors.

“Veterans Helping Veterans — modeled after a successful program in Palm Beach County, Fla. — pairs seasoned former military service men and women with veterans, of all ages and from all wars, who have ended up on the wrong side of the law.

“Though created in 2010 through Broward’s Retired and Senior Volunteer Program, known as RSVP, the program didn’t start thriving until being connected to the county’s Veterans’ Treatment Court, which opened in May.

“Now, it’s receiving three to four court referrals weekly (although any veteran can apply for assistance) and has 18 mentors, who under RSVP guidelines must be age 55 or older.  …

“The veterans’ court is designed to channel people who suffer from behavior, mental health, or substance abuse issues connected to their service into counseling or treatment programs.” Read more.

Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters/File
US Army Private First Class Peter Gong, a Vietnam War veteran and member of the National Guard, stands in front of a US flag during an American Legion event in Hempstead, N.Y.

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National Geographic and Bars of Gold

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on November 19, 2012| 5 Comments »

I recently saw a National Geographic special about money and the central bank. The documentary took viewers into the vault at the NY Fed, where gold bars are stored. Although the security is really tight, anyone may sign up for a tour there. The film also went to places where cameras are usually not allowed, like the National Bureau of Engraving and Printing, which prints dollar bills.

It also went to offices deep underground in the gold and diamond district of New York City. I thought Suzanne would be interested to see the broker who buys gold. Being in the jewelry business with Luna & Stella, she naturally is aware that gold has been expensive since the economic downturn. The film showed the multilingual broker buying small bags of gold objects, which were then shown being melted down and made into a gold bar.

National Geographic has also blogged about the movie: “What Jake Ward of Popular Science magazine discovers in this one hour special is that without the engines that power the world’s financial systems, that world would grind to a halt.

“America’s Money Vault follows 55 million dollars worth of gold as it makes its way down into the most valuable gold vault in the world. Hidden deep under the streets of New York City, hundreds of billion dollars in gold bars  …

“Jake goes behind the storefronts to see how everybody from the street level to the brokers make their money buying, selling and even finding gold. He meets Onikwa Thomas who calls himself the urban miner and claims to earn up to four hundred dollars a week off of gold specks found in the cracks of sidewalks.”  More from the documentary.

P.S. Speaking of Luna & Stella, Suzanne’s birthstone jewelry company, gold vermeil angel wings can make a lovely gift for the right person.

Photograph: National Geographic

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Palestinian Women’s Businesses

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on November 18, 2012| 3 Comments »

When wars are not going on in the Palestinian territories, people try to live normal lives.

Megan Kelly writes at Global Envision that “in recent years, business development and entrepreneurship programs surfaced … and suddenly there was an influx of people trying to start their own business …

“However, many of the programs put in place lacked follow-through. Entrepreneurs were left to sink or swim on their own. ‘It was like walking them to a cliff,’ explains Samin Malik, coordinator of Women’s Empowerment Programs at Tomorrow’s Youth Organization based in Nablus. So TYO took a different approach …

“TYO’s Women’s Incubation Services for Entrepreneurs (WISE) brought back six businesses that had developed a foundation from their initial women’s entrepreneurship program—Fostering Women Entrepreneurs in Nablus—and recruited nine additional female entrepreneurs by running advertisements in local newspapers, radio, and on Facebook. The requirements were simple—businesses had to have a foundation or business plan already completed, and had to be based in the northern West Bank.

“Candidates who responded to ads underwent two rounds of interviews, designed not only to determine the entrepreneur’s eligibility for the program, but also to assess her strengths and needs moving forward. Partnering with the Small Enterprise Center, TYO sent their final 15 candidates to one-on-one coaching early in the process in order to set their women up for targeted support and success. Additionally, the year-long incubation project will provide marketing, access to capital, and financial-growth trainings, as well as business English and social-media training facilitated by last year’s Palestinian TechWomen delegation. …

“By serving as a support system to the businesswomen, Samin and Inas Badawi—a local Palestinian—provide examples of female-to-female support that is uncommon in Nablus, and try to foster the same sense of encouragement between the women they work with.”

More.

Photograph: Ammar Awad/Reuters/File
Palestinian women sit together at a newly opened upscale Italian cafe in the West Bank city of Ramallah in July 2012. Tomorrow’s Youth Organization serves as a support system to Palestinian businesswomen, encouraging new enterprises.

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Employing Ex-Cons Can Be a Win-Win

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on November 17, 2012| 2 Comments »

“Want proof that the goals of business and the needs of the most vulnerable can align?” asks Sarah Treuhaft (in YES! Magazine, by way of the Huffington Post, by way of the Christian Science Monitor).

“Meet Jeff Brown, fourth-generation grocer and owner of the 10-store ShopRite regional chain based in Philadelphia.

“By mixing old-fashioned customer service with innovative new approaches, Brown is chipping away at the nation’s jobs challenge, starting in the communities hardest-hit by the financial crisis.

Treuhaft goes on to describe one of Brown’s employees: “After being sentenced to jail for five years for selling drugs in his hometown of Lancaster, Pa., Louis Rivera was determined to turn his life around. An eighth-grade dropout, he spent his first year in prison preparing for and obtaining his GED. Upon release, he moved to Philadelphia and sent out dozens of resumes, hoping, at age 31, to secure the first real job of his life. No employer responded. …

“He walked down the street from his apartment to Jeff Brown’s ShopRite grocery store … Louis had gone to the right place. He did not know it at the time, but ShopRite is the only grocery-store chain in Philadelphia, and possibly in the nation, with an explicit focus on hiring ex-offenders.”

And with proper screening and training, ex-offenders turn out to be just as satisfactory as other employees.

“Brown believes his success with hiring ex-offenders is due to a strong partnership with a nonprofit workforce training organization, ABO Haven, that screens ex-offender candidates to find those who are a good match for the grocery’s culture, provides training in ‘soft skills’ like how to be successful in a work environment, and then checks back in with the workers once they are on the jobs.” More.

City of Philadelphia photograph by Kaitlin Privitera
Mayor Michael Nutter visits ShopRite following ground-breaking for the expansion of the Cheltenham Brown’s ShopRite

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Birds Deal with Hurricanes

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 16, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Photograph of northern lapwing off course in Massachusetts: Ian Davies

Birds deal with hurricanes better than you might think.

Some get blown off course, but they adapt. Today’s Boston Globe has a story by Peter Schworm and Melissa M. Werthmann on northern lapwings that Hurricane Sandy detoured from their Scandinavia-to-African migration route. The lapwings are now delighting birdwatchers on Cape Cod, Nantucket, and in Middleborough. Read more here.

And Natalie Angier writes at the NY Times, “Biologists studying the hurricane’s aftermath say there is remarkably little evidence that birds … have suffered the sort of mass casualties seen in environmental disasters like the BP oil spill of 2010, when thousands of oil-slicked seabirds washed ashore, unable to fly, feed or stay warm.

“ ‘With an oil spill, the mortality is way more direct and evident,’ said Andrew Farnsworth, a scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. …

“To the contrary, scientists said, powerful new satellite tracking studies of birds on the wing — including one that coincided with the height of Hurricane Sandy’s fury — reveal birds as the supreme masters of extreme weather management, able to skirt deftly around gale-force winds, correct course after being blown horribly astray, or even use a hurricane as a kind of slingshot to propel themselves forward at hyperspeed. …

“In preparation for a possible offshore wind development project, Caleb Spiegel, a wildlife biologist with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, and his colleagues at the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management have attached transmitters to the tail feathers of several types of migratory birds, including the northern gannet, a big waterfowl with a spectacular fishing style of falling straight down from the sky like a missile dropped from a plane.

“As it happened, one of the gannets was approaching the southern shore of New Jersey at just the moment Hurricane Sandy made landfall there, and Mr. Spiegel could catch the bird’s honker of a reaction. Making a sharp U-turn, it headed back north toward Long Island and then cut out to sea along the continental shelf, where it waited out the storm while refueling with a few divebombs for fish.

“ ‘The bird has since returned to New Jersey,’ Mr. Spiegel said. ‘It’s pretty much back where it started.’ ” More here.

Photograph: NY Times
A protected area for plovers in Lido Beach, N.Y., after a 2009 storm.

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Sweden Runs out of Garbage

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 15, 2012| 3 Comments »

I just got a great lead from Erik. It seems that Sweden has run out of garbage for running its waste-to-energy program. Fortunately, Norway has garbage it can spare. (I wonder if Erik’s buddy Svein knows that.)

Check out Matt Hickman at Mother Nature Network:

“Sweden, birthplace of the Smörgåsbord, Eric Northman, and the world’s preferred solar-powered purveyor of flat-pack home furnishings, is in a bit of a pickle: the squeaky clean Scandinavian nation of more than 9.5 million has run out of garbage. The landfills have been tapped dry; the rubbish reserves depleted. And although this may seem like a positive — even enviable — predicament for a country to be facing, Sweden has been forced to import trash from neighboring countries, namely Norway. Yep, Sweden is so trash-strapped that officials are shipping it in — 80,000 tons of refuse annually, to be exact — from elsewhere.

“You see, Swedes are big on recycling. So big in fact that only 4 percent of all waste generated in the country is landfilled.

“Good for them! However, the population’s remarkably pertinacious recycling habits are also a bit of a problem given that the country relies on waste to heat and to provide electricity to hundreds of thousands of homes through a longstanding waste-to-energy incineration program. So with citizens simply not generating enough burnable waste to power the incinerators, the country has been forced to look elsewhere for fuel. Says Catarina Ostlund, a senior advisor for the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency: ‘We have more capacity than the production of waste in Sweden and that is usable for incineration.

“Public Radio International has the whole story (hat tip to Ariel Schwartz at Co.Exist), a story that may seem implausible in a country like garbage-bloated America where overflowing landfills are anything but scarce.” Read more.

Photograph: Smath/Flickr

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Puppet Becomes War Horse

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on November 14, 2012| Leave a Comment »

At Pamela’s party Sunday, I was talking to Jean and Dorothy, who had seen the theater production of War Horse and were enthusiastic about everything — the story, the performances, and the puppets.

Jean sent me to an online TED talk in which the puppet masters explain how they create animals that seem real to audiences even when the puppeteers are visible.

Check the website: ” ‘Puppets always have to try to be alive,’ says Adrian Kohler of the Handspring Puppet Company, a gloriously ambitious troupe of human and wooden actors. Beginning with the tale of a hyena’s subtle paw, puppeteers Kohler and Basil Jones build to the story of their latest astonishment: the wonderfully life-like Joey, the War Horse, who trots (and gallops) convincingly onto the TED stage.”

 

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Solar Sterilizer

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on November 13, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I’ve really gotten to like the Science section of the NY Times, which comes out on Tuesdays. Today Donald G.McNeil wrote about a solar-powered gizmo for sterilizing surgical instruments in rural areas that can’t afford autoclaves.

“A Rice University team recently modified a prototype of an old solar stove to power a simple autoclave, which is a pressure-cooker for instruments, and tested it in the Texas sun.

“On all 27 attempts, it reached United States government sterilization standards.

“How practical it is awaits African trials; it is nearly 12 feet long and 6 feet tall and has bright curved mirrors to focus sunlight on a water-filled pipe. On sunny  … days, it can make steam at 150 degrees Celsius (302 degrees Fahrenheit) from about 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

“Douglas A. Schuler  … a Rice business professor and lead author of the study, published in The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, said he ‘married into the project.’ His French father-in-law designed the solar stove years ago after a student trip to West Africa. But women in Haiti, where they tested it, ‘just hated cooking on it,’ Dr. Schuler said, so they found a different use for it.

“The initial setup costs about $2,100. But sunlight costs nothing, making five years of operation about $2,000 cheaper than using propane.”  More.:

Photograph: Jeff Fitlow

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The Invention of Golf

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 12, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Who came up with the game of golf first? Wikipedia has so many answers that it amounts to no answer, but let’s give it a shot.

This entry is for my dentist, who loves golf and who was kind enough to say that Suzanne’s Mom’s Blog makes him think of floating down a peaceful stream after all the anxious hammering from the media.

“A golf-like game is recorded as taking place on 26 February 1297, in the Netherlands, in a city called Loenen aan de Vecht, where the Dutch played a game with a stick and leather ball. The winner was whoever hit the ball with the least number of strokes into a target several hundred yards away. Some scholars argue that this game of putting a small ball in a hole in the ground using golf clubs was also played in 17th-century Netherlands and that this predates the game in Scotland. There are also other reports of earlier accounts of a golf-like game from continental Europe.

“In April 2005, new evidence re-invigorated the debate concerning the origins of golf. Recent evidence unearthed by Prof. Ling Hongling of Lanzhou University suggests that a game similar to modern-day golf was played in China since Southern Tang Dynasty, 500 years before golf was first mentioned in Scotland.

“Dōngxuān Records (Chinese: 東軒錄) from the Song Dynasty (960–1279) describes a game called chuíwán (捶丸) and also includes drawings of the game.It was played with 10 clubs including a cuanbang, pubang, and shaobang, which are comparable to a driver, two-wood, and three-wood. Clubs were inlaid with jade and gold, suggesting chuíwán was for the wealthy. Chinese archive includes references to a Southern Tang official who asked his daughter to dig holes as a target. Ling suggested chuíwán was exported to Europe and then Scotland by Mongolian travelers in the late Middle Ages.

“The modern game of golf is generally considered to be a Scottish invention. A spokesman for the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, one of the oldest Scottish golf organizations, said ‘Stick and ball games have been around for many centuries, but golf as we know it today, played over 18 holes, clearly originated in Scotland.’ ” More.

The Ming emperor in the picture below seems more like he’s playing croquet. I’m not sure how today’s golfers would react to the idea that their game started as croquet.

Image:  Ming_Emperor_Xuande_playing_Golf.jpg

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Peanut Butter with Extras

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 11, 2012| 2 Comments »

Erik says he cannot see the appeal of peanut butter. Kids in Sweden never had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches growing up, he says.

I, however, was raised on peanut butter, taking sandwiches in my school lunch that ran the gamut from peanut butter and jelly to peanut butter and whatever was in the house — cucumber, coconut, banana, celery, green pepper, mayonnaise.

Peanut butter is high in protein and recommended in pregnancy, which is why Suzanne got back into it when she was expecting.

Today, as Tracy Boyer writes at the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, nonprofits are adding extra nutrients to peanut butter and getting the inexpensive protein-rich food into the tummies of undernourished children in poor countries.

“Deep in the mountains of southwestern Honduras, Maria Digna Ramos Mendoza spoon-feeds Plumpy’Doz, a peanut-based supplement, to her infant daughter.

“Four other hungry children watch while either sitting on the dirt floor of their one-room hut or swinging from a hammock. Chickens, dogs and rats roam around the cluttered room, scavenging for their next meal.

“Mendoza is part of a research study being conducted by professors and students at [the University of North Carolina], part of the University’s larger focus on international health. Researchers aim to improve the growth and development of young infants in rural Honduras.

“The Mathile Institute for the Advancement of Human Nutrition, a philanthropic organization founded by former Iams CEO and board chairman Clayton L. Mathile, funds the year-long project [2009].

“The study is also in conjunction with the U.S. nonprofit organization Shoulder to Shoulder, an organization founded and directed by UNC School of Medicine faculty member Dr. Jeffrey Heck. …

UNC alumna Yanire Estrada [was recruited] “to lead a team of 11 local and U.S. health promoters to provide educational sessions for the mothers and assess each infant’s health on a monthly basis.

“Estrada’s team evaluates nearly 300 infants from 18 villages in both a control and intervention group. Heck insisted that both groups receive some beneficial subsidy for participating in the study, so every mother obtains food vouchers in addition to the educational sessions. …

“The intervention group receives Plumpy’Doz, a fortified lipid-based peanut butter spread, packed with essential nutrients including zinc, iron and vitamin A. The supplement is given to the infants three times a day in addition to their normal diet. …

UNC public health professor Margaret Bentley “noticed the easy access to cheap, packaged snacks and soft drinks that exists in North Carolina also exists in Santa Lucia. Both are troubling, as Honduran mothers feed this junk food to their infants, causing chronic diarrhea and sickness.

“ ‘I don’t think about working overseas as working over there (with) no connection to North Carolina,’ Bentley said. ‘Any problem that we have in North Carolina has a mirror image in another place.’ …

“Back in the mud hut, Mendoza stares lovingly as her infant begins eating Plumpy’Doz straight from the jar. Just six months ago, her daughter’s fragility deeply concerned her, but now she prides herself as she watches the color return to her child’s face.

“ ‘People stop me to ask what I am feeding my child because she is beginning to look so pretty,’ Mendoza said. ‘She is developing extremely well now.’ ”

More.

Photograph: Pulitzer Center

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One World Futbol

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on November 10, 2012| 2 Comments »

The Friday NY Times Giving section addressed innovative approaches — large and small — that nonprofits are developing to improve the world. Reporter Ken Belson described one organization that makes a practically indestructible soccer ball for kids who are stuck with playing on rough terrain.

“Tim Jahnigen has always followed his heart. whether as a carpenter, a chef, a lyricist or now as an entrepreneur. So in 2006, when he saw a documentary about children in Darfur who found solace playing soccer with balls made out of garbage and string, he was inspired to do something about it.

“The children, he learned, used trash because the balls donated by relief agencies and sporting goods companies quickly ripped or deflated on the rocky dirt that doubled as soccer fields. …

“ ‘The only thing that sustained these kids is play,’ said Mr. Jahnigen of Berkeley, Calif. ‘Yet the millions of balls that are donated go flat within 24 hours.’

“During the next two years, Mr. Jahnigen, who was also working to develop an infrared medical technology, searched for something that could be made into a ball but never wear out, go flat or need a pump. Many engineers he spoke to were dubious of his project. But Mr. Jahnigen eventually discovered PopFoam, a type of hard foam made of ethylene-vinyl acetate, a class of material similar to that used in Crocs, the popular and durable sandals.

“ ‘It’s changed my life,’ he said.

“Figuring out how to shape PopFoam into a sphere, though, might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and Mr. Jahnigen’s money was tied up in his other business.

“Then he happened to be having breakfast with Sting, a friend from his days in the music business. Mr. Jahnigen told him how soccer helped the children in Darfur cope with their troubles and his efforts to find an indestructible ball. Sting urged Mr. Jahnigen to drop everything and make the ball. Mr. Jahnigen said that developing the ball might cost as much as $300,000. Sting said he would pay for it.” More.

Today the One World Futbol is making a positive difference in the lives of many children.

Photograph:  Nicholas Hammond
The One World Futbol stays inflated, even when used on concrete in El Salvador.

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Egypt’s Poet of the People

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 9, 2012| 7 Comments »

Maybe one of my Egyptian relatives will know about this poet. I enjoyed what Abdalla F. Hassan had to say about him in the NY Times, but I wish there had been examples of his poems to share with you. (Sorry, Poets!)

“Along a narrow, leafy road just past a small domed mosque is an electric pole with a handwritten sign showing the path to the country home of the poet Abdel-rahman Elabnoudy. The sign reads Aya and Nour, the names of his daughters.

“Sequestered from the big city, Mr. Elabnoudy, a songwriter, dramatist, social critic and man of verse, lives in a whitewashed home on small plot of land planted with mangoes and date palms in a village in Ismailia Province, along the Suez Canal. A couple of decades ago, he tilled and sowed the earth, and designed a home modeled on the traditional architecture of Abnoud, the Upper Egyptian village of his birth.

“ ‘I am from a village where everyone sings, except the shop owners, who reap the output of the singing at the end of the day,’ said Mr. Elabnoudy, 74, one of the Arab world’s best-known vernacular poets. ‘People work and sing, and with their earnings they would buy simple things like cigarettes and tea.’

“Books and awards line the shelves of his sunny study and reception room. On one wall, below a black-and-white portrait of his father, Mahmoud Elabnoudy, is a photograph of a beaming Abdel-rahman embraced by his mother, Fatma Qandil.

“ ‘It was an exaggerated love,’ he said of his mother. ‘She is present a lot in my poetry, but my father isn’t. She is my true educator.’ …

“Mr. Elabnoudy wrote the songs and the dialogue for the landmark 1969 film ‘Touch of Fear,’ which tells the story of a tyrannical village chief and his demise. The film narrowly passed the censorship authorities and was screened only after Mr. Nasser had seen it and given his approval. …

“Its theme — a mass uprising against tyranny ignited by a senseless death — was what unfolded four decades later to topple a system of authoritarianism established by the military coup-turned-revolution of Nasser and the Free Officers in 1952. Mr. Elabnoudy’s only poem in homage to a leader was written to Nasser 40 years after his death in 1970 and weeks before the 2011 revolution, praising his incorruptibility.

“Mr. Elabnoudy’s ascendancy has endured through six decades. His poem ‘The Square’ … captured the dreams and hopes of a nation during the height of the 18-day revolution. ‘A ruler should never think he understands Egypt,’ he said.”

More.


Photograph of vernacular poet Abdel-rahman Elabnoudy is by Abdalla Hassan

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Give a Charity a Loan

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 8, 2012| Leave a Comment »

More and more nonprofits are creating investment opportunities for well-wishers who want to support the charity’s mission while also receiving a modest return on their money.

New Hampshire Community Loan Fund is one I know about. “Investments in the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund are stable, pay interest to the investor and create opportunity many times over in New Hampshire’s communities,” says their website. “The money that people and institutions invest in us, combined with our own capital, creates the pool of funds from which we lend to create opportunity for decent housing, child care and jobs for families with low or moderate incomes.

“Our borrowers are people and nonprofit organizations that won’t qualify for a bank loan, but that are responsible and motivated to achieve their goals, including repayment. We connect them with the specialized training and support they need to be successful.”

The website also notes that the Community Loan Fund “received the highest honor in our field: the NEXT Award for Opportunity Finance. We were selected from among the country’s top community development financial institutions for providing fair, fixed-rate mortgage loans to help people in New Hampshire’s resident-owned communities build value in their home.” (Resident-owned communities are parks for manufactured housing at which the residents own not just the home but also share ownership of the land. They are a specialty of the Loan Fund.)

At The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Holly Hall writes about how the Nature Conservancy is using the concept of an investment vehicle for supporters.

Hall writes, “Project manager Jeff DeQuatro walks on a protective reef built by the Nature Conservancy off Coffee Island, Alabama. The environmental group has started Conservation Note, an investment program that returns the principal and interest of up to 2 percent to the charity’s supporters.

“Since April 2012, the Nature Conservancy has secured more than $16 million with the Conservation Note, a new investment program that will return an interest rate of up to 2 percent to the charity’s supporters. Under the arrangement, supporters who provide at least $25,000 to the Nature Conservancy to invest for a term of one, three, or five years will earn 0 to 2 percent in interest and get all their money back. The Conservation Note has been given a double-A rating by Moody’s.

“The Nature Conservancy will use the money from supporters to help it shoulder the costs involved in transferring a protected piece of land.

“For instance, the Nature Conservancy recently purchased a Colorado ranch on sensitive land and obtained a conservation easement that prohibits the land from being developed, thereby lowering its value. The lower price made it possible for five families with adjacent ranches each to buy a portion of the property back from the Nature Conservancy. The buyers all agreed not to develop the land.

“Money from the Conservation Notes helped the charity make up the costs involved in selling the land and getting the easement.

“ ‘What is so exciting is that it opens up a whole new avenue of supporting conservation with resources aside from philanthropy,’ says Charlotte Kaiser, who manages the program.” More on how it works.

Photograph: Brian Snyder/Reuters/File
Project manager Jeff DeQuatro walks on a protective reef built by the Nature Conservancy off Coffee Island, Alabama. The environmental group has started Conservation Note, an investment program that returns the principal and interest of up to 2 percent to the charity’s supporters.

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Mangroves Protecting Coasts

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on November 7, 2012| 5 Comments »

Johann Earle at AlertNet (“the world’s humanitarian news site”) has a timely article on efforts to protect mangroves along coasts.

“Keeping coastal mangrove forests intact or replanting them is cheaper than building man-man structure to protect coastlines threatened by climate change, according to the head of the International Union for Conservation for Nature (IUCN).

“ ‘Our message is,”Don’t assume that man-made or engineered solutions are the only ones to protect our coasts and rivers and to provide drinking water. We are not against engineering in the absence of natural solutions, but look at what nature has to offer,” ‘ ” urged Julia Marton-Lefevre at the recent World Conservation Congress in South Korea.

“Preserving mangrove forests can help regulate rainfall patterns, reduce the risk of disasters from extreme weather and sea level rise, provide breeding grounds for fish and capture carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to slow climate change, she said. That suggests preserving them will be essential to fighting climate change and protecting lives and livelihoods in the face of climate shifts already underway.

“ ‘Standing trees help us with inevitable climate change,’ she said. ‘Keeping mangroves intact on the coast is not only good for capturing and storing carbon but also very useful for protecting the coast in times of extreme weather conditions and acting like nurseries for fish to ensure people have protein to eat,’ she said.” More here.

Any chance of planting mangroves around Manhattan Island? How about Fire Island? We need something comparable in cooler climes.

Photograph of a mangrove plant on the shore in Cancun, Mexico: REUTERS/Gerardo Garcia

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