Author: Seth Inman

What the Trees Read

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Without question, the section of Cayuga Lake’s Inlet that receives the most traffic is a small area of shoreline at the corner of the second tendril extending east from the Inlet into Ithaca. Community members and college students are attracted to this little spot on the Inlet, known as Steamboat Landing, because the Ithaca Farmer’s Market spends its weekends there, sheltered under a long wooden pavilion topped by a green metal roof. Dozens of stalls are laden with earthly, culinary, and artistic crafts; more than a couple hundred people a day visit each of them to browse and purchase these locally produced goods.

This quaint market is surrounded by a mixture of modern development and natural shoreline that I could not have noticed from the Inlet’s waters—only by walking around Steamboat Landing was I able to understand the spot’s significance to the Ithaca community, and connect elements of Henry David Thoreau’s and Aldo Leopold’s writings with the history of the place. Continue reading →

Prime Directive, Reconsidered

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Global climate change will soon be changing ecosystems around the world to such an extent that many species will no longer have proper habitats to survive and reproduce in. Over the past several years, the scientific community has been discussing the possibility of moving such species to new ranges in order to conserve biodiversity and reduce potential for extinction. This controversial process, known as assisted colonization or managed relocation, might be able to save some species from their current state of risk, but it may also prove dangerous for the natives of whatever area the “colonizers” are moved to. By diligently evaluating the perils and uncertainties of relocation and carefully considering the repercussions of leaving species to their shrinking habitats, The Nature Conservancy (TNC), given its mission and vision statements, should determine that in most cases, the costs of assisted colonization outweigh the benefits.

Patagonian mountains

By assisting the colonization of species with limited ability to adapt or relocate, the annual number of species gone extinct might be lowered in the coming decades. There are, however, disagreements as to whether or not humans should meddle with species movement. Continue reading →

Paying for Ecosystem Services

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Tim Chen has covered ecosystem services as they relate to ecotourism; below I’ve written some additional information on how the process might work on the market.

Sulfur-rich waterfall in Costa Rica

As developing countries increasingly convert natural ecosystems to areas controlled by humans, ecosystem services (e.g., waste absorption, water purification, soil conservation) are being lost. In order to prevent these shifts, people who live in urban areas or have no close relationship with, for example, their sources of drinking water are often willing to pay people who do have direct impacts on the watersheds. Payment for ecosystem services (PES) has become a measure by which higher-resource groups can induce lower-resource communities or individuals to protect local wetlands, forests, or other areas in order to maintain the ecosystem services that support a particular standard of living. Before such payment schemes can be established, however, certain scientific analyses must be carried out to determine the most efficient allocation of resources and facilitate the selection of the right service providers. Continue reading →

Don’t Tread On Me

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Humans’ ecological footprint has been increasing while the Earth has remained the same size. Especially in the last three centuries, the impact of human populations on surrounding landscapes and resources has grown enormously. In the United States, the footprint’s swelling can be explained in large part by the change from subsistence to profit-minded production. The colonists who brought European ideas and techniques to America instigated this shift, which began in the late seventeenth century and has arguably continued till the present. The abundance of resources in early America, and the fact that they could be so easily exploited, facilitated this change towards a profiteering mindset. It is with this observation in mind that I can suggest that the fertile nature of early America contained the seeds of our profit-oriented attitude of today, leading to an ever-growing ecological footprint.

Arthur Rothstein “Soil erosion, Alabama, 1937”

Men such as Gifford Pinchot and John Muir realized the dangers of the attitude towards excess and, in order to avoid exploitation of American forests and mountains, attempted to Continue reading →

The High Line

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Notice where the railway used to enter the building

The High Line railway was originally designed to bring shipments straight from the Hudson to manufacturing warehouses in Manhattan. The train cars could run packages from wharves to upper-level floors of these industrial buildings without having to obstruct street traffic or be carried up several stories manually (freight elevators weren’t a common sight in the 1930s, whether for safety, efficiency, or invention reasons I don’t know).

In 1980 the High Line trains stopped running, and construction of the new park design started in 2006 (after seven years of planning). The first section opened to the public in 2009, and the second section in 2011.

I first heard of the High Line Park this summer, while doing some browsing about the city online. I was immediately struck by the ingenuity of converting what had once been industrial space Continue reading →

Hatched Hats

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For several decades after the 1880s, seeing birds on women’s hats in the United States was very common. It was fashionable to have everything from a couple flowing plumes to a whole pheasant on a hat; the ornithologist Frank Chapman found forty species in the millinery district of Manhattan.

Less than a decade earlier, wild passenger pigeons had gone extinct in North America, due to unfettered hunting and deforestation. It looked like the same was happening to several other species, but instead of being hunted for food like the pigeons, these other birds were killed solely for their bodies or feathers.

Snowy egrets and great white egrets were nearly decimated … The millinery trade in the 1880s and 1890s cleaned out tern, heron, gull and egret rookeries up and down the Atlantic coast, from Maine to the Florida Keys. Continue reading →

Resilience, or Failure?

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It is said that our early experiences create connections in our brains that last throughout our lives. In one particular case I know this to be true: visiting Tikal and Copan as a child filled me with a lifelong awe and interest in the Mayans. So in my current studies it is an easy leap from that simple interest to a more scholarly one.

For hundreds of years human civilizations have looked back on previous societies and wondered why they made certain decisions, how they coped with diverse problems, and what caused them to change. In his popular book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Pulitzer-winning author Jared Diamond examines societies that he claims had unsustainable relationships with their ecosystems, and describes how their actions largely led to their demise. He also refers to some current communities, such as those of modern-day Rwanda, but for my purposes I will only address the past societies (the most academically pertinent and personally interesting to me being the Mayans, because their disappearance from their grandiose cities–Tikal and Copán, for example–has historically been mysterious, and may be closely related to environmental stresses). Continue reading →

Preventing Invasive Fire

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In general, species adapt to ecosystems in which they have greater chances of prospering, and abandon areas that are not conductive to survival and reproduction. Arctic species, for example, have specialized for harshly cold conditions and thereby made it very hard for themselves to live in desert or even temperate biomes. These are common trade-offs that occur with natural selection, and somewhat to be expected. But there are species in certain areas of the world that are not indigenous and still survive in those ecosystems. In many cases, these species have advantages over native ones and flourish. Termed “invasive species,” these organisms often replace autochthonous populations to the point of extermination (one could argue that humans are the ultimate invasive species), causing irrevocable damage to the original habitats.

John Dryzek defines the Promethean discourse in his book “The Politics of the Earth.” The metaphorical name comes from the ancient Greek myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods; fire represents technology and the potential it gives for humans’ improvement. Prometheans are those who approve of a free market that unleashes human ingenuity on the world’s “unlimited” resources, propose liberalization, decentralization, and growth to improve human livelihood around the planet. Every one of these prescriptions, however helpful to humans, is practically a different form of poison for ecosystems in that they tend to greatly increase the numbers of invasive species around the world, contributing to rampant biodiversity loss and environmental degradation.

On the topic of invasive species, I consider myself a Survivalist, or one who believes that Continue reading →

Conciliating Human Nature and Conservation

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When we started this site a few months ago we had the primary objective of sharing what was happening in our field work, starting with Michael in Kerala and myself in Nicaragua.  Writing from Morgan’s Rock, or from Kerala, may have made the posts feel focused on only two locations.  Others have joined in along the way, thankfully, so it is a much broader spectrum geographically and otherwise.  Some of us are back on campus now, and our task remains the same: getting important ideas and examples related to entrepreneurial conservation, and community-based problem solving, out there in a creative forum.

I have decided to bring my work–at Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology and at Cornell Outdoor Education–as well as some of my “book learning” onto the page here.  The main reason for doing the latter is to show that, to put it bluntly, we are not making this stuff up.  Even on our most innovative days in the field, someone has thought about it or done it before, somewhere, sometime.  And that is good news.  So today I thought I would share a bit on the interplay between our basic tendencies and our better selves. Continue reading →

Earth’s Eye

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Thomas Cole’s Long Lake Sketch 1846

“Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. Sky water. It needs no fence. Nations come and go without defiling it. It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs; no storms, no dust, can dim its surface ever fresh; a mirror in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun’s hazy brush—this the light dust-cloth—which retains no breath that is breathed on it, but sends its own to float as clouds high above its surface, and be reflected in its bosom still.” — Henry David Thoreau, Walden p177

Thoreau’s description of Walden and other lakes in New England came to mind this weekend as I was canoeing and swimming with friends across Lake Cayuga, Ithaca’s own majestic mirror (albeit a crinklier one than Walden, given our weather). Continue reading →

Citizen Science

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Bird watchers are everywhere. Countless households around the world sport bird-feeders in back yards, and thousands of photographers like Vijaykumar Thondaman dedicate much of their lives to capturing stunning images. It is practically impossible to believe that anyone could fail to see the beauty in a toucan or quetzal, Latin American species that tourists travel whole hemispheres to see for themselves in the wild.

Swallow nestlings studied by Cornell students

Collecting data on birds is a difficult process because there aren’t enough ornithologists to be in the field all the time. But what about the casual bird watchers carrying around their binoculars, the families gathering on their porches to watch hummingbirds flit around flowers, or the schoolchildren staring out the classroom window at the distant and free shadows of birds of prey in the sky? Citizen science involves using these millions of bird lovers as a resource. As one of the world leaders in the study of birds, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology has been using citizen science since 1966, and is involved in many projects that bring bird watchers together while building an impressive database that is used for important research.

Here’s an article on Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society’s citizen science project eBird.org.

Starting next week I will be working at one of these projects, called Celebrate Urban Birds, managing/deciphering this data and helping people around the country get involved in the surprisingly simple and rewarding experience of watching and identifying birds, whether they have a background in ornithology or not.

Changing the Land

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A previous post described the beliefs about land usage that settlers brought to New England, and the resulting impact on the  environment.  The same source material (Cronon’s “Changes in the Land”) provides a fascinating description of what Native Americans had been doing to “improve the land” since pre-Columbian times.

In southern New England they would burn large areas of the surrounding forest once or twice a year, creating forests that Europeans saw as “open and parklike.” The fires would consume all the undergrowth so that the result was “a forest of large, widely spaced trees, few shrubs, and much grass and herbage.” Wherever Native Americans in southern New England lived, the English traveler (1633) William Wood noted, “there is scarce a bush or bramble or any cumbersome underwood to be seen in the more champion ground.”

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Improving the Land

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When the English arrived on the coasts of New England to form colonies in the 17th Century, they generally viewed Native Americans as savages who, despite their skills at hunting and farming, didn’t rightfully own the land they occupied.

The northern tribes didn’t practice agriculture at all, and the southern tribes were partially agricultural: during temperate months they would harvest corn, beans, and squash, and when winter came they moved north because it was easier to track and hunt animals in the snow. All tribes were fairly nomadic; every year they picked up their few possessions and traveled wherever seasonal sustenance was to be had.

In the King James edition of the Bible, which Pilgrims carried across the ocean, Genesis 1:28 has God commanding man to “fill the earth and subdue it.”  To say the least, Puritan colonists took these words very seriously. When they saw that Native Americans weren’t taming the land as the norms in Europe dictated, it was clear evidence that they did not have the right to own it.

Continue reading →

K-12 Growth

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Last month I wrote about the Dunwoody Community Garden, and commented on my surprise at its seemingly exponential rate of growth and improvement. I also promised to check out Dunwoody High School’s (DHS) current involvement with the community garden, and I can finally deliver on that one:

Grow Dunwoody is a community enterprise designed to bring gardens directly to Dunwoody’s schools. According to Danny Kanso, a senior at DHS, the purpose of the program is

to integrate hands-on learning into science, wellness, and special education, to produce renewable classroom and community resources, and to instill sustainable practices and values within our student body.

Continue reading →

EZ Water Fountain

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From the side the water fountain looks like most others: a spigot shoots arcs of water from a corner when you press a button somewhere. But when you face the EZH2O water station — a bottle-filling station — you see that the spigot in the corner is not the only mechanism on the wall.

I’ve been carrying around aluminum or hard plastic bottles for years, and am always annoyed when I have to replenish from a water fountain that doesn’t shoot water in a high enough arc so that my bottle can fill to the brim. With the EZH2O, all you have to do is place a bottle in front of the motion sensor in the back panel, or simply stand it on the grey plastic platform, and water will come down in a straight and soft stream.

As your bottle fills, a little meter in the top corner of the panel tallies how many plastic bottles have been saved by using reusable bottles. Also, the bottle filling station has a WaterSentry filter (and a light in the top right corner that shows when it needs to be replaced). So far, I have only seen these in Cornell’s Olin Library, both in the stacks and the basement. Hopefully they will spread to every building at Cornell.

Desert Blues

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Last year, during the summer prior to starting college, I worked at Feynan in Jordan teaching English to the children of the local Bedouin community.

The hybrid of Berber, Arab, Western and black African music styles of the Malian group Tinariwen serves as a sound track to his experience.  I had the pleasure of hearing some members of the group in a small venue last year, and that sound of desert yearning, or “asuf”, was almost palpable.   Take a listen to the embedded songs in the multimedia files in both of the above links and tell me if you agree.

…soon it will once again be time for Tinariwen — which operates as a collective, with anywhere from five to nine members, depending on factors like who has herds to tend or whose wife is pregnant — to move out of its cultural space and into ours.  And with that, the feeling of asuf will return, feeding a yearning for the desert even as it powers the music.

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Environotes

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While shopping for notebooks at Cornell University’s bookstore yesterday I came across a brand that I hadn’t seen before. The cover of the dark, forest-green notebook said “Environotes sustainable paper products” in the lower right corner, and a removable card-stock label declared the paper to be a “green” product.

I was somewhat skeptical, because I know how many trees are cut down in the US to provide Americans with paper (about a billion a year) and the only sustainable mass-produced paper I’d ever seen was the banana leaf paper sold in Central America.

Then I saw that the one of the companies behind the notebooks was called Cane Fields, and that the paper was not only made from sugar cane fiber, but the fiber left over from the sugar-making process. This reduces landfill waste, is recyclable, and saves trees! To make it even better, the manufacturing process is powered by wind and biomass renewable energy, doesn’t use acid or chlorine bleaches, and is carbon-neutral through carbon trading. Needless to say, I purchased one of these notebooks, and got a 3-subject one to save space.

I’m glad that the Cornell Store carries these sorts of products; just today when I stopped back at the Store to get small pocket notepads, I found notebooks made by one of Cane Fields’ partners, Roaring Spring Paper Products. With 60 sheets of recycled 5″ by 3″ paper, the so-called “little green book” has a nice little recycling symbol on the front. I bought two.

The Anthropocene

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I wrote yesterday about the North American cod stocks that have practically disappeared during the last century as a result of overfishing. Needless to say, this is just one of many species that humans have had a seriously detrimental effect upon in their shaping of the Earth. An article from The Economist this May discusses the geological forces that humans have had on the Earth, focusing on topics like the carbon cycle or nitrogen fixation rather than species extinction.

Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer coined the term “Anthropocene” in 2000 to classify what they see as a new age on the geological time scale, and the fairly abrupt and sharp decline of cod may be one of the many changes visible in the fossil record thousands or millions of years from now. As you can see in the image below, we are currently in the Holocene, but Crutzen and Stoermer, along with many other scientists, including several of those in the International Commission on Stratigraphy (which arbitrates the geological time scale), believe that we have entered an age primarily shaped by Homo sapiens.

Image from The Economist

Continue reading →

The Gadus Commons

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William Bradford, governor of Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts for much of the first half of the 1600s, from whom North Americans  have inherited the notion of  communal Thanksgiving (and incidentally my grandfather 26 generations removed) noted:

The major part [of the Pilgrims] inclined to go to Plymouth chiefly for the hope of present profit to be made by the fish that was found in that country (Cod; 67).

Fast forward a few centuries.  Bottom trawling, longlining, and gillnetting during the 19th and 20th Centuries were probably the most responsible for cod’s population decline in North America. Faced with the same great abundance that had helped bring settlers to Cape Cod, huge fishing companies acted rationally to maximize their own gain, taking advantage of the bountiful commons, and this led to ruin. With the near disappearance of cod came the absence of herring, capelin, humpback whales, and squid. Continue reading →

Ramírez, Reading & Responsibility Update

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In my post about Sergio Ramírez, former vice-president of Nicaragua, I had very few pictures. I have corresponded with José Tomás, and thanks to his camera I can provide some pictures here:

A welcome poster made by children showing famous stories

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