Swamp Stomp

Volume 18 Issue 22

“Paper or plastic?” It’s a question often heard at the checkout line at the grocery store. For some, this question is insignificant, just another part of the customer service process. But for others, this question is very important, a step needed to help end the mass production of trash that is choking our planet.

Every week on some assigned day, almost all of us perform a necessary ritual. It is the day where we take our trash to the street. It is almost second nature at this point: take the trash outside to the street and by the end of the day, it will have all disappeared. But that trash goes to a landfill and that landfill does not completely break the trash down into non-harmful substances that can go back into the earth. Much of that trash cannot be broken down and can sometimes leak chemicals that poison groundwater that eventually makes its way to the ocean. What follows is often the destruction of ocean habitats and damage to our ecosystems. True, there are a plethora of regulations in place that try to prevent this from happening and they are helpful to a degree. However, a better way would be to just reduce the amount of trash that we produce.

The so-called “zero-waste movement” aims to reduce the amount of trash created each year. This movement is headed primarily by a group of women who have been able to cut down on the amount of trash that they create so much that their yearly trash is able to fit into a Mason jar. The zero-waste movement has five main principles: refuse, reduce, reuse, compost, and recycle. The first principle (refuse) is considered the most important. In order to minimize waste, zero wasters do not buy food that comes in packaging. And if they do, they buy in bulk. The small wrappers on vegetables we buy may seem insignificant, but the amount of plastic really adds up over the course of a year. Additionally, buying in bulk not only cuts down on the plastic waste, but it also saves zero-wasters lots of money. Kathryn Kellogg, a proponent of the zero-waste movement from Vallejo, California, states, “We also saved about $5,000 a year by purchasing fresh food instead of packaged, buying in bulk, and making our own products like cleaners and deodorant.”

Kellogg and other supporters of the zero-waste movement realize it is not an easy task to go from producing an average of 1,500 pounds of trash a year to zero pounds. However, they believe that every act which reduces trash is important. They point out that making even the simplest of changes can help the planet, such as switching out paper napkins with a cloth towel. When people hear of the zero-waste movement, they often initially believe it is some new radical idea. Kellogg says. “But it’s not a radical act to clean up a kitchen spill with a cloth towel instead of a paper towel.” Every little action counts.

You may not be able to limit yourself to a Mason jar’s amount of trash, but even producing one pound of trash less per person on earth could be extremely significant. The zero-waste movement may not radically change your life, but it does make you think about the importance of the tiny plastic wrappers that cover our vegetables and other unnecessary packaging. Just changing one wasteful habit could start to change the world.

Sources:

Leahy, Stephen. “How People Make Only a Jar of Trash a Year.” National Geographic. National Geographic. 18 May 2018. Web. 22 May 2018.

Swamp Stomp

Volume 18 Issue 20

We know that light in the visible spectrum is necessary for humans to be able to see. Since our eyes are able to observe only a relatively limited number of wavelengths on the entire light spectrum, we must rely on artificial lighting to guide us when the sun is down or we are in enclosed areas with no additional lighting. However, many other animals in our world use light in different ways. Some we know about and some have yet to be discovered. The Atlantic Puffin is just one example of an organism that utilizes light in a very interesting way.

Jamie Dunning, a research student at the University of Nottingham, was more than surprised to turn on a black light over a deceased Atlantic puffin and discover that its beak glowed. Now, the Atlantic puffin is considered to be one of 180 animals considered “biofluorescent,” meaning they reflect blue light and reemit another color—the most common being green, red, or orange.
This is different from bioluminescent animals who are able to create their own light which they emit through chemical reactions in their bodies. In other words, biofluorescent animals use light and bioluminescent animals create light.

Most of the animals that are able to be used or create light live in the world’s largest habitat: the ocean. Animals like fish and squid that live so far below the ocean’s surface where light cannot reach, use light in a variety of ways. Most of the time, light is used as a way of defending oneself from a predator. Deep sea squids use light to startle and distract predators before they quickly dart away back into the darkness. Other creatures, such as dinoflagellates, light up to summon a predator of the predator attempting to eat them. Additionally, some species of shrimp and dinoflagellates, who live near the surface of the water, may light up to blend in with the silhouettes created in the water by the sun at dusk. This makes these creatures invisible to predators, as their light matches the light on the water.

But why would a puffin’s beak light up? Tony Diamond, an ornithologist at the University of New Brunswick, had observed the same glowing orange light from a deceased puffin as Dunning, so they have put their data together. Right now, the team is aiming to discover whether living puffins also have glowing beaks, but they had to develop “puffin sunglasses,” first, so as not to harm the puffin’s eyes under the blacklight. The team hopes to be able to observe whether the beaks glow on live birds and hopefully discover why the beaks glow. Is it for the purpose of preventing predation or is it something else? This question has no answer yet, but researchers are hoping to find this out soon.

Sources:

Arnold, Carrie. “Puffin Beaks Glow in Surprising Discovery.” National Geographic National Geographic. 27 April 2018. Web. 4 May 2018.

Judson, Olivia. “Luminous Life.” National Geographic. National Geographic. March 2015. Web. 4 May 2018.

Swamp Stomp

Volume 18 Issue 18

Over the past few weeks, the landscape seems to have finally begun to make the transition from a cold, bleak winter to a bright and colorful spring. The world is starting to become green again and for this, we must certainly thank one group of organisms especially, the trees. Earth Day is on April 22^nd, but just as important is Arbor Day which lies on April 27^th this year. Slightly less well known or celebrated than Earth Day, Arbor Day is dedicated to the propagation and preservation of one of our most important resources, trees.

Arbor Day’s origins begin in 1854 when a man from Detroit moved to the Nebraska Territory. His name was J. Sterling Morton, and he was very passionate about trees. As editor of a prominent Nebraskan newspaper, Morton constantly wrote articles concerned with environmental and agricultural issues. He was especially concerned with the need for trees. He and his fellow pioneers certainly missed the aesthetic beauty of the trees they remembered from the east, but they also needed them for fuel, building materials, and windbreaks to help prevent soil erosion. He strongly advocated the planting of trees throughout the Nebraska Territory.

On January 4, 1872, Morton proposed that April 10, 1872, be “Arbor Day” to honor the importance of the trees he cared about so much. The new holiday was so popular that it is estimated that over one million trees were planted in the Nebraska Territory on that day. Arbor Day became a yearly celebration, but the date has moved around several times since. Soon, other states and territories began to adopt the holiday until it became a nationwide event. Today, Arbor Day is nationally celebrated on the last Friday in April and celebrated locally whichever weekend is the best for tree planting. Similar events now take place around the world.

Sterling Morton recognized the vast importance of trees which is still relevant 146 years later. Trees are an integral part of any ecosystem. Their leaves filter pollutants, improve air quality and help manage the effects of erosion, thereby improving water quality.  Without trees, we would be much hotter and spend a lot more money on our energy bills. It has been shown that shade can reduce air conditioning costs by up to 3o% in certain situations. Shade trees significantly decrease the temperature of asphalt by up to 36 degrees Fahrenheit and the temperature of car interiors by up to 47 degrees Fahrenheit. “All up, the shade provided by trees can reduce our physiologically equivalent temperature (that is, how warm we feel our surroundings to be) by between seven and 15°C, depending on our latitude. (The Conversation -2018) Additionally, without trees, many animals including birds, insects, and small mammals would be homeless. Psychologically, some studies have even shown that areas with more trees have less crime and that children with ADHD benefit from living in areas with more trees. The benefits trees bring to our environment are many. A world without trees would be very different from the world we now know.

Arbor Day is just as important today as it was on April 10, 1872. Local environments and ecosystems everywhere can still benefit from new trees being planted. The Arbor Day Foundation is a nonprofit conservation and education organization founded in 1972 in Nebraska, by John Rosenow and it is the largest nonprofit membership organization dedicated to tree planting. The Foundation’s stated corporate mission is “to inspire people to plant, nurture, and celebrate trees.” The Foundation programs are supported by members, donors, and corporate sponsors that share the same vision of a healthier and greener world. The Arbor Day Foundation has many different resources available to help you celebrate this important holiday at arborday.org. Simple as it may sound, every tree counts.

 

Sources:

“The History of Arbor Day.” Arbor Day Foundation. www.arborday.org/celebrate/history.cfm. Accessed 16 April 2018.

“How Trees Make a Difference.” National Wildlife Federation. www.nwf.org/Trees-for-Wildlife/About/Trees-Make-a-Difference. Accessed 16 April 2018.

“Can trees really cool our cities down?” The Conversation. http://theconversation.com/can-trees-really-cool-our-cities-down-44099 Accessed 19 April 2018

Swamp Stomp

Volume 18 Issue 16

In 2011, the Indonesian government, responding to the rampant deforestation of the archipelago’s tropical rainforests and peatlands, imposed a moratorium on the logging of any new concessions in undisturbed forest areas.

Yet recent satellite imagery monitoring Indonesia’s deforestation rate shows that the country has lost over 10,000 square miles of forested lands since the moratorium went into effect, an area slightly larger than the state of Maryland. This is in addition to the nearly 96,000 square miles of rainforest lost between 1990 and 2011, an area roughly the size of the United Kingdom.

The trend has awarded Indonesia, whose rainforest is the third largest globally and home to 17 percent of the planet’s species, the notorious distinction of being the world’s No. 1 deforester, eclipsing Brazil in 2014. Largely to blame are the land-hungry palm oil and paper pulp plantations that Indonesia has come to rely in recent decades in order to grow its economy.

“In fact, there was a marked increase of deforestation after 2010,” says Erik Meijaard, a conservation scientist and founder of Borneo Futures. “You get a very rapid expansion of the oil palm industry into forest areas, so if a moratorium was called in 2011, it didn’t seem to have an impact on the oil palm sector at least,” said Meijaard.

The plantations clear the land by burning the rainforests and peat bogs, not only destroying habitat for critically endangered species like the orangutan and the Sumatran rhino but also releasing vast volumes of smoke and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. In 2015, due to dry conditions exacerbated by an El Niño event, the largest wildfire in Indonesian history, attributed to industrial burns, released 1,750 million metric tons of CO₂ into the atmosphere, almost twice the annual emissions of Germany.

Even though emissions from forest and land disturbance only account for a quarter of total global emissions, Indonesia leads the world in forest-related emissions, releasing 240 to 447 million tons of CO₂ annually from these activities.

Despite these trends, Indonesia’s Ministry of Environment and Forestry states that the deforestation rate has been decreasing since 2015. “There has been a decline in deforestation in production forests, from 63% [of total deforestation] in 2014 to 44% in 2017,” said Environment and Forestry Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar.

Critically, this is because the Indonesian government views production forests, man-made industrial forests planted for timber harvesting, as reforestation. This is at odds with many research institutes and conservation think tanks, such as the World Resource Institute, that sees production forests as a form of deforestation because they are a human replacement of the natural forest cover.

The disagreement over definitions could impede Indonesia’s access to international funding for its reforestation efforts, such as the $1 billion Norway has pledged as a part of the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) program, and the $100 billion the signers of the Paris Accords pledged to donate to the Green Climate Fund to assist developing counties in fighting climate change.

Yet at the moment, Indonesia has only received 12% of Norway’s promised contribution, and only $10 billion has thus far been given to the Green Climate Fund. This is compared to the nearly $30 billion Indonesia earns annually from paper pulp, palm oil, and coal industries, the very enterprises that are most destructive to the forests.

“The amount of money that’s on the table for conserving forests is not nearly enough to compete with the amount of money that is changing hands every day for clearing forests for palm oil and paper pulp,” says Jonah Busch, an environmental economist and fellow at the Center for Global Development.

Despite the problems with the moratorium and the muddled definition of “deforestation”, Busch thinks that, at least in the short term, something is better than nothing. “The very important steps in the right direction that Indonesia has taken are unfairly characterized as failures because the whole big ship has not turned around yet. If there hadn’t been a moratorium, deforestation might have been higher.”

Sources

1. Coca, Nithin. “Despite Government Pledges, Ravaging of Indonesia’s Forests Continues”. Yale Environment 360. Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, 22 March 2018. Web. 30 March 2018.
2. Harball, Elizabeth. “Deforestation in Indonesia is Double the Government’s Rate.” E&E News Sustainability. Scientific American, 30 June 2014. Web. 30 March 2018.
3. Jong, Hans Nicholas. “Is a plantation a forest? Indonesia says yes, as it touts a drop in deforestation.” Mongabay. Mongabay, 31 January 2018. Web. 1 April 2018.

Swamp Stomp

Volume 18, Issue 14

Despite its reputation as a barren wasteland, the desert regions of the American southwest are some of the most biologically rich areas in all of North America. Within 100 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, there are 25 million acres of protected public lands, including six national parks, six wildlife refuges and a number of wilderness areas.

Of this area, the Coronado National Forest, part of the ecologically rich Sky Island mountain range that extends from Sonora, Mexico, into southern Arizona and New Mexico, contains more threatened and endangered species than any other national forest in the country. Many of these threatened species are charismatic megafaunas, such as the Mexican gray wolf, ocelot, jaguarundi, and a lone jaguar that has reentered the region from Mexico after the species was driven to extinction in the U.S. during the 20^th century.

Yet these species and many others are increasingly threatened by the expanding wall the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is building on the border to deter unauthorized migration from Mexico. A 2011 study by Penn State biologist Jesse Lasky found that, of 369 animal species documented within 30 miles of the border, 50 were considered endangered.

The 654 miles of wall that already exist along the 2,000-mile long border has prevented at least 45 of those species from migrating, potentially reducing their gene pool and cutting them off from water sources and hunting grounds. “A lot of species do best in Northern Mexico, but with changes in precipitation patterns, they would need to disperse across the border,” says Lasky. “This is something we should be thinking about a lot more – how fast organisms are responding to climate change.”

Additionally, new roads created by the Border Patrol into more remote areas of Arizona’s southern desert have also disrupted desert habitat and destroyed many miles of cryptobiotic soil, clumps of fungus and algae that retain moisture and assist in plant growth that take many years to form.

In autumn of 2017, President Trump requested $1.6 billion for the construction of 74 miles of additional wall that would bisect the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge in Texas as well as reinforce an existing wall on the San Diego-Tijuana border in California. Environmentalists worry that apart from bisecting habitat and preventing animal migration, the wall could also exacerbate the risk of flooding to both ecosystems and human settlements.

In Nogales and the adjacent Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Arizona, debris has been known to pile up behind the border fence, damming water behind it until it bursts through in a flash flood event that drowns out habitat and occasionally kills people. “Flood water always has debris in it,” says Dan Millis of the Sierra Club Borderlands project. “That’s how you get these damming events that blew out chunks of the wall. Damming also causes erosion – it creates the situation we saw in Arizona where debris backs up the water and then the sediment building upstream created a waterfall that causes more erosion. This is liable to happen in Texas.”

Due to a law passed in 2005 called the Real ID Act, the DHS has the right to waive most environmental regulations in the name of national security, depriving environmental advocacy groups of the power to litigate against the federal government. Yet as the Trump administration makes plans to build 700 to 900 additional miles of concrete wall along the border to the tune of at least $12 billion, environmentalists, scientists, and regional stakeholders are coming up with alternative solutions that promote border security while also enhancing the health of borderland ecosystems.

One such proposal is to create a large international nature reserve on the Rio Grande that is co-owned and operated by the U.S. and Mexican governments. The Rio Grande’s volume is currently on the decline due to climate change as well as diversions by both countries for municipal, agricultural and industrial uses. It also suffers from excessive pollution from raw sewage and fertilizer runoff, possibly contributing to the loss of half a dozen of its native fish species. By restoring the riparian areas on both sides through the planting of trees, reducing water diversions and cleaning up pollution, the river’s water volume and velocity will likely increase, deterring people from crossing while also providing more robust habitat for wildlife.

Yet another option is to rely more heavily on advanced surveillance technology to monitor the border and reduce the environmental damages associated with a physical wall and terrestrial Border Patrol vehicles. The Department of Homeland Security already employs predator drone aircraft, high-elevation blimps, and helicopters equipped with video cameras and infrared sensors used in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to monitor border activity. “Technology is definitely first,” said David Aguilar, principal of the Washington D.C.-based Global Security and innovative Strategies consulting firm. “These are things that can be used on any part of the border. There are places where you just can’t put a wall.”

Despite insistence from some that security concerns trump environmental ones, this is a false choice. While no solution is 100% effective, it is possible to secure our border without sacrificing the species and ecosystems that make the borderlands beautiful and worth protecting.

Sources:

1. Barclay, Eliza and Sarah Frostenson. “The ecological disaster that is Trump’s border wall: a visual guide.” Vox. Vox, 29 October 2017. Web. 9 February 2018.
2. Goldfarb, Ben. “Where wildlife is up against the wall.” High Country News. High Country News, 10 February 2017. Web. 9 February 2018.
3. Lasky, Jesse R. et. al. “Conservation biogeography of the US-Mexico border: a transcontinental risk assessment of barriers to animal dispersal.” Wiley Online Library. Diversity and Distribution: A Journal of Conservation Biogeography, 3 May 2011. Web. 9 February 2018.
4. Montemayor, Gabriel Diaz. “There’s a better alternative to building a border wall: restoring the Rio Grande.” Quartz. Quartz Media LLC, 28 August 2017. Web. 19 February 2018.
5. Nixon, Ron. “On the Mexican Border, a Case for Technology Over Concrete.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 20 June 2017. Web. 19 February 2018.
6. Ray Ring. “Border out of control.” High Country News. High Country News, 16 June 2014. Web. 9 February 2018.