In an interesting analysis of the Romney-Ryan Energy Plan, Bill Chameides used the "word cloud" app. Word clouds can be a very revealing way to look at ideas.
Read the rest of Bill's analysis (which includes a link to a pdf of the Plan) at www.huffingtonpost.com
Researchers have not yet determined whether this extensive melt event will affect the overall volume of ice loss this summer and contribute to sea level rise.
"The Greenland ice sheet is a vast area with a varied history of change. This event, combined with other natural but uncommon phenomena, such as the large calving event last week on Petermann Glacier, are part of a complex story," said Tom Wagner, NASA's cryosphere program manager in Washington. "Satellite observations are helping us understand how events like these may relate to one another as well as to the broader climate system."
From the US Fish and Wildlife Service: the City of Franklin and the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation will begin demolition of the City’s Harpeth River Lowhead Dam on Wednesday, July 25, at 11:00p.m.
The project will take out the only barrier on the Harpeth River, a lowhead dam, and improve fish habitat and water quality. The project will also improve public access and enhance recreational opportunities on the Harpeth for fishing and paddling.
Earlier this year the National Fish Habitat Partnership named this project
in their “2012 Ten Waters to Watch list.” The Department of Interior also
named this project as a model of America’s Great Outdoors River Initiative
to conserve and restore key rivers across the nation, expand outdoor
recreational opportunities and support jobs in local communities.
The total cost of the project is $870,000, with $350,000 in federal grants
to the Harpeth River Watershed Association from collaborative funding
programs of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Southeast Aquatic Resources Partnership, and the National Fish Habitat Partnership for projects to improve fish habitat.The project is expected to be complete in fall of 2012. The Harpeth River Watershed Association is installing a Dam Cam thatwill tape the entire demolition process.To see the Dam Cam go www.harpethriver.org/damcam. This will enable the public to view this project while the area is off limits as a construction site. Water
recreation and canoe/kayak launch is temporarily prohibited during
construction.
I've been following impacts of this derecho through email and social networks the past few days. The first sentence in the Earth Observatory article below really helped knit all the stories I've been hearing into a larger picture of this systemic awesome event.
Photo courtesy Kevin Gould / NOAA. Caption by Michon Scott.
On June 29, 2012, a windstorm started in northwestern Indiana, and traveled roughly 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) eastward to the Atlantic Ocean. Embarking on a roughly 10-hour journey, the fast-moving storm toppled trees, downed power lines and left more than a million residents without power in the District of Columbia alone.
Read the whole story at earthobservatory.nasa.gov
Steady progress corralling New Mexico's largest ever forest fire allowed some evacuees to return home on Monday even as officials in Utah investigated an air tanker crash that caused the first two deaths among crews fighting wildfires this year.
The airplane, a Lockheed Martin P2V, went down on Sunday afternoon in the Hamlin Valley area of southwestern Utah while on a mission to drop chemical fire retardant on an 8,000-acre (3,237-hectare) blaze along the Nevada-Utah border.
Read the rest of the article at www.huffingtonpost.com
Elk stand in Whitewater-Baldy Complex fire's haze. [Photo Credit: US Forest Service Gila National Forest, Brandon Oberhardt]
The Whitewater-Baldy Complex fire has burned 259,025 acres and is 20% contained, according to today's briefing. Fire behavior was dampened earlier in the day by an inversion over the fire.
A Forest Service Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) team is on the ground now for an assessment of the Whitewater-Baldy Complex burn area. The BAER team includes hydrologists, soil scientists, engineers, biologists, silviculturists, range conservationists and archeologists who will evaluate the burned area and prescribe management actions that will protect the land quickly and effectively.
A number of local and state emergency managers have also come together to support locally driven community-based efforts and to initiate mitigation measures that will minimize damage from post-fire floods.
More at www.huffingtonpost.com
According to InciWeb reports, the fire was extremely active, with torching, spotting and sustained runs observed. Spotting distances were reported up to 1/3 mile. Currently there are 1,246 personnel fighting the fire. It has grown to 216,650 acres, and is about 10% contained.
New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez visited the Whitewater-Baldy Fire Incident Comand Post on Thursday, May 31st, for a briefing. [Photo credit:US Forest Service Gila National Forest]
At this time, the Whitewater-Baldy Complex fire is the largest fire burning in the US and is the largest in New Mexico's history.
Wildfire season is in full swing in the southwestern region of the United States. The image above shows the Whitewater-Baldy Fire Complex, a large blaze burning in a mountainous part of Gila National Forest in western New Mexico. The rapidly expanding fire, which started with a lightning strike, had burned more than 10,000 acres (16 square miles) by May 24, 2012. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite acquired the image at 2:40 p.m. local time (20:40 UTC) on May 23, 2012.
Read more at earthobservatory.nasa.gov
InciWeb reports that this fire is being fueled by mixed conifer, ponderosa pine, pinon/juniper, grass and plenty of deal vegetation within its perimeter. As of 2:00 pm on Wednesday, the fire had grown to 170,272 acres and was burning on all flanks. In some areas extreme fire behavior with running, torching and spotting was observed by firefighters. Spot fires flared up to a mile away from the main burn, including multiple spot fires across FR 141.
In communities of Mogollon and Willow Creek, which are still under mandatory evacuation, fire crews continued to provide structure protection throughout the day.
Oh Sankofa, high on the Heavens you soar
My soul is soon to follow you, back to yesterday's moon
will it remember me?
Back to yesterday's sun, It will rekindle me
Rekindle the spirit into tomorrow and high on the wind
Sankofa flies again and again
-- Cassandra Wilson, SANKOFA/Blue Light 'Til Dawn
Before you can move forward, you must first return home. This is the meaning of the concept of Sankofa, said Zakiya Harris on today's Spring of Sustainability session entitled Sankofa: Regenerative Strategies for Connecting People to the Earth.
Before today, I was only familiar with the symbolism of the Sankofa bird through Cassandra Wilson's music. Before I heard Pandora Thomas and Zakiya Harris of Earthseed Consulting, I had not thought of it in terms of my interest in environmental justice. But they helped me connect the dots and it made total sense that resonated with my own discoveries. How does this apply to environmental justice work?
You can't start with An Inconvenient Truth to get people interested in climate change, for example, if people in the community have trouble securing basic life needs. But if you ask people if they know someone dealing with asthma, high blood pressure, diabetes, inadequate housing, poverty, or limited access to healthy food, says Zakiya, everybody in the room will raise their hand. Then you can help them connect the dots between those more familiar day to day challenges in one's own community and dirty coal plants, climate change, toxic chemicals and other stressors and conditions of the environment.
If the African-American, Latino and other communities of color seem to be underrepresented in the mainstream environmental movement, it's not because they are not interested in environmental issues. All of these communities have their own stories, their own culture's way of relating to Earth, their own expertise to do what's needed where they live.
Too often, says Zakiya, environmentalists wanting to help don't ask the right questions to reconnect communities with the expertise they already have. We don't start off by meeting them where they are before we try to help them move forward. What we need to do is listen to their stories and then frame things in a way that allows them to share and bring their own expertise back into the light.
According to Pandora and Zakiya, education and training is a key to their successful work with people, because when people learn new things, that naturally sparks interest to become involved in something. Among the projects that Pandora and Zakiya talked about were The Green Life program at San Quentin, and the City Slickers Farms project in West Oakland.
At the end of the discussion, Zakiya and Pandora each had a final thought to share (I was typing fast to get this, but I think this is close to what each one said with minimal paraphrasing):
Zakiya: We are witnessing the greatest paradigm shift any of us have ever seen in our lifetimes. We will need to be more inclusive and recognize that their [communities of color that have largely been excluded from the environmental movement in the past] expertise might look different. Drop the guilt, start with your own inner work...we're not here to heal the Earth, we are healing ourselves so we can stay on the planet.
Pandora: Get outside. There are so many aspects of the movement that have actually disconnected us from life. Immerse yourself in the outdoors no matter where you are and just listen.
You can listen to the discussion by registering at the Spring of Sustainability program page, however I think there is a time-limited replay window.
Here's a video of a TedEX talk -- The Vision of Sankofa -- by Pandora and Zakiya:
For some great articles on race and environment, check out Colorlines.
