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A Better (Mac)intosh

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 22:08:06 +0000

Scientists and historians estimate that more than 14,000 varieties of apple have been cultivated in the United States, but over the past 100 years, much of that diversity has been lost as agriculture shifted its focus to large-scale production of just a few types. Today a mere 11 varieties account for more than 90 percent of all domestic apple sales. The good news is that researchers at the University of Arizona and the U.S. Department of Agriculture have recently identified 110 genetically unique types of apple on abandoned homesteads in the Southwest. The newly rediscovered heirloom varieties have survived for decades in the arid Southwest, indicating that they may contain genes that confer resistance to dry weather — an important trait that could come in handy for apple breeders if climate change increases the frequency or severity of droughts.

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A Better (Mac)intosh

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A Better (Mac)intosh

How to Fix the World

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 22:08:05 +0000

Life on a fault line should concentrate the mind, and make it serious. If you want to build an office tower in California, for example, laws require that you make sure it will stand up to a major earthquake. Over the years the specifics change, as both building technology and seismic research advance, but the general principle endures: politics, technology, and science should work together to protect people’s lives. Imagine, though, what earthquake preparedness would be like if it were handled the way American society deals with climate change. There would be little debate on the real choices ahead, but plenty of "debate" over the "alleged scientific proof" that earthquakes are actually real or that humans can do anything about them. Deniers would trot out one or two dissident seismologists to claim (falsely) that there is no scientific consensus. The reality-based community would take the bait and claim (falsely) that all scientists agree about everything. In An Inconvenient Truth , Al Gore states that there are 930 papers that agree on human-made climate change and zero that dispute it. But as the climatologist James Hansen recently noted, "That’s just not normal for science." Instead of pondering probabilities and degrees of confidence, we have allowed our deliberative processes to turn the world’s environmental crises into culture wars. Last December, for example, the biggest climate news concerned not scientists’ data but their stolen personal e-mails. As the sideshows go on, the risk of global catastrophe keeps rising. The entire human population now lives on an environmental fault line. So why, when we debate what to do about global warming or long-term sustainability, can’t we sound like grown-ups? In The Essential Engineer , Henry Petroski offers an answer. Americans, he suggests, are deluded about what science is and how it works. We want high-tech ways to cope with the risks of (to use a list of potential worldwide disasters that Petroski himself quotes) "a modern day global famine; an astronomical event leading to complete or partial extinction of life on Earth; a hundred- or thousand-year severe storm, earthquake or volcanic eruption; a terrorist attack that can kill tens or hundreds of thousands of people, or a climate change that could lead to total extinction of life on Earth." Instead, Petroski argues, American politics and culture prepare citizens for a fantasy world in which science eliminates all uncertainty, predicts the future perfectly, and provides technical solutions untainted by politics and money. "Conventional wisdom is that science is sure," he writes. "In fact that is often the way its findings are reported." Of course, the actual language of science is nothing like this. Only crazy cult leaders tell their followers that the next big earthquake will strike at 8:14 a.m. on April 12, 2016. The best scientists can do is to say there is a 46 percent probability that an earthquake with a 7.5 magnitude will strike Southern California in the next 30 years, and a "greater than 90 percent certainty" that human activities drive global warming. Those are impressive intellectual achievements, and we should be glad to fold them into policy debates. Instead, we want scientists to act like cult leaders. How did that happen? The role of theoretical physics in the development of the atomic bomb, Petroski believes, led us astray. For a few decades during and after World War II, with physicists "almost running amok in political influence," it really did seem that abstract, all-knowing science was the root of progress, both for our understanding of nature and our ability to make airplanes, cell phones, and other useful stuff. In reality, knowledge more often flows from material progress. "The rocket came before the mathematical solution to the problem of rocket flight," Petroski notes. "Inventors seldom have the patience of scientists." From steamships to pasteurization to refrigeration to the earthquake-resistant Golden Gate Bridge, the typical history of invention belongs to practical people trying to make things that we can use, building on what has come before. Revolutionary leaps are rare, unintended consequences ever-present, and a certain amount of failure is inevitable. Indeed, Petroski writes, it is failure that teaches inventors how to improve. The people plodding along this path don’t refine beautiful theories or wait for perfect insights. They just get things done. Approvingly, Petroski quotes a "frequently cited” definition of structural engineering: "the art of assembling materials whose properties we do not fully understand into arrangements we cannot fully analyze to support loads we cannot fully predict — and to do so in a convincing enough fashion so that the public has complete confidence in the resultant structures." The driver of progress, then, isn’t pure science (which often brings up the rear, advancing thanks to the new instruments and data created by the practical inventors). It’s engineering, broadly defined as the business of making things people can use out of what is available, with whatever knowledge is at hand, and accepting the constraints of politics, money, and human nature. "Engineers do not need to imagine the unimaginable," Petroski writes. "They have to imagine the manageable." As a claim about the history of progress, this is an extreme position in a long-standing debate. (Do new machines foster new thought, or does new thinking lead to new machines? Surely it’s a little of both.) And Petroski, a professor of civil engineering at Duke University who has written 15 books (counting this one) that explain the engineer’s mind-set, lays it on thick. In The Essential Engineer , scientists merely know, but engineers do . Petroski’s scientists are passive and innately pessimistic, content to study nature and think their impractical "out of this world" thoughts. But engineers are active, upbeat, and always useful. After all, Petroski writes, while scientists "tend to be more flamboyant than engineers" and "sometimes appear to think of themselves as special," it’s the engineers who, though they have "few if any literary allusions or plays on words in their work," are "in a position to change the world, not just study it." If this makes Petroski sound as if he has a chip on his shoulder, let me hasten to clarify: it’s a boulder, and it makes him, and his argument, look small. The peevish tone is unfortunate, because the book makes a valuable point. Engineering as Petroski describes it is the human side of our science-based civilization. It involves all the mess and strife from which we dream that pure science is immune: incomplete knowledge, insufficient budgets, political trade-offs, fads, fears, and foibles. When we forget all this, we end up expecting inhuman perfection from scientists. We want to know exactly how climate change is happening and precisely what we can do about it. Hence the sorry state of climate politics: if you believe science can know everything , then the slightest uncertainty or disagreement can make science look like it doesn’t know anything. People who think too much of science, in other words, will end up thinking too little of it. So Petroski is right to encourage an engineer’s grown-up perspective. But he goes too far, and it’s not just in his self-indulgent grousing about the "separate and unequal" professional relationships of scientists and engineers. The Essential Engineer isn’t an argument for correcting the imbalance; it’s a call for reversing it. On climate change, for example, Petroski believes we’ve had too much study and not enough action. It’s not enough for scientists to do science, he says; they should also do engineering, or let the engineers do it themselves: "Scientists should either hand the problem over to engineers or engage not only in science relevant to climate change but also in engineering means to control it." But global warming is exactly the kind of problem for which his get-it-done, use-what-we-know solutions could be disastrous. Like any good engineer, Petroski wants to plan our actions on global warming by adding up the dollars and cents and using what knowledge we have. After all, "engineering is all about designing devices and systems that satisfy the constraints imposed by managers and regulators." That leads him to accept without question the supposedly hardheaded, by-the-numbers reasoning of Bjørn Lomborg, the Danish political scientist who claims society should spend its scarce resources on problems other than climate change. Petroski quotes Lomborg as saying that "spending an extra dollar cutting CO2 to combat climate change generates less than one dollar of good, even when we add up all the economic and environmental benefits." These numbers have been disputed by economists, but there’s a larger problem with this kind of analysis: it works only if we can be certain we know exactly how much good will result in 2030 from a choice made in 2010. In other words, it assumes that past experience is a good guide to the future. Petroski, eager to accept the constraints imposed by managers and regulators, buys that premise without question. But climate scientists, whose discipline gave us the term "butterfly effect," know that the planet’s natural history is nonlinear. Sudden shifts in global climate have occurred out of all proportion to their causes, and in those times the past was no guide to the future at all. Before we try to engineer the climate, then, it’s probably a good idea to learn more about what could go wrong. Hence, we’re lucky we still have some people pursuing impractical knowledge instead of just making better refrigerators at a better price. Petroski prefers doing to knowing; he wants to roll up his sleeves and start geo-engineering. But a society that takes his advice to heart could end up not knowing what it’s doing.

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How to Fix the World

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How to Fix the World

An Ancient Carbon Fix

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 22:08:04 +0000

Sometime around 2000 B.C., the Amazon people discovered a trick for improving crop yields. They found that plowing the charred remains of burned food scraps, manure, and other organic waste into carbon-poor soil made plants grow better. What they didn’t know was that they had also discovered a method of carbon sequestration that could benefit a future civilization: ours. When allowed to decompose naturally, wood chips, yard clippings, cornstalks, and other types of organic matter give off about 90 percent of their carbon in the form of methane and carbon dioxide. But cooking them at high heat under low-oxygen conditions forms what’s known as biochar, which retains as much as 50 percent of the organic material’s original carbon. Some scientists who study biochar, including those at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, argue that we could theoretically dial back global warming by turning plant waste into biochar and mixing it into soil. The British company Carbon Gold is among the first to try to cash in on biochar’s promise. Though neither the United Kingdom nor the United States has implemented policies that would promote biochar, as of February, Australian political leaders were debating plans to make biochar a centerpiece of the country’s carbon-cutting effort.

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An Ancient Carbon Fix

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An Ancient Carbon Fix

Home, Sweet Home

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 22:07:58 +0000

When American Municipal Power announced last fall that it had canceled plans to build a new coal-fired power plant in southeastern Ohio, NRDC and its allies rejoiced. For senior attorney Anjali Jaiswal, who had helped devise the legal strategy to fight the proposed plant, it was a particularly meaningful victory. She spent much of her childhood in Ohio — "I love Cleveland!" she readily exclaims — and the battle over the power plant represents what she values most about environmental law: the ability to make real change in her own backyard. Jaiswal’s affinity for protecting the places she has called home bodes well for the planet: she’s had a lot of backyards in her 35 years. Jaiswal was born in India, but her family moved to the United States when she was just 3 years old, first to Dallas and then to Akron, Cleveland, and San Diego. By the time she was in high school, the Jaiswal family was settled in the Los Angeles area. Since joining NRDC in 2001, Jaiswal has fought and won many local battles. First based in the organization’s Southern California office, she worked to protect and improve water quality in rivers, streams, and coastal areas, waging battles that yielded immediate, tangible results. Jaiswal and other members of NRDC’s California staff have also successfully advocated for upgrades to a sewage treatment plant on the central coast, where sea otters in Morro Bay were being sickened by the discharge of dirty water. She waged legal battles to strengthen water pollution controls and to stop dairies in Southern California from dumping waste into the Santa Ana River. In the Sacramento area, she helped win the fight to require that irrigation projects leave more water in ecosystems, shielding endangered fish populations from further degradation. "We said, ‘This is the law, this is the science. You have to rule for us,’" she remembers. "It was a lot of sleepless nights and hard, hard work, but we won." Last year, as Jaiswal was immersed in state and local legal offensives, a colleague approached her about trying international work. "I was conflicted," she says. "I really like working on local issues as a litigator." But as she heard more, her choice became clear. NRDC was looking to start an initiative in India, through which it hoped to bring clean energy and efficiency technologies to a country undergoing tremendous development and modernization. As the country of her birth, it was a place full of import for her. She said yes. Jaiswal had visited India several times as an adult. In 2005 she took a leave from NRDC and spent three months in New Delhi working on pollution control through the Nehru Fulbright Indo-American Environmental Leadership Program. She was gratified by how easily her knowledge transferred to a new setting, allowing her to help with a campaign to improve sewage treatment near the Ganges River. "I knew what sewage plants looked like, their operation, their energy issues," she says. "I knew about compliance and enforcement." She also knew the country on a personal level, having visited relatives in her father’s village in Gujarat, India’s westernmost state, which shares a border with Pakistan. Her experiences there gave her a snapshot of the broad challenges India faces. One evening, she and a cousin walked out into the tobacco fields surrounding the village. Her cousin wanted to show off the village’s new power plant — a sign of progress. Jaiswal couldn’t help but see the environmental repercussions of the emissions spewing from the towering smokestacks. India and the United States have two important things in common: they have large English-speaking populations and are democracies, making collaboration easier than in other rapidly developing countries, such as China. Though NRDC’s work in India is full of potential, Jaiswal says, the challenges that lie ahead are significant: some 80 percent of the infrastructure the country will need by 2030 has yet to be built, and the number of motor vehicles on the road is expected to quadruple by 2020. The environmental ramifications of India’s path forward will be felt around the world. Jaiswal and Jacob Scherr, director of NRDC’s international program, launched the India initiative last June. Their goals include fostering U.S.-India cooperation on clean energy and climate, strengthening environmental compliance and enforcement, and incorporating energy-efficiency standards into building codes to reduce carbon emissions. "One of the great challenges in India is that there are laws on the books that are not implemented or enforced," Scherr says. "Anjali is in an excellent position to explain how we handle these problems in the United States and to translate her experiences to meet the needs in India." Jaiswal sometimes thinks back to her father’s village in Gujarat. The memory she recalls is a hopeful one — that of a relative proudly leading her up to the roof to show off a new possession, the village’s first solar cookstove.

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Home, Sweet Home

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Home, Sweet Home

Honda’s FCX Clarity: How It Works

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 22:07:57 +0000

The key to a hydrogen-powered vehicle is the fuel cell stack (A), which operates like a miniature power plant, generating electricity to drive the car’s motor (B). By using compressed hydrogen stored in a tank (C) behind the rear seat and combining it with atmospheric oxygen, the process produces no CO2 or other pollutants. With thinner fuel cells and a smaller box than previous designs, the V Flow Honda FC Stack fits neatly into the car’s central tunnel between the front seats. When extra power is required for start-up and acceleration, electricity from the fuel cell stack is supplemented by a lithium-ion battery (D). When the car decelerates, the electric motor acts as a generator, converting kinetic energy into electricity, which is then stored in the battery.

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Honda’s FCX Clarity: How It Works

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Honda’s FCX Clarity: How It Works

True Confessions of a Citizen Scientist

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 22:07:56 +0000

Nine years ago, I visited London’s Natural History Museum, a massive building reminiscent of a cathedral with its fawn and blue-gray stone, arched windows, and pinnacles, but with the whimsical touch of animals molded and cast in terra cotta on every wall inside and out. At the time, I was doing research for a book on butterflies. With these credentials — knowing something about writing and little about butterflies — I was permitted entrance to the ground floor of the entomology department, an inner sanctum that went up and down six floors and contained 30 million insects in 120,000 drawers. For an afternoon, I walked dimly lit corridors and opened wooden cabinets to reveal the still-astonishing beauty of insects caught more than a hundred years ago: tiger swallowtails, red admirals, checkered whites, snouts, tortoiseshells. My guides at the museum were men and women working on such projects as the 18-volume series Moths of Borneo or tracking down the British Empire’s archenemies of collections everywhere: book lice and carpet beetles. Late in the day, I had an interview with the museum’s Keeper of Entomology, Dick Vane-Wright. We talked about serious matters like the deforestation of the Philippines and the declining numbers of butterflies in the world. We also chatted at length about eating insects. When the Natural History Museum reprinted the classic 1885 tract "Why Not Eat Insects?" ("Why not indeed!" asked the author. "I see every reason why cabbages should be thus served up, surrounded with a delicately flavored fringe of the caterpillars which feed upon them."), Vane-Wright went on a promotional tour as the quintessential good sport, crunching locusts over the radio and frying up mealworms on the BBC. During the course of our interview, he explained, "Eating insects is a challenge of social mores and cultural norms. It punctures people’s pomposity." At the end of our conversation, the Keeper of Entomology said something that has stayed with me for years: "There is so much we don’t know!" Vane-Wright sounded excited and distressed at the same time. "You could spend a week studying some obscure insect and you would then know more than anyone else on the planet. Our ignorance is profound." Nodding wisely, I wrote the comment down in my notebook. I liked its humility. And I liked its challenge and implied sense of wonder — there is still so much to discover. Almost a decade later, the import of Vane-Wright’s words has only deepened. Certainly our humility has deepened. There is so much we don’t know about climate change, say, and about what life will be like without the polar ice caps or the Amazon rainforest. Our ignorance is more profound than we thought. At the same time, as we lose about a hundred species a day in the current mass extinction, the idea that there is still so much to discover strikes me as a kind of miracle. We think we’ve beaten the world flat, hammered out the creases, starched the collar, hung her up to dry. We’ve turned the earth into our private estate — a garden here, a junkyard there — and as such it feels no longer wild, no longer mysterious. And yet… You could spend a week studying some obscure insect and you would then know more than anyone else on the planet . It’s a strangely cheerful thought. Could it be true? Humans have managed to find and describe an estimated 1.9 million species, about a million of them insects. Every year about 2,400 beetles and 1,200 flies are added to the list. Most biologists believe there are more than 10 million animal species in the world still to discover. In the United States, some 73,000 animal and plant species are unnamed. Recently, in a book called Red Desert: The History of a Place , an entomologist wrote about spending 36 hours sampling insects in the Wyoming desert, making him the world’s leading expert on the area’s arthropods. Of the 5,000 insect species that live in the desert, he estimated that several dozen were not known to science. When the Keeper of Entomology at the Natural History Museum said "you" could spend a week studying some obscure insect and become a world authority, the you in that sentence was an entomologist. Only an entomologist could gain the necessary knowledge in such a short time, not someone like me who doesn’t know a beetle’s anterior apodemes from its mesonotal stridulatory file. Someone like me would take much longer. Someone like me would have to immerse herself in insect physiology as well as general principles of ecology, choose her obscure insect carefully (focusing on ease of collection and observation), and learn some basic field research and laboratory techniques. Someone like me would need to work her way up from rank amateur to professional amateur, often abbreviated to pro-am, also known as citizen scientist. For some time now, traditional research in entomology — how insects behave and where they live — has been the realm of the professional amateur. Partly this is because there are so many species to keep track of and so many good field guides. And then there are all the new Internet sites to help the amateur do this work. While there is some concern that amateurs aren’t rigorous or detailed enough, many scientists welcome the help, especially as climate change causes species to head north or south or disappear altogether. You could spend a week studying some obscure insect and you would then know more than anyone else on the planet. I have always wanted to be a field biologist. I imagine Zen-like moments watching a leaf, hours and days that pass like a dream, sun-kissed, plant-besotted. I imagine a kind of rapture and loss of ego. John Burroughs, a nineteenth-century American naturalist, wrote that he went to nature "to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in tune once more." Burroughs captures exactly my own experience walking through the rural West. I enlarge in nature. I calm down. At the same time, eventually I get bored. Eventually I go home because my work (my writing, my students, my laundry) is elsewhere. But what if that employment, my engagement with the world, was right there, in the largeness and calm of nature? For Burroughs and other naturalists, a passion for what is obscure and unsung in nature is about passion itself. This is the herpetologist mad for a leopard frog, the botanist most happy parsing forbs. In some way, such unworldly love is about authenticity. To devote your life to crayfish? That’s authentic. Such love is also about competence and a vertical burrowing into knowledge. Vertical would be a new direction for me, since my understanding of the world is almost completely horizontal. I know a little bit about a lot. I stretch around the world knowing a little bit about state politics, national scandals, ocean chemistry, and Indonesia. My reach is long, but I don’t go deep. The woman (scientist, pro-am, or rank amateur) who wants to understand the Canyon Rubyspot damselfly, however, must think differently. She must also know about canopied streams, insectivorous bats, and flycatchers. She must think vertical, burrowing into one place. I have always wanted to be John Burroughs, and I have also wanted to be a rock-and-roll musician. Here I am, a woman in her fifties, in good physical shape, with a lively mind, having zero chance of becoming so many things — an ER doctor or the creator of cool television shows. We are defined by our limits as much as our loves. At every point in life, there is a long list of what we will not ever be. You could spend a week studying some obscure insect and you would then know more than anyone else on the planet. John Burroughs was one of those semi-annoying optimists. "If you think you can do it, you can," he wrote. "Leap and the net will appear." Could I take not a week but many weeks in my life and become what I was not: a "leading world authority" on some obscure species of mite or dragonfly in the Gila Valley of southwestern New Mexico, which also happens to be my own backyard? I am searching in my kitchen drawer for cheesecloth. Marriage is about balance. My husband is a saver. I am a purger. Just last week, I purged this kitchen drawer of a wad of cheesecloth that I pretended had gone stale. We never use cheesecloth! But now I need it for my tiny pink-orange eggs and tiny black larvae and somewhat larger black larvae and rather active Calligrapha serpentina adult beetles that I am keeping in a series of labeled jars. A square of cheesecloth secured with a rubber band would be the perfect lid, preventing escape while allowing in air. I have also been told to wet a wad of cheesecloth and leave it in the jar so the insects won’t desiccate. I feel a familiar stab: purger’s regret. In my efforts to become a leading world authority, I have already made my first big mistake. I did not choose Calligrapha serpentina for its obscurity. I went for beauty instead. This leaf beetle is a stunner, with shiny green-gold wings marked by a sinuous, symmetrical pattern of black dashes, swirls, and fillips. Even the name is beautiful, the name of the lover in a poem, "Oh, Calligrapha! Oh, Serpentina!" Typing just a description of this insect into Google gets me 10 photos on BugGuide.net. Fortunately, the life cycle of Calligrapha serpentina is not as celebrated or well known. As a member of the large and commonly encountered beetle family Chrysomelidae , in the genus Calligrapha (with more than 80 recognized species native to North and South America), this insect is not even noteworthy as a pest, unlike its cousins the potato, cucumber, asparagus, and bean leaf beetles. As one entomologist explained to me in an e-mail: "In spite of their showy appearance, little is known about the life history of most species of Calligrapha . Much of the information that you desire has never been published. If you carefully document and publish your observations, they would constitute valuable scientific contributions." That was exactly what I wanted to hear. Early in the summer of 2009, when I first dreamed of becoming a pro-am, dozens of these metallic green beetles were vigorously mating on the leaves of the globe mallow ( Sphaeralcea augustifolia ) growing in my yard. About one centimeter long, the insects clamored and humped on top of one another like so many miniature Volkswagen pileups. On the underside of globe mallow leaves, their eggs could be found massed irregularly in pink-orange groups, each cylindrical pink-orange egg about one millimeter long with smooth and shining ends. Although I never observed a beetle laying eggs, in 1908 the zoologist Robert Hegner watched a similar species and wrote one of the few descriptions. As the insect clings to the undersurface of a leaf, the tip of its abdomen "moves rhythmically up and down about fifteen times at intervals of a little less than one second," he wrote. Following a drop of colorless liquid, the egg emerges and is attached to the leaf by the fluid. The insect shifts slightly, and the process begins again. Hegner studied 54 pairs of beetles of three species, Calligrapha multipunctata , Calligrapha bigsbyana , and Calligrapha lunata , with host plants of willow and wild rose. The females, slightly larger than the males, each produced an average of 315 eggs from June 15 to August 27. The average time for hatching was about six days, and the small emerging larvae were gregarious, eating their host plant together, shedding their skins together as they grew larger, dropping to the soil to pupate at about the same time, and emerging together as adults. Hegner found the average larval stage to be 20 days and the average pupal stage 12 days — about 38 days from egg to beetle. My observations of Calligrapha serpentina were much the same, although I never had as many insects or watched their rhythmic movements quite so closely. I did raise a number of eggs to adults, cheering on as the squirming dots of black broke out of their egg cases, began to eat the leaf they stood on, and grew steadily into dark, hairy lumps with reddish-brown heads and six legs. As beetle larvae grow and shed their skin, each new stage is called an instar. Compared with its former miniatures, the final instar of Calligrapha serpentina seemed monstrous — a great galumphing fellow covered in long bristles, the head and front legs seeming to strain and heave their appendage of a body like Jabba the Hutt in the Star Wars series. In my role as voyeur, I was also a manipulator, a kind of God in the life of Calligrapha serpentina . Not all of my charges survived. In truth, the habitat I provided was hit or miss. Too much water, and a fungus could grow that would attack the eggs. Too little water, and the larvae dried up. I sometimes had to travel with my jars (who can you really trust to feed your larvae?) and wondered about the effect of the car’s motion. I knew that temperature could alter the timing of my beetles’ hatching and growing, and I worried that the jars were too much in the sun. Or in the shade? Some of my black dots may have been worried too. A surprising number of them escaped through the holes in the cheesecloth. In the end, these insects may have done better with me than in the wild, where they would have been constantly exposed to predators. Whenever I felt particularly inept, I went online. Sites such as buglifecycles.com and BugGuide.net offer all kinds of information and anecdotes. Asked nicely, professional entomologists readily send advice. One consoled me: "Freezing excess immatures is a painless (to them) and effective method of discarding insects you probably cannot and/or should not release locally. Alas, there is much death and death-dealing in this work." This same entomologist concluded: "Please remember, specimens are worthless without data. THIS IS ALL ABOUT THE DATA. And it’s about sharing your data through publication for the entertainment and education of others. I assign a specimen number to every animal or series of like animals when I collect them. These numbers go on their jars, written on masking tape. So a monarch larva gets the number 9856, say, and a series of pyralid caterpillars in their communal webbing initially gets the number 9857, with each caterpillar getting a letter code when they are isolated, as 9857-A, 9857-B, etc. Thus when I get two parasitoids, different wasp species, from jar 9857-M, I know that both wasps developed inside A SINGLE CATERPILLAR, which is high quality information." One day, in my own jars, a number of the monstrous black instars of Calligrapha serpentina started turning pinkish-orange and then became wholly pinkish-orange and finally could be seen writhing and thrusting out their abdomens in what appeared to be a painful and desperate act. It could be that this is how instars bury themselves in the dirt in order to pupate. I don’t know. I couldn’t watch for long because I had to go to work (a fact that instantly labels me Not a Real Naturalist). Later I would find the pupae motionless in the soil that I had put in the bottom of the jar. Beetles often pupate naked, without a cocoon or protective casing. Under my hand magnifier, each pink-orange oval seemed to contain a curled-up, mummylike creature beneath a translucent coating — although there may have been no actual coating, only the shiny surface of the half-forming beetle. Days later still, the miracle: metamorphosis, the great spiritual metaphor and enactment of myth. Sometimes I could see the patterned wings under what still looked like a thin covering and then the legs were distinct and then the beetle quivered and was there, moving as if dazed, fumbling in the dirt. In a few moments the wings had dried and the miracle began to lumber across the bottom of the jar toward a globe mallow leaf. Now — and again and again as the beetles pupated and emerged — I saw that the resulting insect was beautifully colored red and black, not green and black. Had I raised up the wrong species? Was I a kind of anti-naturalist? Particularly gifted in doing the wrong thing? Was this some effect of an artificial environment? Or, since some beetles are known to hybridize, perhaps this represented a cross between species? As my jars filled up with pure red and black beetles, all looking alike, I theorized that red was a juvenile stage — a possibility no one had mentioned to me or discussed in the scientific literature. In about a week, the red beetles turned green. Testable question. Hypothesis. Conclusion. I felt like a kid who had just won first prize at the science fair. Okay, this was not the first of many "valuable scientific contributions." I never could determine how many instars the larvae went through. My examination of the pupae was hardly thorough and did not include dissection. As important, I am not sure how the beetle overwinters. I think the last adult generation of the season goes dormant once the temperature drops. (By the first of September, I could not find any beetles outside on my globe mallow.) But I wouldn’t bet my life on it. I also never became comfortable with beetle anatomy. In volume 2 of American Beetles, when I am faced with a description of Chrysomelidae in which the dorsum is "usually glabrous, vestiture when present sparse to dense and consisting of simple hairs," I can only murmur back, " ‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves/Did gyre and gimble in the wabe…" I do believe, however — and I am proud of this — that I have a fairly complete collection of all the papers ever written on Calligrapha serpentina , including the 1897 "Biological Notes on Some Coleoptera From New Mexico," the heavily illustrated 1941 "Relationships Within the Family Chrysomelidae as Indicated by the Male Genitalia of Certain Species," and the 2006 "The Evolution of Unisexuality in Calligrapha Leaf Beetles." It is a small personal library my friends are welcome to peruse on any weekday from 9 a.m. to noon. Unfortunately, my own documentation was essentially confined to notes on my desk calendar, with "eggs in Jar #2 hatched" sandwiched between "call optometrist" and "potluck at Madge’s, make salad." I have no plans to publish, only to e-mail a few entomologists ("I think the red coloring of Calligrapha serpentina is the juvenile phase! I’m so excited!") and tell my new friends on buglifecycles.com and BugGuide.net . I did not, did not, become a leading world authority on Calligrapha serpentina . And, yes, I feel bad about withholding that information until near the end of this essay. Sorry. What I did do was add my voice to a chorus, standing shoulder to shoulder in that growing crowd of citizen scientists who rarely become individual experts but who contribute to the collective expertise. We send our observations to the real experts who can then make them part of their research and publication. Moreover, for the citizen scientist, this is not really about publishing data, as important as that is. The further job of the citizen scientist is to mesh the world of science with, well, the world of citizenry. We trumpet the beauty of Calligrapha serpentina to friends, co-workers, relatives, real estate developers, and politicians. The more we fall in love with our own backyard — with the marvel and complexity of life — the more committed we are to protecting its diversity. In my case, once I started looking for one beautiful green and black beetle, I found so much more: many more eggs, brown or white, red or yellow, and many more larvae, some that deceive by looking like bird droppings and some that hide by rolling up in leaves. In a single morning, I might find a marbled orb weaver like some aproned, plump grandma, 1,675 ants, and the grace of a pipevine swallowtail. I saw that Dick Vane-Wright was truly right when he said, "There is so much we don’t know," and that lots of things I don’t know are outside my front door, the theater of insects playing all summer long. Nor is my infatuation with Calligrapha serpentina over. I have learned that I am not really made for the exacting work of a scientist, the tedium of 9857-A, 9857-B, 9857-C. A leading world authority needs many more jars and would label them better. But I do have plans next fall for a large outdoor terrarium filled with the larvae and beetles of Calligrapha serpentina and their host plant. As cold weather approaches and the globe mallow dies, I can watch and observe. How do these beetles overwinter? I hope to find out.

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True Confessions of a Citizen Scientist

NRDC: Why Insects Matter

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 22:07:54 +0000

NRDC’s Science Center is led by Gabriela Chavarria, an expert on bees who earned her doctorate in entomology under E. O. Wilson . She works to protect insects — particularly bees-by fighting to remove toxic chemicals from the environment. What can the average citizen do to protect bees? The next time you walk out into your backyard, look around. Insects are the little creatures that run the world. Bees pollinate many of our crops, yet they continue to be threatened by pesticides and other toxic chemicals. We tend to be afraid of bees, but 95 percent of them do not sting. If you find a bee’s nest, don’t knock it down. Find a local beekeeper in the yellow pages and call to report the hive. Beekeepers are increasingly interested in collecting feral hives to breed more robust and genetically diverse bees. You can also go to beesafe.org to learn more about taking other actions to protect bees. Where is the scientific consensus on what’s happening to honey bees? Scientists studying colony collapse disorder argue that a combination of factors could be causing bees to abandon their hives, including pesticide exposure, invasive parasitic mites, a nutritionally inadequate food supply, and severalviruses that targets bees’ immune systems.. NRDC is working to curb the use of the worst of those pesticides. Which pesticides should we try to avoid in our own gardens? Well, avoiding all pesticides is best. If you do use a pesticide, don’t use them in combination. The additive effects can be especially harmful. And it’s important to read labels and instructions on the products you do buy. Not only do you want to avoid the nastiest chemicals, you also want to avoid over-spraying. You don’t need to empty the whole can at once. If you read the label you will see that a small spray is plenty. Some pesticides are more toxic to bees and other beneficial insects than others. Four groups of chemicals are particularly harmful, so home gardeners should try to avoid them. They include clothianidin (commonly used on corn and canola), dinotefuran (used on cabbage, bell peppers, cotton, grapes, and melons), imidacloprid (used on cabbage, pumpkins, cotton, blueberries, citrus, grapes, and melons) and thiamethoxam (used on bell peppers, cotton, cantaloupes, cherries, pears, strawberries, watermelons). What is NRDC doing to try to curtail the use of pesticides that are harmful to bees and other beneficial insects? We’re trying to keep the worst ones off the market. About two years ago the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approved the use of a new type of pesticide, spirotetramat, which was marketed by Bayer under the trade names Movento and Ultor and interrupts the process of cell division in insects. Bayer applied for approval to use spirotetramat on crops including apples, pears, peaches, oranges, tomatoes, grapes, strawberries, almonds, and spinach. Beekeepers and scientists have expressed concern over Movento’s potential impact on beneficial insects such as honeybees. The pesticide impairs the insect’s ability to reproduce and the EPA’s review of Bayer’s scientific studies found that trace residues of Movento brought back to the hive could cause significant mortality in honeybee larvae. The approval process went forward without the advance notice and opportunity for public comment that is required by federal law and the EPA’s own regulations so NRDC filed suit. In December, a federal court in New York invalidated the approval and the ruling went into effect on January 15, making future sales of spirotetramat illegal. Sounds like we won’t have to worry about dousing backyard bees with spirotetramat. Any other tips for protecting bees at home? Do your best to turn your garden into a safe haven for insects. Use native plants that bloom throughout the growing season. That creates a healthy buffet of diverse nutrients for local pollinators. Creating nesting sites — remember that 95% of bees don’t sting! This is safe! — and water sources is also important. Avoid planting flowers that carry the label “Pollen Free”: the amount of pollen flowers produce is minimal, and believe me they are not the ones responsible for most allergies. Usually wind pollinated plants are the ones that trigger allergy symptoms since they produce massive amounts of pollen. Bees come to your garden to eat, so make sure you have some pollen for them. NRDC scientists have put together a series of additional tips and guidelines to help gardeners get started.

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NRDC: Why Insects Matter

Salt River Solar & Wind Invites Customers to Go Solar! at the Maricopa County

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0000

Salt River Solar & Wind (http://www.saltriverenergy.com) invites customers to bring a copy of their electricity bill to receive a free solar quote from Booth #117 at the Maricopa County Home & Garden Show on March 5th - 7th at the University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale on March 5th – 7th from 10:00 am to 7:00 pm.

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Salt River Solar & Wind Invites Customers to Go Solar! at the Maricopa County

OwnEnergy & Horn Wind Complete 51-MW Windthorst Project

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0000

OwnEnergy and Horn Wind have completed development of a 51-megawatt (MW) wind power project in Texas. The Windthorst-1 project is located near Windthorst, Texas, just outside of Greater Dallas, in the ERCOT North Zone.

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OwnEnergy & Horn Wind Complete 51-MW Windthorst Project

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OwnEnergy & Horn Wind Complete 51-MW Windthorst Project

Get Smart – the sensible solution

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0000

An illustrious meeting of the most influential Power and Energy suppliers took place this week in Germany. Chaired by Michael Lewis MD Eon Renewables, the challenge of the meeting was to look at innovative ways to source 20% of energy needs from renewables.

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Get Smart – the sensible solution