Resiliency: That’s the Plan!

Are you concerned, as I am, about our community’s ability to bounce back from the effects of the coronavirus? “Resiliency” is used to describe the ability to recover from a disruption like the pandemic or climate change and to plan for, adapt to, and even thrive during times of great change.

Figure 1: The Student Food Forest on Campus (photo credit: Emily Thompson)

I recently had the opportunity to attend the 2020 Higher Education Conference on Climate Leadership in Atlanta, GA. The conference was hosted by Second Nature (formerly the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education), and the key point I took away was that resiliency is something for which we can plan. We can plan for resiliency in a business, a state, a country and even a community college, like the one where I teach.

Fantastic!  To plan for a resilient future for our community college, we can look at some of the dimensions of resiliency that need to be implemented.  To be effective, the plan should be made by stakeholders at our college and the surrounding communities.

The first dimension is social equity and governance.

          There are a couple of issues to address here.  Do we have strong networks between our community college and surrounding communities and is our governance inclusive of all participating groups in the community?

          If we imaging governance as a tree, the tree will only stand if the roots in the community are strong.  If they are not strong in one neighborhood, on one side, the tree will fall in a heavy wind.           

For example, what we see with regard to the coronavirus is that Blacks in our state have a higher rate of infection and death than whites, according to Thebault, Ba Tran, Williams, 2020 (more here). If we then want to create a resiliency plan that addresses the coronavirus pandemic and we’re looking at governance, we need representation from Blacks as well as white for there to be equity. 

          Additionally, our college must have strong town-gown connections that can be leveraged in times of great change. Existing networks make it far easier to share knowledge and resources when needed.  For example, in the current pandemic, the department heads at our community college donated gloves and masks to staff at nearby medical facilities.

The second dimension is health and wellness.

          The issue here is, do all groups on campus and our larger community have food, water, housing and health care?

Well, we know they don’t. In the two cities near our community college, roughly 25% or more of the residents are living in poverty (U.S. Census Bureau, 2018), which leads to disparities in access to food, water, housing, healthcare and overall health.  One way to see this is in disparities in asthma prevalence.  In Washtenaw County, 19% of adults and 10% of children have asthma.  Alarmingly, the incidence of asthma is 37% for Blacks/African Americans in Washtenaw County, according to a report from Washtenaw County Public Health (2013; you can read it here).  For comparison, the CDC reports that nationally, 8% of adults and 8% of children have asthma and 11% of Blacks nationally have asthma (Centers for Disease Control, Asthma Surveillance, 2018; read it here).

          Some studies have hinted at better health outcomes among populations of asthma patients receiving better food. Wood et al. (2012) did a randomized clinical trial of the effects of diet on asthma, finding that patients eating 5 servings of vegetables and two of fruit each day had the best relief of asthma symptoms (more here ). Going back to the tree analogy, even trees feed one another through their roots in times of stress (read it here).  We will need to work on getting high quality, locally grown food on campus and into the surrounding communities in order to ensure better health that may fight asthma.  Additional actions can be taken to provide additional resiliency in the dimension of health and wellness. 

Figure 1 shows the Student Food Forest at the community college and Figure 2 shows a Farmer's Market in the community. These are both examples of ways to increase the health and wellness of members of the community.

Figure 2.  Healthy Food (Photo Credit: a2gov.org)

The third dimension is infrastructure.

          The question to answer here is, in the event of another pandemic or a climate change disaster, are our communication and transportation systems resilient?  Using the tree analogy, the roots of trees provide conduits for both chemical communication and transport of nutrients. (Read about it here ). If the root system is not well-developed, the tree will receive less information and fewer goods in times of stress.  So it is in our community.

In terms of communication during the current coronavirus situation, the faculty at our community college worked tremendously hard to put their classes online in one week . However, not all students have computers or internet access. To plan for resiliency, we need to find ways to make computers and the Internet accessible to all.

We do have pretty good public transportation to our community college, although it is not especially convenient or timely.  Looking to the immediate future with the coronavirus, if we decide to have on campus classes in the fall, we will have to find a way to get students to campus.  Because students may not be able to afford gas for their cars during the expected economic downturn, we could consider running an electric bus service (less polluting!) into the nearby neighborhoods.  We’ll have to study this dimension to find ways to build resiliency into both our community's communication and transportation systems.

         

In summary, the community college and surrounding communities need to work together on Social Equity and Governance, Health and Wellness, and Infrastructure.  In doing so, they can plan for resiliency for the future.

This blogpost was written for the benefit of students at Washtenaw Community College and the community as part of my sabbatical activities for winter 2020.  I am solely responsible for the content and hold the copyright for the work. Feel free to use the information in this blog; just credit me with a link back to my blog! -Emily Thompson, Ph.D.

Environmental Secrets Uncovered in Museum Bird Collections

I had the good fortune recently to accompany members of the local Audubon Society on a behind-the-scenes tour of the bird collection at the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History. The Audubon Society, according to their website, has a mission “to protect birds and the places they need, now and tomorrow.”  You can find more about the Audubon Society, here. 

Figure 1. Bird skins, UM Museum of Natural History.  Photo Credit: Emily Thompson.

You might wonder, then, what is in a museum bird collection?  Surprisingly, the things collected and saved since the late 1800's are not just birds, but nests, eggs, wings, skeletons and the skins of whole birds. Other things collected and saved include stomach contents and parasites. Specimens used to be collected by shooting the birds. Now, however, specimens are usually added to the collection after they're killed accidentally, perhaps by hitting a window or being hit by a car.  

Figure 2.  Bird Nest, UM Museum of Natural History. Photo Credit: Emily Thompson.

Why would birders, who love living birds, be interested in a collection of dead birds?  One reason is the collections are used for important conservation research.  For example, bird collections were used in the study of the effects of DDT on eggshell strength that helped lead to the publication of Rachel Carson’s ground-breaking book, Silent Spring. This book in turn lead to a ban on the use of DDT in the U.S. Bird collections are also used in forensic research to determine which bird species caused a specific airplane crash.  What follows are two examples of the benefits of bird collections.  

From the Egg Collections: Conservation Studies

Figure 3.  Bird Eggs, UM Museum of Natural History.  Photo Credit: Emily Thompson.

According to John Bates at the Field Museum i nChicago, Illinois, the most important study arising from bird collections was published in October of 1968 by Hickey and Anderson in the journal Science. Their paper is considered to be one of the most important scientific papers of all times, and it describes the effect of the pesticide DDT on eggshell thickness compared with no-DDT control eggs. At the time, DDT was being widely sprayed to kill the mosquitoes that spread diseases like malaria.  These scientists studied the peregrine falcon eggshells from areas that were sprayed (from the Field Museum in Chicago, IL) and compared them with peregrine falcon eggshells from areas that were not sprayed (from the Charlotte Islands, British Columbia, Canada). The results showed the eggshells in Illinois thinned after spraying with DDT while the eggshells in the Charlotte Islands area showed no change in the same time period. (more information here).  The result of weakened eggshells was declining numbers of peregrine falcon and other birds of prey (such as the American eagle) due to breeding failure, because weak eggshells caused embryo death. The study of Hickey and Anderson was key to Rachel Carson’s argument that indiscriminate spraying of DDT would lead to a “silent spring” where birds would no longer sing. The result of the study, coupled with Carson’s book was the banning of DDT and greater environmental awareness.  You can find more, here  and here. 

From the Collections: Forensics Studies

Figure 4.  Bird Skeleton, UM Museum of Natural History.  Photo Credit: Emily Thompson.

When a bird strikes an airplane, causing a crash, the authorities want to know what species brought down the plane.  The ultimate goal is to avoid future accidents, and by knowing what type of bird is involved, they can design airports, engines and airplanes to reduce bird strikes.  The bird remains, often just  a feather or bird bits called “sparge” are often sent to forensic ornithologist Carla Dove at the Smithsonian Institute. There, she and her staff identify the bird causing the bird strike by comparing its remains to samples in the huge bird and feather collections of the Smithsonian.  Additionally, they perform DNA analysis and  microscopic analysis. Here’s a study from 2009 of identification of remains of an American white pelican involved in the crash of a Cessna.   

If you like the idea of looking through museum collections, try this website from the American Museum of Natural History  in New York.  They have videos of what it’s like to open up the drawers and cabinets in the museum and what scientists are using the collections for.

This blogpost was written for the benefit of students at Washtenaw Community College and the community as part of my sabbatical activities for winter 2020.  I am solely responsible for the content and hold the copyright for the work. Feel free to use the information in this blog; just credit me with a link back to my blog! -Emily Thompson, Ph.D.