Happy Arbor Day!

In the last blog post I indicated how depressing it can be to think about the negative impacts of humans on the planet. For anyone that cares about the environment, a cleaner planet, human survival, etc., it can be hard to see that the proverbial glass is half full rather than half empty. Indeed, there are times when I can be drawn into a nihilistic conversations, leading to the thought that we might as well enjoy our exploitation of the earth all we can since our species is doomed at some point anyhow.  Yuck! Now that is depressing. So I try not to go there. Or at least try not to stay there. Instead I try to remind myself of the many successes we’ve had in the environmental movement and to look for positive trends and indicators.

 

The polluted Cuyahoga River 1970

One of the primary reasons I have hope is that a LOT has happened since the first Earth Day was held just 43 years ago. At that time, the amount of pollution, toxic waste, trash-lined-roads, smog, and other degradation was incredible. The Cuyahoga River near Cleveland Ohio was so polluted with oily chemicals that it caught on fire. Something obviously had to be done. Many of the common goals of early environmentalism such as reducing pollution, cleaning up rivers, preserving natural areas, saving threatened species, etc. were embraced not just by the “hippies” and “tree huggers” but by many throughout mainstream America. Today, except for a few on the right-wing fringe, they have since become almost universally accepted as important human endeavors. Here are a few other examples that give me hope:

 

·         The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created in 1970 by a Republican President (Nixon)! Perhaps no other governmental action has done more for the environment.

·         Several efforts like the Endangered Species Act of 1973, have helped shine the light on endangered plants and animals. Major successes in preservation have included the American bison, gray wolf, grizzly bear, bald eagle, and brown pelican to name a few.

·         The world came together to address ozone depletion and to ban chlorofluorocarbons.

·         The Clean Water Act (1972) and Clean Air Act (1963) have made our air and waters safer and cleaner.

·         The Superfund program has helped clean up hundreds of toxic waste sites across the country.

·         More than 100,000 areas representing nearly 12% of the earth’s land mass have been protected as parks and preserves across the globe.

·         Many of the worst chemical pesticides, including DDT, have been banned or significantly restricted. The EPA now makes it much harder for new chemical poisons to be approved for use.

·         Recycling is now ubiquitous in most modern societies across the globe. The amount of materials recycled every year continues to grow dramatically, reducing landfill trash.

·         The output of clean and renewable energy is increasing rapidly and has reached nearly 12% of total US production and is growing even more rapidly in Europe and Asia. A foreseeable future without reliance on fossil fuels is almost guaranteed.

·         Societal awareness of the need for healthy eating and other factors have led to the local food movement including community gardens, community supported agriculture and a return to more backyard vegetable growing.

·         The general advancement of science and our improved understanding of how the natural world and ecological processes work.

·         The establishment of many environmental organizations across the globe including Nature Conservancy, National Audubon Society, Keep America Beautiful, Sierra Club, World Wildlife Fund, The Xerces Society. Perhaps even more importantly are the many thousands that exist on the local level.

·         Others: reduced acid rain, the banning of asbestos, emission limits on mercury, banning of leaded gasoline, fuel economy standards, etc.

 
As I prepared to write this blog, I quizzed a few of my friends and cohorts about this subject. I’m happy to report that everyone I talked to is also able to retain a hopeful view of the future. Although many of us preach to or a part of the environmental “choir”, we all sense that nearly everyone we interact with wants a better future for the environment and our planet. It starts with awareness, and at least that part seems to be on the right track. So, yes, we’re hopeful. What other choice do we have?
 
I had intended to offer some simple suggestions that nearly anyone can adopt to help the environment. However, I’ve ran on too long with this diatribe so the big list will have to wait. But on this day that we celebrate Arbor Day in Nebraska I can offer a very simple suggestion that many people can do to help the environment: plant a tree.

Happy Arbor Day!

 

Waverly Arbor Day 2012

 

 

Earth Day 2013: Is There Hope?

As we celebrate Earth Day 2013, it’s difficult not to be a bit depressed about the impact of our species on the planet:

 

·         The loss of biodiversity across much of the planet continues to advance and species extinction rates are growing rapidly. Some scientists warn that we are now at the beginning of one of the most severe mass extinction events since the dinosaurs died out.

·         As our cities grow, they gobble up vitally important natural areas and agricultural land.

·         The honeybee is struggling across the globe and monarch butterfly numbers have dropped precipitously in the last year.

·         Many of our most important native pollinators are threatened with lost habitat.

·         Amphibians (especially frogs) are declining rapidly with many heading toward extinction.

·         Non-native invasive species of plants and animals threaten all parts of the globe.

·         The world’s oceans are in great trouble with a collapse of species diversity and abundance. Important and fragile coral reefs are disappearing rapidly.

·         More of our rivers and streams are becoming polluted and degraded.

·         Safe and clean drinking water is becoming scarcer.

·         Our reliance on fossil fuels causes a myriad of problems, including worldwide pollution and regular scarring of the landscape (and oceans).

·         Our transportation infrastructure greatly fragments the land.

·         In our part of the world, the prairie ecosystem has been significantly altered (the tallgrass prairie is mostly gone) and many creatures that evolved along with it are imperiled. And to top it off, high corn prices mean even greater pressure to remove trees and convert grassland and other wild habitat to a few more acres of production.

·         The few wild areas we do have are greatly fragmented making it difficult for many important wildlife species to move and adapt to a changing environment.

 

Many other problems could be added to the list. Perhaps most importantly now is the impact of a warming planet and a rapidly changing climate. Although no one knows exactly what that will mean for natural ecosystems, few experts believe there will be many positive outcomes. In simplest terms, human activity is now mostly in the way of the natural processes that favor biodiversity and ecological health. With a global population of 7 billion heading toward 10 billion in a few decades, the pressures on Mother Earth will certainly mount.

Regal Fritillary - A prairie butterfly that could use our help.

 

As discouraging as it all sounds, this article is not meant to be a wallow in gloom and doom but rather to suggest there is hope. Though it’s true that humans do cause environmental harm, we must first accept that humans are part of the environment just like every other creature. In that regard, all living organisms impact the natural world in some form or another as they go about their quests for survival. Above all other species, humans have figured out how to exploit the environment in ways that have allowed us dominate the globe. To the victors go the spoils so to speak.

 

However, since we are the most sentient of beings, we have evolved the unique ability to understand that our impact on the planet not only imperils ecosystems, it imperils our own long-term survival as well. We now clearly realize (though maybe not some on the far right of the political spectrum) that our survival depends on the broader ecological health of the Earth. We are an incredible animal with an amazing ability for creative problem solving. And I choose to believe that our species can solve many of our biggest environmental problems. Indeed we have to!  In the next blog post I’ll offer some evidence as to why I have hope and I’ll also suggest some simple ways that we all can help the environment right where we live.

 

Justin Evertson

Green Infrastructure Coordinator

 

Historical Drought - Yikes!

The official first day of spring arrived several days ago, but only now does it seem that the grip of winter is softening. Temperatures have reached into the 60s, some early bulbs are coming up and the birds are really starting to sing.  Normally I would be giddy with excitement about putting winter in the rear view, but not this year. Indeed, this is the first year in many that I might prefer we skip spring and summer altogether. Last year's drought is still too heavy on my mind. I worry that we have not yet recharged our soil moisture, and if we have a repeat of last year, we will dry up and blow away!

Hopefully my fear is misplaced, but if we actually take a much closer look at historic droughts on the Great Plains, we'll see that our recent droughts (including the last few years and the Dust Bowl years) pale in comparison to some droughts that lasted for decades in centuries past. Check out this fascinating study from the Kansas Geological Survey: This report investigates past drought occurrences from paleoclimate records over the last 1000 years. In particular, it focuses on Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) reconstructions calculated from annual tree-ring chronologies - including tree rings from Nebraska's Sandhills. 



Figure 4. Mapped spatial patterns of the 1930s and 1950s droughts using instrumental PDSI data. Figure modified

from Stahle et al. (2007).

Yikes! What a scary picture this study paints. It is very likely that we've been living in an unusually wet period over the last century and a half. Hmmm. Of course we can't predict the future but we can all bet our right arms that periodic drought will be a part of the climate here for a long-darn time to come. This reality should inform our decision making regarding trees and landscapes. I apologize for this scary and depressing blog post. The next one will be better!

Living Soils Sustain Landscapes

By Justin Evertson, Green Infrastructure Coordinator

“If you go down in the dirt today, you’d better not go alone!
For today’s the day the nematodes have their picnic!”
     Sung to the tune of “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic”



So opens the forward written by Dr. Elaine Ingham, Ph.D. for the book Teaming with Microbes: The Organic Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web authored by Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis.  Ingham goes on to say: “When you are bored looking at soil from urban lawns, making up words to popular songs is always good! Soil shouldn’t be so boring, but urban landscapes mean dead dirt. It means being bent over a microscope for long hours looking at … nothing but inert particles. Boring. And so, we make up words to songs. Real soil is active, alive, moving! Critters everywhere, doing interesting things! No hours staring through a microscope looking at micrometer after micrometer of boring -- nothing happening. Instead, after just a few seconds – movement, life, action”!

 
We are learning more all the time about the importance of biologically active soils to the health of natural ecosystems as well as the planted landscape. A healthy soil is teaming with an incredible array of interconnected life forms including bacteria, protozoa, fungi, nematodes and arthropods. More often than not it is also home to amphibians, reptiles (snakes!) and small mammals (mice, voles, etc.). And healthy soils contain abundant organic matter -- the waste, residue and metabolites from plants, animals and microbes.  We call such soils “healthy” because they better sustain the health of the world around us – not just the plants that grow from them, but also the animals that rely on those plants, including people. It’s simple: healthier soils means healthier people.  

Garden millipedes. Photo by UNL Dept. of Entomology.

Unfortunately, in our communities we have mostly practiced the art of soil sterilization as we have gone about our gardening and landscape activities in modern times. When humans figured out how to synthesize fertilizers and pesticides through modern chemistry, we thought (understandably) that we had found a shortcut around Mother Nature to help make our soils more productive and our landscapes easier to maintain (at least in the manicured vision we came to expect). Since then, biological and ecological research has revealed that we were wrong. When it comes to gardens and community landscapes, we must strive for biodiversity and we must start working in greater partnership with nature and natural processes. And this begins with our soils.

Modern lawn care reduces soil health. (image credit: lawncare.org)

This critique is not meant to say that all efforts with synthetic fertilizers or pesticides are bad. Indeed, it is unlikely that we could ever feed the 7 billion people of the world without modern chemistry’s assistance to agriculture and some forms of gardening. But within our communities, there really is no excuse for continuing the bad habits that have shortchanged our soil health. We can and we must do better. Thankfully, in our modern age good information is just a click away. Kendall Weyers recently wrote a great piece titled Soil… It’s Alive for the Nebraska Statewide Arboretum. Also, the Teaming with Microbes book quoted at the start of this discussion is highly recommended as an entertaining read about what soil is, why we should all care more about it, and how we can make it better in our own yards and gardens. And there are many others. Just Google “healthy soil”.  

Recycling organic matter is a key to healthy soil.



Tree Planting and Drought

The impact of drought on trees has been in the news quite a bit lately including this story from USA Today. Which begs the question: since we are in the midst of a severe drought and since there is no way to know how long this drought may last, should we be planting trees? That is a very fair question, especially if we think about the potential issue of water scarcity. If it came down to a choice between planting new trees or trying to keep alive the ones we already have, then I would choose the latter. But I don't think that is a fair assessment ofthe situation. My hunch is we can do both - and indeed we must  do both.


Dead Ginkgo in Waverly

Something that can help inform our decision making today regarding tree planting in drought is to look back at the 1930s, when some of the hottest and driest years on record were recorded for this part of the world. Just think about this: on July 25th 1936, Lincoln reached a high of 116 F and the overnight low was only 91F - yikes! Back then the fear of drought and a changing climate actually spurred huge efforts at tree planting across much of the central US. In fact the Prairie States Forestry Project led to the planting of more than 220 million trees in shelterbelts and other plantings across the region. People realized the great value trees provided in taking the edge off the often brutal Great Plains climate.

Although I have come to love the wide-open expanse of this part of the world and feel we should do much more to conserve our prairie heritage, I would not want to live in a community without trees. They are vital to making our communities more comfortable, livable and beautiful. So I say yes! Let's plant more trees, even during times of drought. Our community forests are ever-changing and dynamic and require our constant attention at planting and care. With a changing climate that will almost certainly include more droughts and likely higher overall temperatures, it should be obvious to all of us that we need to adopt the best practices possible when it comes to tree selection, planting and care. A few suggestions that I would offer to help our tree planting endeavors would include:

1. Emphasize the planting of species that have proven drought survivability including bur oak, gambel oak, hackberry, juniper, Ponderosa pine, Osage orange, green ash, walnut, elm, etc. (Note: yes I did intend to include green ash here. Although we don't recommend the species for wide-spread planting due to the threat from emerald ash borer, the advancement of the pest across the region is relatively slow and many green ash trees will likely be alive for decades to come - especially in the western half of Nebraska).

Walnut is drought tolerant

2. Plant high quality root systems. Roots should be fibrous and laterally spreading, not circling at the bottom of a container.
3. Plant smaller trees more often. There are several factors at play here, but in general smaller nursery trees with good root systems are easier to establish in the landscape and generally become drought tolerant more quickly than larger specimens. There is nothing wrong with planting seedlings or even seeds, as long as those small plants can be protected in the landscape.
4. Plant properly! The first trees to die in any drought are the ones whose health was compromised for some reason. Common compromisers to good health in landscape trees include problematic roots and trees planted too deep.
5. Group trees together and encourage a healthy rooting zone. Trees grouped relatively close together help protect each other from weather extremes. And if the space between trees is maintained as nutrient recycling system with appropriate groundcover plants or mulch (not intensively managed turfgrass) the soil and rooting zone will be much better at conserving moisture and much healthier for the tree.

Planting a seedling can be good strategy.

For those who like Facebook, ReTree Nebraska is a good place to go for good tree spirit: