Tag Archives: biodiversity

bumble bee watch

If you have some free time or are looking for an outdoor project with kids, you can take pictures of bumble bees and upload them to this website. Scientists there can help you identify them and tell you if they are rare.

Bumble bees seem to like my anise hyssop, milkweed, and sunflowers especially. I tried to take a photo of one just now but it turns out they don’t always sit still for photos. There is only so much you can do for wildlife in an urban situation, but one thing you can do is plant to help bees and butterflies, then have friendly conversations with family, friends and neighbors when they ask what the heck you are doing in your “overgrown” garden and when your “weeds” make attempts to expand beyond your borders.

May 2020 in Review

You can’t say that 2020 has not been interesting so far. The Covid-19 saga continued throughout May. I certainly continued to think about it, including a fun quote from The Stand, but my mind began turning to other topics.

 

Most frightening and/or depressing story:

  • Potential for long-term drought in some important food-producing regions around the globe should be ringing alarm bells. It’s a good thing that our political leaders’ crisis management skills have been tested by shorter-term, more obvious crises and they have passed with flying colors…doh!

Most hopeful story:

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

  • There are unidentified flying objects out there. They may or may not be aliens, that has not been identified. But they are objects, they are flying, and they are unidentified.

what E.O. Wilson is up to

What, you haven’t received this month’s issue of The Bitter Southerner yet? An interview with E.O. Wilson finds him 90 years old and only semi-retired, living in Massachussetts.

In 2016, Wilson published Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, in which he claims that if every nation sets aside half its landmass and waters for nature, then we can ensure the continuing existence of 85% of all species on the planet — including ourselves. The book garnered acclaim and criticism, but, like much of Wilson’s work, its central tenets have become more mainstream over time. 

bye bye bumblebees

The latest charismatic species to be at risk of disappearing – bumblebees, according to Science. It’s a simple story – they just can’t handle the heat.

Climate change could increase species’ extinction risk as temperatures and precipitation begin to exceed species’ historically observed tolerances. Using long-term data for 66 bumble bee species across North America and Europe, we tested whether this mechanism altered likelihoods of bumble bee species’ extinction or colonization. Increasing frequency of hotter temperatures predicts species’ local extinction risk, chances of colonizing a new area, and changing species richness. Effects are independent of changing land uses. The method developed in this study permits spatially explicit predictions of climate change–related population extinction-colonization dynamics within species that explains observed patterns of geographical range loss and expansion across continents. Increasing frequencies of temperatures that exceed historically observed tolerances help explain widespread bumble bee species decline. This mechanism may also contribute to biodiversity loss more generally.

Science

neonicotinoids

The problem with neoniconitoid pesticides, according to this Intercept article, is not that they kill bees directly, but that they weaken their immune systems so that they succumb to fungal infections. Sick bees have an instinct to fly away from the hive and die quietly somewhere to protect the hive. And the concentrations that cause this are so low they are not even detectable in monitoring data.

2019 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • JANUARY: Writing in 1984, Isaac Asimov thought we would be approaching world peace, living lives of leisure, children would love school, and we would be mining the moon and manufacturing things in orbital factories by now.
  • FEBRUARY: Cyber-attacking may be a lot easier than cyber-defending. Also, nuclear proliferation is back partly thanks to diplomatic unforced errors by the United States.
  • MARCH: Invoking of emergency powers was the first step down the slippery slope for the democratic Weimar Republic. New research suggests that climate change can be the trigger that pushes a society over the edge.
  • APRIL: The most frightening and/or depressing story often involves nuclear weapons and/or climate change, because these are the near-term existential threats we face. Oliver Stone has added a new chapter to his 2012 book The Untold History of the United States making a case that we have lost serious ground on both these issues since then. In a somewhat related depressing story, the massive New Orleans levy redesign in response to Hurricane Katrina does not appear to have made use of the latest climate science.
  • MAY: Without improvements in battery design, the demand for materials needed to make the batteries might negate the environmental benefits of the batteries. I’m not really all that frightened or depressed about this because I assume designs will improve. Like I said, it was slim pickings this month.
  • JUNE: The world economy appears to be slowing, even though U.S. GDP is growing as the result of the post-2007 recovery finally taking hold, juiced by a heavy dose of pro-cyclical government spending. The worry is that if and when there is eventually a shock to the system, there will be little room for either fiscal or monetary policy to respond. Personally, the partisan in me is thinking any time before November 2020 is as good a time for any for a recession to hit the U.S. I am a couple decades from retirement, and picturing that bumper sticker “Lord, Just Give Me One More Bubble”. Of course, this is selfish thinking when there are many people close to retirement and many families struggling to get by out there. And short-term GDP growth is not the only metric. The U.S. is falling behind its developed peers on a wide range of metrics that matter to people lives, including infrastructure, health care costs and outcomes, life expectancy, maternal and infant mortality, addiction, suicide, poverty, and hunger. And it’s not just that we are no longer in the lead on these metrics, we are below average and falling. Which is why I am leading the charge to Make America Average Again!
  • JULY: The water situation in India, and the major city of Chennai in particular, sounds really bad.
  • AUGUST: Drought is a significant factor causing migration from Central America to the United States. Drought in the Mekong basin may put the food supply for a billion people in tropical Asia at risk. One thing that can cause drought is deliberately lying to the public for 50 years while materially changing the atmosphere in a way that enriches a wealthy few at everyone else’s expense. Burning what is left of the Amazon can’t help. 
  • SEPTEMBER: Being a TSA air marshal may be the worst job ever.
  • OCTOBER: A third of all of North America’s birds may have disappeared since the 1970s. (Truth be told, it was hard to pick a single most depressing story line in a month when I covered propaganda, pandemic, new class divisions created by genetic engineering, and nuclear war. But while those are scary risks for the near future, it appears the world is right in the middle of an ongoing and obvious ecological collapse, and not talking much about it.)
  • NOVEMBER: The Darling, a major river system in Australia, has essentially dried up.
  • DECEMBER: Pilots occasionally go crazy and crash planes on purpose.

Most hopeful stories:

  • JANUARY: The dream of fusion power is not dead. There is even some hope of new advancements in fission power.
  • FEBRUARY: Here is the boringly simple western European formula for social and economic success: “public health care, nearly free university education, stronger progressive taxation, higher minimum wages, and inclusion of trade unions in corporate decision-making.” There’s even a glimmer of hope that U.S. politicians could manage to put some of these ideas into action. Seriously, I’m trying hard not to be cynical.
  • MARCH: The Green New Deal, if fleshed out into a serious plan, has potential to slow or reverse the decline of the United States.
  • APRIL: There is forward progress on a male birth control pill.
  • MAY: Planting native plants in your garden really can make a difference for biodiversity.
  • JUNE: There have been a number of serious proposals and plans for disarmament and world peace in the past, even since World War II. We have just forgotten about them or never heard of them.
  • JULY: Deliberate practice is how you get better at something.
  • AUGUST: I explored an idea for automatic fiscal stabilizers as part of a bold infrastructure investment plan. I’m not all that hopeful but a person can dream.
  • SEPTEMBER: I think Elizabeth Warren has a shot at becoming the U.S. President, and of the candidates she and Bernie Sanders understand the climate change problem best. This could be a plus for the world. I suggested an emergency plan for the U.S. to deal with climate change: Focus on disaster preparedness and disaster response capabilities, the long term reliability and stability of the food system, and tackle our systemic corruption problems. I forgot to mention coming up with a plan to save our coastal cities, or possibly save most of them while abandoning portions of some of them in a gradual, orderly fashion. By the way, we should reduce carbon emissions and move to clean energy, but these are more doing our part to try to make sure the planet is habitable a century from now, while the other measures I am suggesting are true emergency measures that have to start now if we are going to get through the next few decades.
  • OCTOBER: I’ll go with hard shell tacos. They are one of the good things in this life, whether they are authentic Mexican food or “trailer park cuisine” as I tagged the story! 
  • NOVEMBER: There is progress on carbon capture technology. Also, just restoring soil on previously degraded farm and grazing land could provide large benefits worldwide. There may also be real progress on fusion power.
  • DECEMBER: Deep inside me is a little boy who still likes bugs, and I spotted some cool bugs in my 2019 garden, including endangered Monarch butterflies. So at least I made that small difference for biodiversity in a small urban garden, and others can do the same.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • JANUARY: Some in the U.S. Senate and military take UFOs seriously.
  • FEBRUARY: We could theoretically create a race of humans with Einstein-level intelligence using in-vitro fertilization techniques available today. They might use their intelligence to create even smarter artificial intelligence which would quickly render them (not to mention, any ordinary average intelligence humans) obsolete.
  • MARCH: China is looking into space-based solar arrays. Also, injecting sulfate dust into the atmosphere could actually boost rice yields because rice is more sensitive to temperature than light, at least within the ranges studied. This all suggests that solutions to climate change that do not necessarily involve an end to fossil fuel burning and carbon emissions are possible with existing or very near future technology.
  • APRIL: Genetic engineering of humans might have to play a big role in eventual colonization of other planets, because the human body as it now exists may just not be cut out for long space journeys. In farther future space colonization news, I linked to a video about the concept of a “Dyson swarm“.
  • MAY: Joseph Stiglitz suggested an idea for a “free college” program where college is funded by a progressive tax on post-graduation earnings.
  • JUNE: In technology news, Elon Musk is planning to launch thousands of satellites. And I learned a new acronym, DARQ: “distributed ledger technology (DLT), artificial intelligence (AI), extended reality (XR) and quantum computing”. And in urban planning news, I am sick and tired of the Dutch just doing everything right.
  • JULY: I laid out the platform for my non-existent Presidential campaign.
  • AUGUST: Liquid hydrogen could theoretically be used as a jet fuel.
  • SEPTEMBER: I mentioned an article by a Marine special operator (I didn’t even know those existed) on how to fix a broken organizational culture: acknowledge the problem, employ trusted agents, rein in cultural power brokers, win the population.
  • OCTOBER: A list of “jobs of the future” includes algorithms, automation, and AI; customer experience; environmental; fitness and wellness; health care; legal and financial services; transportation; and work culture. I’ll oversimplify this list as computer scientist, engineer, doctor, lawyer, banker, which don’t sound all that different than the jobs of the past. But it occurs to me that these are jobs where the actual tools people are using and day-to-day work tasks evolve with the times, even if the intended outcomes are basically the same. What might be new is that even in these jobs, you need to make an effort to keep learning every day throughout your career and life if you want to keep up.
  • NOVEMBER: Google claims to have achieved “quantum supremacy“. This may allow us all to live lives of Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
  • DECEMBER: Estonia is supposedly the most digitally advanced country in the world. Finland has posted a free AI literacy course.

I want to give the reader some brilliant synthesis of all that, but you could probably go back to my past year in review posts and find that I am saying pretty much the same things each year. Well, here goes.

There is a list of serious risks that are being acknowledged but not effectively addressed. These include climate change, nuclear war, drought, rainforest loss, loss of freedom and human rights, economic recession, cyberwarfare, and automation leading to job loss. Climate change, drought, and rainforest loss are clearly intertwined. Solutions are largely known and just not being implemented due to dysfunctional politics at the national level and lack of international cooperation. These trends seem to be going in the wrong direction at the moment unfortunately.

Other than rainforest loss, the ongoing catastrophic loss of biodiversity, biomass and ecosystem function is mostly not even being acknowledged, let alone addressed. Biodiversity is a somewhat esoteric concept to most people, but hearing about mammals and birds and even insects just vanishing on a mass scale really starts to get to me emotionally. I don’t hear others in my social circles talking about these issues much, so I wonder if they just haven’t heard the same facts and figures I have or if they just don’t have the same response. Politicians are certainly not talking about these issues.

The risk of catastrophic war is very real. The world is in a very cynical place right now, but we have made progress on this before and we can do it again.

Recession and automation have an interesting relationship, where recession is a short- to medium-term reversal of economic growth, and automation, at least in theory, should lead to a longer-term acceleration of it. Of course, even if the acceleration happens it will benefit the majority of workers only if the wealth is shared. I’ll just repeat what I said above: “Here is the boringly simple western European formula for social and economic success: “public health care, nearly free university education, stronger progressive taxation, higher minimum wages, and inclusion of trade unions in corporate decision-making.” Or just copy the Dutch because they seem to know what they’re doing, the smug bastards.

You could accuse my blog of being US-centric, and I would accept that criticism. I am living in the US after all. I’ve lived and worked abroad though, and came to appreciate the strengths of my country more when I spent some time away from it. The US is still a good country to live in as a middle class professional person, but we are cruising along on the momentum of our past extraordinary success. We have lost momentum and begun to slip not only out of the leadership position among our developed country peers, but below the middle of the pack. The hard evidence on this is clear. We have politicians that just tell us that we are “great again”, because that is what we want to hear, without taking any necessary steps that would at least help us to keep up. 2020 is an election year and we have a chance to make some changes. We need to deal first and foremost with our systemic corruption problem which causes our government to respond to wealthy and powerful interests rather than citizens. We need real, inspiring, once-in-a-generation leadership to make this happen. I have decided to support Bernie Sanders for this reason, even though I don’t agree with every one of his stated policy positions.

There are some interesting and even astonishing technologies in the list above, from fusion power to micro-satellites to quantum computing to genetic engineering. It is 2020 after all.

And finally, when I’m not thinking and worrying about the world at large, I’ll be tending to my garden and my family and eating my hard shell tacos, and reminding myself that life here in the United States on the planet Earth is actually pretty good.

December 2019 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story:

Most hopeful story:

  • Deep inside me is a little boy who still likes bugs, and I spotted some cool bugs in my 2019 garden, including endangered Monarch butterflies. So at least I made that small difference for biodiversity in a small urban garden, and others can do the same.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

  • Estonia is supposedly the most digitally advanced country in the world. Finland has posted a free AI literacy course.

2019 garden retrospective

A retrospective on my 2019 garden may not be of great interest to anyone but me, but here it is for my future reference.

My gardening philosophy is basically to try to design a diverse ecosystem that can take care of itself with just a little nudging from me. Every plant should be useful to me in some way, useful to wildlife in some way (which generally means natives), or preferably both. Aesthetics come last, but I find that a diverse array of useful plants arranged in a gently guided ecosystem tends to be interesting at a minimum, and beautiful at best. Sterile, ornamental plants are pretty boring to me. I’ve been influenced by the permaculture and native plant movements, among other things. Anyway, here we go…

what did well this year:

  • My 4-year-old Asian pear tree grew a pretty impressive crop of fruit. The final score? Squirrels – 20 or so, humans – 0. But nonetheless, the tree seems to be doing well. My 3-year-old Asian persimmon tree grew its first persimmon. The final score? Squirrels – 1, humans 0.
  • Spring color – violets, dandelions, chives. These are all common plants that a lot of my neighbors probably consider weeds. But they add up to some nice color right when you need it in the spring. I also have a nice carpet of green and gold, a nursery-grown cultivar of a native species listed as threatened in Pennsylvania. All but the green and gold are edible if I am so inclined, and all are tough competitors that can hold their own against the urban weeds.
  • Milkweeds are everywhere. Particularly butterfly milkweed, which has some really cool orange flowers. But also common milkweed, which I don’t plant on purpose but leave alone whenever and wherever it decides to crop up. And the monarchs did indeed make an appearance.
  • Anise hyssop, beebalm, and mountain mint all are doing well without getting completely out of control. These are attracting a ton of pollinators, particularly bumblebees.
monarch butterfly, Black-eyed Susan and butterfly milkweed

too much of a good thing?

  • fennel – When I planted a few fennel plants from the farmer’s market a few years ago, I didn’t really understand that it was a different thing than dill, specifically a perennial that comes back year after year from the root, spreads aggressively by seed, and is hard to dig up. Don’t get me wrong – it’s an attractive plant, looks and smells nice for most of the year, attracts a ton of pollinators and caterpillars, and is edible from root to stem to leaf although I haven’t availed myself of it much. It’s just becoming a thicket that I will need to start limiting next year.
  • lemon balm – This is attractive, out-competes weeds and is nice in tea. It’s tough enough that it is starting to invade a lot of my ground covers and out-compete other desirable plants, however. I may have to start limiting it.
  • Black-eyed Susans – These are in two big clumps and looked absolutely fantastic in mid- to late-summer. They are expanding and aggressively out-competing other plants so I may need to limit them if I don’t want a garden of nothing but Black-eyed Susans. Pollinators love them, but so, surprisingly, do mice. After gorging themselves on Black-eyed Susan seeds, sure enough the mice came in at the first sign of frost to hang out in my nice warm kitchen.
  • garlic (Chinese) chives – These are nice-looking, grassy, edible, beloved of pollinators and also spiders and predatory insects that like to eat pollinators. They are aggressive enough that they are spreading into groundcovers in the front of the garden, and I kind of wish I had planted them in the back.
  • Sunchokes – planted four little raisin-sized tubers in a desperate bid to block a neighbor’s plants from invading. They took a long time to sprout, but just when I had written them off as either DOA or eaten by the squirrels – boom! in the space of a week or two my living fence popped up. They did exactly what they were supposed to do, creating a biological moat that nothing could cross, and attracting lots of bees and butterflies. I didn’t try digging up and eating any but I know that is a possibility. I have seen them get aggressive elsewhere so I will have to keep an eye on them.
caterpillars munching on the fennel thicket – probably black swallowtails although I’m not sure why these two look different
black swallowtail hanging out on the neighbor’s ornamental grass, persimmon leaves in the foreground

desirable species still there but not competing well

  • white clover – Surprisingly, it is there but unobtrusive. This is okay with me, and I don’t plan to add or subtract any, just let it do what it is going to do.
  • chicory – I think it is there, but it wasn’t distinguishable from the dandelions this year and didn’t put up any flower stalks. Perhaps it has a biennial habit and will be back next year. Most people consider this a weed but I think it is cool, and another plant that I don’t get around to eating but take some pleasure in knowing I could.
  • miner’s lettuce – I left this for dead seasons ago but one sad little plant did pop up. It disappeared again shortly due to whatever animal it is that likes to dig at night in that particular part of the garden.
  • wild strawberries and garden strawberries – The problem here is not animals, but friendly, well-intentioned human neighbors who keep pulling what they are certain are “weeds”. Well, they never get all the roots and the strawberries will be back. They are in a losing battle with the Black-eyed Susans however and may need some help even if I can get the neighbors to leave them alone.

what didn’t make it

  • French sorrel – I had a healthy clump of this for several years and it was just nowhere to be found this year. I’m not sure I will miss it.
  • prairie smoke – This was something I was enticed to plant by a nursery catalog. It didn’t survive the digging animals.
  • cucumbers – They are supposed to be easy, but I planted some and they either didn’t sprout or withered and died before I could even be sure they were there. They were hard to distinguish from the pumpkins.

problem species

  • ornamental ground covers and grasses. The neighbors tend to like these, or in some cases neighbors from years or decades gone by liked them. It’s a forever war.
  • general urban weeds – the trick is keeping them under control March-June. If you do this, your desired plants can take over and out-compete them by mid-summer on.
  • mosquitoes – I use bacillus thuringiensis and try to avoid all standing water. It doesn’t matter. By June on they are out there and just vicious. I don’t want to use harsher chemicals so we rely on insect repellant.

notable sitings

  • monarchs, as I mentioned earlier. Other butterflies too, particularly black swallowtails which love the fennel, parsely and celery, and yellow swallowtails which like some of the neighbors bushes. These last two aren’t rare but give no end of pleasure to kids and the young-at-heart.
  • praying mantises, both the native Carolina mantis and the introduced (but still cool) Chinese mantis. The native mantis liked to hang out on my introduced Chinese chives, so go figure. But when the Chinese chives flowered, they attracted a ton of little flies and wasps which were probably easy pickings. The Chinese mantis liked to climb my house. I can’t explain that one, unless it was for the warmth of the bricks.
Carolina mantis hanging out upside down on garlic chives
Chinese mantis climbing my house

the pots

  • Asian yard-long beans – these are prolific, interesting, and delicious.
  • Thai sweet basil and holy basil – these are beautiful, delicious and tough. We cook with them all summer. Leave italian basil alone in the sun for one mid-summer weekend and it is done, but the Thai version can handle the heat no problem and bounce back from a dry spell within reason.

interesting volunteers and self-seeders

  • Virginia creeper – it’s native so I let it go
  • Thai chillis – didn’t plant them but got lots of them, probably from the compost. They are so spicy they grew more than we could ever practically eat.
  • sweet peppers – didn’t plant these but got some, most likely just from last year’s kitchen scraps thrown in the compost. They were good, and there was no sign of cross pollination with the hot peppers.
  • pumpkins – probably because I tossed the previous year’s Halloween pumpkin in the compost. I thinned to just one per half barrel out front, but still they got massive. They flowered but didn’t set any fruit.
  • celery – planted last year because I mistook them for flat-leafed parsley. Self-seeded. The black swallowtails like them.
  • parsley – the curly-leaf kind. Survives the winter and self-seeds. A surprisingly tough competitor in the urban garden.

So that is the gardening year that was. Kind of sad when everything is so brown and lifeless now. But that is how the seasons, and eventually years and decades, go by. I mulched the trees with a summer’s worth of coffee grounds, kitchen scraps and garden trimmings today, and the kids helped me sweep up the leaves and put them in the compost for next year’s garden.

I’ll give some thought to new things I want to try in the 2020 garden sometime soon.

October 2019 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story:

  • A third of all of North America’s birds may have disappeared since the 1970s. (Truth be told, it was hard to pick a single most depressing story line in a month when I covered propaganda, pandemic, new class divisions created by genetic engineering, and nuclear war. But while those are scary risks for the near future, it appears the world is right in the middle of an ongoing and obvious ecological collapse, and not talking much about it.)

Most hopeful story:

  • I’ll go with hard shell tacos. They are one of the good things in this life, whether they are authentic Mexican food or “trailer park cuisine” as I tagged the story!  

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

  • A list of “jobs of the future” includes algorithms, automation, and AI; customer experience; environmental; fitness and wellness; health care; legal and financial services; transportation; and work culture. I’ll oversimplify this list as computer scientist, engineer, doctor, lawyer, banker, which don’t sound all that different than the jobs of the past. But it occurs to me that these are jobs where the actual tools people are using and day-to-day work tasks evolve with the times, even if the intended outcomes are basically the same. What might be new is that even in these jobs, you need to make an effort to keep learning every day throughout your career and life if you want to keep up.

There will still be openings for evil HR cats.