Some Shale Gas Links

• EQT chief speaks on fracking, coal, greenhouse gases at UC   - News - The Charleston Gazette - West Virginia News and Sports -: The question of what chemicals are used in hydraulic fracturing are "overstated," Porges said. Many still ask for companies to reveal them, however, he said they're available on frackfocus.org, which is run by the Groundwater Protection Council.
• Ohio agency says fracking-related activity caused earthquakes | Reuters: An Ohio state agency said on Friday there is evidence that the high-pressure injection of fluid underground related to fracking caused a series of Ohio earthquakes culminating in a New Year's Eve tremor in any area not known for seismic activity.
• Natural born drillers: Why shale gas won't end our energy woes | Grist:
  

  Talk about a dangerous echo chamber: A government agency relies on industry data to calculate "independent" estimates, then industry proponents point to the government figures to bolster their rosy outlook.

  This echo chamber is one powerful explanation for how federal energy officials have, wittingly or unwittingly, become peddlers of the so-called "crack cocaine of the power industry."

  Has the agency cleaned up its act? It has lowered its numbers. But only time will tell whether it has changed how it does its research.

  In the meantime, we'll all have to live with a natural gas boom that may turn out to be a lot more expensive--for both the environment and consumers--than the industry and regulators first believed.

  Drilling Down - Fighting Over Oil and Gas Well Leases - NYTimes.com

  
  

Paleoclimate Links: Atmosphere Evolution, Carboniferous Climate

Some paleoclimate references my environmental science students might find useful:

• Climate during the Carboniferous Period
• Evolution of the Atmosphere

State launches gas-drilling database for public

State launches gas-drilling database for public  - News - The Charleston Gazette - West Virginia News and Sports -: "CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- West Virginians interested in oil and gas drilling plans can now study permits and get other details online. The Department of Environmental Protection's Office of Oil and Gas has launched a website with information on horizontal drilling operations. The site was mandated under legislation passed in December."

'via Blog this'

The Chaff Which the Wind Driveth Away

I've been reading philosophy and ecology papers, trying to get ahead of my students on the fly with courses I took over mid-semester. Since my personal flight from academia, I have kept up on ecology literature, but philosophy, not so much. I'd be in better shape if the topic were "biology and the literary imagination," or "aesthetics of natural history," or "nature, prose, and poetry." In fact, I'm sneaking in all the Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson I can manage, on the grounds that they are much cited in environmental ethics texts.

Thus, Prairiemary's recent blog post, Meanings of Vegetal Life fit right in with my current reading lists. Mary's introduced me to Deleuze and Guattari in the past, although I can't claim to understand postmodernism enough to explain it in my own words. In this blog post, she reprints a call for manuscripts on "Critical Plant Studies: Philosophy, Literature, Culture."

The goal of the Critical Plant Studies, a new book series at Rodopi Press, is to initiate an interdisciplinary dialogue, whereby philosophy and literature would learn from each other to think about, imagine, and describe, vegetal life with critical awareness, conceptual rigor, and ethical sensitivity....Ethically stated, the aim of the book series is to encourage an incremental shift of cultural attitudes from a purely instrumental to a respectful approach to vegetal beings.

I suspected this overlaps with environmental ethics topics I've been reading about, but I really couldn't imagine how, so I tracked down what I could find by the book series editor, Michael Marder. He has a 2012 publication in Peace Studies Journal entitled Resist Like a Plant: On the Vegetal Life of Political Movements. Here's the abstract:

This brief article is an initial attempt at conceptualizing the idea of political movement not on the basis of the traditional animal model but, rather, following the lessons drawn from vegetal life. I argue that the spatial politics of the Occupy movement largely conforms to the unique ontology of plants and point toward the possibility of a plant-human republic emerging from it.

This is where I run into trouble with modern philosophers. How is this anything more than a search for a metaphor? And isn't this already an ancient trope? Here are King David's botanical similes from Psalm 1, verses 3 and 4:

And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.

The ungodly are not so: but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away.

This famous simile has moved into politics, from spiritual to protest song: Just like a tree that's planted by the water./ I shall not be moved. Perhaps I can use this to justify shifting the course emphasis from ethical theory to literature. The whole Deleuze and Guattari: Concept of the Rhizome seems to me to rest on an inartful metaphor. I think a "stolon" would better represent lateral, multidirectional movement of ideas.

Agriculture and World Water Consumption

I'm currently flapping around the Internets, scavenging for articles suitable for my environmental science classes. The good news is, it's quite interesting; but the bad news is, much of what's interesting is behind pay walls, like that of AAAS. We're left with interesting teasers like this:

Is Agriculture Sucking Fresh Water Dry? - ScienceNOW:

Agriculture accounted for about 92% of the world's water footprint, the researchers estimate. The water needed to grow so-called cereal grains such as wheat, rice, and corn accounted for about 27% of global water consumption; meat and dairy products accounted for another 22% and 7%, respectively. "Grain is the currency by which we trade water," Postel says.

Agriculture's huge water usage offers hope that humans can reduce overall water consumption, Hoekstra says. Improving the efficiency of irrigation, for example, will allow enhanced use of surface water derived from precipitation and reduce dependence on unsustainable withdrawals of groundwater. Each cubic meter of water that's drawn from surface sources, which are generally renewable, is a cubic meter that doesn't have to be pumped from aquifers. Such underground sources of water typically aren't considered renewable at timescales relevant for humans, he notes.

What I've Been Doing Lately

Here's a peek at what I've been up to lately:

I'm enjoying revisiting my ecology textbooks and reading new PLoS ONE articles. I wish I didn't have to do it on such a tight deadline, but that is the way these things usually go!

New USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map

This week the USDA Agricultural Research Service released its new Plant Hardiness Zone Map. Strangely, I discovered this, not through the agriculture and gardening sites I follow, but through Mother Jones magazine's Blue Marble Blog. Julia Whitty points out:

The new map is interactive, which is cool, and based on a much finer data scale than the old one, which is great. And guess what. It shows that things are getting warmer. The USDA managed to pretty much bury that fact in Bureaucratese in their press release...Compared to the 1990 version, zone boundaries in this edition of the map have shifted in many areas. The new map is generally one 5-degree Fahrenheit half-zone warmer than the previous map throughout much of the United States. This is mostly a result of using temperature data from a longer and more recent time period; the new map uses data measured at weather stations during the 30-year period 1976-2005. In contrast, the 1990 map was based on temperature data from only a 13-year period of 1974-1986.

The interactive USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map lets you select a state and "zoom in" to see surprisingly fine-grained detail. I've already zoomed in on every place I've ever tried to garden.

Extinctions Inside Us

I've had this article sitting on my "to blog" list for a while: Bugs Inside: What Happens When the Microbes That Keep Us Healthy Disappear? The human body has more microbial than human cells, but this rich diversity of micro-helpers that has evolved along with us is undergoing a rapid shift--one that may have very macro health consequences. At my last "real" job at The Institute for Genomic Research (Now known as J. Craig Venter Institute, because that is the boss's name, and he's not a bashful fellow) I wrote some grants to sequence microbial ecosystems. It was too early in the microbial genome sequencing game for those proposals to fly, but now several organizations are doing just that. It's been 11 years since I left, so I guess I was right not to stick around waiting for it to happen, but I'm feeling a little envious of the folks who are getting to do that work now.

Sea water microbes, oil well flora, rumin ecosystems, and human "normal flora"--it's a way to get a look at bacteria in non-homogeneous culture, and characterize "bugs" that can't be cultured individually. Of course, the normal flora of humans are of particular interest.

Having evolved along with the human species, most of the miniscule beasties that live in and on us are actually helping to keep us healthy, just as our well-being promotes theirs. In fact, some researchers think of our bodies as superorganisms, rather than one organism teeming with hordes of subordinate invertebrates....

With rapid changes in sanitation, medicine and lifestyle in the past century, some of these indigenous species are facing decline, displacement and possibly even extinction. In many of the world's larger ecosystems, scientists can predict what might happen when one of the central species is lost, but in the human microbial environment—which is still largely uncharacterized—most of these rapid changes are not yet understood. "This is the next frontier and has real significance for human health, public health and medicine," says Betsy Foxman, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan (U.M.) School of Public Health in Ann Arbor.

Meanwhile, each new generation in developed countries comes into the world with fewer of these native populations. "They're actually missing some component of their microbiota that they've evolved to have," Foxman says.

Getting and Spending, We Lay Waste Our Powers

"Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers...." An Earth-Day inspired article, Waste Not, Want Not by Bill McKibben reminded me that the Romantic poets were spot-on about the Industrial Revolution. The news sites I follow have featured environmental news and commentary along these lines:

In the end, we built an economy that depended on waste...Making enough money to build houses with rooms we never used, and cars with engines we had no need of, meant wasting endless hours at work. Which meant that we had, on average, one-third fewer friends than our parents' generation. What waste that! "Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers," wrote Wordsworth. We can't say we weren't warned.

The economic mess now transfixing us will mean some kind of change. We can try to hang on to the status quo--living a Wal-Mart life so we can buy cheaply enough to keep the stream of stuff coming. Or we can say uncle. There are all kinds of experiments in postwaste living springing up: Freecycling, and Craigslisting, and dumpster diving, and car sharing (those unoccupied seats in your vehicle--what a waste!), and open sourcing. We're sharing buses, and going to the library in greater numbers....

It's not that I don't take these things seriously--my parents remembered the depression after World War I as well as the Dustbowl, and I never felt comfortable spending money on stuff in suburbia, back when I had the income to cover it. It's just that these endless discussions of lifestyle modification are so repetitive, and generally involve at least a little whining.

That's why I was so pleased to find a reference to Susan Strasser's book, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash, including a generous two-chapter sample from Google Books.

She provides a review of how people have seen household and industrial trash from Harriet Beecher Stowe's household hints through the swill children of New York City to today's freegan dumpster divers. It's refreshing to get a really different perspective on waste and recycling. ("Fresh" isn't quite the word for it....) I particularly liked Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe's distinction between

"cunningly devised minces" made from leftovers by "the true domestic artist" with "those things called hashes...compounds of meat, gristle, skin, fat, and burnt fibre, with a handful of pepper and salt flung at them, dredged with lumpy flour, watered from the spout of the teakettle, and left to simmer at the cook's convinience while she is otherwise occupied."....Unfortunately, cookbook writers had trouble describing exactly how to achieve a cunning mince instead of a forgettable hash....

That is the rub, isn't it? Sometimes hash is best forgotten, especially if it sports much "burnt fibre."

Marcellus Shale Developments

The Marcellus shale natural gas extraction business has made the news in West Virginia lately. One company has decided not to build a regional corporate headquarters here after all, while local and state government are moving toward regulation of hydrofracture extraction's use of water resources.

Chesapeake takes parting shot by George Hohmann Charleston Daily Mail Business Editor

Chesapeake Energy Corp. on Thursday not only announced it will downsize its Charleston office, it sent the state a stinging message: West Virginia's legal system hurts business. The company said the jobs of 215 of its Charleston-based employees will either be moved to Oklahoma City or eliminated in the reorganization.

Chesapeake co-founder and CEO Aubrey McClendon said in a prepared statement that downsizing the Charleston office from a regional corporate headquarters to a regional field office follows an operational model Chesapeake has used successfully elsewhere....Then he took a parting shot at West Virginia's legal system.

It was just four years ago that Chesapeake made its presence known in the Mountain State in a huge way. In 2005, it bought Columbia Natural Resources for $2.2 billion cash. The deal instantly made Oklahoma-based Chesapeake the largest natural gas exploration and production company in West Virginia.

Little noticed at the time was the fact that Chesapeake inherited a role as defendant in a class-action lawsuit known as the Tawney case. The lawsuit charged Columbia Natural Resources and NiSource Inc. with cheating landowners. In early 2007 a Roane County jury said the companies should pay $134.3 million in allegedly unpaid gas royalties to landowners plus $270 million in punitive damages....

In October, McClendon was forced to sell 33.4 million shares of Chesapeake - essentially all his stock in the company - to meet a margin call in a $570 million fire sale.

Chesapeake's Appalachian Basin operations stretch from the Finger Lakes region of western New York to central Alabama. Chesapeake is one of several oil and gas companies drilling in West Virginia's underground Marcellus Shale reserves.

Chesapeake's stock plunged from a high of $74 last summer to a five-year low of $9.84 in early December. The company's shares were trading at $16.32 Thursday....

Last week, a New York law firm filed a class-action lawsuit against Chesapeake, alleging that company officials violated federal securities laws by issuing false and misleading statements about Chesapeake's business activities and finances.

This cancellation of regional corporate headquarters does not mean that Chesapeake will give up its existing natural gas extraction sites, or quit buying ad developing leases in West Virginia, as some people around here have speculated. Their operation in Jane Lew, along Interstate 79, is hiring now. Here are a couple more analyses of the court verdict, the unsuccessful appeal, and its putative effect on the natural gas industry in West Virginia:

• Chesapeake slashes 215 jobs--Company blames natural gas slump, court decision
• Hoppy's Commentary on Chesapeake by Talkline Host Hoppy Kercheval

A "Marcellus Shale water pollution control" bill was introduced last week: West Viginia Legislature House Daily Journal for March 5, 2009:

H. B. 2960 - "A Bill to amend and reenact §22-11-4 of the Code of West Virginia, 1931, as amended, relating to water pollution control; and requiring the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection to develop specific standards to control levels of total dissolved solids in the state's rivers and streams"; to the Committee on Government Organization then the Judiciary.

By Delegates Fleischauer, Manypenny, Marshall, Mahan, Doyle, Martin, Beach, Shook, Lawrence, Longstreth and Hatfield

Last month saw some local government action, described in this article: Morgantown City Council Passes Marcellus Shale Resolution by John Christensen, WVEC Lobbyist.

In order to express major concern over the possible hazards to water supplies due to drilling for natural gas in the Marcellus shale, the Morgantown City Council adopted a comprehensive resolution calling for the Legislature to adopt stricter standards and "emergency measures" to prevent water contamination resulting from that activity. The resolution also asks for the Legislature "to petition Congressional leaders to amend the (2004) federal Safe Drinking Water Act" which "exempts hazardous chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing--even diesel fuel--from limitation."

...The three page resolution addressed the hazards of the 300-odd chemical compounds used in the fracturing process developed by the Halliburton Corporation in which a pressurized brine solution is injected along with one to six million gallons of water for each well to explain their heightened response for safety....

WVEC Green Legislative Update tracks West Virginia state legislation on environmental and energy issues.

Whose Back Yard Should Have It?

Dave Bonta, of Via Negativa has posted an open letter to President Obama from nature writer Chris Bolgiano concerning wind power in Appalachia. Dave has asked readers to pass along the link, (which I just did). Like many people around here, Chris and Dave are concerned about habitat destruction and loss of rare species, and they point out, correctly, that wind turbines and their access roads have negative environmental impact.

Here in West Virginia, we get a good close look at surface coal mines (Imagine calling something "mountain top removal" to improve public relations.), natural gas drilling, and under-inspected fly ash containment ponds, as well as the sort of rural poverty that causes communities to welcome these things for the jobs and money they bring in. I keep files of news clippings on these subjects, but I usually get too depressed by the issues to post them. There's no energy without cost, and weighing those costs is a series of grim tradeoffs.

Chris makes a case for community-scale, rather than industrial-scale, wind power, and I can agree wholeheartedly there. I hope someday to afford my own small windmill, along with some solar panels for our ridge top home. I'm sure most of my neighbors would desire these things too if they were not so pricey. Who wouldn't want to save on electric bills? She's also spot-on concerning the marginal nature of wind power on Appalachia's high ridges--it wouldn't be profitable to build unsubsidized wind farms here.

Still, most natural resource extraction is government subsidized in some way. Chris observes Industrial wind power has a place, and T. Boone Pickens knows exactly where that is: On the plains, where winds are incessant. Other potentially low impact sites are mid-western crop fields, eastern strip mines, and off-shore waters, much closer to the coastal cities that need the power. Unfortunately, the people that live in those places don't find the wind farms "low impact." (Except perhaps on those strip mines where everyone has moved away because there is no more safe drinking water.)

I would like to pass along this Associated Press article from last summer (August 16, 2008) by Helen O'Neill: Windmills split town and families. She describes the coming of wind turbines to New York's Tug Hill Plateau, west of the Adirondacks, far west of the Appalachians, and includes quotes from people who are glad for the windmills and the money they've brought in, as well as people who are heartbroken about what has happened to their homes.

...[F]or all the benefits of clean, renewable energy, the windmills come with a price--and not just the visual impact.

"Is it worth destroying families, pitting neighbor against neighbor, father against son?" asks John Yancey, whose family have farmed Tug Hill for generations. "Is it worth destroying a whole way of life?"

Similar questions are being asked across the state and the country as more and more small towns grapple with big money and big wind....The Maple Ridge project produces enough electricity to power about 100,000 homes. Other wind projects are going up all over the state. Pickens is talking about building a $10 billion wind project -- the world's largest -- in the Texas panhandle. Everyone, it seems, is talking about wind.

Yancey understands its seduction. An electrician, he knows as much about the turbines as anyone. He helped build and install the ones on Tug Hill. He can rattle off statistics about the bus-sized nacelle at the top of the tower which houses the generator and the sophisticated computer system that allows the blades to yaw into the wind. He talks about the 1.65 mw Vestas with authority and respect.

Turbines have their place, Yancey says, just not where people live.

Here are some more links from my e-scrapbook on wind power.

• Coal River Wind hopes to trade a wind farm along Coal River Mountain for "mountain top removal" by Massey Energy. It's not to late to sign the petition, so click on over.
• U.S. becomes top wind producer, solar next February 2, 2009--Reuters, via Scientific American. It seems we're Number One already.
• Greenbrier County's Windmill War (2006). Greenbrier County's projected wind farm has, since this article, moved a little closer to reality, but is still not a done deal.
• Windmills and Mountaintop Removal: (from West Virginia Highlands Voice, November 10, 2006) Instead of debating the false choice of coal versus wind energy, we would all be better off spending our energy forcing the coal and wind industries to bear all the costs of their operations, including the costs to society. It would be more productive--and more fun--then sniping at each other.
• Citizens for Responsible Wind Power Their mission statement: The mission of Citizens for Responsible Wind Power is to ensure that industrial wind power complexes do not adversely affect citizens, local communities, and the public. This includes adverse effects or impacts on the local economy, cultural resources, scenic viewsheds, wildlife habitat, public lands, and sensitive natural environments that may result from siting, construction, and operation of such facilities.
• Wind Farm No Threat to Cape Cod, Report Says--Project Is Deemed Safe for Environment by Derek Kravitz, Washington Post, January 17, 2009. Many people from Martha's Vineyard oppose this offshore wind project, and, despite the Interior Department's approval, it may not go through. (I find the farmers of Tug Hill plateau a lot more sympathetic than the folks on Martha's Vineyard, but perhaps that's just some reverse class-ism on my part. Of course, the Kennedys use more electricity than the Tug Hill Amish farmers....)

Seed Catalog Fantasies

As the weather gets really really cold, I'm daydreaming about starting this year's garden. The Internet makes this a particularly hazardous exercise, because I am not limited by the garden catalogs which come in the mail. I can covet plants from all over the world. Seed Savers Exchange is a particular favorite for these fantasies.

An old-time variety potato sampler--20 pounds representing eight varieties for $67.50. Ah, if only the weather and the tater bugs were not such unforgiving variables!

Butterfly weed--I really love milkweeds, but with house building, the "landscaping" is not ready for store bought perennials.

Prickly Caterpillars--I'd love to grow these, but I'm not sure what they're for. Seed Savers says "Low-growing plants make a nice ground cover and are sure to be the best conversation piece in your garden. In days past, caterpillars were added to salads to surprise unexpected diners, but not meant to be eaten, mostly because they are so hairy. Try growing in containers, if space is tight. Great historic novelty that should be grown in every garden."

If We Were a Nation of Botanists...

I read this essay last month: When Writing About John Muir, I Had to See What He Saw by Donald Worster, December 1, 2008, History News Network. Worster's book, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir, looks very interesting, but I was particularly struck by this historian's new interest in "nature" (he seems to mean "biological nature," with less excitement about chemistry and physics). I liked this observation:

Writing Muir's biography has given me more insight into this extraordinary man and his times. But getting away from my keyboard and file folders in order to see the places that he explored has been eye opening and soul fulfilling. I have learned more about botany, his favorite subject. Like him, I have fallen in love with trees, tree ferns, grasses, wildflowers, sedges, brambles, cacti--all those plants that turn solar radiation into the food that keeps us and a few million other species alive, through cold and heat, rain and drought. If we were a nation of botanists, all of us in love with plants as Muir was, we would be better environmental citizens. More knowledgeable and caring about the green world, we could survive almost anything.

A nation of botanists--it would certainly be Utopia!

Rock Flipping Report 2008

Earlier this year, we dug a big hole in the ground, breaking through and turning over a layer of shale sandwiched between layers of clay. . Here are some fragments of that rock layer, hidden until recently. It won't be long before we cover them up again, but we'll never get them back the way they were.

In observance of International Rock Flipping Day, here's a list of links to rock flippers from around the world. There are all sorts of rocks, and all sorts of rock-flippers. I haven't read them all--yet!

Anticipatory posts (a selection)

Marcia Bonta — Rock-Flipping (summary of IRFD 2007)
fish without faces — the tanager and the scorpion (poem)
Fragments from Floyd — Today is Rock Flipping Day: Get Out There!
Going Like Sixty — International Rock Flipping Day: the First Sunday in September

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Rock-Flipping Day Reports

Pohanginapete (Pohangina Valley, Aotearoa/New Zealand)
Blaugustine (London, England)
Nature Remains (Ohio, USA)
Pensacola Daily Photo (Florida, USA)
KatDoc’s World (Ohio, USA)
Notes from the Cloud Messenger (Ontario, Canada)
Brittle Road (Dallas, Texas)
Sherry Chandler (Kentucky, USA)
osage + orange (Illinois, USA)
Rock Paper Lizard (British Columbia, Canada)
The Crafty H (Virginia, USA)
Chicken Spaghetti (Connecticut, USA)
A Passion for Nature (New York, USA)
The Dog Geek (Virginia, USA)
Blue Ridge blog (North Carolina, USA)
Bug Girl’s Blog (Michigan, USA)
chatoyance (Austin, Texas)
Riverside Rambles (Missouri, USA)
Pines Above Snow(Maryland, USA)
Beth’s stories (Maine, USA)
A Honey of an Anklet (Virginia, USA)
Wanderin’ Weeta (British Columbia, Canada)
Fate, Felicity, or Fluke (Oregon, USA)
The Northwest Nature Nut (Oregon, USA)
Roundrock Journal (Missouri, USA)
The New Dharma Bums (California, USA)
The Marvelous in Nature (Ontario, Canada)
Via Negativa (Pennsylvania, USA)
Mrs. Gray’s class, Beatty-Warren Middle School (Pennsylvania, USA)
Cicero Sings (British Columbia, Canada)
Let’s Paint Nature (Illinois, USA)

Sleeping in the Heartland (Midwestern U.S.)

* * *

Photos

IRFD group on Flickr
IRFD gallery on Via Negativa

An Act of Agriculture

Here's another event that demonstrates there are no easy solutions to environmental problems. The American demand for corn for ethanol has driven up the price of corn, which would have been good news for me if I had stayed on the farm. However, the rising price food is bad news for everyone living close to the edge. Those same potential ethanol profits have also encouraged landscape changes that make my home state, Iowa, less resilient in rough weather conditions. The Washington Post ran an article yesterday on unintended consequences: Iowa Flooding Could Be An Act of Man, Experts Say by Joel Achenbach, Thursday, June 19, 2008.

As the Cedar River rose higher and higher, and as he stacked sandbags along the levee protecting downtown Cedar Falls, Kamyar Enshayan, a college professor and City Council member, kept asking himself the same question: "What is going on?"

....Enshayan, director of an environmental center at the University of Northern Iowa, suspects that this natural disaster wasn't really all that natural. He points out that the heavy rains fell on a landscape radically reengineered by humans. Plowed fields have replaced tallgrass prairies. Fields have been meticulously drained with underground pipes. Streams and creeks have been straightened. Most of the wetlands are gone. Flood plains have been filled and developed.

....But some Iowans who study the environment suspect that changes in the land, both recently and over the past century or so, have made Iowa's terrain not only highly profitable but also highly vulnerable to flooding. They know it's a hard case to prove, but they hope to get Iowans thinking about how to reduce the chances of a repeat calamity....

"I sense that the flooding is not the result of a 500-year event," said Jerry DeWitt, director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University. "We're farming closer to creeks, farming closer to rivers. Without adequate buffer strips, the water moves rapidly from the field directly to the surface water."

Jerry DeWitt was a young professor at ISU, and led entomology field trips when I went to 4H Conservation Camp in 1971. I was so thrilled that an actual entomologist would talk to me! It was probably a career-defining moment for me. I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing anymore.

The Rural South--Epidemiological Reality

Recently, our local TV news has been reporting a new study indicating that life expectancies for rural Appalachian women have decreased in the last twenty years. They have accompanied this with the usual admonitions to eat healthful foods, exercise, and quit smoking. I was interested to read this newspaper story, Southwest Va.'s Mortality Mystery--More Than Diet Behind Women's Sharp Life Expectancy Drop by Theresa Vargas,Washington Post, April 26, 2008, and to follow its link to the original story, Eight Americas: Investigating Mortality Disparities across Races, Counties, and Race-Counties in the United States.

The Washington Post article features a discussion of the usual "lifestyle-related" mortality risks but also notes:

Residents will tell you little distinguishes the city of Radford and neighboring Pulaski County from elsewhere in rural America. That is what troubles health-care workers here most about a new study that found a sharp drop in life expectancy for women in the two communities.

According to the study, life expectancy for women dropped in nearly 1,000 counties but fell most in Radford and Pulaski. In 1983, life expectancy for women in the two jurisdictions was about 84 years. By 1999, it had dropped 5.8 years, to 78. No other jurisdiction in the nation had a decrease of more than 3.3 years.

This begins to get at what is surprising about the "Eight Americas" study. It looks at mortality data county by county over 20 years, for the entire United States, and identifies eight economic-geographic-racial clusterings. Since the article is in the open-source journal PLoS Medicine, you can look at a detailed data summary, the entire article, and all the figures and maps.

The eight Americas classification reveals that within the white population there is a wide variation in health experience that cannot be explained by differences in average income: low-income white rural populations in Minnesota, the Dakotas, Iowa, Montana, and Nebraska (America 2), with a life expectancy of 76.2 and 81.8 y for males and females, respectively, have a substantial advantage over the rest of white America, despite a large income disadvantage. Low-income whites in Appalachia and the Mississippi Valley (America 4), with an average income level similar to that of America 2, have a life expectancy equal to those of Mexico and Panama. The life expectancy gap between whites in America 2 and America 4 was 4.2 and 3.8 y in 2001 for males and females, respectively, comparable to the 6.4- and 4.6-y gaps between whites and blacks as a whole. The gap between whites in America 2 and America 4 has in fact increased since 1982, when it was 3.0 and 2.4 y for males and females respectively; between 1982 and 2001 life expectancy among females in America 4 declined from 78.2 y to 78.1 y.

Both white and black low-income rural Southern populations have a shorter life expectancy than their more affluent counterparts ("White Middle America" and "Black Middle America") in other areas of the US, but there is one white, rural, low-income population that has a longer life expectancy than "White Middle America." Low income, chemical exposure, and inconvenient access to health care are not the only reasons America 4 fares worse than America 2. To my mind, the study identifies rural white Southerners and rural black Southerners, as epidemiologically distinct groups, separate and unequal from their counterparts in other parts of the United States. Where Lillian Smith and W.J. Cash critiqued Southern cultural identity, this study identifies a biological definition for the region distinct from income and population density.

The traditional emphasis of the US health system has been on children and the elderly, as, for example, illustrated by the low levels of resources devoted to injury prevention and tobacco control compared with immunization. This emphasis may have partly contributed to substantially lower disparities in these age groups relative to young and middle-aged adults. On the other hand, the emphasis on children and the elderly has treated many of the diseases that are important contributors to young and middle-aged adult health disparities, and their risk factors, as either the responsibilities of individuals (alcohol, tobacco, obesity, and dietary determinants of blood pressure and cholesterol, like salt) or in the domain of clinical care (blood pressure and cholesterol)....It is when the public, community and professional groups, media, and politicians focus attention on what is being achieved, and why efforts are working in some places and not others, that the culture of accountability for health outcomes will be strengthened.

The study is an interesting data-mining exercise, intended to point the way to more intensive public health research. I grew up in a county included in "America 2," and now I live in a different rural area in "America 4." I had always thought, terrain aside, that southwestern Iowa was surprisingly similar to Pocahontas County. Now I'm wondering whether I shouldn't be trying to identify the differences.

In case you're interested, here's the abstract for the article:

Eight Americas: Investigating Mortality Disparities across Races, Counties, and Race-Counties in the United States Murray CJL, Kulkarni SC, Michaud C, Tomijima N, Bulzacchelli MT, et al. PLoS Medicine Vol. 3, No. 9, e260 doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0030260

Background

The gap between the highest and lowest life expectancies for race-county combinations in the United States is over 35 y. We divided the race-county combinations of the US population into eight distinct groups, referred to as the "eight Americas," to explore the causes of the disparities that can inform specific public health intervention policies and programs.

Methods and Findings

The eight Americas were defined based on race, location of the county of residence, population density, race-specific county-level per capita income, and cumulative homicide rate. Data sources for population and mortality figures were the Bureau of the Census and the National Center for Health Statistics. We estimated life expectancy, the risk of mortality from specific diseases, health insurance, and health-care utilization for the eight Americas. The life expectancy gap between the 3.4 million high-risk urban black males and the 5.6 million Asian females was 20.7 y in 2001. Within the sexes, the life expectancy gap between the best-off and the worst-off groups was 15.4 y for males (Asians versus high-risk urban blacks) and 12.8 y for females (Asians versus low-income southern rural blacks). Mortality disparities among the eight Americas were largest for young (15-44 y) and middle-aged (45-59 y) adults, especially for men. The disparities were caused primarily by a number of chronic diseases and injuries with well-established risk factors. Between 1982 and 2001, the ordering of life expectancy among the eight Americas and the absolute difference between the advantaged and disadvantaged groups remained largely unchanged. Self-reported health plan coverage was lowest for western Native Americans and low-income southern rural blacks. Crude self-reported health-care utilization, however, was slightly higher for the more disadvantaged populations.

Conclusions

Disparities in mortality across the eight Americas, each consisting of millions or tens of millions of Americans, are enormous by all international standards. The observed disparities in life expectancy cannot be explained by race, income, or basic health-care access and utilization alone. Because policies aimed at reducing fundamental socioeconomic inequalities are currently practically absent in the US, health disparities will have to be at least partly addressed through public health strategies that reduce risk factors for chronic diseases and injuries.

Sympathy For the Urban Trees

Earth Day spawned a host of articles on "environmental issues." I'm still sifting through my RSS feed results from that day, which is how I came upon The Greening of America--Ambitious Tree-Planting Programs Are Sprouting Up Nationwide by William Booth, Washington Post, Friday, April 25, 2008. It's not easy making those small changes:

Urban tree farming can be a time-consuming, expensive and exasperating experience -- like children, trees require years of maintenance. Businesses complain about the cost, neighbors about the sap. Their roots are murder on sidewalks; their limbs tangle with power lines.

"The city sidewalk can be one of the most hostile environments for a young tree," a cramped cell of garbage soil surrounded by smothering asphalt, says Gregory McPherson, a scientist with the federal Center for Urban Forest Research. "A virtual conflict zone," as one arborist put it, beset by disease, pollution, drought, insects -- not to mention drunk drivers and staple guns and trip-and-fall lawsuits. "It's a tough life," sighs Marcia Bansley, executive director of Trees Atlanta. It's hard out there for a poplar....

Nationwide, three dozen cities have lost a quarter of their tree canopy since 1972, according to the group American Forests, which discovered that America is missing 600 million trees, as our major metropolitan areas fade from green to gray. But here's the problem: The increased density of American cities means there is less room for trees to replace the missing. The same is true in the suburbs: All those new mini-mansions built to the edge of the property line don't have big yards.

When Los Angeles launched its "Million Trees LA" project, it was assumed there would be plenty of room, but as it turns out, "the space is actually quite tight," says McPherson, the scientist with the Forest Service who surveyed the city's bio-inventory with the help of aerial reconnaissance and computer algorithms. McPherson found just 1.3 million spots to "realistically" plant in Los Angeles, most in the yards of private homes....

Treewise, "Washington is in pretty good shape," says Mark Buscaino, executive director of Casey Trees, a community group that helped plant 1,500 trees in the city last year. Canopy cover in Washington is a nice, leafy, green 35 percent, he says, and per capita the city spends more than New York or Los Angeles on its forest, which includes about 120,000 street trees....

But everybody likes trees, right? Apparently, no. According to the community tree planters toiling on the streets, businesses don't like trees (when foliage blocks signage). Bureaucrats don't like trees (because they're a hassle). And despite what they say now, politicians have not been tree huggers. The first item cut in any tight budget year is usually tree maintenance. "When you say, 'What's the cost of a tree?' it is more than buying a tree and putting it in the ground. It's also taking care of it," says Ray Tretheway, executive director of the Sacramento Tree Foundation, who explains it takes two or three years for a tree to establish a home....

Especially, when cities give away small, vulnerable six-inch seedlings in bags or tubes -- the kind of tree offered today, on Arbor Day, around the country. Many arborists now urge cities not to distribute free seedlings for fear the green swag just ends up in the trash. Los Angeles recently stopped the practice.

Planting street trees often requires both a city permit and the permission of neighbors, who give many reasons for not wanting a tree at the curb. They don't like dogs, who do like trees. Tree activists have heard people complain about sap, birds, squirrels, spiders, leaves and shade. Oh, and they don't want their views blocked.

Burry explains that neighborhoods with the fewest trees are the toughest places to plant. "These are often the harshest environments, communities on the bad side of environmental justice issues -- lots of renters, working class, two-job individuals. For us it is much more costly." Burry says it takes intense community outreach -- many meetings, much door knocking, to get neighbors to agree to plant and care for new trees. Then: "Sometimes there has been no organic life on the street in 20 years. The soil is extremely dry, nutrient-poor, compacted. We have to pour gallons and gallons of water and just let it sit, and still sometimes you dig and it's like concrete. This loud clang." Other challenges? "They don't have water hoses," Burry says....

Cranky Environmentalists

I have mixed feelings when I read snide articles like Greed In the Name Of Green--To Worshipers of Consumption: Spending Won't Save the Earth by Monica Hesse, Washington Post, March 5, 2008. On the one hand, she is pointing out a real contradiction in pro-environmental advertising. It would be less wasteful of resources if we all bought less stuff, but the whole point of advertising, and of offering things for sale in general, is to sell more stuff. Hesse, like most critics of the "environmentally correct" movement, seems to say there's little point in becoming more mindful of waste, excess, and poor practices.

But, but, but--buying green feels so guilt-less, akin to the mentality that results in eating 14 of Whole Foods' two-bite cupcakes. Their first ingredient is cane sugar, but in a land of high-fructose panic, that's practically a health food, right? Have another.

"There's a certain thrill, that you get to go out and replace everything," says Leslie Garrett, author of "The Virtuous Consumer," a green shopping guide. "New bamboo T-shirts, new hemp curtains."

....Chip Giller, editor of enviro-blog Grist.org, has a less fatalistic view. He loves that Wal-Mart has developed an organic line. He applauds the efforts of the green consumer. "Two years ago, who would have thought we'd be in a place where terms like locavore and carbon footprint were household terms?" he says, viewing green consumption as a "gateway" to get more people involved in environmental issues. The important thing is for people to keep walking through the gate, toward the land of reduced air travel, energy-efficient homes and much less stuff: "We're not going to buy our way out of this."

This article was accompanied by an on-line discussion with one of the quoted authors:

Leslie Garrett...was online Wednesday, March 5, at 1 p..m. ET....Hello! Leslie Garrett here, author of The Virtuous Consumer: Your Essential Shopping Guide for a Better, Kinder, Healthier World (and one our kids will thank us for!). World's longest title, I know...Happy to answer questions!

Much of that discussion involves weighing which practices are more "virtuous," and how other people perceive one's behavior. This always makes me uncomfortable. "Paper or plastic?" is more effectively decided as a practical rather than a moral choice. (Around here, it's not a choice. Just try and find a brown paper bag to make school book covers in Pocahontas County!) Developing a new reason to look down on other people and feel self-satisfied seems counterproductive, too, but judging your neighbor based on carbon footprints and recycling efforts seems inevitable in these discussions.

This is the tone that deters me from following blogs and news websites about "green living," voluntary simplicity, and frugal practices. I'm interested in these topics, and would no doubt benefit from other people's insights, but the carping and cavilling eventually leads me to hit the "unsubscribe" button. Perhaps it's inevitable that giving up consumerist practices and possessions just makes us a bit cranky.

Instant Gardening Gratification

The broccoli seeds I planted Tuesday had already sprouted yesterday morning. I used to get very frustrated by the process of starting seeds indoors. Most of the houses I've lived in have been cold and drafty in winter, and I've been more likely to see mold growing on top of the soil than the desired seedlings.

All that changed when we got a big dehydrator for our shitake mushrooms. I set the dehydrator for 85 degrees (F) and within 48 hours the cabbage and broccoli germinate. The tomatoes generally take a day or two longer.

This morning I found a few tiny sprouts there too. I've moved the cole crops to a window sill. The tomatoes will probably benefit from another warm day in the dehydrator, but they'll have to come out of the dark by tomorrow, too. In previous years, I've kept the seedlings in the dehydrator with a grow-light, but the extra heat doesn't seem to speed their growth, just their germination.

Aren't the root hairs wonderful?

Remembering Cabbages Past

The warm weather and the school vacation have given me the chance I needed to start seeds for our garden. Last year, I ordered heirloom garden varieties from Seed Savers Exchange. I like to save my own garden seeds from year to year, and I looked forward to sampling some of the interesting vegetables I saw on their beautifully-illustrated Web site.

Unfortunately, a cold wet spring gave way to a hot, dry summer last year. It's a good thing we don't depend on what we grow as our sole food supply, or we would have starved out. I grew enough beans to save as seed, but the broccoli bolted, the cabbage was puny and so bitter we couldn't eat it, and the tomatoes did truly bizarre things.

Hope once again triumphs over experience, and this year, I ordered more Seed Savers' seeds. I started these handsome cole crops:

Calabrese Broccoli. Brought to America by Italian immigrants in the 1880s. Popular market variety. Tight heads can grow up to 8" in diameter. After the central head is harvested, side shoots follow. 58-90 days from transplant.

I grew this broccoli last year, and it was quite good, although most of the plants dried up and didn't make heads. Between the Tarnished Plant Bugs, cabbage butterflies, and Harlequin Bugs, there wasn't all that much left for us.

Year after year, I've bought cabbage plants at the local stores. Sometimes the cabbage turns out to be brussel sprouts, sometimes it's just some odd-ball variety I wasn't looking for. The last few years, I haven't even been able to find cabbage seed for the varieties that do well for us. That's why I have high hopes for these lovely plants:

Mammoth Red Rock Cabbage. Introduced in 1889. Solid round heads are 8" in diameter and weigh 7 pounds. Red throughout, vigorous and uniform, small to medium core, sure cropper, fine flavor. Excellent for cooking, salads and pickling. 98 days from transplant.