What I Learned Today



Sunsets are hard to improve upon. Photos of sunsets, however, can be made more interesting by including a foreground detail. 

Open the whole post for the sunset-with-foreground vs sunset-only view.
 

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Autumn Elm

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You can live a long time in one place and still make discoveries. Yesterday's discovery was just how many American elms there are around here. American elms used to be common as they were the preferred tree for city planting in the 19th century due to their shape and color. And they are beautiful trees, large, majestic, everything a tree should be. I assumed for quite a while that elms were pretty much a threatened species  well on their way to being extinct thanks to Dutch elm disease which ravaged the population. Dutch elm disease and the monocultivation of elms is Exhibit A in why diversity of planting is a good thing. Diversity provides built in resistance. I was both surprised and pleased to discover about a year ago that on the grounds of the science center where I work there were not one but two large elms. Outside my window. That I looked at every day. I just assumed they were cottonwoods, the other large, beautiful majestic tree in my ecosystem. It wasn't till...
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Climate Change Is Still Worse

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 My city is a municipal utility, which means the city owns the electric utility that provides the electricity to the community. An insert in our recent electric bill caught my attention. Apparently, there is a possibility of controlled energy outages which means under energy emergency conditions we would have to take assigned turns using electricity until demand goes down.  The city's explanation of contributing factors to the need for controlled outages was a deep sigh moment.  For someone who isn't familiar with our national electricity grid (no shame, it's generously described as arcane) this reads as if renewable energy and closure of coal-fueled energy generation were the definitive reasons for the controlled power outages. This is an oversimplification. The more technically precise reason for the controlled power outages is the lack of energy storage capacity on the grid. In other words, we have to store electricity made by renewables when they are producing for tim...
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Take Action Tuesdays

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  Well, that was fast. I no sooner announce that I am going to do 8 weeks of climate action per How to Save a Planet  (or How 2 Planet as I call it) then I find out that Tuesdays are action days. This week's action: learn more about energy storage and create a climate venn diagram to find the place where what brings you joy, what you're good at, and what needs doing intersect. My venn diagram is above. Since my job is in informal education and I am literally paid to do outreach about watersheds and soil health, this is a no-brainer. My climate action is to make the climate connection  to these topics explicit and then teach my little heart out. There is a long standing tension about whether education is action. And in my opinion it is when you are trying to effect systemic change, not because education automatically leads to behavior change or voting in a certain way but because it creates a social norm that people must agree with or resist. This is why the backlash to "C...
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