GreenBiz Interview with CEO of Audubon

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We like the Audubon Society, the publications they produce, and of course, the artist himself. Over the last half decade, a new CEO for the Society has rewritten their strategic plan and seen overwhelming success in involvement of all sorts. Elsa Wenzel interviewed this CEO, David Yarnold, for GreenBiz:

The Audubon Society appears to be doing everything right in social media and marketing. It’s got apps, maps, a buzz on social media, an engaging website and a funny blog. It’s hip to crowdsourcing and citizen science: In just one weekend, 163,000 of its volunteers recorded on smartphones their sightings of more than 5,000 bird species. Audubon said its digital platforms reach a million people, a staggering climb from just 35,000 a couple of years ago.

Much credit for this goes to David Yarnold, CEO and president. He joined Audubon in 2010 after a long career in journalism at the Pulitzer-winning San Jose Mercury News, and a stint as president at the Environmental Defense Fund.

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Continue Protecting The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness

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Canoeing in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness near Ely, Minn.Bre McGee/The St. Cloud Times, via Associated Press

None in our immediate circle has been there, but it looks like our kind of place. We hope to see it, to canoe it, to breathe in that clean air. This editorial makes it clear what’s at stake, and what needs to be done. It’s not the messengers, it’s the message (but wow on the messenger front too):

Protect Minnesota’s Boundary Water

By WALTER F. MONDALE and THEODORE ROOSEVELT IV

MINNESOTA’S Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is one of America’s most popular wild destinations. Water is its lifeblood. Over 1,200 miles of streams wend their way through 1.1 million acres thick with fir, pine and spruce and stippled by lakes left behind by glaciers. Moose, bears, wolves, loons, ospreys, eagles and northern pike make their home there and in the surrounding Superior National Forest. Continue reading →

National Geographic Travel Photography

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Grand prize winner: Winter Horseman. The Winter in Inner Mongolia is very unforgiving. At a freezing temperature of -20F and lower with constant breeze of snow from all directions, it was pretty hard to convince myself to get out of the car and take photos – not until I saw horsemen showing off their skills in commanding the steed from a distance, I quickly grabbed my telephoto lens and captured the moment when one of the horseman charged out from morning mist. Photograph: Anthony Lau/National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest

Have a look over at the source:

Winners Announced

The National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year has been named!

Explore the prize-winning photos and download stunning wallpapers. Share your favorite pictures with your friends and see the judges top picks. Continue reading →

Environment, Rights & Responsibilities

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The singer Rebecca Martin helped keep Niagara, a water-bottling company, from tapping a reservoir near her adopted home, in upstate New York. “What’s more important than drinking water? Nothing,” she says. PHOTOGRAPH BY PAT KEPIC

Thanks to Alexis Okeowo for this note about actions our fellow citizens take, a reminder of our rights and responsibilities:

A JAZZ SINGER FIGHTS NIAGARA BOTTLING

By Alexis Okeowo

For years, Rebecca Martin was used to being transient, without a permanent home or commitments. As a jazz musician who performed both solo and with a band named Once Blue, Martin spent much of her time on the road touring and performing, while being loosely based in New York City. When she decided, almost fifteen years ago, to move to Kingston, ninety miles north of the city on the Hudson River, she felt a sense of relief. She had “really lost touch with the idea of community and responsibility to one another,” she said, and took the chance to grow her family and settle down. She started noticing ways that her new town could improve. There was a shop in her neighborhood that was selling large knives, big enough to be called swords, near two schools. Continue reading →

Ozone Hole over the Antarctic is Shrinking

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Launching an ozonesonde. This balloon transported instrument measures a vertical profile of the ozone layer. Credit: NOAA via Flickr

Thankfully, there’s good news on the atmospheric front from the southern edge of the world, where chlorofluorocarbons released in the seventies and eighties had created a hole in the ozone layer. The seasonal gap in this ultraviolet-blocking layer is not as big this year as others in the past, thanks to prompt and concerted action to prevent release of dangerous chemicals. Alexandra Witze writes for Scientific American:

It’s the beginning of the end for the Antarctic ozone hole. A new analysis shows that, on average, the hole — which forms every Southern Hemisphere spring, letting in dangerous ultraviolet light — is smaller and appears later in the year than it did in 2000.

The 1987 global treaty called the Montreal Protocol sought to reduce the ozone hole by banning chlorofluorocarbons, chlorine-containing chemicals — used as refrigerants in products such as air conditioners — that accelerated ozone loss in the stratosphere. The study shows that it worked.

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Conservation Reserve Program

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The Hull family has partnered with U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Farm Service Agency (FSA) Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) in Vermont to conserve sensitive riparian areas on their dairy farm by establishing forested buffer zones and installing high-tensile fence, stream crossings and other water handling equipment. Photo © USDA / Flickr through a Creative Commons license

This article by Kris Johnson for The Nature Conservancy is reminiscent of a post on paying for ecosystem services published here five years ago, where watersheds that would otherwise be affected by agriculture are better protected with incentives from conservation programs. From Cool Green Science today:

Ask someone in the rural Midwest what the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) does, and a likely answer is: “It pays farmers not to farm.” But, research recently published in the journal Ecosystem Servicessuggests a better answer would be: It pays farmers to grow clean water.

It’s a better answer because with nutrient pollution threatening drinking water supplies, impacting boating and fishing on lakes and rivers throughout the Midwest and causing a persistent “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, figuring out how to produce clean water is a critically important challenge. And the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) is key to solving it.

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Gallon Jug, Conservation The Belizean Way

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Two months ago I had the opportunity to visit Chan Chich Lodge in Belize, something I had wanted to do for decades.  Sometime in the 1990s I first heard of it, from various visionaries in Costa Rica who considered it to be a model on which to base development, both at the property level and for the destination as a whole. Chan Chich was mentioned frequently in conversations, in Costa Rica and throughout Mesoamerica, when the notion of sustainable tourism was first being developed. Continue reading →

Recommended Podcast: Food Packaging

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If you are not yet listening to Gastropod, this would be as good a place to start as any:

Outside the Box: The Story of Food Packaging

The invention of food packaging is one of humanity’s greatest achievements. It may seem hard to imagine today, but the first clay pots made the great civilizations of the ancient world possible, while paper’s first use, long before it became a surface for writing, was to wrap food. But packaging’s proliferation, combined with the invention of plastics, has become one of our biggest environmental headaches. In this episode, we explore the surprising history of how our food got dressed—and why and how we might want to help it get naked again.

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#12 Of One Dozen Love Letters About Xandari

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After our visit to Cardamom County last weekend to bid farewell to our colleagues there, Amie suggested that I amend my dozen Xandari love letters writing engagement to a baker’s dozen: Cardamom County has been so integral to our time in Kerala that it would not be proper to reflect only on Xandari in this manner. Continue reading →

The Sense Of A Place

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One of the finest food writers, Bee Wilson surprised me by choosing this moment to pen What Brexit Means for British Food, and to post it when most of us continue to consume information and analysis about the “more mportant” implications of that referendum one week ago. But then I read it, and was even more surprised. I expected her to mention how improved UK cuisine is after decades of exchange with the Continent’s great chefs, especially those like Guy Savoy who mentored more than one of today’s UK celebrity chefs. None of that. Much more interesting. I should not be surprised.

Read that post. Ironically, perhaps, it reminded me of this article from more than one year ago that I neglected to share here. Ironic because it seems quaint in light of current headlines from Europe and around the world. But the distraction seems timely. More than three decades ago I worked in restaurant Guy Savoy, in my hometown of Greenwich, CT (USA). Today we would call it a pop-up but in the early 1980s it was what I would call a miracle. He flew the Concorde weekly from Paris to operate this outpost for just a couple years and at the height of its success, shuttered it. His renewed focus on his Paris restaurant was surely what earned him the third Michelin star, which he has retained ever since.

I still do not tire of reading news about him, especially about how he keeps reinventing his home restaurant while retaining something essential. The chef-entrepreneur was one of the first to establish an outpost in the USA while maintaining his home base in France. It has been more than one decade since Amie and I enjoyed a meal as a guest in his rue Troyon restaurant. But not many days go by without my sensing the influence that working for him had on me. So, after reading Bee Wilson’s post, I also recommend that you have a look here:

Restaurant Guy Savoy Has a Striking New Home in Paris

By

PARIS — For 28 years, one of this city’s most famous restaurants operated out of a dark, starkly modern site on rue Troyon, a banal street in the 17th Arrondissement close to the Arc de Triomphe. Now diners at Restaurant Guy Savoy will enter a grand 4,300-square-foot top-floor space on the site of both the oldest institution in France and the oldest factory in Paris: the Monnaie de Paris — the French mint.

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Phenology Disrupted by Climate Change in the UK

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The UK has a rich history of biological recording by scientists and ‘citizen scientists’ who document the first signs of spring. Photograph: Alamy/Guardian

We first heard of the word phenology on this site back in 2012, from writings on a citizen science workshop in the Galápagos. Since then, the term has been linked to citizen science in the context of forest life cycles in England, coffee farming in Costa Rica, and orchids in the United Kingdom. It’s a good thing that there’s a history of normal people collecting information on nature’s timelines in Britain, because that provides rich and deep data on changing phenology with a warming climate. Jessica Aldred reports for the Guardian on a new study published in Nature:

Climate change is disrupting the seasonal behaviour of Britain’s plants and animals, with rising temperatures having an impact on species at different levels of the food chain, new research shows.

The result could be widespread “desynchronisation” between species and their phenological events – seasonal biological cycles such as breeding and migration – that could affect the functioning of entire ecosystems, according to the large-scale study published this week in the journal Nature.

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Graylings Recovering

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Spawning Arctic Grayling at Green Hollow Genetic Brood Reserve. Photo © Emily Cayer FWP

Graylings sound like wild beings out of a fantasy series, but in fact they’re a type of fish found all over the world in different species, some threatened with population decline, and some stable. The Arctic grayling, found in Russia and Canada but also some areas in Alaska, Montana and Wyoming, has suffered extirpation from certain spots in the latter two states during the last hundred years or so, due to anthropogenic effects. Ted Williams reports for The Nature Conservancy:

The Arctic grayling’s spotted, orange-trimmed dorsal fin looks as if it had been photoshopped. It’s half as long as the body and just as wide; and it glows with impossible shades of violet, green and turquoise. This gaudy trout cousin was deposited by the retreating glacier in the coldest, clearest waters of the contiguous states.

So common was the species in Michigan that a city, Grayling, took its name. And as recently as the early 20th century grayling abounded in the upper Missouri River system. While these fish still thrive in Alaska and Canada, they’ve been wiped out in Michigan and persist only in about 15 percent of their historic range in Montana and Wyoming.

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Queens, NY Entrepeneurial Conservation

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Architecture intersecting with cultural conservation–that is a topic that will always get my attention. When I read this article it reminded me a bit of the early days of scouting out the location that would become Xandari Harbour’s restaurant, 51. Hard to resist reading, based on the title, and the article does not disappoint:

Never Has My Breath Been Taken Away Like It Was at Knockdown Center

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#11 Of One Dozen Love Letters About Xandari

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It is that time of year. Monsoon in Kerala, and what we like to call green season in Costa Rica. The rains are delicious, and give the sense of abundance and replenishment, refreshment. It is the ideal time for ayurveda in Kerala. Or just pure relaxation with a book, escaping the news and other distractions–digital detox–and any of the four properties shown above can help you achieve that bliss.

For one more day La Paz Group will be responsible for ensuring that Xandari delivers that bliss. July 1 onward George M George and his team will be in that role. In making the rounds to all the properties this week we have been experiencing a sensation that maps on almost perfectly to the sensation that has come with two decades of nomadic life. Continue reading →

Moringa: Superfood?

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A moringa tree (tallest plant in the back left of the photo)

There’s a Moringa tree in the coffee plot at Xandari’s west farm area, and the head gardener José Luis always points it out to guests as a plant with dozens of healthy properties, in addition to its value as a shade-provider to the coffee shrubs. The genus of trees is beginning to be touted as a “miracle tree” and superfood in the United States, but has yet to really catch on among the denizens of developing nations in the dryland tropics, where Moringa grows best. Amanda Little writes for the New Yorker:

On the western margin of Agua Caliente [Mexico], Mark Olson, a professor of evolutionary biology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, has a farm. “It may look like a shitty little field with runty little trees in a random little town, but it’s an amazing scientific resource,” Olson said, as he led me through the hilly, hardscrabble acre that constitutes the International Moringa Germplasm Collection. This is the world’s largest and most diverse aggregate of trees from the genus Moringa, which Olson believes are “uniquely suited to feeding poor and undernourished populations of the dryland tropics, especially in the era of climate change.”

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Use Nature, Not Seawalls, to Defend from Storms

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A Living Shoreline replaced a failing bulkhead at the N.C. Wildlife Resource Commission’s Edenhouse boat ramp on the Chowan River. Photo by the North Carolina Coastal Federation

From the Harvard Gazette, an article by Colleen Walsh on the environmental damage and lack of success in general from manmade seawalls:

For years coastal homeowners have tried to beat back Mother Nature with seawalls, imposing structures of wood and/or concrete intended to fend off angry tides and surging storms. But emerging research suggests that in some areas, biological barriers both better protect against erosion and preserve vital ocean habitats.

Not only have seawalls in certain areas been shown repeatedly to fail when tested, but they pose a threat to the delicate ecosystems associated with wetlands and intertidal areas, Rachel Gittman, a postdoctoral research associate at Northeastern University’s Marine Science Center, said during a talk at Radcliffe on Thursday. Instead of absorbing energy generated by wind and waves, seawalls reflect that force back into the water, said Gittman, further eroding the shore and erasing important habitats for fish, crabs, and shore birds.

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