Wally Smith - OnEarth Magazine, from NRDC

New book stresses the need for faith-based collaboration in combating climate change

A new book entitled "A climate for change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions" is beginning to make rounds in the blogosphere. Authored by husband-wife team Katharine Hayhoe (a professor of geosciences at Texas Tech) and Andrew Farley (a religious scholar at Texas Tech and an active pastor), the book has two goals: i.) to provide some truth in the nonsense-filled world of global warming "debates" that have overridden media and the internet, and ii.) to provide insight into what role the faith-based community can play in combating climate change. The book has already gotten several high-profile endorsements, including a glowing one from the past president of the Association for the Advancement of ...read full post

Comments (1) | October 26, 2009
Is Florida's "Turtle Tunnel" Really a Waste?

In a highly publicized report released this week, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma has highlighted a number of projects being funded under Congress's stimulus bill in an attempt to pose a "second opinion" on economic recovery. Specifically, Senator Coburn outlines 100 projects funded by the bill that he deems examples of wasteful government spending and that are "likely to fail."
At number five on Senator Coburn's list is the Lake Jackson Ecopassage, an extensive construction project along U.S. Highway 27 near Tallahassee, Florida. The ecopassage has been in the works for nearly a decade, designed to mitigate turtle mortality along a portion of Highway 27 - a stretch of blacktop that has exhibited an incredibly high level of mortality for nearly ...read full post

Comments (4) | June 19, 2009
Making the Case for Mountain Protection

Almost anyone keeping current with hot-topic environmental news these days has become familiar the environmental history of the Appalachians: man finds mountains; man logs and mines mountains. Some mountains, in the end, are preserved to recover to the state that we see them in today. But we also know that even with the federal protection of wilderness areas and national forests, the mountains are not immune from environmental threats. Mountaintop removal, for example, is poised to become (if it is not already) one of the leading environmental topics of our generation.
In the mountains of north Georgia's White County, however, there are no coal mines. There are no mountains being lopped off for mining, no fill being dumped in pristine valley heads. Instead, environmental threats at this southernmost end of the Appalachian Mountain chain come on slowly - much unlike the drastic measures taking place farther to the north.
White County lies at the transition between the ...read full post

Comments (0) | June 15, 2009
Living in sprawl: the two sides of place.

Several days ago, while watching television during a visit with my 80-year-old grandmother, a commercial played showing a child crossing a V-shaped rope bridge over a stream. Chances are you've seen them or perhaps even crossed one during a high ropes course: a sturdy rope is strung between two trees for walking, and a series of ropes are strung outward from the central rope for bracing and balance. Upon seeing it, my grandmother's eyes lit up.
"We used to have one of those out on Bell's Ferry," she said, "You could cross the river on it, and anyone could come out and use it."
"Wasn't it dangerous?" I asked, remembering how I'd trembled and worried my way across one during a ropes course in college.
"Well, yes. But it was fun!" she exclaimed. "That was before everything around here grew up, though."
It was true, I thought. The area around my hometown, nestled in the sprawling suburbs of metro Atlanta, had ...read full post

Comments (0) | June 1, 2009
Environmentalism, religion, and barbeque: the perfect combination?

Late last May, a colleague and I were asked to present an amphibian conservation program at the Alabama 4-H Center just outside Birmingham. As a graduate student studying evolutionary biology at the University of Alabama, I often speak to school groups and others about amphibian ecology, biodiversity, and conservation in general. But on this Saturday morning, pulling up to a packed pavilion and a trio of smoking barbeque cookers, I quickly noticed that this program would be different - we were to be presenters at the Alabama Baptist Cooperative Fellowship's annual spring gathering.
An evolutionary biologist wandering into a crowd of 200 Southern Baptists in Alabama sounds like the start of some bad joke, or at least a recipe for disaster. After all, in my two short years as a graduate student in Tuscaloosa I've seen students nearly come to blows arguing over science and religion, and my colleagues have excitedly gone to debates ...read full post

Comments (0) | May 8, 2009
The Road Less Traveled

Stecoah Gap sits, at 3,165 feet, in a high saddle in western North Carolina's Cheoah Mountains. It's a quiet place - a weatherbeaten, two-lane state highway crosses the mountains in the gap, amid a thick tangle of hardwoods, wildflowers, and the white-blazed footpath of the Appalachian Trail. Black bears lumber across the road from time to time. Brightly-colored salamanders scuttle underfoot.
But Stecoah Gap is getting attention not for what lives in its forests and nearby coves, but for what lies beneath. Last year, the North Carolina Department of Transportation released its plans to drill a 2,870-foot long tunnel almost 500 feet below Stecoah Gap, as part of a project aimed at building a mostly four-laned highway across the southern Appalachian highlands of North Carolina and Tennessee.
Deemed Corridor K, the road-building project is part of the larger Appalachian Regional Commission's Appalachian Development Highway Program, authorized by Congress in 1965 to build ...read full post

Comments (0) | April 6, 2009
Bioblitz in Suburbia: Just Your Friendly Neighborhood Frog-Counting Rally

It's six-thirty in the morning in the not-so-sleepy Atlanta suburb of Dallas, Georgia, and biologist Sean Graham is standing in the bed of his pickup, barking out rules.
"You have from seven this morning to seven at night to find as many species as possible! Report back at dark." With a twinkle of mischief in his eye, he concludes, "Cheating is entirely acceptable."
Sean is laying down the ground rules to our ragtag group of herpetologists, all standing in a semicircle in the parking lot of a Sonic Drive-In. The whole scene looks like some kind of off-kilter, khaki-clad political rally. We've descended on Dallas for a bioblitz: a term scientists have coined for a rapid, all-encompassing inventory of a region's biodiversity. Put simply, the goal of a bioblitz is to find and identify as many species as possible within a set time limit, often in just one to two days. Sean's bioblitz has gathered groups of herpetologists from three southeastern ...read full post

Comments (0) | March 27, 2009