Species & Biodiversity

"Sustainability." That word gets thrown around so much today. What does it really even mean? According to Wikipedia, sustainability is "1) The capacity to endure. 2) The ability of biological systems to remain diverse and productive over time. 3) The potential of long-term maintenance of [human] well-being in environmental, economic and social dimensions."

This month's CSA news from the Crop and Soil Science societies of America is entitled "Sustainability: Learning the lessons of past civilizations." There is a drawing of the iconic Easter island statues on the cover. Easter Island has become the poster child of unsustainable human activity - deforestation, soil degradation, over population. UCLA geography professor Jared Diamond has written a book called "Collapse: How Societies Fail or Succeed." At the 2010 tri-societies meeting in Long Beach, he used the Easter Islanders as an example of the kind of damage we are doing to our planet with massive deforestation, over population and un-sustainable agricultural practices. He issued the warning that once we destroy this planet, we will have no where else to go.

The Institute for Bird Populations (IBP) conducts avian monitoring and research throughout the western United States, Texas, the Midwestern states and eastern states, mainly on land under the stewardship of the US Forest Service, Department of Defense, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service and US Fish and Wildlife Service. IBP coordinates data collection from mist-netting stations that operated as part of its Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship (MAPS) program.

IBP is using Data Basin to publish spatially-explicit results of research into MAPS data for two regional studies.  This work is being carried out by two Data Basin groups:

This week, I’ve been looking into the sustainability of bioenergy. The cover story on my CSA News (crop, soils and agronomy magazine) is called “Sustainable Bioenergy: Fueling Biomass Plants without Degrading the Land.” Can we do that? We’re having enough difficulties growing food without degrading the land. It would surprise me if we could produce energy from agriculture without further increasing soil degradation.

Last week a colleague from the lead Forestry school in France came to visit me in Olympia. Yves told me a story he read in the Smithsonian (2004) about forest decline following drought-years in Morocco, where Barbary macaques were found stripping the bark of Atlas cedars to eat the moist and nutritious tissues underneath. Authorities want to get rid of the monkeys but they are endangered.

As I was sitting in the office one fine June day in 2009 watching a severe weather cell steamroll its way through the Willamette Valley, I couldn’t help but marvel at its awesome, enveloping presence and destructive potential. My officemates and I were first alerted to its impending arrival by the rapid darkening of the skies to the East and South of us.

The theme of the annual Ecological Society of America meetings this year was climate change. One talk I listened to really stands out in my mind. Tom Stohlgren (USGS Fort Collins) gave a thought provoking talk about the role of invasives  species (harmful plants, animals and diseases from other countries) in shaping the world we live in.

I found that I was getting depressed every day when I took a piece of bread out of a bag to make French toast, open a pill container to take my allergy medicine, or peeled back the wrapper from a block of cheese to make an omelette, so I took a vow not to buy any new plastic for one week. Plastics aren't just in grocery bags, which I can avoid most of the time. They're in food wrappers, diapers, hair care, appliances, toys, computers, writing utensils, art supplies, pet supplies, eyeglasses, business envelopes, you name it.