5) BIO-DIGESTION TOILETS – Indigene Community

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Oak trees “produce huge, abundant amounts one year and not in other years,” Dr. Ashton said. “I don’t think it’s bad — the whole system fluctuates like this.”One theory for why oak trees vary their acorn yield is the so-called predator satiation hypothesis. Under this theory, during bumper years, the trees litter the forest floor with seeds so completely that squirrels, jays, deer and bears cannot possibly eat them all. Then, in off years, the trees ramp down production to keep the predator populations from growing too large to be satiated.But the variability of weather in New York and New England could also be playing a role in the shortage this year.“A lot of it has to do with the initial spring,” Dr. Ashton said. Acorn production is high when “everything converges on a perfect spring.”It takes a red oak 18 months to grow an acorn. The tree is pollinated in the spring of one year, and its acorns drop in the fall of the next year. The rainy spring of 2010 could have dampened the wind-driven transfer of pollen from one tree to another, resulting in the acorn dearth this year.While acorn fluctuation is normal, what is unusual this year is the abundance followed by the steep drop. “In a sense, it’s just another trough,” Dr. Ostfeld said. “But this is the most extreme pair of years that we’ve seen.”Dr. Ostfeld describes acorns as an engine that drives the forest ecosystem. “When that engine is cooking along,” he said, “you get these heavy knock-on effects.”The population of field mice, for instance, exploded this summer. While that was good for the mice, it was bad news for ground-nesting birds like the wood thrush, whose nests are susceptible to rodent predation. In addition, the large numbers of mice caused an increase in the tick population.On the other hand, Dr. Ostfeld said, “when you get a failure of the engine, things just change radically.”Now the field mouse population is expected to crash — about 90 percent have died off in similar glut-dearth acorn sequences in the past. And the outlook is not good for the ground-nesting birds, which face an increased threat from hawks and owls.“The adult wood thrush will take it on the beak by the one-two punch,” Dr. Ostfeld said.

Boom and Bust in Acorns Will Affect Many Creatures, Including Humans – NYTimes.com

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Jerry Jenkins, who is the author of the book “Climate Change in the Adirondacks: The Path to Sustainability,” spends much of his time on the water and in the woods, documenting the ecosystem with a notebook and a camera. He thus brings an unusual perspective to the scene. Where a casual observer might behold diversity and continuity, he projects decades into the future and finds absence and loss.“Nothing we see here is found at temperatures 10 degrees warmer, and very little makes it to five degrees warmer,” Mr. Jenkins said matter-of-factly on a mild fall day. “We will be in a climate that this community has never known in its history. One has to go back to world climate levels we haven’t seen in 15 million years.”…

“Maybe it’s a baseline measurement, or maybe it’s an elegy,” Mr. Jenkins, 68, said of his photographic record of alpine flowers and mighty pines. “We may be the last generation to see the big bogs and the boreal creatures.”

A major study of the impact of climate change on New York State drew similar conclusions. In a 600-page report published last month, scientists from Cornell and Columbia Universities, as well as the City University of New York, said that temperatures would rise as much as nine degrees by the 2080s. They also projected the decline and eventual loss of spruce-fir forests and alpine tundra in the Adirondacks.

Mr. Jenkins has yet to detect signs of stress in trees and plants, which respond slowly to alterations in temperature. Northern mammals like moose and pine martens are holding steady, though they, too, are sure to suffer. “They are both at their thermal limits here,” he said.

Yet there is ample evidence elsewhere that the region is already reacting to a warmer climate. “For the hunters, farmers, hikers and birders, the change in the climate, especially in the past 10 to 15 years, is just too great to write off,” he said.

Hard frosts that a generation ago came in mid-September now arrive in October. Lake Champlain, a huge freshwater body that divides New York and Vermont, once froze over completely every winter, but now remains open in the middle some years.

Ornithologists have recorded recent declines in northern bird species like the black-backed woodpecker, olive-sided flycatcher and rusty blackbird. Loggers have told Mr. Jenkins that their winter operating season — the period when they haul timber over frozen earth — has been shortened by almost six weeks.

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Recent moves by national and local policy makers have sought to encourage individuals to engage in a wide range of pro-environmental practices to address both discrete environmental problems and major, global challenges such as climate change. The major framing device for these developments is the notion of ‘citizen–consumers’, which positions individual ecological responsibilities alongside consumer choice logics in a Neo-liberal socio-economic framework. In the environmental social sciences, there have been recent moves to interpret the citizen–consumer through adopting a social practices approach, which advances the notion that in understanding environmental commitments, a deeper appreciation of underlying norms, values, identity politics and consumption is required to uncover the complex processes that lead to environmental practices in specific contexts. This paper argues that whilst these approaches have considerable utility in tracing the normalisation of established and discrete environmental practices in particular contexts, the issue of climate change represents an independent and over-arching discursive conflict between new and embedded practices that challenges the ability of citizen–consumers to act as agents for change. Accordingly, the data presented in this paper suggest that climate change can be seen as an unsettling and dynamic issue that generates discursive conflict in its own right around fundamental issues of knowledge, responsibility, scale and place. The paper therefore argues that a new and more critical perspective is required within environmental social science to understand (conflicting) discourses of sustainable living between the ‘passive’ normalisation of conventional environmental practice and the ‘contested’ ambiguities of climate change.

doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2011.07.009

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A new prototype petri dish can create an image of what’s growing on it and send that information to a laptop, all from inside an incubator. The prototype, dubbed the ePetri, was created from Lego blocks and a cell-phone image sensor, and uses light from a Google Android smart phone.

doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1110681108

          Ed. Note: I would sure like to culture my own cold and flue bacteria to see what the heck ails me every Fall. Imagine the wealth of data that could be gathered by sniffling citizen scientists!

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Natural Gas Subcommittee of the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board

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