Author Archives: morinwt

Nature Inspiration: Connection to Nature

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Sometimes it can be hard for people to feel connected to the natural world; for some it is obviously more difficult than for others. Especially living in an urban environment like Charleston, the routines of everyday life can cause the natural world to slip the mind. I have always felt pretty connected to nature because I grew up hiking, camping, and fishing with my family, but I would say that living in Charleston for the past four years has made me feel a bit disconnected. However, every time that I get the chance to immerse myself in nature, I immediately feel that strong connection that I grew up fostering. For example, when I went to Colorado with my dad, a few summers ago, I was in awe of the raw beauty it had to offer. The red rock formations in the Garden of the Gods are probably still to this day one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. On top of this, the view from the top of Pike’s Peak was sublime. For my own eyes, it was very easy to appreciate the raw power of Mother Nature and how lucky we are to live on this Earth. Unfortunately, these thoughts generally only come into my head when I am immersed in nature, which is not very often as a resident of Charleston.

 

Over spring break this year I went to Costa Rica, which is a country full of natural beauty. My friends and I stayed at a resort in Tamarindo, which is a small town on the Pacific Ocean. One day while I was there, I decided to go sit on the beach without my phone and reflect about my connection with nature and the importance of having a connection with nature. As I sat there and watched the very large waves crash on the rock formations coupled with the palm trees swaying in the breeze, I decided that a personal connection with nature should be important to everyone on this planet. This is our home, and it is the only home that we have. As powerful as nature is, humans are infinitely more powerful due to our ability to affect change in nature. A lot of the damages to the environment and changes in climate that have been caused by humans came before scientific knowledge on the subject, but now the data is in and it is very clear that our actions are having a great effect on the planet. It is great that we now understand what is going on, but that doesn’t necessarily make it easy for policy-makers to effect change on what we are doing to the environment. For something to truly be done about climate change, people must hold themselves individually accountable and make changes in their own lives to help the planet. I believe that people who do not feel a strong connection to the natural world probably do not care enough to make these changes. In other words, the importance of having a connection to the natural world cannot be understated, especially in generations moving forward

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News Report: Plummeting insect numbers ‘threaten collapse of nature’

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News Report Take-away

 

i) Article Title:

Plummeting insect numbers ‘threaten collapse of nature’

 

ii) Citation and Link:

Carrington, D. (2019, February 10). Plummeting insect numbers ‘threaten collapse of nature’. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeting-insect-numbers-threaten-collapse-of-nature

 

iii) Main ideas:

  • Source: The Guardian
  • The questions:
    • What: rapid decline in population
    • Who: insects
    • Where: globally
    • When: over past half century
    • Why/how: intensive agriculture, urbanization, climate change
  • Relevance to society: without insects, ecosystems across the globe would collapse
  • Relevance to the course: this decline is caused by factors that we have studied in this class
  • Questions raised:
    • How can this global decline be stopped, or can it even be stopped?

 

Talking points:

  • More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered
  • The rate of extinction is eight times faster than for mammals, birds, and reptiles
  • Total mass is falling 2.5% per year, it is estimated that they could vanish within a century
  • Report comes from the journal Biological Conservation, written by Francisco Sanchez-Bayo at University of Sydney, Australia and Kris Wyckhuys at China Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing
  • Planet is at the start of the 6thmass extinction, but larger animals are easier to study
  • Insects are the most varied and abundant animals, outweigh humans by 17 times
  • Insects are essential for all ecosystems because as food for other animals, pollinators, and recyclers of nutrients
  • Large scale collapses have been reported in Puerto Rico and Germany but the issue is global
  • Intensive agriculture is the main driver of the declines, particularly the heavy use of pesticides
  • Urbanization and climate change are also factors
  • One of biggest impacts is loss of food for birds, reptiles, and amphibians, and fish
  • 98% fall in ground insects in Puerto Rico the past 35 years
  • Butterfly and moths among worst hit, butterfly species fell by 58% in UK from 2000-2009
  • Bees also seriously affected, only half of bumblebee species in Oklahoma from 1949 present in 2013
  • 6 million honeybee colonies in US in 1947, 3.5 million have been lost since
  • Beetles are in decline too, not much is known about flies, ants, crickets, etc. but there is no reason to believe they are faring better
  • Small number of adaptive species are increasing in number, but they do not outweigh the losses
  • Common eastern bumblebee is increasing in US due to tolerance to insecticides
  • Decline that began in the 1950s or 60s has been accelerated over the past few decades by new classes of insecticides such as neonicotinoids and fipronil
  • Most of the lost in tropical areas without agriculture attributed to climate change
  • Unusually strong language used in the review was not “alarmist”, they just need people to wake up

Public Health Emergencies and their Relation to Environmental Issues

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A few weeks ago, on January 28th, I attended an event hosted by the Department of Health and Human Performance at the College. The event was a presentation given Dr. Stephen Redd, the Deputy Director for Public Health Service and Implementation Science and the Director for the Center for Preparedness and Response at the CDC in Atlanta. His presentation was titled The Challenge of Preparing for the Unexpected with Public Health Emergencies. The presentation was both interesting and informative. It was not surprising to find out that the battle against public health emergencies and the battle against climate change and for sustainability have a lot in common.

 

The first striking similarity that I see between public health emergencies and climate change/environmental injustice is that the latter is an emergency as well, although many people don’t realize it. At the beginning of his presentation, Dr. Redd defined an emergency and listed some characteristics that are necessary for the people leading the fight against public health emergencies to have. It is important to have urgency in decision making, complete information about the issue that you are facing, and the resources to get the job done. I think that these characteristics translate almost perfectly to combating environmental injustice, especially the one about having complete information. How can world leaders and policy makers help save the planet or even care to do so if they do not know the true effects that humans are having on the long-term sustainability of the planet? Dr. Redd went on to group public health emergency events into three different categories; predictable events, predicted events, and emerging events. After he gave examples for all three categories, I noticed that all the examples he gave for predicted events were weather events (hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and floods). He then did what I expected him to do and acknowledged the fact that with climate change, the frequency and impact of these events are increasing over recent years (his example was the frequency the College has had to cancel class recently because of hurricanes and floods).

 

Next he talked about the main drivers of public health emergency events, two of which I found to be very relevant to climate change and sustainability. He said the largest driver was rapid population growth, which I would argue is also the largest driver for climate change and lack of sustainable living. The other driver was exposure to domestic animals raised for food production (interestingly he said that 980 million pigs are slaughtered every year worldwide). Although exposure to domesticated animals doesn’t have much to do with sustainability, the sheer number of domesticated animals worldwide and the amount of land used for food production does. I’m not an expert, but I do know that cutting down forests for food production (such as the Amazon in Brazil for cattle production) is depleting one of the largest carbon sinks on the planet. Raising animals for food is also must less efficient than farming fruits and vegetable (in other words it takes up much more land). Lastly, domestic animals such as cattle, pigs, and chickens produce carbon dioxide rather than using it to grow like plants do.

 

I learned a lot from Dr. Redd’s presentation and it helped provide me an interesting alternative way of looking at environmental injustice issues. As environmental science is highly interdisciplinary, it made complete sense that it has a strong overlap with areas of the public health field. Hopefully the environmental emergency is one that can someday be overcome.