1. photo of Ilulissat Icebergs, Disko Bay, Greenland (Flickr/CC photo by kaet44)

Every year, 20 billion tonnes of icebergs calve off the Jakobshavn Isbræ glacier and pass through the Ilulissat Icefjord.

2. Understanding deep ocean circulation and climate modeling

If you follow the latitude lines from much of Europe westward across the Atlantic, you tend to run into Canada. Even if you go to the southern tip of Spain, you’re not much further south than the Virginias. Canada, of course, has a reputation for being rather frozen and inhospitable, while Europe goes to pieces if it snows for more than an hour or two. The difference is mainly due to ocean currents.

At the north edge of the Atlantic Ocean, warm surface water cools off and sinks, drawing in more warm surface water from the south, generating a warm surface current along Europe’s Atlantic coast. Portions of this current comes in from the tropics near Africa and South America, and more is drawn in from the Indian and Pacific Oceans. In addition to making Europe a pleasant place to live, this current also provides the main source of ocean mixing—that is, these currents act to cool the ocean surface temperatures and heat the deep ocean.

More on thermohaline circulation, also known as the “ocean conveyor belt.”

See also: “Freak Current Takes Gulf Stream to Greenland”

3. World’s Longest Migration Found–2X Longer Than Thought

Miniature new transmitters recently revealed that the 4-ounce (113-gram) [arctic tern] follows zigzagging routes between Greenland and Antarctica each year. In the process, the arctic tern racks up about 44,000 frequent flier miles (71,000 kilometers)—edging out its archrival, the sooty shearwater, by roughly 4,000 miles (6,440 kilometers).
…
Since the birds often live 30 years or more, the researchers estimate that, over its lifetime, an arctic tern migrates about 1.5 million miles (2.4 million kilometers)—equal to three trips to the moon and back.

See also: The Arctic Tern Migration Project

Bird of the Sun, a beautiful photographic tribute to the arctic tern by Carsten Egevang

4. A Year of Global Shipping Routes Mapped by GPS

Scientists have come up with the first comprehensive map of global shipping routes based on actual itineraries. The team pieced together a year’s worth of travel itineraries from 16,693 cargo ships using data from LLoyd’s Register Fairplay and the Automatic Identification System, which tracks vessels using a VHF receiver and GPS.

A few hot spots logged the majority of journeys. The busiest port was the Panama Canal, followed by the Suez Canal and Shanghai.

5. The Mariana Trench to scale

Click on the link for an amazing graphic of the deepest point in the ocean.

via kottke:  “representation of how deep the Mariana Trench is. Turns out it’s really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really deep.”

Related posts:

1. Loosely Knit : 16 February, 2010

CC/Flickr image: USGS

The first flood of the season arrived early in Natchez, Mississippi.

Meteorologists at the Lower Mississippi River Forecast Center of the National Weather Service had been tracking late January rainfall (“high-water events”) upstream in the Mississippi River Basin.

On Jan 21, the Tennessee River Valley got 1-2 inches of rain, on Jan. 22 the Ohio River Valley received 1.5 inches, on Jan. 24 1.5 inches fell over the Missouri River Valley and on Jan. 25 the Tennessee River Valley received another 1.5-3 inches of rain.

Under “normal” conditions, the Mississippi doesn’t rise significantly until March, as snow melt and other precipitation starts flowing down the river. Even prior to this early precipitation, autumn had dumped substantial rainfall on the Midwest (“the wettest October ever in St. Louis”). As a result, water tables are already high. Spring rain on top of a saturated ground equals more flooding.

Communities along rivers in the Midwest are bracing for would could be a whopper of a spring flood season, with the National Weather Service warning of a “high probability” of significant flooding along parts of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers and their tributaries.

Big Watershed

The Mississippi River Basin is remarkably vast, drawing water from 31 states and two Canadian provinces and covering 40% of the continental United States. Water takes approximately three months to flow from the headwaters at Lake Itasca, Minnesota, to the Gulf of Mexico. Imagine the rain and snow melt shedding off this broad landscape, collecting in the capillaries of streams, merging into rivers, and amassing into the slow wave that rolls down the Mississippi. On the Lower Mississippi, forecasters can see a flood building a long way upstream.

On February 8, the Mississippi reached flood stage at Natchez. While the crest of the flood has already passed New Orleans, flood stage waters continue in some areas between Natchez and Baton Rouge. As the river remained above the 48-foot natural riverbanks this past weekend, crews in Natchez keep a close eye on “sand boils” that form as water displaces soil under the city’s levees. Sandbagging around these boils is part of the seasonal fight against floods. When the river subsides, the crews will wait for the next rise later this spring.

A report from the U.S. Global Change Research Program predicted for the Midwest:

“an increase in precipitation in winter and spring, more heavy downpours, and greater evaporation in summer, leading to more periods of both floods and water deficits.” More “droughts, floods and other extreme events,” in other words.

The flood of media

While the weather is a topic of daily chatter pretty much everywhere, I suppose most people in the U.S. pay little attention to river levels these days. “How’s the hydrological cycle?” rarely comes up in polite conversation. Rivers (and the seas) aren’t as central to most people’s livelihoods or for commerce and transportation as they once were — even though 500 million tons of commercial traffic continues to move on the Mississippi each year.

As spring nears and so does the snow melt, media coverage of Midwestern floods is beginning to appear.

Floods tend to be treated by the media as isolated — and dramatic — news stories. Throughout the year, some part of the world is likely to be passing through its rainy season. So flood stories are not hard to find.

Recent headlines from around the world:
Lusaka: Eight people die in heavy Zambian floods due to poor drainage
Afghanistan: Afghan floods, avalanches kill 20
São Paulo: Living with the floods
Cumbria, Ireland: The extreme floods in Cumbria
Madeira, Portugal: Madeira floods kill 42, divers hunt for missing

Typhoon Ondoy; CC/Flickr image by IRRI Images

Treehugger recently posted this slide show on the destructive power of floods. The media coverage of the “Snowpocalypse” on the East Coast may transform into news of floods. And, alas, flood stories will become part of the saga in post-quake Haiti, especially when hurricane season arrives.

“Natural” disasters

Floods undoubtedly unleash tremendous pain and suffering around the world, wreaking havoc on the assumed stability of human social and economic affairs. What makes a flood a “natural disaster” — and a headline — is the presence of humans. The combination of human population growth, the expansion of settlements along rivers and coastlines, and increasing threats from climate destabilization will certainly mean more floods:

Droughts and floods account for more than half of the world’s total deaths from disasters, according to the United Nations. But unlike many other catastrophes, most water crises are man-made. Nature may bring the occasional monsoon downpour or dry spell, but environmentalists agree that global warming, dams, deforestation and slash-and-burn farming exponentially exacerbate these seasonal weather patterns.

Sea-level rise, storm surge, and extreme weather events will all contribute to coastal and riverine flooding. In many parts of the world, sewage, toxic runoff, and water-borne disease, like cholera, extend the impact of floods. Inevitably, the most vulnerable communities bear the burden of these disasters. In the U.S., of course, the disproportionate burden of Hurricane Katrina on the poorest residents of New Orleans remains the most visible example.

A flood, in a way, poses a variation on the old question, “If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” Is it a media story? Flood and flooding are often used interchangeably. Perhaps there’s a distinction between a “flood” and “flooding.” A “flood” represents a condition or an event. “Flooding” is both a local phenomenon and a process, part of the temporal ebb and flow of ecosystems, the timeless hydrological cycles under which landscapes and other species have evolved.

Channeling the river

Since the late 1800s, the Mississippi River Commission has focused on improving navigation and flood control on the lower Mississippi. In 1928, the MRC launched the Mississippi River and Tributaries project, one of the world’s most extensive engineering projects, led by the Army Corps of Engineers.

In order to maintain “order,” much of the Upper and Lower Mississippi River has been dramatically channeled with levees and reservoirs and locks, in the process destroying wetlands and altering the flow of water and sediment. The Mississippi River Delta is in terrible shape. In the state of Missouri, the river now has less than one-fifth of the original wetlands. According to Ana Barros, a civil and environmental engineer at Penn State,

A channel has no capacity to adapt to variable conditions. Tamed, constricted, “It can’t evolve to prepare itself for the next event. This river has nowhere to go.”

For Barros, part of understanding the river is learning to respect it: recognizing that ultimately it will not be controlled. “We must learn to work with the river instead of against it.” This means recognizing the river as a complex, self-regulating system, and seeking to restore as much of its integrity as possible. At the same time, she says, “We have to anticipate the worst, and design systems that work well in failure.”

River restoration is a critical and growing field. Reconnecting the river and floodplains will help to reduce flooding. Even the Corps has begun to integrate conservation biology principles. But the field also needs more coordination and will have to evolve as our understanding of climate change and river ecosystems deepens.

Learning to work with the natural systems will also inevitably force significant tradeoffs. Along the Mississippi, agriculture and urban centers have expanded in conjunction with the channelization of the river. Reintegration of natural buffer areas will place constraints on the location of development along the river. Commercial traffic on inland waterways will also have to adapt. But this is a long-term process of necessary rethinking and restoration.

Ultimately, this restoration involves shifting the focus from “floods” to “flooding.” As Ana Barros suggests, we will have to learn to respect the river. We can also reacquaint ourselves with and embrace the pattern of the river:

Rivers pulse in reflection of the seasons. When there is snowmelt and during rainy seasons, the total volume of water in the river increases.  As water in the river channel rises, islands and riverbanks that are usually exposed are submerged. Increased levels of water scour the land it flows over and increases the amount of sediment carried with the current.  The process is reversed in the dry season. Land that was submerged is exposed, less water and slower current allow particles to settle out of the water and be deposited on the riverbed itself. Year after year this cycle is repeated.

Thanks to @River_Restore, @NEMWIUpperMiss, @DDimick, @troutheadwaters

No related posts.

A collection of loosely-knit links. Not about blackbirds.

1. blackbird
Flickr CC image by Striatic (Bryan Partington)

2. Pale Blue Dot: An Alien View of Earth

Twenty years ago last week, NASA’s Voyager 1 sent back this photo from four billion miles away. From NPR.

“It was just a little dot, about two pixels big, three big,” [Candace Hansen-Koharchek] says. “So not very large.”

But this was the Earth — seen as no human had ever seen it before.

…

The late astronomer Carl Sagan eloquently tried to express how he felt about this photo in his book Pale Blue Dot:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ’superstar,’ every ’supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

See also: Audio Gallery: Views Of Earth From The Middle Ages To The Space Age

3. “Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in L.A.”

Jenny Price’s illuminating essay, reprinted in The Believer, weaves together the worlds of nature writing and Los Angeles.

To say there’s no nature in cities is a convenient way of seeing if I like being a nature lover and environmentalist but don’t want to give up any of my stuff. We cherish nature as an idea of wildness while losing track of the real nature in our very houses. We flee to wild nature as a haven from high-tech industrial urban life, but refuse to see that we madly use and transform wild nature to sustain the exact life from which we seek retreat. We make sacred our encounters with wild nature but thereby desacralize all other encounters. Or in other words, if we cannot clearly understand cities and our lives within them unless we keep track of our connections to nature, still there may be some basic things we prefer not to see and understand.

Ideally, if there’s any one argument I could persuade you of, it’s that our foundational nature stories should see and cherish our mundane, economic, utilitarian, daily encounters with nature—so that what car you drive and how you get your water and how you build a house should be transparent acts that are as sacred as hiking to the top of Point Mugu in the northern Santa Monica Mountains and gazing out over the Pacific Ocean to watch the dolphins leap, the ducks float, and the sun set.

…

Nature stories have been more than key L.A. stories. They’ve been the L.A. stories. They’re the driving stories in the city we use to think. It’s ironic, isn’t it? Los Angeles, which symbolizes the city as antinature, really has long flourished as a mecca for thinking and writing about nature, and for telling this powerful story in particular that nature writing has so dedicatedly perpetuated.

(via Good)

4. America’s Vanishing Silent Spaces

Newsweek interviews audio ecologist Gordon Hempton, author (with John Grossman) of One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World.

Why should we care about silence?
It has become an increasingly rare experience to be in nature as our distant ancestors were. Even in our national parks today, despite laws to protect them, you are much more likely to be hearing noise pollution, particularly overhead aircraft, than you are to be hearing only the native sounds of the land. Yet to be in a naturally silent place is as essential today as it was to our distant ancestors. Besides spending time away from the damaging noise impacts present at our workplace, neighborhoods, and homes, we are given the opportunity not only to heal but discover something incredible—the presence of life, interwoven! Do you know what it sounds like to listen for 20 miles in every direction? That is more than 1,000 square miles. When I listen to a naturally silent place and hear nature at its most natural, it is no longer merely sound; it is music. And like all music, good or bad, it affects us deeply.

See also: onesquareinch.org

5. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

from Wallace Stevens’ famous poem

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

See also Corey Finger’s piece on “Thirteen Ways…” in the blog, 10,000 Birds.

Credits: NASA/JPL (Pale Blue Dot); Graphic from One Square Inch of Silence (“Blanket of Noise” map)

Related posts:

1. Loosely Knit : 2 March, 2010
2. Looseleaf : 15 February, 2010

A collection of loosely-knit links.

1. The Grid, Our Cars and the Net: One Idea to Link Them All

From Wired last year:

Robin Chase considers the future of electricity, the future of cars and the internet three terms in a single equation, even if most of us don’t yet realize they’re on the same chalkboard. Solve the equation correctly, she says, and we create a greener future where innovation thrives. Get it wrong, and our grandchildren will curse our names.

Chase, founder of ZipCar, proposes a smart grid for electricity and information that links transportation, power, and the internet through mesh networking, involving cars as network devices.

Related (on Shareable.net): New Study: Smart Grid Would Shrink Carbon Footprint by 18 Percent

2. Flyway Cities Coalition

The National Wildlife Federation’s program to improve wildlife habitat in “urban areas located within the flyway that break the connectivity of natural habitats.”

The Flyway Cities Coalition is an innovative approach towards creating healthier environments for people and wildlife living in wildlife habitat corridors, or “flyways.”  Targeting key urban areas throughout the United States, each city’s Coalition brings together the efforts of local stakeholder groups, magnifying their individual strengths as they work towards common sustainability goals.  Flyway Cities Coalitions will restore viable habitat for native wildlife and plant populations, educating others about local and regional environmental issues, and encouraging communities to engage in projects that create a better urban environment for everyone.

3. Purple Martins in snow and 100,000 blackbirds

From David J. Ringer’s blog, Search and Serendipity:

I heard the distant clamor of blackbirds and finally spotted a river of Common Grackles up high, moving south. Thousands of birds streamed past — and that was only the beginning. They kept coming. Thousands became tens of thousands, and somewhere along the way, the Red-winged Blackbirds started pouring toward me as well.

The grackles moved high in long ribbons that, at times, stretched farther than I could see in both directions. One such stream passed overhead continually for 20 minutes. The red-wings were much lower, flying in wide bands and in a slightly different direction. Vertigo gripped me briefly as the birds rushed past.

You have to look at the photo more closely to see birds for the trees. Click on the photo or the link below.

OK, you have to see this big to get it, and then you can see a cloud of grackles in the sky, a small, loose flock of red-wings lower down, and thousands of birds packed into the lower tier of trees.

4. The Sense of Wonder in the Wildlife Garden

From a guest post by Kelly Senser in Carole Brown’s wonderful blog, Ecosystem Gardening:

[Rachel] Carson acknowledged that some adults would feel ill-equipped to teach children about the natural world because they lacked an understanding of it themselves.  But the scientist held this belief: It is not half so important to know as to feel.

Admittedly, I’ve still much to discover. But the thirst is there—for my family too.  Indeed, that’s what I love most about our backyard habitat: It invites us to tune in.  It’s a place to nourish our children’s sense of wonder, as well as our own. We planted our garden with wildlife in mind and are daily rewarded with scenes such as bluebirds nesting, monarchs emerging from their chrysalides and mantises stalking their prey.

5. (Video) The World According To 9 Year Olds

Check out the video in the post.

We previously pointed out the above quote, then stumbled upon the video below where 9-year-old children answer some questions about how they see the world.

Questions include: identifying the most famous celebrities, their first computer interactions, and their fears. If nothing else, it will make you feel a bit older than you currently are.

Image credits: Phil Hawksworth (Robin Chase); David J. Ringer (blackbirds); Matt Cottam (childhood)

Related posts:

1. Loosely Knit : 16 February, 2010

Where there is life, there is water. Water finds its way across a terrain. It shapes the land and connects places within a landscape. Human settlements inevitably begin around water: oceans, rivers, streams, springs, wells, aqueducts.

Where there are people, the landscape changes in unique ways.  As cities grow — and as urbanization spreads — cities begin to replace water’s imprint with a human touch: graded and paved surfaces, channeled and covered streams, filled marshes and wetlands.

Water, of course, doesn’t disappear. It still courses beneath the urbanized landscape. Broken sewers, basement seepage, and the occasional sinkhole serve as reminders. Stormwater management traditionally approached water as a problem — which it can be; paradoxically, the problems often get worse when settlements are engineered with the belief that nature can be tamed.

As city administrators increasingly recognize the value of natural amenities and ecological functions, such as flood control, and begin to reincorporate nature’s infrastructure into urban planning, there is a growing effort to “daylight” once-covered streams. The technology called the city continues to evolve. Even recognizing the presence of streams and knowing the history of a place can change one’s perceptions about a city.

Here are some examples of work that document and/or recover urban streams:

I’ll take Mannahatta

Mannahatta image from The New Yorker/The Mannahatta Project

New York City, the first megacity, is well-known for the grid of streets overlayed on Manhattan Island. Inspired by a British surveyor’s detailed map of the island in 1782, Eric Sanderson of the Wildlife Conservation Society merged landscape ecology, computer modeling, and historic accounts to reconstruct — block by block — an image of the island Henry Hudson would have encountered in 1609. This combination of art and science became The Mannahatta Project, after the Lenape name for the island. Through his work, Sanderson has located 89 of the 300 original streams documented by the British Headquarters map. This vision of what New York once was offers a great framework for imagining the ecological future of New York.

More about Mannahatta here. Also check out Sanderson’s talk at TED.

Interesting sidebar: In 1924 traffic administrators proposed the draining and filing of New York City’s East River (actually a tidal strait) to accommodate development. (from a post in the fascinating blog, Landscape and Urbanism. Also check out this related item on “The Blue Road.”)

Philadelphia

Urban landscapes embody a combination of factors, including topography, population, and history. Adam Levine, a consultant to the Philadelphia Water Department, presents a fascinating glimpse of the city’s hydrological history on his website, Philly H2O. Levine illustrates the changes to the topography of the urban watershed with some remarkable maps.

The first map shows the streams that once ran on the surface in Philadelphia. The second map shows the few streams that still run on the surface — and the sewer pipes that now run the other streams once flowed.

Levine writes:

As in many urban areas, most of Philadelphia’s surface streams, encompassing many square miles of watershed, were systematically obliterated over the course of the city’s development. Diverted into pipes — their valleys leveled with millions of yards of fill and overlaid with a grid of streets — these streams now flow in some of the largest sewers in the city’s 3,000-mile drainage system. In most cases, these projects were designed as combined sewers, carrying raw sewage along with the stream flow and stormwater runoff. For this reason alone (and there are many others), it would be prohibitively expensive to “daylight” such streams (that is, uncover the streams and restore them to something akin to a natural state), since it would mean building a completely separate system of pipes to carry the sewage.

Levine points out that this pattern of converting streams was standard practice during the 19th and 20th centuries. The early era of sanitary engineering significantly improved public health by helping to control epidemics, such as typhoid fever, among the burdgeoning urban population. The result, however, is that “The modern map of the city’s surface streams is now disturbingly blank.”

Los Angeles

Flickr/CC image by Ron Reiring

Growing up in Los Angeles, I often saw the concrete Los Angeles River from the window of a car; it seemed a rather broad interpretation of the word “river.” I was also fascinated by the Tujunga Wash, a rectilinear channel running through the San Fernando Valley that carried away the seasonal rains. Think the trench on the Death Star in Star Wars. History classes taught us about roads that followed Native American trails or El Camino Real, the 19th-century road connecting Spanish missions. But school told us virtually nothing about the natural history of the streams and rivers, of the land beneath our feet.

Now that I live in Brooklyn, I’ve recently come across a couple of wonderful blogs about water in L.A.. Journalist Emily Green writes about water and politics in Los Angeles and the West at Chance of Rain, as well as for the L.A. Times. And Jessica Hall and Joe Linton’s blog, L.A. Creek Freak, explores the waterways and ways of water in an arid urban environment. These blogs have offered a new perspective of the city. This quote by Jessica Hall from an interview in LA Weekly captures the value for revealing the ecology of the land:

“When I was growing up here, the idea that there was any nature at all around me wasn’t even on my mind,” says Hall. “My father is from a rural part of Kentucky, so my childhood experience of nature was from there, or from New Mexico, where my mom was from. I had no experience of nature in Hawthorne, or even Los Angeles. It wasn’t part of my consciousness. How can you ask people to be good stewards of the environment when they have no concept of what’s around them?”

A significant movement to revitalize the Los Angeles River is taking shape. These blogs also introduce community efforts to restore Ballona Creek and the Arroyo Seco watershed. A media capital, key port city, and gateway to the Pacific, Los Angeles is also situated within the California Floristic Province, considered one of the global diversity hotspots by Conservation International.

Other points West

Concern about urban streams have brought together community members in other cities across the West. In Vancouver,  an estimated 700 kilometers of streams flow through storm sewers. Groups have worked to restore Brewery Creek and Guichon Creek. Local groups in Berkeley, California, have daylighted parts of Strawberry Creek, which runs through the city, as part of rebuilding community. High Country News reported on urban watershed restoration in the industrial East Bay (San Francisco Bay), where a coalition has come together to address urban sustainability and environmental justice in North Richmond. Community activists and water management specialists have developed an “eyes on the creek” mentality, to borrow from Jane Jacobs,  understanding that upstream and downstream communities are tied together by the health of Wildcat Stream. Phil Stevens, executive director of the Urban Creeks Council, “This is basically “Creeks 2.0.’ The idea is that we’re not just doing a single restoration project and moving on, but looking at an integrated management model that could make the watershed an asset for the entire county.”

Seoul, Korea

Flickr/CC image by Kyle Nishioka

One of the largest and most successful daylighting projects has converted a capped stream running through the heart of Seoul, Korea into a centerpiece of urban revitalization. The Cheonggyecheon or “clean stream” project “peeled back the pavement” to create a green corridor through the city of 10 million inhabitants. Benefits have included decreased air pollution, lower summer temperatures in the vicinity, and an inviting area for active (running) and passive (sitting by the stream) recreation. Even local wildlife has responded, with significant increases in the number of fish, bird, and insect species reported.

According to Lee In-Keun, the assistant mayor for infrastructure, “We’ve basically gone from a car-oriented city to a human-oriented city.” Cheonggyecheon has become an inspiration for other cities, including Los Angeles (L.A. Creek Freak), looking to recapture the vitality of streams and improve the livability of downtowns.

***

In developing awareness of local and regional ecosystems, human communities can better plan for resilience in the face of uncertain conditions (climate destabilization, constrained resources) and understand how their specific landscapes are tied into the “network of networks” that comprise the ecosphere. Recognizing human and natural histories of place allow us to grow roots, even in an mobile, information-driven culture. Residents of cities and suburbs everywhere can embrace their “hidden streams.”

No related posts.

Here are five maps I came across during the last few weeks.

They involve high-speed passenger rail; a re-imagined map for the U.S. electoral college; landscape conservation; North American migration flyways; and wildlife “megalinkages.” The images are accompanied by minimal commentary, mainly their source info.

I’ll leave it to you to make any connections. Your thoughts and comments are much appreciated.

U.S. federal investments in high-speed passenger rail were announced last week. Another map of high-speed rail corridors is available here. (Map: US Department of Transportation)

What if the U.S. were divided into 50 states with equal populations (based on 2000 Census)? Neil Freeman produced this thought experiment about electoral college reform. Covered by GOOD; Matt Yglesias; and James Fallows in the Atlantic (here, here, and here). (Map: Neil Freeman)

Landscape conservation cooperatives proposed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. I previously posted about this new framework for addressing conservation at the landscape scale. (Map: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

Migratory flyways (Map: Montana Raptor Institute for Research and Education)

The Wildlands Network and The Rewilding Institute stress conserving four “MegaLinkages” to preserve habitat for larger predatory species integral to the fitness of the continental ecosystem. (Map: The Rewilding Institute)

Any thoughts?

No related posts.

Last week, 20 young whooping cranes completed their first migration led by their mentors in flight, ultralight aircraft flown by pilots from Operation Migration. The 89-day, 1285-mile (km) journey started at the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in Wisconsin and traversed seven states, until the cranes reached their destinations at the St. Marks and Chassahowitzka NWRs in Florida. Over nine years, Operation Migration has helped to rebuild a decimated whooping crane population, teaching cranes to fly and migrate; from there, the cranes’ instincts will take over. What a wonderful, even poetic, story…but it’s much more than that.

For someone watching a 30-second news segment on TV or reading the quick general interest article in the local paper (some coverage can be found here, here, and here), it’s easy to marvel at the dramatic images of an ultralight leading whooping cranes across the sky.

Now that the migration season is over, I read through the Field Journal on Operation Migration’s website. I highly recommend it. Three months of daily entries by Liz Condie and the OM pilots, staff and volunteers reveal a grander, more epic journey and a deeper, more complex relationship between the humans, the cranes, the wind, and the land.

The birdmen/birdwomen of Operation Migration

Adult cranes have 7-foot wingspans, which means they are built to ride thermals. But the pilots seem to have as much flight in their DNA as do the cranes. Tucked into their “trikes” (as the ultralights are called), they read, test, and prod the air, negotiating cold and cross-winds. Pilot and crane alike share an aversion to turbulence, also known as rough or “dirty” air.

One trike flies “lead,” the cranes riding the draft from the ultralight’s wing. Several other pilots wrangle the cranes, who straggle or choose their own course. This is especially true as the cranes are learning to fly. It’s like a cattle drive, in the air.

Another plane flies “top cover” like a guardian angel, keeping a watchful eye on the activities below and communicating with the trike pilots and ground staff.

It takes a flock

The flight is only part of the journey. In an effort to reestablish a migratory population, the Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership relies on a combination of nature and nurture, art and science.

Whooping crane chicks learn to eat and drink and to fly from their parents. Without adult cranes around, humans have stepped in to model the essential behaviors. Wildlife specialists at Patuxent Wildlife Research Center raise and hatch the eggs. Using crane puppets, staff teach the chicks to eat. After being moved to Necedah NWR, the “cranelets” continue to learn the basics of foraging and flight. The cranes never interact directly with humans. Even the pilots wear crane costumes.

Once the migration begins, the trikes lead in the sky, but a mobile village follows along with every stopover. Staff from Patuxent travel along with the OM tracking van in two week shifts. Like any road show, the progress involves an extensive “operation” with logistical issues: transporting and setting up travel pens for the cranes, generators, five campers; hosting official “flyovers” for the public and media; and feeding and caring for the cranes and the people.

A line is a series of points

While the migration does connect point A and point B, the journey is less a line than a series of skips across and above the landscape. Operation Migration has to plan for staging areas, including spaces for landing and takeoff, along the route.

During this era of globalization and talk of the world being flat, Operation Migration reminds us that places do not exist in isolation. They are also waypoints for long-distance travel that has been going on for millenia. A migration (and the winds) connects places and landscapes. Habitat conservation is critical at the wintering areas of the National Wildlife Refuges, but also along the length and breadth of migration corridor, in backyards, on farms, around cities.

How’s the weather? Go ask it

Every day, the staff and especially the pilots look to the weather to see whether it will cooperate. Poor winds (too light, too strong), cold, and rain limited flying time. During the official 89 days of the migration, only 24 days produced any major progress. That’s a lot of waiting.

When you live as closely with the winds as do the pilots, when progress relies upon good weather, perhaps it’s not surprising that the staff develop a very personal relationship with the weather. Everyone wants to fly; noone likes the propane heat running out at night. Like mariners and the sea, the staff end up anthropomorphizing “Old Man Weather” — and the equipment.

Weather was certainly the mundane constant and the critical factor throughout the field notes. This was a welcomed reminder. While we all live with weather day in and day out, most of our lives in urban and suburban places rarely rely so significantly on how the Old Man is feeling.

It’s a risky business

During the 2009 migration, the journey involves many hours in the air under difficult conditions for the pilots. Engines fail, fuel lines freeze. One trike’s engine failed. The plane flying top cover lost power and had to make an emergency landing in a field, flipping over in the process. Even the motorhome suffered from engine failure. The staff, especially the pilots, are truly a brave bunch.

Two sad side notes also involve human behavior. While the staff was out on the road, their OM headquarters in Necedah were ransacked and vandalized. And even more tragically, perhaps the most important adult in the Eastern Migratory Population, a female crane who had taught its offspring to migrate, was shot and killed in Indiana.

Once the cranes arrive in Florida, they have, in a sense, come of age. But many dangers — predators, food scarcity, weather — will continue to threaten the cranes. The entire class of 2006 (18 cranes) was killed by tornadoes that hit Florida in 2007. Extreme weather events are projected to increase with climate change; habitat destruction will continue. Even today, food scarcity threatens the only naturally-occurring whooping crane population, now wintering in Aransas NWR in Texas. Rebuilding a robust eastern migratory population is a long-term commitment.

Seeing like a bird

Operation Migration’s CraneCam and TrikeCam (mounted on the ultralight) provided virtual followers with powerful images of the migration. During the course of the migration, I checked in periodically on OM’s website and their Twitter feed. But I never caught the “live in-flight video” (a bit different from a movie inside an airplane). You can be sure I’ll be paying more attention next year. For now, you can find some wonderful photos on Flickr and videos on YouTube.

The staff and pilots slowly get to know the cranes as a group and as individuals (each numbered as part of the Eastern Migratory Population), learning their personalities and preferences.

Liz Condie wrote: “I think this year’s bunch have some devilment in them,” after some mischievous overturning of equipment by the cranes. (December 26)

Richard van Heuvelen on January 8:

904 led most of the first leg before 906 took over. Once in a while a group of seven or eight birds would drop off at the end of the line. Pushing the bar out we would slow down to let them catch up and they would soon be back with us. On one occasion a lone bird broke out from the back of the line and out of the slipstream. It charged ahead past all of the other birds, and butted in front of 906 who had been flying erratically, diving below the wing, and leading the rest of the birds with it. I guess 905 disliked this behavior, as it made the birds at the back of the line work harder, and decided to take the lead away from 906.

Joe Duff on January 12:

In past years many of the birds would break off and persuade others to join them. In fact number 827 developed a habit of leaving the flock within minutes of the start of every flight. He would fall behind knowing that one of us would give chase and he would have the benefit of an aircraft all to himself for the remainder of the trip.

Seeing like a parent or caregiver

Following the entire journey from Wisconsin to Florida, I get a sense of the stewardship represented by all the staff and volunteers of Operation Migration. They devote their care and attention to these cranelets in the hope that after this first migration, instinct will kick in and the cranes will thrive independently as adults. As an adoptive parent, I feel (perhaps a little inaccurately) a certain kinship to the crew of Operation Migration.

In truth, I think it’s something that anyone can connect with. Images from the flyovers capture the emotional reactions from spectators. They are not simply seeing a beautiful bird, but getting a glimpse of the relationships between the crane and its changing world and the generosity and compassion of dedicated people.

It’s also a wonderful journey to be shared. Besides visiting Operation Migration’s website, you can check out two educational websites, Journey North and “Three White Cranes, Two Flyways, One World,” which track the whooping crane as an introduction to migration and conservation for school classes.

I read the Field Notes with joy and wonder — and now consider myself one of the many “Craniacs” out there. I’ll definitely be watching next year.

PS: Operation Migration takes donations.

Flickr images courtesy of Operation Migration (CC)

No related posts.

“…climate change does not respect juridictional boundaries.”
– Hector Galbraith, Director – Climate Change Initiative, Manomet Center for Conservation Studies

Of course, no sooner do I post about colleges and universities collaborating at the bioregional level than I come across this exciting initiative from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: landscape conservation cooperatives.

From the Service’s FAQ sheet:

What are landscape conservation cooperatives?
Landscape conservation cooperatives, or LCCs, are self-directed, applied conservation science partnerships that will drive success at landscape scales. Collectively they create a seamless, national network of interdependent partnerships between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Geological Survey, other federal agencies, states, tribes, NGOs, universities and other entities which will inform resource management decisions to address national-scale stressors, including climate change.

Seeking to “address the impacts of accelerating climate change on wildlife and the habitats upon which they depend,” the Service has pulled together a national collaborative strategy for strategic habitat conservation on the landscape level, seeking to “put the right science in the right places.”

Check out this video (4:08) from the Service’s Northeast Region:

Would you like to replay the video or share the link to it with your friends?

Source: USFWS Northeast Region (If you have trouble viewing the video, you can also visit this page.)

As pointed out in the video, LCCs provide a new institutional framework for addressing ecological issues beyond the state level. The FWS proposed an interim national geographic framework of 21 conservation areas.

Just as flyways have provided an effective spatial frame of reference to build capacity and partnerships for international, national, state and local waterfowl conservation, the national geographic framework will provide a continental platform upon which the Service can work with state and other partners to connect project- and site-specific efforts to larger biological goals and outcomes. By providing visual context for conservation at “landscape” scales — the entire range of a priority species or suite of species — the framework helps ensure that resource managers have the information and decision-making tools they need to conserve fish, wildlife, plants and their habitats in the most efficient and effective way possible.

Source: US Fish & Wildlife Service

From these 21 areas, the Service is forming eight initial LCCs in the following geographic areas: Pacific Islands, Great Plains, Plains and Prairie Potholes, South Atlantic, North Atlantic, Great Northern, California and Arctic.

Working Together for Wildlife — and People

In June 2009, the Service convened the inaugural Conservation Leadership Forum to launch discussions toward the development of the national strategy.

Though the primary objective of the strategy is ensuring abundant, healthy, and distributed populations of fish and wildlife, leaders noted the effort would be tied to a larger goal of improving quality of life for all Americans by providing clean water, clear air and “green” infrastructure critical to sustainable and healthy human communities. While investments in the strategy would be national, the group agreed collaboration and information sharing must extend to the global community. …

Forum participants also agreed the strategy must be developed with an eye toward the future. By 2050, Selzer said, the U.S. population is projected to be mostly urban, minority, and increasingly beset by health issues such as asthma and diabetes. He urged the group to view its conservation work in the larger context of a changing society and articulate a vision that resonates with tomorrow’s audiences.

The LCC brings a valuable approach to coordinating scientific research and for promoting preservation. The Service’s information mentions a “continental” platform, so it will be interesting to see how this initiative integrates research and policy beyond the U.S. borders, as well as how it connects with the efforts of the Wildlands Network. I also wonder what other interdisciplinary collaborations might evolve from this landscape perspective.

Related posts:

1. Five ways of looking at the U.S.

“All education is environmental education.”
– David W. Orr

It’s time to update the mission of U.S. land-grant and state universities to align education and research with a growing understanding of ecosystems and the world’s changing environmental and social conditions. That means working together across landscapes and bioregions. We need colleges connected by nature.

In the last post, I proposed adapting the idea of NCAA athletic conferences in a way that fosters bioregional collaboration among US colleges and universities in order to understand better and promote awareness of nature and ecosystems. (I was, admittedly, in the throes of bowl season.)

Many of the major state universities — including those belonging to the six conferences in the Bowl Championship Series — share a common origin as land-grant institutions, which were created by Congress during the mid-1800s.

“A State University for the Industrial Classes”

Let’s take a quick look at the historical roots of the land-grant university.

During the middle of the 19th century, the industrial revolution began to transform life and work across a largely agrarian America. Led by the populist preachings of Jonathan Baldwin Turner and the statesmanship of Representative Justin Morrill from Vermont, a reform movement arose in the (these) still fragmented United States and territories. Congress responded to the call to open up education and opportunity to the growing “industrial classes.” Previously, higher education was accessible mainly to the elites and focused on classical studies. (If one considers that currently only half of Americans have attended any college, and approximately one quarter graduate with a Bachelors degree, significant disparities in educational attainment remain.)

The Morrill Act of 1862, signed into law by Abraham Lincoln, called for each state to establish a major public university,

without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactic, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.

Turner’s words, carved onto the main quadrangle of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1867 (then the Illinois Industrial University), capture the context of a nation in transition: “Industrial Education Prepares the way for the Millenium of Labor.”

The Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890 (the latter to incorporate the former Confederate States) launched the expansion of education through land-grant and public universities and supported the widespread agricultural and industrial development of the United States. The precursors to Michigan State and Penn State became the first land-grant institutions.

Today, the 218 universities (including 76 land-grant institutions) included in the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities now enroll 4.7 million students annually and claim 20 million alumni. (18.2 million students were enrolled in 4800 colleges and universities in the US in 2007.)

Public and land-grant universities for the 21st century

A century and a half since the Morrill Act, our world is in transition again. Populations are much more urban, more mobile. (Students and academics are also more mobile.) Families are smaller; life expectancy is greater. Advances in medicine and sanitation have brought many diseases under control. Food is more plentiful for many. The human world is more connected in many ways. Information, news, and gossip flow at speeds previously unimaginable.

In the US, people live less connected to nature. We plug into electronic forms of entertainment. Manufacturing has given way to a service-based economy. We know little about the origin and resources embodied in goods and products. The fulfillment of needs has merged with the encouragement of wants and the tyranny of convenience.

The scale of development and consumption has led to tremendous collective human impact on the world, including biodiversity loss, acidification of the oceans, and climate change. In some ways, local and global inequalities have been amplified by development.

The era of climate change calls for an evolution of the land-grant university. As Professor Richard Grimes of Washington State University (home of the Cougars) suggests, land-grant universities can contribute their significant expertise to meeting the challenges of global food security and energy.

In a separate piece, Grimes highlights the need to predict and respond to the “downstream effects of regional climate change”:

The anticipated changes in our global climate and their varied impact on regional climate systems where crops are grown confound a “one size fits all” response as considered in Copenhagen.

That’s why we must work to mitigate the consequences of global climate change at the regional level — in Eastern Washington, in sub-Saharan Africa, or wherever food crops are grown. The U.S. and world require a dynamic and responsive research-based approach that will allow the rapid development and deployment of regional responses to climate change.

Our land-grant research universities have many of these tools in hand and, in concert with the National Institute for Food and Agriculture and other agencies, others can be developed quickly.

Grimes make a good case for regional approaches.

Yet these commentaries also highlight the traditional focus of the land-grant university, that is, agricultural sciences and engineering. Undoubtedly, food, energy, and agriculture are critical areas of research for addressing climate change that need to be supported. Bioenergy can contribute towards the shift from oil and coal. Farmers can play a significant role in conserving ecosystems.

Remaining true to its origins, the land-grant institution has co-evolved with an industrializing nation. These universities supported farmers, communities, and fledgling industry. This practical approach towards harnessing “natural resources” reflected a can-do perspective that is increasingly outdated and problematic. The overexpansion of industrial agriculture and multinational agribusiness and the corporatization of biodiversity owes much to the land-grant university.

These institutions are not monocultures, of course, but the shift towards corporate funding of research and marketing intellectual property has clouded the independence of the university and charge of research for the “public good.”  Still, the public research institution — and the legacy of the land-grant university — is severely threatened by state budget cuts. (requires subscription to the Chronicle of Higher Education)

Collaborations for “nature states”

Another historical feature of the land-grant institution that presents a challenge for the upcoming century is its state-centric focus. Public institutions follow the designated state territories platted out before the early 1900s.

State boundaries (in the US and elsewhere) are historical constructs, the choices of surveyors and politicians, the legacy of a certain way of laying dominion over the land.

Some borders reflect natural divisions, either rivers or the crest of a mountain range. Remember, though, that a river boundary means that at least one other state shares the same watershed.

Problems arise when examining environmental (and other) issues primarily through the lens of state divisions. To be practical, dealing with existing governmental administration is often necessary, but more and more, cross-jurisdictional cooperation will be needed to address most ecosystem and habitat challenges.

Spencer Beebe and Ian Gill of Ecotrust write in “A Nature State of Mind” in the Stanford Social Innovation Review:

[T]rue restoration — environmental and economic — will not come from congressional legislation, top-down stimulus money, or EPA rulings. Instead, restoration will come from a shift in the relationships between people and their ecologies, as well as from the businesses, policies, and cultural changes that will arise from this shift.

[R]eliable peace and prosperity will elude humankind unless we change our relations with each other and the environment. A good first step toward this lofty goal is to start thinking at the scale of “nature states.” Also called bioregions, nature states are defined by their social and geographic coherence, rather than by state or national borders. People organize themselves by nature states, such as the Pacific Northwest, the Mississippi Delta, and the Chesapeake Bay.

By recognizing each nature state’s distinctive environmental and geographic characteristics, its citizens can preserve those qualities while building businesses and organizations that take advantage of them. This nature state thinking has the potential to fuel more bottom-up local and regional innovations, which will in turn produce more of what our country really needs, not just more of what we think we want.

Nature states also provide a good scale at which to work. Only systemic solutions solve systemic problems. Cities, counties, and even most states are often too small for systemic solutions, and the world is almost always too big.

I’m not calling for dispensing with the states.

State universities have long provided valuable policy analysis and recommendations to their sponsoring state governments. If the ecological systems do not recognize state boundaries, then there are significant opportunities and valuable resources being wasted on redundant or incomplete approaches. Data is being collected for historically convenient, but ecologically inappropriate analyses.

There’s simply a tremendous opportunity for rethinking university research and education so that they reflect the way the natural world operates, and acknowledge that regional collaboration and mutualism are essential to engaging the global challenges. Universities, when not turned inward, are ideal places for the convening the broad range of stakeholders needed to generate systemic solutions. No school is an island.

This concept is not wholly original. For example, the Environmental Consortium of Hudson Valley Colleges and Universities brings together institutions to harness place-based education. But it seems rare in practice.

Funding (including federal stimulus money) and support for interdisciplinary research and cooperative engagement of bioregions by institutions could catalyze a range of benefits, including: better understanding of local/regional biodiversity; business and urban development solutions in line with ecological realities; collaborative mitigation of and response to human disasters associated with extreme weather events; more engaged and informed students and communities.

The bioregion is not the ultimate perspective; it just may be a more useful framework for collaboration in a changing world.

Further thoughts on education in a future post.

Update: I’d love to hear about other institutional collaborations around bioregions or watersheds.

Related posts:

1. The Green Campus and Beyond: from bowl games to bioregions?
2. What are Landscape Conservation Cooperatives?

Photo by Ian Ransley (Flickr CC)

The start of winter and the new year bring many things: Christmas bird counts, whale migration along the Pacific Coast, New Year’s resolutions, and…college football bowl games (U.S. colleges, U.S. football).

Ah, you say, that last one makes you…a) giddy, b) annoyed, c) like, whatever. (I get a thrill out of watching college football, but don’t catch it that often.)

Last night, in the final game of the season (and the last of 34 bowl games), the Alabama Crimson Tide rolled over the Texas Longhorns to claim the BCS National Championship. 92,000 fans packed the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, to witness the matchup. Another 30 million tuned in to watch the game on television.

What does this represent? Big bucks. College football is a multi-billion dollar industry in the U.S. (think hats and T-shirts, hotels and restaurants, alumni donations and TV rights). In 2005, the 121 football teams of what was then called Division 1-A (now Football Bowl Division) generated US$1.8 billion for their colleges.

Of course, the ultimate value of a football program to these institutions of higher learning is, supposedly, to further their educational and research mission.

So what does this have to do with people and nature?

Photo of Austin by Jaredten (CC)

Alma mater and Mother Earth

Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine college football as a network of places and regions

What do you see when you picture a college stadium on game day? The swath of crimson or orange or blue t-shirts reflects a strong self- (and collective) identification with an institution. These fans are invested in the ongoing success (at least football-wise) of an institution. They maintain a vital connection with a place.

Now, I know not everyone relates strongly with college sports or goes to a school with a team or even attends college. But it is a big part of American culture. And for some, the sports seasons are as important as spring, summer, fall, and winter.

On the field or in the media, sports teams stand in for their respective colleges and places — and states, conferences, or regions. Tuesday night, following the Orange Bowl, a sportscaster asked the quarterback of Iowa what it meant to him to represent mid-America. Bowl games still offer intriguing contests between teams from different regions that don’t normally play each other.

The regular college sports season revolves primarily around teams playing other colleges within their respective conferences, which are mostly regional groupings of schools. The reason for the proximity is practical: less travel time and expense for teams and fans (mostly students). I suppose having regional rivals also means enough familiarity to develop “healthy competition” (i.e., acceptable levels of contempt). The conference name often reflects the region: Southeastern Conference, Mountain West, Pac-10.

Now look at this through another lens. Regional affiliations means that the schools may share landscapes or other connections through nature.

I looked at some regional maps (here) of NCAA or other athletic conferences and then compared them with these maps of ecological regions. Some possible relationships:

• The Pac-10 and Atlantic Coast Conferences link universities along major flyways and migration routes.
• The Ohio Valley, Big South, and Ivy League conferences share watersheds or ecoregions.
• The universities of the Big 12 cover the breadth of the Great Plains.

Image from EPA/Commission for Environmental Cooperation

Beyond the green campus

As American society becomes more urbanized and life more media-saturated, what’s the role of the university in fostering a land or nature ethic?

Undoubtedly, college campuses across the nation are hotbeds of “sustainability.” Students are concerned about their future and what to contribute to a better world. The “green campus” seems to emphasize energy and resources, or operations and planning. These are important changes that can be made. Beyond that, what are the complements to becoming “carbon neutral” in the educational mission of the university?

The crux of making the transition to sustainability is large scale behavior change. Policy and regulation are essential tools, as are technological advances, but systemic change may ultimately reflect new patterns of individual and social behavior. Is there a concurrent push to educate and develop residents, community members, and decision-makers who are ecologically aware — not simply to emit less CO2, but also to act in greater alignment with the natural systems that support our world?

How might these institutions of higher learning take the regional relationships of competition and develop corresponding relationships of cooperation to

• foster a higher level of awareness of natural systems
• inculcate within students a greater appreciation of place and context, especially where young adults may spend four years

College education represents an important transitional phase for young adults — as much about social relationships and networks, growth and distraction, as it is about books. But writ large, it is about finding a place in the world.

Today’s institutions of higher learning introduce students to a broader horizons of time and space. In a sense, though, “higher education” tends towards ways of understanding that are more abstracted, more disciplined, less experiential, certainly less outdoors. The community of scholars usually has more in common with other similarly disciplined individuals scattered across the globe than with the world across the street, along the river, in the valley. But as some have observed, even in the era of globalization, the world isn’t really flat; it is made of people living in places.

Especially in today’s culture, a student may spend two or four years on a campus without developing any real connection to or awareness of the natural world. The Leave No Child Inside movement, led by Children and Nature, takes on “nature deficit disorder” at a formative age. Some projects, such as Classroom Earth, focus on high school students.

Given the rise of nature-deficit disorder, colleges may be tasked with a new kind of remedial education.

This world of climate change and degradation of the ecosystems that support the well-being of human society and all life on earth calls for a rewidgeting of the academic disciplines. Social sciences can highlight ecological and behavioral economics, sustainable security, ecosystem services.

For an analogy, one might look to the evolution of the environmental movement. Initially, the movement focused on point-source pollution and its impacts on air and water quality. As many of those conditions improved through effective regulations and education, non-point-source pollution became the greater challenge. The pervasive, systemic issues that underlie global warming and biodiversity loss, etc. require new approaches.

If one thinks of campuses (and college communities) as embedded in nature’s systems, then alongside campus greening, we can look beyond single institutions to how they relate in natural networks. The sustainable campus is a site specific endeavor. The sustainable conference or ecoregion or flyway may offer possibilities for higher education to support future generations.

Faithful college football fans — and other alumni — hold dear the alma mater, which is Latin for “nourishing mother.”  Perhaps  college can become a place where people can develop deeper connections both to home and to the larger world.

***

I imagine there are great examples of innovative work going on out there. If you know of colleges connected by nature, schools working together to promote a better understanding of place and the value of natural systems — or have other thoughts on this — please share them below.

Next post: Land-grant universities for the 21st century

Related posts:

1. Connecting Colleges by “Nature States”: public universities for the 21st Century (part 1)