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On Dust

August 17, 2010

This is the Amazon rainforest. Or at least a part of it. Last week, an item in the Guardian (UK) highlighted a surprising connection between the Amazon rainforest and the Sahara desert — how one region in Chad supplies the Amazon with half of the rainforest’s mineral nutrients. Around 40m tons of dust is carried [...]

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Biodiversity and the City 2: In an urban world, where are the ecologists?

August 10, 2010

What happens to biodiversity in areas that become more urban? The short answer, not surprisingly, is that urbanization decreases biodiversity. In a review article published in Science a couple years ago, Nancy Grimm and colleagues wrote that urban land use tends to reduce both species richness and evenness for most biotic communities, despite increases in [...]

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Biodiversity and the City

August 3, 2010

Part I On Worldchanging, Amanda Reed posted this remarkable video from the Biodiversity Campaign that the European Commission on the Environment launched earlier this year. It’s a lovely piece that I hope reaches a large audience. What is surprising is the explicit focus on connecting urbanization and biodiversity loss. The ad seeks to shift the [...]

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Bill Reed on “The Practice of Living System Design”

May 17, 2010

Architect Bill Reed recently spoke at the Living Future 10 conference in Seattle. Reed, a principal at the Integrative Design Collaborative, was a founding board member of the US Green Building Council. Julia Levitt from Worldchanging wrote a nice piece about Reed’s talk, which was part of a panel entitled, “Integrating the Whole System — [...]

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Nature in the City: promoting community-based ecological stewardship

May 10, 2010

With its focus on regional stewardship and “re-inhabiting the land,” the following item from Peter Brastow resonated with me. Brastow directs Nature in the City, a project of the Earth Island Institute that focuses on local ecology and stewardship in the San Francisco Bay Area. Nature in the City recently celebrated its fifth anniversary. Last [...]

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Some thoughts on cities and nature while perusing Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

April 12, 2010

This morning I found myself in a Barnes & Noble bookstore, not two blocks from home, looking at a stack of books by Annie Dillard, whose works I have not read. I opened up Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (which won Dillard a Pulitzer Prize) and landed on this passage: The general rule in nature is [...]

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Spring Brings Citizen Scientists Together

April 2, 2010

Last week, my almost-three-year-old daughter glanced out the window and cheerfully shouted, “Look, the tree is making leaves!” The first buds on the branch or leaves in the garden, the first purple martin or monarch butterfly or hummingbird…these little changes in our natural surroundings grab our attention and herald the arrival of spring. Each first [...]

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Circumnavigate This! Two Ocean Voyages: One by Land, One by Sea

March 24, 2010

All Life has its roots in the meeting of earth and water. –TH Watkins When you look at photos of the Earth from space, what do you see? Does the ocean frame the land? Or does the land frame the ocean? This question relates to an aspect of vision called figure-ground perception. You probably have [...]

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Loosely Knit : 2 March, 2010

March 2, 2010

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 [...]

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Here come the floods

February 25, 2010

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 [...]

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