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.

Earth Day 50th Celebration in Ann Arbor

In Ann Arbor, the Earth Day celebrations for 2020 will take place even though many live events have been canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic. Locally, the Ann Arbor Sustainability Office is taking the celebration online with the A2Zero 2020 Virtual Earth Day Celebration. Nationally, the Sunrise Movement and Youth Climate Strike are taking their events online with the Earth Day Live 2020, a 3-day live-stream.

Figure 1: Earth shot from nasa.govnasa.gov

 

History of Earth Day

I grew up in Western Pennsylvania in the 60’s and 70’s.  Water pollution was so bad the local news used to report on whether or not Lake Erie was on fire, again, because people kept dumping flammable oil and tires in the water. Near the steel mills in Pittsburgh, air pollution was so bad that, no matter how often people cleaned, everything was coated in a sticky black dust that got into your pores and lungs.

The first national Earth Day was held on April 22, 1970 and about 20 million people in the U.S. participated (more here).  It was held as an environmental teach-in because of the air and water pollution and unsafe working environments arising from unregulated industrial development.  Senator Nelson from Wisconsin had the idea for Earth Day and enlisted Representative Pete McCloskey and activist Denis Hayes to help plan the event.  According to the EarthDay.org website, 10% of Americans including both Democrats and Republicans, demonstrated in 1970 at the first Earth Day. A photograph from the New York Times of huge crowds in New York City  on Earth Day in 1970 is here.

What is the tie between the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Earth Day? According to heritage.umich.edu, U. of M. held the first environmental teach-in one month prior to the first Earth Day and 15,000 people attended the event.  The national Earth Day was modeled on the U. of M. event and Ann Arbor, where U. of M. is located, and Ann Arbor have therefore always had a strong connection with Earth Day.

What was the first impact of the first Earth Day?  It was huge and included the establishment of the Environmental Protection Act in 1970, and the passage of the Occupational Safety Health Act in 1970,  the Clean Air Act in 1970, and  the Clean Water Act in 1972, according to earthday.org.

A2Zero Virtual Earth Day Celebration

For the 2020 Virtual Earth Day Celebration, the Ann Arbor City Hall Sustainability Office is live-streaming the events for the day! You can click on this link to register for the virtual event.  Once you register, you can access the activities online any time.  Also, if you’re interested, you can go to this page

 to complete a pledge online for activities you will undertake for Earth Day. 

The schedule of events is available here and events take place from 9 AM-8 PM.  It will be kicked off by Mayor Christopher Taylor, who will give an address on sustainability in Ann Arbor and the history of Earth Day.

Another highlight is a youth panel on “What Gives You Hope On Earth Day,” led by U.M. student Kristen Hayden and including W.C.C. student Zaynab Elkolaly at 2:30 PM.

If you’re looking for educational events, you can learn about Ann Arbor-specific programs, carbon neutrality, rooftop solar, wind energy, integrated pest management and more. Finally, there’s entertainment, too, including a couple of sessions of music, sustainability trivia, Earth Day BINGO, the movie "The Story of Plastic" and the reading of a children’s story, Mama Miti.

Get the Youth Out (-of-Doors, That Is)

The Ann Arbor A2Zero site also lists 10 kid-friendly Earth Day activities suitable for kids that will keep them engaged but safe during the pandemic. (Go here and scroll to the bottom of the page.)

Activities include: going on a nature scavenger hunt, building a “seed blaster” (you’ll have to read the description to find out what it is!), using a toilet paper tube to make a colorful wind sock, starting a meditation journal, and “Nature Lesson” videos from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. A number of these ideas are especially good at getting the kids out of the house, so they can have fun, education, and exercise on Earth Day!

Figure 2. The Great Lakes from nasa.gov

Earth Day Live, April 22-24 Live-stream

The Earth Day Live 2020 events are put on by the Youth Climate Strike and Sunrise movements. These events are youth-led and represent a growing concern about climate change and the environment, especially among our youth and teens.

The schedule of events for the 3-day live-stream is here, (scroll to find the events) The events include speeches, presentations, live music, meditations and calls to action.  The first day, April 22, will “focus on amplifying the voice of indigenous leaders and youth climate activists who are leading the movement to halt the climate crisis,” according to the website.

Additionally, there are 24 hours of action you can engage with, which you can find here.  Activities include sharing your air quality with a photo, cleaning up litter (solo), making a plant-based meal, contacting your representative and many more.

There Is No Planet B

Earth Day celebrations and events are taking place starting tomorrow, April 22 – April 24, 2020, because the Earth has limited resources for human needs, and, as the T-shirts say, there is no Planet B. Won’t you join in the celebration of the Earth, starting tomorrow and the work that must be done to sustain it, starting today?

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.

Mark Your Maps: Aldo Leopold Weekend in Wisconsin

Mark Your Maps: Aldo Leopold Weekend in Wisconsin

Mark Your Maps …

“To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.”

For all you avid map-readers out there, this quote appears in Aldo Leopold's book, A Sand County Almanac (ASCA, p. 294), first published in 1949. The quote explains Leopold’s view that the wilderness in "the blank place on the map" has immense value even if humans have no roads into it, no ways to extract products or recreational pleasure from it and no lines in the ledger signifying its economic value.  If Leopold were asked, “When a tree falls in the wilderness and there is no one to hear it, will there be a sound?,” he would give a resounding, “YES!”  And he would probably point to a blank place on a Wisconsin map to show you where the tree fell.

Courtesy of the Aldo Leopold Foundation,
www.aldoleopold.org

Aldo Leopold was a wildlife manager, forester, professor and author of the book, A Sand County Almanac.  In it, he conveys the idea of a land ethic in which we humans need to act as responsible members of our biotic communities and manage our ecosystems for the long haul and not just for short-term gain.  Over two million copies of this book have been sold and it's considered one of the finest environmental books ever written.

To honor Leopold’s life and work, each year the state of Wisconsin celebrates (by decree) the Aldo Leopold Weekend during the first full weekend in March.  This year, there will be low-key celebrations at the Aldo Leopold Center in Baraboo, Wisconsin and elsewhere (for events, click here) March 7-8 2015. Activities may include readings from A Sand County Almanac, screenings of the film “Green Fire,” Dutch oven cooking workshops and Aldo Leopold Bench Building workshops (for potential activities click here).  

…But Would You Please Stay On The Path?

If you don’t mind a quick look down this side path with me, Aldo Leopold was concerned about the impact of people, including our roads and recreational activities, on wilderness areas.  He wrote, "Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the … human mind.” (ASCA p. 295.)  He recommended saving examples of different types of wilderness areas for a variety of purposes, including for low-impact recreation, for scientific study, and for use by wildlife.

Photo of A Sand County Almanac and Wisconsin Recreation Atlas

A recent article in the New York Times takes this idea further, describing the subtle and not-so-subtle harm that people do to animals simply by engaging in recreational activities in wild areas. Wolverines near ski resorts waste precious energy in winter avoiding skiers; birds avoid 100 meters on each side (!) of hiking and cycling paths and rear fewer young as a result; and opening an area in Connecticut to hiking caused a wood turtle species to vanish within 10 years. The article states that the solution may be to restrict human activity to certain times of the day or to certain parts of a natural area in order to best allow animals to live and rear their young.

While wildlife managers are working out their recommendations for making minimal impacts on wildlife, it makes sense when you’re out in nature to control your pets (maybe leashing Lassie?), to pack out what you pack in and to stay on the trail so the wild animals and plants can thrive instead of merely survive.  For ideas on how to help make your outdoor activities low-impact, check the online L.L. Beans guide or the helpful  Wisconsin DNR site.

All Cooped Up in Here

Here’s a little more about naturalist and conservationist Aldo Leopold, who was born in Burlington, Iowa in 1887.  Leopold was an outdoors enthusiast and during his lifetime enjoyed hunting, fishing, journaling, sketching and bird watching.  He graduated from the Yale School of Forestry in 1909 and was hired as one of the first foresters in the U.S. Forest Service, working in Arizona and New Mexico.  He was instrumental in getting the first wilderness area, the Gila Wilderness Area in NM, designated as such in 1924.  In 1933, he published the first book on game management ever written and he became the first chair in game management in the U.S. at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

In his personal life, Leopold married Estella Bergere and they had five children, Starker, Luna, Nina, Carl and Estella. In 1935, the Leopolds bought, as a vacation property, an abandoned farm with a burned-down house and worn-out soil in Baraboo, Wisconsin.  They turned the old chicken coop into their living quarters, which they called the Shack and, over the years, planted tens of thousands of trees and worked to restore the prairies. Aldo Leopold carefully recorded the resulting changes to the land and wildlife over the years in his many notebooks. What looked like a crazy investment in a run-down farm became a long-term ecological restoration project that shaped many of Leopold's ideas about land conservation.  Below, you can see a photo of the Shack and a copy of the Leopold-style bench, which you might be lucky enough to build at an Aldo Leopold Weekend event.

Courtesy of the Aldo Leopold Foundation,
www.aldoleopold.org 

Leopold was a prolific writer and in the 1940’s, he wrote A Sand County Almanac to get his message about land conservation out to the public.  Although it was rejected by a number of publishers, it was finally accepted for publication by Oxford University Press in late February of 1948.  In March of that year, Leopold died of a heart attack while helping a neighbor fight a fire near the Shack property.  In case you’re wondering about Leopold’s five children, they all grew up to follow in their father’s footsteps, working in the natural sciences and conservation. (For more information click here.)

In 2007, the Aldo Leopold Foundation opened a center to help it fulfill its mission to “foster the land ethic through the legacy of Aldo Leopold.” The center is  platinum LEED-certified  building and was built on the Leopolds' Baraboo property using trees planted years earlier by the family. Today, we would say this was built in a sustainable manner, although Leopold might have said it was built with a land ethic in mind.   

Land Conservation: the Ultimate MMP Collaborative Game

Leopold described the land ethic like this, “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively: the land. (ASCA , p. 239)  He went on to say that because we humans are part of a larger ecological community, we have an obligation to use and maintain the land wisely.  “A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity.” (ASCA, p. 258) 

Courtesy of the Aldo Leopold Foundation,
www.aldoleopold.org

A land ethic includes avoiding use of resources as stakes in a zero sum game where the winner takes all at the expense of the environment. Regarding environmental resources, business as usual is like playing Monopoly, where there is only one winner left at the end of the game and he or she owns most of the resources.  Business using the land ethic is more like playing Pandemic, where the players all win if they can work collaboratively to find a solution to the problem at hand.  We could even say that natural resource management is the ultimate, massively multi-player (MMP), collaborative game where we all win if we can just work it out.

The solution to ecological problems, according to Leopold, is for individuals and governments to use their ecological conscience to make correct decisions about conservation.  Because it's so difficult to assign an economic value to species of songbirds or wildflowers, for example, such decisions should not be based on solely on their economic worth.  Each species is part of a biotic community and the community as a whole may not survive if separated from its parts of supposedly low economic value. Decisions made using an ecological conscience and keeping the land ethic in mind are better because, "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community.  It is wrong when it tends otherwise." (ASCA p. 262)

Happy Trails to You!

I hope you find a way to celebrate the Aldo Leopold Weekend coming up March 7-8, 2015. Borrowing  A Sand County Almanac from your local library and reading it would be one way to participate.  Putting up a bird feeder and watching the birds or taking a long walk in a natural setting near you would be another.  Happy Trails to you!  

Notes and Resources

1)  The abbreviation “ASCA” refers to the book, A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold and the page numbers to the paperback edition published by Ballantine Books in New York in September of 1970.
2) The Wisconsin Recreation Atlas is published by National Geographic and was last updated in 2012.
3)  Environmental problems are quite complex and can’t be easily modeled with a simple board game like Monopoly or Pandemic.  However, the cooperative environment management game Okolopoly does a pretty good job of modeling this complexity.  It was produced in the 1980's in Germany as a board game and also in an online version. 
4) Note I've stopped just short of calling ecological resource management an MMPRPG because no roles are taken.