My Second Favorite Store At The Mall

When conversations, both intellectual and your run of the mill small talk, head towards environmental degradation and/or loss of biodiversity, several buzzwords start flying around. (I don’t know why these topics would come up in everyday conversations, but they could.) Among these buzzwords, one reigns supreme: “Conservation.” It shows up like a store at the mall you go to because it has cool graphic tees and you “like the music” (i.e. Hot Topic). For an idea that gets thrown around quite a bit, there seems to be a very narrow realm that conservation covers. People know about, but only from the little experiences they’ve had with it or from what others say. Almost like a store that gets a bad rep from people who don’t visit it.

As a wannabe geography professor, I feel that it is my duty, nay my job, to use what I have learned to allow for a better understanding of what could be meant by “conservation.” Take, for instance, the Flint Hills that surround Manhattan, KS. While it could be argued that the area is heavily influenced my mankind, and indeed it is, if you look at the history of the area, you would find it surprisingly well taken care of.

The Flint Hills are in an environment that, at least before the vast majority was converted to farmland, would be called a tallgrass prairie. Defining features of prairies are large expanses of grassland and a deficit of trees. Now, for the shortgrass and mixed-grass prairies that dominate the Great Plains west of the Flint Hills, this environment exists due to the lack of available moisture. Trees can’t really survive, and the prairie grasses only due so thank to their extensive root systems. But these same climatic conditions do not occur in the tallgrass prairies. Trees can, and do in our present age, grow readily. So then, why were there so few trees when Europeans first described this area? It wasn't because the native tribes deforested the area; there is little evidence supporting the area as forested at the same time as human habitation. So what gives? There must be some reason found in nature for the prairies continued survival.

The answer is every Hot Topic shopping teens dream: fire. Every so often, a storm would come through after a dry period, and some errant lightning strike would start a wildfire. While there is the common preconception that fire is bad, it is the very lifeline for the tallgrass prairie. As the prairie fire sweeps through the land, it burns away the old grass stems. Now, tallgrasses have very deep roots, 10 ft. or more on average. So they are fine, and with the nutrients from the ashes added back to the soil, they can grow again very quickly. An added benefit from the fire is that any new saplings or other plant growth is destroyed in the process, allowing the prairie grasses to flourish, and allowing the soil to maintain its excellent fertility. The tribes that originally inhabited the Flint Hills recognized this, and there are records stating that they would regularly start fires to renew sections of the prairie, creating locales where game animals would want to head to. In much the same way, modern day ranchers burn their fields to allow for grasses to grow anew, creating prime grazing land for their cattle.

It is extremely rare nowadays for a wildfire to start, so humans have taken it on themselves to start and monitor them. Anthropogenic burns have been a part of the tallgrass prairie for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Remarkably, however, this isn’t thought of as conservation. The prairie isn’t protected except in a couple of places. Farms, roads, and buildings are all over the Flint Hills. But, you could argue this is one of the longest lasting conservation efforts in the world. While the effort is mostly for some self-serving reason, the landscape isn’t degrading as much as it would if the burns were not in place. So maybe conservation needs to take a page out of a farmer’s book. Using our resources in a responsible way is what matters, and even if that means doing something that might seem to hurt the environment, or put it squarely into mankind’s hands. Counterintuitive thinking may be hard to comprehend, but teenagers manage to do it. Why can’t we?

P.S. my favorite mall store is Barnes & Noble. I love books.

I could be Superman, but I don’t want the responsibility

As is already well known, I love geoengineering. When I decide to talk about geographical concepts, it is one of my favorite to soapbox on. So when I see an opportunity to bring it up, I do. (If you don’t actually know how I feel about is, go ahead and look at my previous post over it. It’s the one with the word “Geoengineering” in the title. Sorry, I’ll try to be less sassy from now on.) Another friend of mine (as opposed to the one in my previous post. Yeah! I have more than one friend. Take that, parents!) and I were talking about negative externalities, and I saw my chance to enlighten another person. After finishing my diatribe, I was shocked with what he said. He told me he was glad that I was paying attention to this kind of stuff, because he had no idea about it. I was like David Keith, telling others about the dangers of geoengineering (if you haven’t seen that TED Talk yet, I highly recommend it. Again, it’s in the post with “Geoengineering in the title). Most importantly, I was becoming the change I wanted to see in the world. I was becoming my own Superman, or possibly Batman, since he’s cooler. Regardless, I was the person in my friend group that could make a difference. They are all cool guys and gals, my friends, and they aren’t against the trying to improve the world. I would argue that they all are actively for improving the world. But, as most of my friends and I are strong Christians, saving the environment was not necessarily on our minds. This has changed thanks to my picking geography as my major, and taking several meteorological, climatological, and environmental classes. It still isn’t, frankly, something I consider important, at least not in the same way as other people might view it. I want the environment to be safe so people can be safe. There are seven plus billion people on the Earth, and I consider each of them important, but I am only one man.

I help out with the food pantry at my church. That feeds about 10 families regularly. On one hand, it is great that the hungry of Manhattan are being fed. On the other hand, I have done next to nothing to truly stop world hunger. What am I to do?  What is the director of the Flint Hills Breadbasket to do, when there are homeless and hungry in Topeka, Lawrence, Wichita, KCK? There is simply too much to do. Have I shattered your hope yet? Well, I haven’t shattered mine. I’m not saying I can plant a forest by myself, but I am uniquely qualified to change the world around me in ways that no one else, including me, could imagine.

I have already mentioned that I am religious. I am also interested in going to grad school, with climate or atmospheric science being a possible point of emphasis. I’m starting to sound like a smaller, albeit taller and male, Katharine Hayhoe. And like Dr. Hayhoe, this puts me in a unique position. I am in no way trying to compare my body knowledge and grasp of understanding with hers, but like her, I can communicate with in-groups that other science oriented people may not be able to enter into. It’s not because I am some gifted writer or great orator or spectacular word-smith (I am not any of these things). It is merely because I have the knowledge I have learned, and am an excepted member of my friend group. They listen to me and what I have to say because I have earned it, because I share the same basic beliefs and ideologies that they do. The science and the facts haven’t changed, just who is presenting them. The response, however, can be radically different.
All of us are uniquely qualified to make an impact wherever we are. And the most wonderful, beautiful part of this is that, just as are qualifications are unique, so too are our impacts. I personally enjoy gaining knowledge and sharing it. That’s why I want to be a professor. But nothing is going to happen if we have a bunch of smart people (the only dumb people are those who support geoengineering) sitting around teaching others. And some people aren’t really comfortable doing that. They want to go out and do something. These go-getters are great as well. The world needs them just as much as the mobilizers who can inform them of what changes are needed. Combined, it is easy to see how just one person can make a difference.

P.S. I love my parents, and I know they support me in all that I do
P.P.S. And I love being able to start sentences with conjunctions. Suck it, English grammar rules

Energetics, or test number five in your Principles of Biology class

Energetics is the study of energy under transformation. It is also considered the hardest test in the introductory class, to which I can attest (I thought the class as a whole was easy, but that is neither here nor there). The reason I bring this up is because, in biological energetics, food and the molecules that make it up is broken down to create energy. This process involves a physical flow of the molecules for the energy to be produced. Both of these aspects, transforming something into energy and having that energy moved, are extremely important to modern society, at least as far as those who can read this blog are concerned. And, like everything else I seem to post about, the effects and consequences of this energy movement, even from one small area, can become global in scope. Maybe I should have stopped sleeping in class.

Now, I’m going to be talking about oil and coal and other fossil fuels, but by no means should that be taken that I think alternative energy is without fault. I even hate when people call it “clean energy.” It shows that someone failed their physics class in high school. In fact, I have changed my mind. Alternative energy is on the table for discussion. Grab your seatbelts, this will be a wild ride.

As you can see from my second Ind. Inq., dams are on my mind. I personally find it funny to think that such large constructs draw little attention to how much they can impact the region around them. Unlike building something of that magnitude on land, which really only effects its immediate area, dams constrict the fourth dimension of rivers: flow. Just like the atmosphere, rivers have mass movements as a natural part of their processes, and disturbing or disrupting these normal fluxes can have devastating results. Obviously, dams create large reservoirs behind them from the constricted flow the river suffers; The Three Gorges Dam project in China displaced 1.3 million people. What many people don’t think about, though, is that every location down river from the dam is affected, as well. Shanghai is almost 1,000 miles away, and it suffers the possibility of inundation because a lack of silt deposits to strengthen the city’s foundation. The interconnectedness of features in the world, again, is something that seems to be quickly forgotten about, but is extremely important.

Mitchell, in his essay Carbon Democracy (2008), posits that modern democratic politics is inextensibly tied to coal, and later oil. The control over the flow of energy is an utmost priority for the societies on which it is the bedrock for their current status. The same could be said for the importance of mitochondria in a cell (mitochondria are apparently so important, they actually contain their own independent set of DNA. The same is true for chloroplasts in plant cells. Even nature understands the implications of having a working energy transport system. And you thought the first paragraph had no relevance).  Many workers rights came about during the Industrial Revolution, when coal was the primary fuel, and coal miners the sole producers of it. This gave the workers and miners of coal plants and mines a great amount of political power. When oil gained dominance as a fuel source, policies were changed, and the corporations who extracted and transported the oil had the power, instead of the common worker. This is how the model works in present times.

It is interesting to bring up how alternative forms of energy would fall into these political processes. Would a new group of people gain power and importance, or would those companies already at the top keep their hold on the market? Evidence does not look good for new companies.  In the solar energy market, this can be seen through the life of the company to Solyndra. The new solar panels Solyndra promised were to be a new era of energy collection, with them capturing 12 to 14 percent of incoming sunlight and converting it to energy. The U.S. DOE gave a $536 million loan guarantee, and the company got $25 million dollar tax break from the state of California. Despite these huge benefits, the company went bankrupt in 2011 amid allegations of accounting fraud. A very inauspicious start to what have a great source of “clean energy,” or at least cleaner energy. It is my fear that the Solyndra scandal is only a prime example for the future of alternative energy solutions. It seems that only those already in power could change the source of energy, and they currently have no incentive to. So the DNA of our society remains with the controllers of energy. No wonder this was a hard test.