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Posts Tagged ‘environment’

The Miracle of Tiny Gardens

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on May 29, 2026| 4 Comments »

Photo: Annette Hornischer/American Academy in Berlin.
Kate Brown, MIT Professor and author of Tiny Gardens Everywhere.

It’s reassuring to think that small actions of many people can have a significant influence on what happens in the wide world.

In April, Kendra Nordin Beato of the Christian Science Monitor interviewed Kate Brown, a woman used to thinking very big, about how small improvements to improve urban living can play a role in saving the planet.

“Kate Brown, a professor of environmental history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an award-winning author,” says Beato, “has examined the wake of large-scale disasters and the massive challenges they create.

“On a smaller scale, Dr. Brown is also an avid gardener. Her most recent book, Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City, probes gardens as small patches of resilience, resistance, and regeneration.

“By studying histories of select European and North American urban gardens, she explores how these spaces helped to build communities centered on cooperation and mutual support. They also hold a promise, she says, for cities as places of sustainable food production. …

Kendra Nordin Beato
“What drew you, as an environmental historian, to this subject of urban gardening?

Kate Brown
“I wrote two big nuclear histories – and then about the environmental and health effects of Chernobyl, which were profound. As I worked on these big histories, I would think, once people find this out, it is going to change everything. And then it doesn’t.

“Countries are threatening each other as if it is the Cold War all over again with nuclear weapons. And then I started to think that maybe part of the problem, maybe these big histories – problems on a planetary scale – add to our sense of anxiety, apathy, you know, that we can’t do anything about it. I can’t get a U.N. resolution passed. So what can we do? We can do something on a very local level; we can do something in our own backyards.

“I love to garden. As you see in the book, my friend and I decided to plant a food forest around this mothballed school. And there I was, out in the street, and I got to know my neighbors in this really amazing way. I had lived there for 15 years and all it took was just to be out with a shovel in my hand to meet the guy who is always a porch sitter and get to know the kids who are running around. So that’s where I started to connect the simple act of planting a garden – especially in a visible place, whether that’s a front yard or public land – with community.

Beato
“One theme in your book explores how regenerative it is to extract life from seemingly little pockets of wasteland. …

Brown
“We call gardening recreation for a reason: because it’s fun. Gardeners find it fascinating to go out, mess around, see what happens, see what works. And it’s the small scale of it that makes it enjoyable, not drudgery. 

“Gardeners work with the environment. You treat your soil well; every worm is sacred. I abandon my garden every summer here in Cambridge [Massachusetts] for two months. I pack in the seeds, I set up a sprinkler that goes off at 5 every morning, and I have a lot composted from my kitchen compost. And when I come back, there’s really no space for weeds because all these plants – the beans are growing in the squash, the melons I didn’t even plant are vining their way around the potatoes and the garlic – all I have to do is come back and harvest, because this little space is self-propagating. …

Beato
“Why do you think gardens can strengthen, as you call it, civil societies?

Brown
“Not all community gardens are the same. [For instance, consider 19th-century factory workers in Berlin who] go to the edge of the town and they see all these sand dunes, basically. And so they take manure and the scraps from the brewery and the scraps from the sugar beet factory, all this organic material, and they build soils. … First it’s these miserable little gardens on sand, these poor little struggling plants. But then, within 10 years, they’re quite lush. And then, in another 10 years, most of the infrastructure is botanical. And so, people come together in these self-actuated communities, and they are living there, too. They start to build the sinews of what we would now call a social security network. They take up collections for people whose shacks burned down, unemployment collections, microloans to one another, and these places become very resilient. They weather war and famine. …

“We just did a YouGov Poll and asked a cross section of Americans what they do with their front-yard gardens. And 16% of Americans use their front yards to grow food. Then we asked: Did you get a lot of pushback? Did your neighbors complain? … Most of them – well over 60% – said, ‘Oh, my neighbors just compliment me. And a lot of them ask for advice because they want to do the same.’ So we found that these front-yard gardeners clustered together. Once somebody broke the mold, others wanted to follow. And so, we’re thinking there’s a quiet revolution against the institution of the American lawn that’s going on regardless of political affiliation. 

“In case you are thinking, ‘Oh, this can’t happen in a big country. This can’t be part of modern life,’ think of the Soviet Union [when it was a] nuclear superpower. By the 1990s, 96% of the potatoes people were eating were coming from tiny garden plots. We can go a long way toward feeding ourselves with these tiny urban spaces.”

More at the Monitor, here.

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Releasing Bats in Ukraine

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on May 27, 2026| 4 Comments »

Photo: Dan Bashakov/AP.
A volunteer of the Ukrainian bat rehabilitation center shows the wing of a rescued bat to people before returning bats to the wild in Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, April 4, 2026.

I wonder how some celebrations emerge and become yearly events. Do they start with one person or family being excited about something — perhaps the return of a certain bird in spring — and the next thing you know, a whole community is having annual cookouts and parades?

Derek Gatopoulos and Vasila Stepanenko at the Associated Press and have a story about an annual celebration in Ukraine, war or no war.

“As night falls over a nature park on the edge of Kyiv,” they write, “children crowd around volunteers who carefully open cloth bags and release bats into the twilight.

“As each one takes flight, snapping through the air, more than 1,000 spectators cheer and applaud — families, off-duty soldiers, and bat enthusiasts, a few dressed in Goth outfits.

“Hundreds of bats, many rescued from war-torn areas in the east of the country, were released [in April] at one of multiple events around Ukraine planned to coincide with the arrival of spring.

“ ‘This is important for us as an organization because these are on a red list of endangered animals. Preserving them is very important,’ said Anastasiia Vovk, a volunteer at the Ukrainian Bat Rehabilitation Center, which organized the release. All 28 bat species in Ukraine are listed as protected animals due to declining populations.

“For many attendees, the event offered welcome relief and an excuse for a family outing after a harsh winter marked by subzero temperatures, nightly Russian drone and missile attacks and crippling power cuts.

“Late Saturday, children, many wearing bat-themed T-shirts and hats, watched as volunteers fed the animals mealworms with tweezers before letting them go. Some were allowed to wear gloves and handle the bats themselves.

“ ‘Life goes on despite the war,’ said Oleksii Beliaiev, a 54-year-old Kyiv resident who attended with his family. … Beliaiev runs a small printing business and spends time volunteering for army projects.

“The war has displaced animals as well as people. Buildings destroyed by shelling damage bats’ shelters, and explosions terrify the tiny mammals, experts say.

“ ‘In winter, bats hibernate, and if they are disturbed, they can die. They reproduce slowly — one or two offspring per year — so populations recover very slowly,’ said Alona Shulenko, who headed Saturday’s release. ‘As natural hibernation sites disappear, bats move into cities, into cracks in buildings and balconies. But repairs or destruction of these places can kill entire colonies,’ she said.

“All Ukrainian bat species are insect-eating and legally protected. … The charity says it has rescued more than 30,000 in total, including 4,000 bats last winter.

“ ‘We are all living in wartime, and everyone has their own struggles,’ Shulenko said. ‘But we are doing what we know best. … If we stop what we are doing, thousands of bats will die.’ ” More at AP, here.

I know some of you may be thinking, “Ugh. I really don’t like bats!” So I can’t leave this topic without saying a word about why bats are important.

Much of the information below applies to bats globally, not just in the US.

“Few of nature’s animals are as misunderstood as bats. We at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service [FWS] want to set the record straight and help others understand the importance of bats. Though often feared and loathed as sinister creatures of the night, bats are vital to the health of our environment and our economy. …

“Bats play an essential role in pest control, pollinating plants and dispersing seeds. Recent studies estimate that bats eat enough pests to save more than $1 billion per year in crop damage and pesticide costs in the United States corn industry alone. Across all agricultural production, consumption of insect pests by bats results in a savings of more than $3 billion per year. While many bats eat insects, others feed on nectar and provide critical pollination for a variety of plants like peaches, cloves, bananas and agaves. In fact, bats are the sole pollinator for the agave plant, a key ingredient in tequila! A third bat food source is fruit, leading to yet another important role in the ecosystem – seed dispersal. Fruit-eating bats can account for as much as 95% of the seed dispersal responsible for early growth in recently cleared rainforests.

“Unfortunately, bats are declining across the globe. Many bats are needlessly killed because people do not understand the important role bats play in a healthy ecosystem. For bats that hibernate in caves, the need for winter shelter during hibernation puts them at another disadvantage. Human activity resulting in loss of habitat and disruptions during hibernation are detrimental. Making matters worse, a fungal disease called white-nose syndrome has claimed the lives of more than 5 million bats since its discovery in 2006 and has spread across North America at alarming rates. …

“Across the continent, we’re working with partners to protect bats, research treatments to halt the spread of white-nose syndrome and raise awareness about just how incredible, and vulnerable, bats are. More than 15 bat species are currently listed as federally endangered, threatened or under review in the candidate or petition process under the Endangered Species Act. … One recent study led to the discovery of a large summer roost for Indiana bats in Missouri — a single tree was providing refuge to more than 150 endangered Indiana bats!”

More at FWS, here.

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Beauty Salon Fights Waste

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on May 19, 2026| 4 Comments »

Photo: John Francis Peters/The Guardian.
Easton Basjec and Melissa Parker, founders of Scisters Salon & Apothecary in San Diego, California, on 18 March 2026. Together, they’re showing how salons can help the environment rather than contribute to waste.

My hairdresser is very thoughtful in her daily life about health and the environment. Of course she knows that there are an awful lot of unhealthful chemicals in the salon business. I wonder if the owner of her workplace would be up for making a switch like the San Diego salon in today’s story did.

Michaela Haas writes at the Guardian, “The first thing you notice when you walk into Scisters Salon & Apothecary is what isn’t there. No wall of glossy plastic bottles. … No sharp chemical tang or aerosol haze. The only trash can is a tiny basket that mostly collects coffee cups and gum wrappers clients bring from home.

“Instead, the shelves of this southern California salon are lined with large refill containers of shampoo and conditioner, houseplants dot the space, hair clippings are swept away for compost, and the air carries a trace of bergamot and vanilla.

” ‘It’s the smell people comment on straight away,’ says co-founder Melissa Parker. ‘They walk in and say: “It smells good in here.” ‘ …

“Parker and her co-founder Easton Basjec opened Scisters 15 years ago in a strip mall in La Mesa, about 9 miles east of San Diego. Since then, they’ve built it into one of the region’s most prominent low-waste salons, diverting, they say, up to 99% of its refuse from landfills.

“The beauty sector is a dirty business. Salons in North America send an estimated 63,000 lbs of hair to landfills every day, along with hundreds of tons of used foil and leftover hair dyes, according to Green Circle Salons, a Canadian recycling and recovery organization. On top of that, many products used in salons contain chemicals like formaldehyde and lye that carry potential health risks.

“But Parker and Bajsec have staked their business on the idea that beauty doesn’t have to come at the expense of the planet – or the people in the salon.

“The two business partners, both native to San Diego’s East county, met while working at another salon before attending business school together at a local community college. In 2010, they opened their own seven-chair salon and named it Scisters in a nod to their close friendship.

“For years, the business – which has seven employees and serves up to 22 customers a day – operated much like any other boutique salon, carrying more than 150 products from a large corporate brand and offering the full range of services. …

“The turning point came several years later, after Bajsec watched a documentary about the zero-waste movement and began questioning the beauty industry’s environmental footprint. Around the same time, Parker developed serious health problems that her doctors linked to prolonged exposure to salon chemicals.

“Several studies have found that hairdressers’ exposure to harmful chemicals such as formaldehyde, ammonia and sulfates puts them at a higher risk of asthma, skin conditions, reproductive illnesses and cancer. Eventually, a naturopath warned Parker she might have to stop working as a hairstylist, a prospect she found ‘terrifying.’

“But rather than walk away from the beauty business altogether, Parker and Bajsec set out to transform their salon.

“First they took a hard look at the services they provided and products they carried. They stopped offering perms because the treatments release formaldehyde, a carcinogen. And they decided to move away from the big-name shampoos and conditioners they’d been selling. …

” ‘We knew that if we switched to products that didn’t perform as well, we risked losing clients,’ Parker says.

“The pair enrolled in online formulation design courses and developed their own line. The process took years, Bajsec says. ‘Stability testing, packaging, preservatives – we had no idea how complex it was.’

“Element, which they launched in 2019, is made in a California lab and sold in refillable glass and aluminum containers. It boasts recognizable ingredients such as organic aloe, wheat protein and castor oil. Parker and Bajsec encourage customers to use the salon’s ‘jar library’ – a collection of donated and sanitized pasta sauce or salsa jars – to purchase refills. …

“ ‘I spoke with the local waste company and convinced them to accept hair scraps for composting,’ Bajsec says. … She and Parker started washing and recycling foils rather than sending them to the dump. Instead of waxing, Scisters began to offer sugaring – a hair-removal technique using a compostable paste made from sugar, water and lemon. … In the bathroom, customers use washable cloths rather than paper towels to dry their hands. Parker and Bajsec also rethought their energy use, switching to LED lights and installing Ecoheads sprayers for their shampoo bowls. …

“They found that some compromises are unavoidable. Scisters still offers hair bleaching, which releases ammonia, a chemical linked to respiratory and gastrointestinal irritation. … They mitigate the fume’s potential harms with ‘industrial air filtration, open doors, and air-purifying plants such as snake plants. …

“Parker and Bajsec ship the plastic waste they do produce – about two boxes a year, they say – along with excess hair dyes and broken stylist tools, to Green Circle Salons for specialized processing. Bajsec said they pay Green Circle $200 per box of waste – which she said she’s happy to do for the peace of mind knowing they’re not going straight to the dump.

“Though the transition to reducing their waste – namely developing the Element line – required an initial upfront investment, Parker says it has paid off. ‘Overall, it’s actually less expensive….

” ‘Going green has been the greatest thing we’ve done for our business financially,’ Parker says. ‘We accidentally created a point of differentiation.’

“Denise Baden, a professor of sustainable business at the University of Southampton … who has been working with salon owners for more than a decade to help them incorporate sustainable practices, says hairdressers are uniquely positioned to influence their communities. ‘The practices they model in the salon and the message they give to their clients about how to adopt ‘greener’ hair practice in their homes have the potential to make a world of difference.’ ”

It’s a big step, and probably one that needs the whole staff on board, but I imagine that there are customers who would seek out such salons.

More at the Guardian, here.

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Conservation Helps Butterflies

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on May 13, 2026| 5 Comments »

Photo: Marco Ugarte/AP.
Every fall, millions of the butterflies travel nearly 3,000 miles from Canada, across the US and finally to western Mexico. :

Can I give up avocados? Will it make a dent in the loss of butterfly habitat in Mexico?

Well, I have cut back of what I buy in the supermarket, but so far, if you buy it, I’ll eat it. Not much of an activist, am I?

Oscar Lopez at the Guardian explains what’s happening in Mexico.

“The population of monarch butterflies in Mexico increased 64% this winter, compared with the same period in 2025, offering a glimmer of hope for an insect considered at risk of extinction.

“The figures, released [in March] by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Mexico, showed that the area occupied by monarchs expanded to 2.93 hectares (7.24 acres) of forest from 1.79 hectares (4.42 acres) the previous winter, the largest coverage since 2018.

“ ‘The monarch butterfly is the symbol of the trilateral relationship between Mexico, the United States and Canada,’ Mexican environment minister Alicia Bárcena Ibarra said at a news conference. … ‘Its conservation is a collective commitment we must maintain for the future.’

“Every fall, tens of millions of the butterflies travel nearly 3,000 miles from Canada, across the US and finally to the forests of western Mexico. There, the orange insects cover entire trees and flutter through the air in spectacular fashion.

“But a combination of habitat loss from deforestation, climate crisis and the use of herbicides has seen their numbers plummet over the last 30 years.

“In the US, the increasing use of herbicides like glyphosate and dicamba has seen the amount of milkweed, the only plant that monarch caterpillars can eat, drop considerably, with butterfly numbers also plummeting as a result. …

“In Mexico, the spread of avocado farming in the state of Michoacán has seen vast swaths of forest lost to illegal logging, driven partly by organized crime groups who have infiltrated the highly profitable avocado trade.

“Compared with a peak of nearly 18.21 hectares (45 acres) in the winter of 1995, the area covered by monarchs in Mexico today is just a sliver, and well below the 6.07 hectares (15 acres) that scientists say are necessary for the species’ survival.

“The involvement of cartels in logging has at times become deadly: in 2020, Homero Gómez González, one of the best-known monarch butterfly conservators in Mexico, was found dead, with his family suspecting he was murdered by organized crime groups intent on clearing the monarch’s habitat.

“Still, conservation efforts have slowed logging in recent years: from a peak of nearly 500 hectares (1,235 acres) of forest in 2003-2004, just 2.55 hectares (6.3 acres) between February 2024 and February 2025 were affected.

“ ‘One of the greatest achievements of this work is that illegal logging in the core zone of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve has been virtually eradicated since 2008,’ María José Villanueva, WWF Mexico’s director, told reporters. ‘This means that the forests that represent the fundamental habitat for the monarch butterfly’s hibernation are being protected and conserved.’ ” More at the Guardian, here.

You know, in terms of making a dent, one thing that seems to have changed for good, at least in my area, is property owners’ hostility to milkweed. I know this didn’t happen overnight, but it really seems like overnight milkweed is actually featured in flower gardens and front-yard landscaping.

Anther hopeful example of a lot individuals doing a little.

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When a Critter Is Not Really Extinct

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on April 20, 2026| 2 Comments »

Photo: Carlos Bocos.
According to the Guardian, the pygmy long-fingered possum was last known to have lived in West Papua until about 6,000 years ago. 

It’s always good news to me when long-disappeared animals turn out not to be extinct — even if I never knew enough in the first place to be worried. I do know that many species are disappearing rapidly, so it’s comforting when scientists find that one they’d given up on is still around.

Adam Morton wrote about this at the Guardian recently. “Researchers led by the Australian scientist Tim Flannery have made a once-in-a-lifetime discovery: that two charismatic marsupial species that had been thought extinct for 6,000 years are alive in rainforest in remote West Papua.

“The pair are rare examples of ‘Lazarus taxa’ – species that disappeared from fossil records in the distant past that are later found to have survived. [Do note the choice of the word “Lazurus”!]

“One of the species is a striped possum with an extraordinarily elongated fourth digit, twice as long as the rest of its fingers, that it uses to extract and feed on wood-boring insect larvae. Fossil records had previously indicated the species, known as the pygmy long-fingered possum (Dactylonax kambuayai), lived in Australia’s central Queensland region about 300,000 years ago but seemed to have vanished during the ice age. Before the recent discovery, it was last known to have lived in West Papua until about 6,000 years ago.

“The other is a ring-tailed glider (Tous ayamaruensis), which is closely related to the Australian greater glider but with unfurred ears and a strongly prehensile tail used for gripping. It was first described by the late Australian zoologist Ken Aplin, who pieced together fossil fragments found in West Papua late last century. Flannery’s research team found the species was still living in the rainforest and identified it as part of a newly described taxonomic group, or genus, of marsupials. …

“Flannery is best known as a climate campaigner and the author of the international bestselling The Weather Makers, but he made his name in science as a mammalogist and palaeontologist working in New Guinea and Pacific islands. He says the likelihood of finding one mammal species that had been thought gone for millennia was ‘almost zero.’ The chances of finding two? ‘It’s unprecedented and groundbreaking, really, to find two Lazarus taxa,’ Flannery says.

“The 70-year-old says the identification of a new genus, in particular, felt like a ‘lifetime achievement, shared with all our many other co-authors.’ …

“Both species live in lowland mountain forests on the sparsely populated Bird’s Head peninsula, also known as the Vogelkop, in the north-west of the Indonesian-controlled part of New Guinea. Their existence was established through photographs taken by local and independent researchers, fossil fragments and, in the case of the long-fingered possum, a museum specimen that was collected in 1992 but initially misidentified. …

“The long-fingered possum was photographed in 2022 by Carlos Bocos during a trip to the area by the organization mammalwatching.com. A ring-tailed glider was captured by Arman Muharmansyah by the side of a river in a forest belonging to a palm oil company in 2015, and photographed by Ichlas AlZaqie from Orangutan Foundation Indonesia.

“The discoveries are detailed in a special edition of a peer-reviewed journal published on Friday by the Australian Museum, edited by Flannery and the museum’s former chief scientist, Kristofer Helgen. …

“They are in part a result of Flannery’s repeated trips to the Vogelkop, where he works with Indigenous elders, researchers from the University of Papua, the Global Wildlife Fund and the Minderoo Foundation to protect forests from logging and leave them in the control of traditional owners. He says the research underscored the importance of preserving the area’s unique environment.

“David Lindenmayer, an ecologist and professor at the Australian National University who was not involved in the research, says … ‘It’s fantastic to see new species still being discovered and it shows the importance of some of these rainforests in very remote parts of the world where there hasn’t been much study in the past.’ …

“The ring-tailed glider is considered sacred by some Vogelkop clans, who believe it is a manifestation of ancestors’ spirits. Rika Korain, a local Maybrat woman and a research co-author, says the species could not have been identified without the help of traditional owners. ‘This connection has been essential,’ she says.

“Flannery says the discoveries are evidence the Vogelkop was once a part of the Australian continent that had later become part of New Guinea. The link is the subject of another paper in the journal, and may have wider implications. ‘Its forests may shelter yet more hidden relics of a past Australia,’ he says.”

More at the Guardian, here.

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Saving a Nigerian River

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on April 19, 2026| 6 Comments »

Photo: Ogar Monday.
Unity High School students in Nigeria hold conservation signs and copies of the book The Loud Cry of the Ogun River.

It’s good to be reminded that many of our planet’s troubles can be alleviated by good education. It’s especially true when children grasp an idea and take it home. In my own family, I have seen the influence of environmentally oriented children. After a while, efforts to, say, compost food scraps become so embedded in family culture it’s hard to tell anymore if it’s parents or kids who are behind them.

Today we learn how students in Nigeria are influencing grownups to clean up a polluted river.

Ogar Monday reports at the Christian Science Monitor, “Ugonna Nkemjika is reading aloud from a storybook as a classroom of rapt children follows along. When she turns the page to an illustration of a river clogged with plastic bottles, a student’s hand shoots up.

“ ‘Yes, Blessing?’ Ms. Nkemjika says to the girl.

“ ‘Is this our river?’ the girl replies.

“Ms. Nkemjika nods, and the room falls silent. The students, who attend Catholic Comprehensive High School on the outskirts of Abeokuta in Nigeria’s southwestern Ogun state, have crossed the Ogun River countless times. Some have fetched water from the river; others have watched fishers cast their nets into it. Yet for many of the students, this is the first time they are being asked to reckon with the peril their river is in – and how they can help.

“Ms. Nkemjika is a volunteer with Project Conserve Ogun River (COR). The Loud Cry of Ogun River, the book open on the students’ desks, seeks to explain the river’s decline in terms children can absorb. Solomon Ekundayo, who founded Project COR and wrote the book, believes training adults to protect their natural resources is vital but that teaching children will yield results for generations to come.

“ ‘When children learn about conservation, they carry it home,’ Mr. Ekundayo says. ‘They question their parents. They challenge what feels normal. Over time, that knowledge becomes culture.’

“The Ogun is Nigeria’s fifth-longest river. It stretches nearly 480 kilometers (298 miles), beginning in Oyo state and running through the Ogun region before emptying into the Atlantic Ocean via the Lagos Lagoon. In addition to fishing, residents use the river for irrigating crops, drinking, and bathing. 

“As a child, Mr. Ekundayo regularly crossed the Ogun River with his mother, watching fishers ply their trade and kids play along its banks. But his understanding of conservation did not come until much later, after he began studying geology at Ahmadu Bello University and embarked on an externship involving freshwater conservation. As part of the program, supported by the National Geographic Society and the Nature Conservancy, he was asked to study a river system, and thought immediately of home.

“But when he returned to the Ogun River, he barely recognized it. The water was darker and filled with plastic waste and untreated sewage. Fishing activity had plummeted, and in some areas, the stench alone kept people away.

“ ‘I saw more plastic than fish,’ Mr. Ekundayo recalls. …

“In late 2022, Mr. Ekundayo launched Project COR. From the outset, he thought that river cleanups alone would not be enough. The deeper challenge, he believed, was environmental literacy. 

“ ‘People don’t connect dumping waste into the river with illness or flooding,’ he says. ‘No one ever explained it to them in a way they can understand.’

“So Mr. Ekundayo turned to storytelling. He drafted the text for The Loud Cry of Ogun River and worked with Project COR volunteers to illustrate it. Throughout the book, the river speaks. 

“ ‘I used to breathe the fresh air of mother nature,’ the river says in the expanded online version. …

“Child-friendly word puzzles reinforce key ideas, and concepts such as biodiversity are broken down into simple language. The book also weaves in Yoruba proverbs to pass conservation lessons on ‘in a familiar cultural way,’ Mr. Ekundayo says. At the end, the book contains a pledge for students to sign, committing to environmental protection.

“Saviour Iwezue, founder of Team Illuminate, an organization that is raising an army of young environmentalists across Nigeria, agrees with Project COR’s approach. She says many environmental campaigns fail because they overlook how behavior is formed.

“ ‘Children should not be seen only as future leaders, but as also capable of influencing what happens around them today,’ Ms. Iwezue explains. ‘If you want sustainable change, you change values,’ she adds. ‘And values are most malleable in childhood.’

“Teachers in Ogun state have noticed changes in students’ attitudes toward the river, thanks to Mr. Ekundayo’s book. …

“Says Ashade Adepeju, a teacher at Catholic Comprehensive High School, ‘Now they point at the illustrations and say, “That’s our bridge!” or “My father fishes there!” ‘

“Teenager Adebayo Firefunmi says he used to throw plastic pouches of water, commonly sold by Nigerian street vendors, into the river after drinking them. … ‘But when I learned what plastic does to the river, I felt bad.’ Now, he says, he discards trash responsibly and reminds his friends about the ‘three Rs of reduce, reuse, and recycle,’ when he sees them littering.

“Project COR’s efforts include the wider community, too. The group’s volunteers have run campaigns to get residents to stop dumping waste into the river, and have set up informal dump sites that are easily accessible by shoppers at the popular riverside market. The group also has supported school environmental clubs and youth volunteer groups, many led by students who now organize cleanups themselves.

“Mr. Ekundayo still crosses the Ogun River regularly. … On his most recent visit, he noticed something he hadn’t seen in years: fish swimming freely.”

More at the Monitor, here.

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Fossil Fuels Have Health Costs

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 27, 2026| 5 Comments »

Photo: Seed Global Health.
Dr. Vanessa Kerry (second from left) speaks at the Foreign Policy event at the World Health Assembly in Geneva in May 2025. Under her leadership, Seed Global Health has helped educate more than 45,000 doctors, nurses, and midwives in seven countries.

We humans are inconsistent critters. Today we’re panicking that the latest stupid war is messing up our oil markets (and I get it: we still need oil), but we seem to downplay just how bad oil really is for us.

At the environmental radio show Living on Earth, we learn what fossil fuels are actually doing to our health.

“The burning of fossil fuels is linked to some 300,000 deaths in America every year, not to mention the related carbon emissions that promote global warming. Dr. Vanessa Kerry directs Global Health and Climate Policy and teaches at the Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health. She is also the World Health Organization Special Envoy for Climate Change and Health and joins host Steve Curwood to discuss the major health costs and lost opportunities linked to pollution.

Steve Curwood
“There’s been a shift in messaging from environmental groups regarding the impact of air pollution on environmental health. Discuss what that means in terms of the effectiveness of helping people understand the impact of the environment on their daily lives.

Vanessa Kerry
“There’s a group that calls [climate change] the greatest hoax of our time, and there are others that are really trying to think strategically about what is happening on this earth in ways that aren’t just degrees Celsius. Health has been a really important piece — how extreme heat puts you at risk of flaring your diabetes or your lung disease or your heart disease. …

“But I think there’s another step that we can also take to help people really understand what we’re up against in climate change, which is that these health impacts that we’re seeing cost us money, because if you are too sick to go to work, or you can’t breathe, or your child has an asthma attack, and you can’t go to work because you’re taking them to hospital, that’s lost income. We know, for example, that the United States is losing 100 billion in productivity from extreme heat already now, and that’s supposed to go to 500 billion in the next 20 years. So these, it’s very real. And I think for those that can’t even think about health, understanding the economic bottom line and how it affects your pocket is something that I think is universally related and understood and very real.

Curwood
“If it’s that much of a health danger, climate change is almost an aside. …

Kerry
“Without question, the burning of fossil fuels is driving our risk through multiple pathways. Particulate matter is co-emitted with the greenhouse gasses and … not only do you breathe it in and can it cause issues in your lungs, but actually particulate matter can cross into your bloodstream, lead to increased risk of heart attacks, worsen your blood pressure, increased risk of strokes, cause all sorts of other problems. …

“Beyond the direct impacts of fossil fuels, people who are paying out of pocket for catastrophic health costs related to this are therefore losing access to nutrition, ability to send their children to school, access to other resources. … We know that we’re going to see upwards, you know, 44 million people are going to fall into poverty from the health impacts of climate change alone, according to the World Bank, in the next 20 years.

Curwood
“If air pollution has such a tremendous impact on us, health-wise and economically as well, why aren’t we talking about this more in America?

Kerry
“The Harvard School of Public Health and Department of Environmental Health is actually looking at that exact question. … And there’s lots of data out there that tells us that investments in health actually have higher returns.

Curwood
“To what extent are the massive impacts of air pollution on public health part of the reason that we have such a huge economic divide in this country? …

Kerry
“When you look at who lives in urban cities, in heat deserts, where it can be absolutely crippling to live in high heat, it’s often people of color or people in poverty. And so there’s a massive divide that is happening where we are exacerbating inequity, not just in the United States, but globally. …

Curwood
“The Heritage Foundation in Washington claims that climate change alarmism (quote, unquote) is discouraging families from having children. …

Kerry
“It’s really actually the perpetuation of misinformation. … How we communicate a conversation which is fact-based, scientific, ground in truth … is a really critical question.”

More at Living on Earth, here. And whiled we’re on the subjec t, I want to be sure everyone knows about the heeroes of Cancer Alley in Louisiana, who just dont’ care if fighting the Power is impaossible, They do it and succeed. (Click here.)

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The Disappearing Prairie

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 11, 2026| 5 Comments »

Photo: Dietmar Rabich, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
The American bison is a well-loved symbol of the prairie, and for good reason. Bison provide important ecosystem services.

I have blogged several times about Frank and Deborah Popper’s insights on the loss of population in the industrial Midwest and the idea of returning former urban areas to prairie, a kind of Buffalo Commons. (See one post, here.) It’s an optimistic concept: Instead of crumbling under the loss of “the way things were,” we can learn not only to accept the change but feature it.

But what if the prairie itself is disappearing? The environmental radio show Living on Earth investigates the role of agribusiness.

“The American prairie is one of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the world, with numbers of species rivaling even a tropical rainforest. But today, just one percent of eastern tallgrass prairie remains, and western shortgrass prairie is disappearing at a rate of more than a million acres a year. Author Josephine Marcotty joins host Paloma Beltran to discuss her book Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie.

Paloma Beltran
How did the idea for Sea of Grass first come about?

Josephine Marcotty
Growing up, I really had little or no contact with the prairie because it was gone. … I grew up in a suburb of Detroit, and the prairie was something I read about in books like Laura Ingalls Wilder, but not something that I had experienced. So it was only when I started exploring the prairie that was left and understanding what we had lost that inspired me to write, not only about agriculture, but about what we were losing by expanding agriculture in the Midwest.

Beltran
Can you describe the American prairie for us? You know, what does it feel like to visit such a place and what makes it special?

Marcotty
The tallgrass prairie, which is now almost completely gone, used to be an extraordinary place where grasses would be taller than a standing person, and in order to see over the top of them, you had to stand on top of a horse. It was a place where people could get lost, and often did in those tall grasses, or in the massive wetlands that used to occupy a third or 25% of the mid part of the country. It was an extraordinary place full of animals that we no longer have, wolves and bears and other carnivores, extraordinary birds. So I mean, the thing that I like about a prairie is the immense silence. All you hear is the sound of wind, and that enormous sense of space that you get, which is very similar to [being] out on a great lake or out on an ocean. …

Beltran
Let’s talk about one of the main characters in your book, the buffalo. …

Marcotty
They are what biologists call a keystone species on the prairie. They have been around for millions of years. … They were huge. And they shared the grasslands with giant sloths and other animals that you know have long gone. But over time, they became a key part of the grassland ecosystem. So they come through and they eat the grass short and that creates an environment that’s conducive to birds that like short grass, or insects that need short grass, and then they move on, and then the grass grows taller, and then that becomes an ecosystem for other animals that like taller grass. One of the things that they do is they wallow.

If you’ve ever been to Yellowstone National Park or any other park where you can see bison, you’ll see them roll over and just create these huge clouds of dust, and then when they leave, there’s a little wallow. Those wallows are really important for collecting water when it rains, and scientists have found that there’s unique species of animals and insects that will live in and around those wallows when they collect water. Bison, they carry seed across thousands, hundreds of miles when they eat the grass, and then they move the seed up to other parts of the of the grassland. …

Prairies create a whole universe of organisms around them, and that’s an excellent way of sequestering and processing carbon, of sequestering and processing nitrogen, both of which are very important for world health in terms of air pollution and in terms of climate change. The world’s grasslands contain more carbon than humans have released since the Industrial Revolution, more than the planet’s forests and atmosphere.

[But] we’re plowing up about a million acres a year, and that’s the equivalent of adding 11.2 million cars to the road every year. … For many, many decades, intensive agriculture stopped at around the 98th parallel because it was too dry in the West to really graze crops properly. And instead, that’s why we have cattle there. That’s because it was good country for cattle and bison. But through genetic technology, we now are creating seeds like for corn that is much more capable of withstanding severe weather, that can thrive in dry conditions. … And the profits from that are much greater than from growing cattle. So you can sell a piece of land that has been plowed for much higher price than you can sell it if it hasn’t been plowed. …

What’s driven the loss of grasslands … is just growing corn for our gas tanks.

More at LOE, here.

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Mardi Gras Regrets

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on February 21, 2026| 1 Comment »

Photo: Grounds Krewe.
In the interest of environmental protection, barriers were set up to block discarded Mardi Gras parade throws and party trash from going down storm drains.

New Orleans likes to have fun, and whether it’s a funeral with a brass band playing “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In,” men high-stepping in feathers to welcome the New Year (Mummers), or the abandon of Mardi Gras before the solemnity of Lent, parades produce litter. A lot of litter.

That’s why environmentally oriented New Orleanians have decided to do something about cleaning up.

As Jackie Delamatre writes at the New York Times, “In recent years, the city’s huge, weekslong party has been producing more waste than ever: an average of 1,123 tons per year for the last decade, according to the city’s Sanitation Department.

“ ‘It’s an environmental catastrophe,’ said Brett Davis, who runs a nonprofit group, Grounds Krewe, that’s trying to make Carnival greener.

“The New Orleans area is especially vulnerable to climate change because of hurricanes and coastal erosion. Yet, for weeks of ebullient parading, which culminate on Tuesday, those problems are forgotten as float riders fling plastic beads, cups, doubloons and foam footballs at teeming crowds. In the moment, these baubles can seem like treasures. Within days, though, what was caught, as well as the excess left on the streets or dangling from oak trees like Spanish moss, ends up in the trash.

“Now, a coalition of nonprofit organizations, city officials and scientists is trying to clean up the party. … It’s not just that all this party detritus is swelling landfills. A 2013 study found that more than 60 percent of Mardi Gras beads contained unsafe levels of lead. And in 2018, the city discovered 46 tons of beads clogging catch basins that are essential for clearing floodwaters. …

” ‘When I was a kid, we caught everything that came off the floats,’ Mr. Davis said. ‘There was a big hoopla about who was going to get it. Now it’s a carpet, a river of waste.’ …

“Mr. Davis came to believe that, by reusing beads, he was just ‘recirculating toxic, plastic junk no one wants,’ he said. Now, he has pivoted to waste prevention, building a catalog of sustainable throws.

“To date, he has sold more than $1 million of these festive but practical items, including jambalaya mix, native flower starter kits and plant-based glitter. He has also recruited a cadre of volunteers, from fifth graders to retirees, to help package the goods.”

Read at the Times, here, about scientists inventing sustainable Mardi Gras beads containing okra seeds. Imagine yourself cooking the okra you grow in your gumbo and reliving happy New Orleans memories.

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A Group Cleaning Up Ocean Plastic

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on January 29, 2026| 5 Comments »

Photo: Ocean Cleanup.
Ocean Plastic doing its 100th cleanup in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where an estimated 100,000 tons of plastic have accumulated.

Today I’m sharing an organization’s website describing its work to clean up plastic in the Pacific Ocean. Ocean Cleanup uses the natural circulation of currents to sequester the garbage in several hotspots so they can remove it.

Excerpts from the website: “Plastic [in the Pacific] accumulates in five ocean garbage patches, the largest one being the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, located between Hawaii and California. To solve it, we not only need to prevent plastic from accumulating into the ocean, but also clean up what is already out there. Floating plastics trapped in the patches will keep circulating until they break down into smaller and smaller pieces, becoming harder to clean up and increasingly easier to mistake for food by sealife. …

“The Great Pacific Garbage Patch [GPGP] poses a severe threat to marine life, ecosystems, and human health. Animals often mistake plastic for food, while ghost nets — making up 46% of the patch — cause deadly entanglements. As plastic floats at sea, [it] can enter the food chain through bioaccumulation, potentially contaminating seafood. Beyond ecological and health impacts, microplastics also disrupt oceanic carbon sequestration, with estimated annual losses ranging from 15 to 30 million metric tons of carbon. …

“After the Transpacific Yacht Race [in 2025], sailors helped our research team in two key scientific areas: sailors tagged GPS buoys to megaplastics found at sea, allowing us to track their movement, and mounted ADIS [our Automated Debris Imaging System] on their boats to help identify plastic hotspots.

“After years of engineering development and strategic partnership agreements, the Ocean Cleanup became the first ever organization to remove plastic pollution from the GPGP – and it remains the only one to this day.

“We captured our first plastic from the GPGP in 2019, and by 2021, our technology was proven. Since then, we’ve removed hundreds of tons of trash from the GPGP — mostly plastic coming from fishing gear.

“In 2022, we began … upgrading components while continuing cleanup. …

“Since 2024, [we’ve] begun working on optimizing our efficiency even more. Through hotspot hunting, we can address our cleanup efforts in areas with higher quantity of plastic, while decreasing our environmental impact.

“The circulating currents in the garbage patch move the plastic around, creating natural ever-shifting hotspots of higher concentration. With the help of computational modeling, we predict where these hotspots are and place the cleanup systems in these areas.

“Our floating systems are designed to capture plastics ranging from small pieces, just millimeters in size, up to large debris, including massive, discarded fishing nets (ghost nets). After fleets of systems are deployed into every ocean gyre, combined with inflow source prevention, the Ocean Cleanup aims to remove 90% of floating ocean plastic by 2040.

“It is estimated that 100,000 tons of plastic float in the GPGP. We work with renowned partners to repurpose our catch into meaningful products – to prevent plastic ending up in the natural environment.

“We aim to rid the oceans of plastic in the most responsible way possible. Our mission is intended to benefit the ocean and its inhabitants, so we place protection of the marine environment and mitigation of any negative impact of our operations at the forefront of our ocean cleaning operations.

“[Our] ocean cleaning technology has deterrents, cameras, escape aids, and other features to minimize risk to marine wildlife. We also have trained independent observers on board the vessels each trip to monitor any interactions with protected species (such as turtles or whales) in the area. Monitoring data has confirmed that our operations are having only minimal effects on the environment.”

Learn more about their plastic-capture techniques at the Ocean Cleanup, here.

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Ultimate Recycling: Romania

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on January 20, 2026| 6 Comments »

Photo: RetuRO SGR.
A notice for the RetuRO scheme, above. In the two years since launch, beverage-packaging collection and recycling has frequently hit 94% in Romania.

Romania was for the longest time behind the rest of Europe in initiatives like recycling. But once the stakeholders there saw how a modern system could benefit everyone, it made surprisingly fast strides.

Andrei Popoviciu writes at the Guardian, “In the Transylvanian village of Pianu de Jos, 51-year-old Dana Chitucescu gathers a sack of empty polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles, aluminum cans and glass every week and takes it to her local shop.

“Like millions of Romanians across cities and rural areas, Chitucescu has woven the country’s two-year-old deposit return system (DRS) into her routine.

“It is a simple scheme: when buying soft drinks or alcoholic beverages, the customer pays an extra 0.50 Romanian leu [$0.11] per bottle and gets the money back when returning the packaging, cleaned and in its original shape, to a collection point (usually the same shops where the goods were bought).

“Chitucescu makes about 40 leu a week from recycling her and another family’s bottles. ‘That covers the food for my seven cats,’ she said.

‘It’s a great system, everyone in our village uses it, there’s always a queue at the shop.’

“Her weekly walk is one tiny part of a national shift that, until recently, seemed impossible. Romania’s recycling rates were among the lowest in the EU, but in the two years since the scheme launched, beverage-packaging collection and recycling has skyrocketed to as high as 94% in some months.

“ ‘It is a zero to hero story,’ said Gemma Webb, the chief executive of RetuRO, the company running the system in a public-private partnership with beverage packaging manufacturers and the state. ‘The products are clean, there is little contamination, they can be recycled easily and we have full traceability as well, so we know every bottle that goes on the market.’

“[Between] the system’s launch in November 2023 and the end of September 2025, according to the company … more than 500,000 tons of high-quality recyclable materials have been collected. ‘We are the largest fully integrated deposit return system globally.’

“The scale of Romania’s turnaround is even more striking given where the country started. For more than a decade, the country has sat at the bottom of Europe’s recycling statistics. …

“But in 2018 the government began discussions about the scheme; in 2022 RetuRO began work, and on an extremely tight timeline including the construction of nine counting and sorting centers nationwide, the scheme launched in late 2023. …

“Starting later than other countries may have been an advantage, says Raul Pop, the secretary of state in the environment ministry and a waste policy expert because Romania could use modern software and traceability tools.

“It is on a return-to-retail model: shops that sell the containers must either install reverse vending machines or process the packaging manually. There is also a financial incentive for them, which helps them cover processing costs, and RetuRO reinvests all profits back into operations. … A recent study found that 90% of Romanians say they have used the system at least once and 60% return packaging regularly.

“Other countries, Pop explained, ‘suffer from their own inertia’ because they introduced their systems decades ago and are now stuck with outdated models. For them, shifting to new systems risks confusing consumers, even if it could improve collection rates. …

“Romania has also introduced a supportive legal framework, which means retailers can be penalized if they refuse returns – even the smallest village shops must accept containers if they sell the products or they risk fines, while big chains have automated return points.

“After the success with beverage containers, there are plans to expand the system to cover other types of packaging. ‘If you can put a bottle of water, you can also put a bottle of vinegar, a jar or a milk carton,’ said Alexandra Țuțuianu of Ecoteca, Romania’s first waste management NGO. …

“Environmental groups have praised Romania’s system, but warn that it covers only a small slice of the country’s overall waste stream. ‘It’s the largest environmental program, an example of good practice, we praise it, we like the system a lot, but it is not enough, it does not solve the waste problem in Romania,’ said Țuțuianu. …

“Even with a hypothetical 100% return rate for beverage containers, the overall waste recycling rate would only rise marginally. Re-use, Elena Rastei of the NGO Zero Waste Romania argued, needed to be looked at more closely.

“ ‘Collection solves the problem of visible waste, but re-use changes its nature. When packaging circulates – returned, washed, refilled – it becomes a resource, not waste. A single, reusable bottle can replace 20 to 50 single-use bottles, cut carbon emissions, and support a truly circular economy.’ “

More at the Guardian, here.

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Chicago River Restored

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on December 14, 2025| 5 Comments »

Photo: Linda Barrett.
The Chicago River, once badly polluted, has been cleaned up. Above, 265 swimmers participated in a public swim this year.

When humans make up their minds to do something, miracles can happen. Remember the river that caught fire and led to the Clean Water Act? Today’s article points to a more recent river success.

The environmental radio show Living on Earth reports that “on September 21st, hundreds of people leapt into the Chicago River for the first public swimming event since 1927.” Here’s an interview between Friends of the Chicago River Executive Director Margaret Frisbie and Aynsley O’Neill of Living on Earth. (I edited out the verbal pauses.)

Aynsley O’Neill
“This public swimming event was a fundraiser, but its impact actually goes even further than that. What does it mean to you to have public swimming in the Chicago River for the first time in nearly 100 years?

Margaret Frisbie
” ‘I was a magical day that’s hard to describe, seeing hundreds of people in the water swimming so joyfully, really represented all the work that Friends of the Chicago River and so many organizations and agencies have done to improve the health of the river, not only for people, but for wildlife too. The morning of the swim, people just were beyond thrilled. People were watching from the bridges. They were watching from the Riverwalk. … For people who’ve lived here a long time, I think it’s a game-changer. Seeing people in the water makes you believe that it’s possible. …

“We had Olympic athletes. We had … Becca Mann, who’s an Olympic athlete who swims 10Ks in open water, which is really impressive and amazing. She got out and she was just beside herself, and she said, I cannot wait to come back to Chicago and do this again. …

O’Neill
“Give us a sense of the difference between maybe now and maybe 50 years ago in terms of sewage spills into the river.

Frisbie
“When friends of the Chicago River was founded in 1979, on average, there was sewage in the river every three days. Fast Forward 46 years, and basically there’s never sewage in the river ever. …

“The one thing that’s always fun for us to talk about at Friends of the Chicago River is how alive the river is and how different it is. .. We’re seeing our aquatic animal life going up, and that’s because of the work of Friends of the Chicago River, the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, the forest preserves at Cook County and so many partners. In the 1970s, when friends was founded, there were less than 10 species of fish in the river system. Now there’s nearly 80, and we have beavers and muskrats and turtles, and we’re seeing the return of river otters, who are really an excellent sign of river health, because they depend on clean water to keep their coats clean and their bodies healthy, and then they’re also dependent upon mussels and fish and other aquatic and macro invertebrates to eat. …

O’Neill
“For those who are unfamiliar, how did we get here? …

Frisbie
“Over the last 50 years, Friends of the Chicago River has been chipping away at both the actual water quality through advocating for cleaning up the river system, but also by using the Clean Water Act and building support for a river that was swimmable. And so the water quality has changed since 1979 when we were founded, bit by bit, you know, using the rules of the Clean Water Act and partnering with government agencies like the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District that dug a huge tunnel and reservoir system that’s virtually eliminated sewage from the river system, and then also disinfecting sewage affluent that goes to the river, and just also creating public access so people can get down to and in the water.

O’Neill
“How much of this was from a government level versus a volunteer level? How did that work?

Frisbie
“[It] really it takes both. The Tunnel and Reservoir Plan is 110 miles of tunnel, three enormous reservoirs that can store 17 billion gallons of sewage and storm water and industrial waste. However, it’s not just about building it; it’s having support for that system and also making sure that the government agencies who are working on it are on task, and making sure that they’re getting the work done. … Advocates encouraged and pushed a long way. So while we partner with this agency, the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, on many, many programs, we also were engaged with forcing a permit that included an enforceable deadline of 2029 so they have to be done and wrap up the project and not say, hey, we ran out of money, we just can’t finish it yet. …

O’Neill
“What would you consider the biggest challenge during this process of cleaning up the Chicago River?

Frisbie
“People got used to the river systems being a place where sewage and waste could go, as opposed to we’re on the shores of Lake Michigan, which everyone fights for. …

“The river comes to us. It flows through communities. It’s a community connector, and it provides access to nature for people who live in an urban area. We also know that with the impact of the climate crisis, heat is the number one killer, and it is incumbent upon all of us to take seriously the fact that people need public open space where they can go and they can get away from the heat. … We know that nature actually improves public health, and, you know, mental wellness. So it plays so many, many, many roles. And then also we have major biodiversity loss, and cities can play a role in protecting biodiversity. … We are getting massive amounts of migratory animals, birds, bats, insects, and they depend on natural areas, and so it’s really important for that too. …

O’Neill
“For many of us, we might hear about the Chicago River once a year, St. Patrick’s Day, when it gets dyed green. What do you think about this tradition? …

Frisbie
“At Friends of the Chicago River, we think that we have outgrown that tradition. It’s really a fun morning. It builds community. … But we think a river that’s alive with wildlife really needs to be treated like a natural resource.”

More at Living on Earth, here.

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Growing a Microforest in Rhode Island

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on December 1, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Photo: Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff.
Lacey Kohler, Urban Greening Projects co-ordinator and Cristiane Caro, cofounder of Pearl Street Garden Collective, worked in the new microforest in Providence, Rhode Island.

I have posted a lot about Miyawaki urban forests in Massachusetts, thanks to my friend Jean (Biodiversity Builders), who showed me several she’s helped to create. I didn’t know that similar work was afoot in nearby Rhode Island.

These efforts are all about what a dense little forest can give to a city neighborhood where there’s very little nature left. It can remove dangerous carbon from the atmosphere while spreading biodiversity all around, making the city a healthier place for both humans and critters.

Ed Fitzpatrick reports on the Rhode Island venture at the Boston Globe, “The asphalt grid of South Providence is lined with multifamily homes and concrete sidewalks. But along Pearl Street, one lot stands out.

“It’s lush and green, with nearly 270 trees packed into a 1,000-square-foot lot. Officially called the Pearl Street Garden, it contains a tiny forest in the middle of the urban jungle.

“ ‘Microforests’ like this one are cropping up in places ranging from Elizabeth, N.J., to Cambridge, Mass., to Pakistan. South Providence has two, both along Pearl Street, created by Groundwork Rhode Island and the Pearl Street Garden Collective. …

“ ‘This isn’t habitat restoration on the scale that is needed in terms of the world,’ said Jacq Hall, director of special projects at Groundwork Rhode Island … but it is a really great way, especially in a city, for people to become very in close touch with biodiversity and why it’s important and why it’s also beautiful.’

“In May, more than 100 people came out to plant the microforest. …

“The pocket forests adhere to the ‘Miyawaki method’ devised in the 1970s by Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki, which calls for planting a wide variety of local trees in large numbers and in very tight quarters. …

“Massachusetts now has at least 20 microforests, according to Alexandra Ionescu, a Providence resident who is associate director of regenerative projects at Biodiversity for a Livable Climate, a Cambridge-based nonprofit that promotes ecosystem restoration to address climate change. …

“Rhode Island is the smallest and second most densely populated state in the nation, and a 2022 study found it contains 139 square miles of asphalt, concrete, and other hard surfaces, amounting to 13 percent of its land area. Hall said the benefits of forests and tree-lined streets are not distributed evenly in Rhode Island. …

“[Hall said], ‘We’re trying really hard to go back into those places that have been aggressively paved over and try to work in little bits of nature to bring those benefits to more people.’ …

“Hall said microforests help combat climate change because they grow so quickly. With plants packed close together, they both collaborate and compete for resources, racing to reach the sun first. She said research shows forests grown using the Miyawaki method grow 10 times faster than a traditional landscape planting. …

“Hall said projects such as this received a big boost in funding from the federal Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. ‘It was a historic moment,’ she said. …

“Groundwork Rhode Island and the Pearl Street Garden Collective are now looking for other funding sources” because of federal curbacks.

More at the Globe, here. And if you want to know more, search this site for “Miyawaki.” Or just click here.

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Natural Dyes for Theater Costumes

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on November 20, 2025| 2 Comments »

Photo: Rory Murphy.
Chemical dyes are often toxic for the environment and bad for human health, and that is why the National Theatre in London is planning to use natural dyes from a rooftop garden in its costumes.

My friend Ann is deep into using natural dyes for her textile art, and she even grows the plants that are used for those dyes. It is not just that she is concerned about all the synthetics in our environment, she loves the colors that nature produces.

In London, the National Theatre is on the same track.

Helena Horton  writes at the Guardian, “Squint at the roof of the grey, brutalist National Theatre on London’s South Bank and you might be able to spy a riot of color spilling from the concrete. This is the theater’s new natural dye garden, from which flowers are being picked to create the colors for the costumes worn in the theater’s plays.

“Chemical dyes are often toxic for the environment and bad for human health, so the costume designers at the theater are experimenting with using flowers including indigo, dahlias, hollyhocks, camomile and wild fennel to create the vivid colors used in their productions.

“The textile artist, Liz Honeybone, is buzzing with excitement about the opportunities the new garden is bringing. … She has been very concerned about the health impacts of using harsh, synthetic chemical dyes, which require users to be swaddled in protective clothing. …

“ ‘There used to be a thing called dyer’s nose, which is basically when the aniline dyes came in,’ Honeybone said, ‘They used to destroy your nasal membrane.’ …

“The theater is planning to use natural dyes from the garden in every production at the South Bank going forward, starting with Playboy of the Western World, which is on this autumn and winter.

“Claire Wardroper, costume production supervisor at the theater, said it was ‘a beautiful early 19th century piece, with lots of nice woolly jumpers, because it’s set in rural Ireland, and we can certainly get some nice colors into them.’ …

“They are trying to bring a gentler, more environmentally friendly way of dyeing into the mainstream. ‘We are saying that if you want to use this horrible synthetic dye, you can do that, but you can achieve this beautiful look by using a natural dye, and we can do it a little bit slower and a bit more sort of organically,’ said Honeybone.

“Wardroper added: ‘It’s unfortunate to say, but the theatre and film and anything creative in one-shot opportunity entertainment has a history of being incredibly wasteful.’ …

“Honeybone said: ‘It’s been such a good harvest. My indigo is more than I can cope with. I’ve got three shows going on at the moment, so I’ve had to recruit people to help me.’

“People may imagine the colors extracted from flowers will be muted compared with synthetic dyes, but Honeybone said this could not be further from the truth and she has been able to create neon greens and yellows. ‘Our forefathers were drowning in color. They loved it, it wasn’t hard to get and all the tapestries that were up on the wall were a riot of color. What we’re seeing now is the sad, faded leftovers,’ she said.

“Honeybone says she has become ‘obsessed’ with natural dyeing. ‘My daughter gave me a bunch of flowers on Mother’s Day, and I noticed there was some golden rod in it, so whisked that out and dyed with it just to see what it yielded. And it was the most glorious, strong yellow.’

“The garden is not only used for dyes but also as a refuge from the hustle and bustle of the theatre. The pair said actors were frequently seen pacing among the flowers, or sitting down on benches to learn their lines.

“The space is also a haven for wildlife. The grey concrete of the South Bank does not have a huge amount to offer pollinators, and they have been swarming to the garden to sample the nectar from the varied dye plants.

“Wardroper said: ‘We’re seeing so much more wildlife, like hummingbird moths, and we’ve got bees on the National Theatre roof which produce honey for the National Theatre. And they’re loving the variety of plants that we’ve planted as well. These are a new stock of plants that they just haven’t had access to. So the bee person that comes in and caters to the bees is very happy.’

“The pair hope that most if not all of the costumes at the theatre can eventually be produced using natural methods. But for now, Honeybone is enjoying the opportunity to start using these dyes.

“She said: ‘This is such an all round sensory experience, totally engulfed in the smells and the feeling. … It is just wonderful.’ ”

More at the Guardian, here. (Gotta love that someone in this earthy-crunchy field has a name like Honeybone and that Wardroper oversees the wardrobe!)

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How Solar Panels Benefit Sheep

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on November 6, 2025| 2 Comments »

Photo: Farmingdale Observer.
Merino sheep are said to show improved wool quality under solar arrays.

Here’s a win-win-win for the environment, sheep grazing, and agrivoltaic farming practices in general. One caveat: you need to place solar arrays on already open land. Cutting down trees to put in solar is actually a loss for the environment as trees are so good at carbon capture.

Bob Rubila writes at the Farmingdale Observer, “In a groundbreaking study that combines renewable energy with traditional farming practices, researchers have observed remarkable changes in 1,700 sheep grazing amidst solar panels. This innovative approach, known as agrivoltaics, is revolutionizing how we think about land use while yielding unexpected benefits for the animals involved.

“A comprehensive three-year study conducted at Wellington Solar Farm in New South Wales, Australia, has revealed fascinating results about sheep and solar panel coexistence. The research team from Lightsourcebp, in partnership with EMM Consulting and Elders Rural Services, monitored 1,700 Merino sheep divided into two groups: one grazing in traditional pastures and another among solar panels.

“The findings challenge conventional assumptions about livestock welfare in modified environments. Sheep grazing between solar arrays showed no negative health impacts. Instead, researchers documented enhanced wool quality with increased fiber strength and growth rates. The solar infrastructure created microhabitats that benefited both the animals and the underlying vegetation.

“ ‘The promising results indicate we’re on the right track,’ explained Brendan Clarke, acting environmental planning manager at Lightsourcebp for Australia and New Zealand. …

“The solar arrays provide critical shelter during extreme weather events, protecting sheep from both intense heat and adverse weather conditions. This protection creates a more stable environment for the animals throughout seasonal variations. The panels’ shade effect helps retain soil moisture, which promotes healthier grass growth and more nutritious forage for the grazing animals.

Interestingly, researchers noted reduced parasite presence in the solar grazing areas, contributing to improved overall animal health.

“This unexpected benefit appears to stem from altered ground conditions beneath the panels, creating an environment less hospitable to [common] parasites. …

“The relationship between energy infrastructure and animal welfare continues evolving as more long-term studies emerge. While some regions face environmental challenges like the dormant volcano showing signs of awakening after 250,000 years, these sheep-solar partnerships represent positive ecological developments.

“The Australian findings align with similar research conducted in France, where INRAE (National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment) collaborated with renewable energy producers Statkraft and CVE. Their two-year study involving 24 ewes confirmed beneficial effects on flock welfare, improved thermal comfort, and enhanced forage quality.

“ ‘The thermal comfort of the animals improves significantly, and the availability of quality fodder increases, among other benefits,’ noted Véronique Deiss, INRAE researcher. These correlated results across continents suggest universally applicable principles for successful agrivoltaic implementation.

“Beyond animal welfare, agrivoltaics offers economic advantages for both energy and agricultural sectors. Solar farms benefit from reduced vegetation management costs as sheep naturally control grass growth, eliminating the need for mechanical mowing or chemical treatments. For farmers, access to otherwise unused land provides additional grazing opportunities without purchasing or leasing additional property. …

“With these 1,700 sheep demonstrating improved wool quality while maintaining solar farms, agrivoltaics exemplifies how innovation can simultaneously address energy production, land management challenges, and animal welfare – creating sustainable solutions that benefit multiple stakeholders across agricultural and energy sectors.”

More at Farmingdale Observer, here.

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