We Speak For Earth
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ikenbot CWL -
mohandasgandhi Mohandas Gandhi -
realcleverscience Real Clever Science -
socialuprooting Social Uprooting -
abstractnerd Abstract Nerd -
perscientiamlibertas A Matter of the Most Pleasant Fraternal Confidence
We all share the common desire to leave the Earth a better place for our children and for future generations. The problems of pollution and environmental degradation can sometimes seem so vast that it’s hard to know where to start. What can we do?
We can show our children that we care about their future, and the future of their children’s children, by actively participating in clever and innovative solutions to restore health to the Planet. The Life Box® is one solution.
All my life, I have loved watching life emerge. Knowing that all plants are part fungi and that fungi are essential for our food webs, I started to experiment with combining seeds and mycorrhizal fungal spores and was astonished by the results. The mycorrhized plants surged in their growth compared to the same plants without mycorrhizae. The mycorrhizal mycelium enhances the root nutrient-aborption zone of plants by hundreds of times. Knowing the benefits of marrying plants and fungi, and that deforestation is exacerbating climate change, I focused my attention on the roles of fungi in forest ecosystems.
While growing many wood-decomposing mushrooms, my friends and I discovered the ‘wonders of cardboard’ for growing mycelium. Silky, diverging forks of mycelium would happily race down the valleys within the folds of corrugated cardboard. Having myco-mulched with cardboard for many years, I realized that cardboard could become a growth medium for encouraging communities of fungi and plants symbiotically working together. Then, the epiphany hit me like a lightning bolt. Why not re-invent the cardboard box so each box becomes a designed ecosystem? The Life Box was the result.
Within the corrugated walls of a Life Box, tree seeds intermingle with millions of spores of mycorrhizal fungi, forming a tree-nursery-in-waiting. When it has outlived its usefulness as a box, it can be torn up and planted, and begin anew as a platform for the growth of nascent trees.
Why use a Life Box?
Once delivered, a regular cardboard box dies at your doorstep, so to speak. The conventional brown box serves only the purpose of delivering a product. And then, at best, it is recycled. The Life Box is not just a box: it is a teaching tool that unfolds into a continuing, life-long experience. It empowers individuals with the ability to sequester carbon by planting trees and making a positive difference. The Life Box has ‘legs’, or more aptly trees, which will remind the receiver for years to come of their own environmental awareness, and that of the company who shipped it. The shared experience of everyone involved builds a community of those trying to help the planet with a long-lasting and sustainable solution to climate change.
The Life Box may become a palette, a template for eco-artisans and architects to help re-green the planet. The Tree Life Box uses trees approved by every state in the United States that regulates tree movement, and are approved for export to Canada. All species embedded within the Life Box are native to the continental US and Canada and are non-invasive. We plan to expand the Life Box line of products to include wild flowers, vegetables, grasses and herbs within boxes, padded envelopes, egg cartons and a wide variety of packaging materials.
Harvard Scientist Proposes a Way to Refreeze the Arctic to Combat Possible Global Warming Disaster
The amount of ice in the Arctic Ocean shrunk to an all time low in September, with the area covered now only half of what it was in the 1980s. This alarming development along with the global community’s inability to come to a consensus about cutting CO2 emissions has led Harvard professor of applied physics David Keith to look at a technological solution to reversing the warming of the Arctic. In a paper published in Nature Climate Change and an affiliated study in the Environmental Research Letters, Keith proposes a way to refreeze the Arctic through geoengineering.
Injecting reflective particles into the high atmosphere could reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface, counteracting the greenhouse gas effect. High CO2 levels would continue to trap heat in the atmosphere, but with less energy coming in, temperatures on the surface would go down. Keith suggests using the method for a regional correction to restore the ice cover in the Arctic. In his paper, he claims that “with an average solar reduction of only 0.5%, it is possible to recover pre-industrial sea ice extent.” A separate paper shows that this could all be done with a few modified Gulfstream jets and is estimated to cost around $8 billion, which is about the price of a installing a major oil pipeline.
But large-scale geoengineering like what Keith is suggesting is banned by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity because it could result in disastrous unintended consequences. Even Keith acknowledges that manually refreezing the arctic is not the right way to solve the larger problem of global warming. He thinks that this level of geoengineering would only be appropriate to consider in states of emergency such as a sudden collapse of ice sheets or a killing drought. But first, we need to cut our greenhouse gas emissions and he warns that “if we do this and we do not cut emissions, we just walk further and further off the cliff, like Wile E. Coyote.”
(via ikenbot)
Bad-Ass Female Scientists: Lynn Margulis
“ I don’t consider my ideas controversial. I consider them right.”
Biologist Lynn Margulis died on November 22nd. She stood out from her colleagues in that she would have extended evolutionary studies nearly four billion years back in time. Her major work was in cell evolution, in which the great event was the appearance of the eukaryotic, or nucleated, cell — the cell upon which all larger life-forms are based. Nearly forty-five years ago, she argued for its symbiotic origin: that it arose by associations of different kinds of bacteria. Her ideas were generally either ignored or ridiculed when she first proposed them; symbiosis in cell evolution is now considered one of the great scientific breakthroughs.
Margulis was also a champion of the Gaia hypothesis, an idea developed in the 1970s by the free lance British atmospheric chemist James E. Lovelock. The Gaia hypothesis states that the atmosphere and surface sediments of the planet Earth form a self- regulating physiological system — Earth’s surface is alive. The strong version of the hypothesis, which has been widely criticized by the biological establishment, holds that the earth itself is a self-regulating organism; Margulis subscribed to a weaker version, seeing the planet as an integrated self- regulating ecosystem. She was criticized for succumbing to what George Williams called the “God-is good” syndrome, as evidenced by her adoption of metaphors of symbiosis in nature. She was, in turn, an outspoken critic of mainstream evolutionary biologists for what she saw as a failure to adequately consider the importance of chemistry and microbiology in evolution.
I first met her in the late 80’s and in 1994 interviewed her for my book The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (1995). Below, in remembrance, please see her chapter, “Gaia is a Tough Bitch”. One of the compelling features of The Third Culture was that I invited each of the participants to comment about the others. In this regard, the end of the following chapter has comments on Margulis and her work by Daniel C. Dennett, the late George C. Williams, W. Daniel Hillis, Lee Smolin, Marvin Minsky, Richard Dawkins, and the late Francisco Varela. Interesting stuff.
As I wrote in the introduction to the first part of the book (Part I: The Evolutionary Idea): “The principal debates are concerned with the mechanism of speciation; whether natural selection operates at the level of the gene, the organism, or the species, or all three; and also with the relative importance of other factors, such as natural catastrophes.” These very public debates were concerned with ideas represented by George C. Williams and Richard Dawkins on one side and Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge on the other side. Not for Lynn Margulis. All the above scientists were wrong because evolutionary studies needed to begin four billion years back in time. And she was not shy about expressing her opinions. Her in-your-face, take-no-prisoners stance was pugnacious and tenacious. She was impossible. She was wonderful. — John Brockman
“Gaia is a tough bitch.” L. Margulis
The Santa Barbara Coastal (SBC) Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Project, located in the Santa Barbara Channel region of the Southern California Bight, investigates the importance of land and ocean processes in structuring giant kelp forest ecosystems. Although there is increasing concern about the impacts of human activities on coastal watersheds and nearshore marine environments, there have been few long-term studies of linkages among terrestrial, estuarine, nearshore and oceanic habitats. The SBC LTER is filling this gap.
(via ikenbot)
The Great White Shark Cattle Market
Because they spend so much time in remote waters, and don’t survive in captivity, great white sharks are deeply mysterious creatures. But over the last ten years, biologists have been able to track them using electronic tags which record their position and depth, and the ocean temperature.
On the face of it, that information can’t tell you what the sharks are actually doing. But Salvador Jorgensen of the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey, California, and colleagues have developed a new statistical analysis that picks out patterns of behaviour from the tagging data.
It seems to confirm earlier suggestions that the sharks have a breeding ground in the east Pacific. What’s more, it suggests that the males go there to show off side-by-side in front of the choosy females – cattle-market style.
Greta Oto (The Glasswing)
Caption: “Ecologist use the presence of the Glass-wing butterfly as an indication of high quality habitat, & its demises alerts them of Ecological change.”
(via ikenbot)
Help scientists identify seafloor types and living species in this engaging, citizen dependent project. The hope is to identify species, map populations, and get a better idea of the makeup of the northeastern continental shelf of the U.S.
Despite just being released, over 200,000 images have been mapped and possibly even a new species. How reliable those mappings are remains to be seen, but with such a great amount of input the results should even out.
A fantastic project that really takes advantage of the huge citizen workforce that is available on the web. I’m looking forward to see what results Seafloor Explorer can give us, and whether any similar projects pop up.
Pretty much sums it up.
h/t Jer
Has mankind outgrown Earth?
A new report from the World Wildlife Fund says we’re gobbling up the planet’s resources at such an alarming rate that by 2030, even a second Earth wouldn’t be enough to sustain us
Which resources are we depleting?
Renewables like fish, water, timber, and food are being used up much faster than previously thought. According to experts, mankind’s “ecological footprint” is now over 50 percent higher than it was in 2008, meaning it takes 1.5 years for Earth to regenerate the natural resources we use up annually.Why is our ecological footprint growing?
The world’s population, which according to the U.N. surpassed 7 billion last October, is getting too big, and the average individual is using more than he or she needs. “The excessive demands that we are putting on the planet will inevitably lead to acute water shortages, a chronic food crisis, and rising prices for energy, metals, and minerals,” says Robert Walker at the Huffington Post.
(via ikenbot)
