I have loved maps just about as long as I can remember anything. I collected them. They showed up in my dreams. I spent significant chunks of time looking at them, reflecting on their meaning, appreciating their beauty, connecting with the hearts and minds of their makers.
I found this article today at WIRED that features the work of a team of contributors that included John Hessler, a Library of Congress cartographer, to publish a new book, Maps: Exploring the World. I would love to read it.
From the article:
Still, all maps serve as some alternate form of world history. Like art, they use visuals to reveal truths about a particular time and place. Maps can act like a memory frozen in time, as seen in John Auldjo’s map of Mount Vesuvius eruptions. They can highlight the issues of the day or chart the trajectory of human exploration and advancement.
Okay, here’s a pre-Earth Day success story from Idaho!
Panther Creek, a tributary of the Salmon River, “has mostly recovered” from severe damage caused by toxic runoff from the former Blackbird Mine, an inactive mine west of Salmon, Lemhi County, Idaho. The recovery was documented in a long term study recently published by USGS scientitsts in the journal Elementa.
Underground and open pit mining of cobalt, silver and copper caused contaminated discharges from the flow of storm water and snowmelt through soil, sediments and tailings at the mine. It was so bad that from the 1960s through the 1980s, scientists found no fish and very few aquatic insects in Panther Creek. Serious cleanup began at this mine in 1995 by collecting runoff and treating the water for copper and cobalt pollution. Waste-rock pile at the mine were also stabilized.
According to the study, full recovery of salmonid populations occurred within about 12 years. Panther Creek now supports diverse species including Chinook salmon, steelhead, rainbow trout and bull trout.
“I was involved in studies in the early 1990s that documented the extent of the environmental damage,” said USGS biologist Christopher Mebane. “So it’s gratifying to also document the speed and extent to which the ecosystem recovered after cleanup measures started taking hold.”
Mebane is lead author on the paper and collaborated with scientists from EcoMetrix, an environmental consulting group, and Rio Tinto, one of the companies participating in the Blackbird Mine Site Group, which cooperatively manages cleanup activities.
“Among other things, this study demonstrates the value of long-term monitoring,” said Mebane. “A tremendous amount of money is spent each year on river restoration, but it’s rare to find examples where data were systematically collected, year after year, to learn if cleanup activities really translated into tangible improvements in fish populations and other parts of an ecosystem.”
Such an awesome view of the Rocky Mountain Trench, one of my favorite regions of North America.
From the article:
While geologists still debate the circumstances that created the trench, the section seen here likely formed due to underlying normal faults that emerged in the aftermath of tectonic collisions that pushed up the mountains. Normal faults are ruptures in the rocky outer part of Earth—the lithosphere—that generally emerge when land surfaces get stretched out. In a normal fault, one piece of lithosphere drops down relative to another.
In this case, the normal faults that underlie the southern half of the Rocky Mountain Trench likely formed as the lithosphere stretched after a period of mountain building that occurred between 185 million and 55 million years ago. At least three chains of islands plowed into the western coast of North America, forming mountains by bulldozing rock layers onto North America. In this part of western Canada, mountain building progressed from southwest to northeast, so the Columbia Mountains are older than the Canadian Rockies. With the normal faults in place, rivers and glaciers have since worked to widen and deepen the trench through erosion.
Hurricane photos fascinate me, and (almost) never fail to draw me into their swirls to contemplate order and chaos and what it all means (or can mean) for lived experience at the edges of predictable and unpredictable. Awesome...thank you, Amanda and NASA.
NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this view of Amanda—the first named storm of the 2014 hurricane season in the Americas—southwest of Manzanillo, Mexico, on May 25, 2014. The image was acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) at 21:00 Universal Time (2 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time).
Today the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Army Corps) released a proposed rule to clarify Clean Water Act protection for streams and wetlands that form the foundation of the nation’s water resources. Over the next 90 days, EPA and the Corps will reach out to citizens, groups and businesses to gather input they need to shape the final rule.
EPA has released two short videos as part of this outreach:
The proposed rule is based on the latest peer-reviewed science, including a draft scientific assessment by EPA (pdf: 11MB!), which presents a review and synthesis of more than 1,000 pieces of scientific literature. According to the EPA, a final version of the rule will not be published until the scientific assessment is complete.
The EPA has a portal page for protection of waters of the US that includes access to the scientific assessment, the proposed rule, press releases, fact sheets and other background information. People can also find a link for submission of comments on the proposed on this page.
Just a side note on the page itself: I thought EPA did a pretty good job making aspects of this complex issue accessible without overwhelming someone who prefers summaries, talking points and overviews. People who want to dig deeper can certainly do so easily by exploring the drop down info and links on the page.
Several court cases in the past decade or so -- U.S. v. Riverside Bayview, Rapanos v. United States, and Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (SWANCC), and Rapanos v. United States (Rapanos) -- challenged EPA jurisdiction in several ways.This draft rule attempts to address issues of the agency's regulatory reach into small but critical upstream waters whose protection was thrown into question by the court decisions.
For example, around 60 percent of stream miles in the U.S. only flow seasonally or after rain. Though they be small, they have a mighty impact downstream. Approximately 117 million people get drinking water from public systems that rely in part on these small, intermittant streams. EPA and the Army Corps hope the rule will clarify protection of these waters.
Specifically, the rule proposes that under the Clean Water Act (and based on the science)
Most seasonal and rain-dependent streams are protected.
Wetlands near rivers and streams are protected.
Other types of waters may have more uncertain connections with downstream water and protection will be evaluated through a case specific analysis of whether the connection is or is not significant. However, to provide more certainty, the proposal requests comment on options protecting similarly situated waters in certain geographic areas or adding to the categories of waters protected without case specific analysis.
During the comment period I'll try to post updates, analyses and other information on this rule-making process, and the very critical challenge to return US waters to good health and keep them that way.
A new USGS study quantifies how the diversity of fish changes when stream flow is altered in the Tennessee River basin:
The USGS study highlights the importance of the timing, magnitude, and variability of low streamflows and the frequency and magnitude of high streamflows as key characteristics critical to assessing how fish communities change in response to streamflow alteration. This study was completed using fish community data collected by the Tennessee Valley Authority, and predictions of streamflow characteristics at more than 600 locations.
The Tennessee River basin is one of the richest areas of aquatic diversity in the country, if not the world. However, expanding urban development, more than 600 privately held small dams on medium to small streams, and withdrawal of more than 700 million gallons of water each day threaten this diversity. Understanding the effect of streamflow alteration on aquatic ecology is increasingly important as change in land use and human population are projected.
Insectivorous fishes, such as Percinidae darters, Cyprinidae minnows, and Noturus madtoms, are among the most jeopardized fish in the Tennessee River Valley. Insectivorous fish represent a middle ground in the trophic structure of a stream, feeding on invertebrates while being prey for predator species. For their eggs to hatch insectivorous fish must lay them in gravel beds that are relatively clear of sediment. Insectivorous fish are sight-feeding and need clear water for feeding.
I lived and worked in New Mexico for eight years -- though I didn't live in Mora County, I often traveled through it on days off or trips to Colorado. I wasn't so much a community activist at that time, either -- more aligned and active through one or another of the "big greens".
I like this article by Staci Matlock for several reasons. First, she represents the issue of fracking in the context of life in this part of New Mexico. Then she goes a little deeper than many reporters are willing to go these days into the complexities of politics in multicultural communities and the dynamics shaped by colonization, settlement, land use, land ownership, water rights, and so on. Anyone who does organizing in multiracial/multicultural communities will likely appreciate the situation there. I really enjoyed reading this article and getting a deeper look at a place I was usually just traveling through...
People around the U.S. and the world who are deeply concerned about the influence of big corporations and the potential environmental damage from hydraulic fracturing methods — used to tap oil and gas supplies — cheer on Mora County.
But there’s more to this story — nuances and tensions that are hard to uncover unless you were born and raised in this hard-scrabble, beautiful and resilient Northern New Mexico county.
Jordan Flaherty has produced a great video on the situation with the Bayou Corne sinkhole in Louisiana. Especially encouraging to me were the interview segments with Wilma Subra and Lt. General Russel Honore. I'm really glad the people of Bayou Corne and Grand Bayou have support from folks of this caliber as they seek justice for corporate destruction of their communities.
About the video: The Bayou Corne Sinkhole is a window to the devastation that the
petrochemical industry has caused in Southern Louisiana. Featuring
correspondent Michael Okwu, produced by Jordan Flaherty, filmed by
Fletcher Johnson, edited by Leila Garcia. Interviews with Lt. General
Russel Honore, WIlma Subra, Anne Rolfes, Mona Degas, Michael Schaff,
Sonny Cranch, Michael Courreges, and Carla Alleman. Aired on America
Tonight on September 12, 2013.
I'm getting a lot of interesting photos and updates from friends who live in the Boulder area. One of the most amazing things to me is the geographical extent of flooding. Some information on the weather patterns that created such extreme rainfall is coming out...really interesting stuff. Unfortunately there is also a growing list of people who are unaccounted for. Here are some links to articles that include some of the newer info:
In light of extreme flooding going on in Boulder County, Colorado, this week, this new report might be useful for connecting to broader perspectives on the relation of mega-weather events and climate change:
Human influences are having an impact on some extreme weather and climate events, according to the report Explaining Extreme Events of 2012 from a Climate Perspective released September 5, 2013 by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Scientists from NOAA served as three of the four lead editors on the report. Overall, 18 different research teams from around the world contributed to the peer-reviewed report that examined the causes of 12 extreme events that occurred on five continents and in the Arctic.
