Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Last Child in the Woods

By Chip Young

“Rhode Island… could become the leading state in the children and nature movement.“

On Saturday, September 27, at the Warwick campus of the Community College of Rhode Island, the acclaimed author, founder of the Child & Nature Network, and activist, Richard Louv, delivered a lecture based upon his latest book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder.  The book has stimulated an international conversation about the future relationship between children and nature, and has helped spawn a movement that is now moving into federal and state legislatures, national parks and local schools. 

U.S. Senator Jack Reed had been set to do the intro for Louv, but for obvious reasons was in D.C.  But Reed is the author of the “No Child Left Inside Act,“ a new initiative designed to strengthen environmental education programs in America’s classrooms and reconnect more kids with nature, which runs hand in glove with Louv’s thinking and advocacy work.  The No Child Left Inside Act has picked up momentum and passed the U.S. House of Representatives last week by a wide margin of 293-109.

“Teaching children about the environment and giving them a hands-on opportunity to experience nature should be an important part of the curriculum in our schools,“ said Reed in a message from Washington.  “The strong vote in the House is a positive first step toward restoring environmental education in America’s classrooms.  I look forward to working with my colleagues in Congress to include NCLI as part of a broader elementary and secondary education bill.“

Louv serves as chairman of the Children & Nature Network, an organization helping to build the international movement to connect children with nature. He also serves as honorary co-chair of The National Forum on Children and Nature. Co-chaired by four state governors, the Forum, sponsored by the Conservation Fund, will fund programs around the country designed to get kids outside. 

“Perhaps because Rhode Island is the second most-densely populated state, Rhode Islanders have always promoted efforts to protect the natural areas that define their state through support of state and local bonds and creation of parks and preserves,” Louv observed. “The Ocean State boasts over 300 miles of coastline, and, thankfully, supports a number of growing efforts through conservation groups, schools and political leaders to get children out-of-doors to connect with the nature that they find in their communities. But like every state, Rhode Island can do much more—in fact, it could become the leading state in the children and nature movement.“

Some points Louv makes very well.  First, is that it has been shown that test scores go up with increased exposure to nature and the outdoors.  As does a child’s interest and excitement about nature and school in general, even if the outdoor exposure is in small doses.  And teachers who get their kids outside are less likely to burn out.  Take note, NEA.

Along those generational lines, there is often as much need for adults to haul their lazy rear ends somewhere further than from the front door to the car and then the car to the workplace or the store.  Like kids, some grown-ups and parents are a bit of afraid of what’s out there, and it is a not a comfortable place to be.  Can I sit here?  Is that poison ivy?  What if I get my feet wet, catch a cold and die?  C’mon, Daddy and Mommy.  You aren’t being asked to be Daniel Boone or Calamity Jane.  Just turn off the TV, grab little Junior and Sissy by the hand, walk them through the park, make up the names of plants and trees you don’t know (OK, maybe “Christmas tree tree” is not the true name of a fir tree, but it’ll do), and fake your own enjoyment.  You might even find you are having a good time in spite of yourself.

I thought one of the most telling bits of information in Louv’s 90-minute presentation and extended Q&A was the correlation between the rise in childhood obesity and the increase in organized sports for kids.  Having spent the days before Louv’s talk at a high school soccer team reunion with a bunch of other jaded, busted-up old jocks a lot of the discussion among was about kids and parents’ attitudes today, which the consensus was needs a lot of work. Too much regimentation and not enough being set loose to have fun.  The learning will come with the playing, so hold the uniforms and the red-faced parents on the sidelines.

I am of the mind that if you don’t have grass stains on your pants, a missing tooth or a scar you picked up from playing outside you shouldn’t be allowed into school.  All my friends, male and female, took a few knocks on the playground or doing something fun outdoors on their own.  I remember falling out of a tree the day before I attended my first day of first grade and tearing up my hand, so I made my entrance into public education with stitches in my palm and a red badge of courage, although I probably should have had an orange badge of stupidity as well. 

The presentation by Richard Louv was sponsored by a partnership of leading local environmental organizations that are dedicated to environmental advocacy and education: The Nature Conservancy; Audubon Society of R.I.; the Coastal Institute at the University of Rhode Island; Norman Bird Sanctuary; R.I. Environmental Educational Association; Roger Williams Park Zoo; Save the Bay; and the Apeiron Society for Sustainable Living. 

All of the co-sponsors of Louv’s lecture are actively involved in education initiatives that bring children and nature closer together:

• The Nature Conservancy works to protect the wild places that provide the “natural classrooms” about which Richard Louv writes in Last Child in the Woods.
• Roger Williams Park Zoo is a living classroom whose exhibits and education programs serve children throughout the Southeastern New England region.
• The Audubon Society of Rhode Island has a wildlife refuge system, protecting nearly 9,500 acres of wildlife habitat, which provides students with the opportunity to discover first-hand wetlands, fields, forests, and streams.
• Save The Bay has been doing standards-based experiential education programming for over 20 years, using Rhode Island’s largest natural resource, Narragansett Bay, as its classroom.
• The Norman Bird Sanctuary has public education programs such the Neighborhood Naturalists After School Club and the Saturday Explorers Club that link to the spirit of Last Child in The Woods. 
• Apeiron’s outdoor programs help people of all ages discover and experience their connection to the world around them, choose courses of action that promote health, well being and the environment, and become leaders of sustainable living in their communities. 

For more information on each organization’s educational programs, please contact them directly.  NOW.  Our kids need it.

Monday, September 15, 2008

Are You High?  You Better Find Out

By Chip Young

New technology needed to examine sea level rise vulnerability

You might not be aware of it, but long-range thinkers at state and municipal agencies, and at businesses who are sharp enough to recognize what is coming in the future, are already planning for the effects of sea level rise and impacts of storm surges caused by global climate change.  This would probably exclude Alaska and the town of Wasilla, whose fearless leader, Sarah Palin, obviously has a much better handle on the issue than those pesky scientists.

One of the tools they are clamoring for to do this sort of planning and management as well as possible is LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging).  Nathan Vinhateiro, a fellow at the Coastal Institute at the University of Rhode Island, works with the folks who are seeing the light, so to speak, and explains why LIDAR can give us a head start on the gradually increasing water levels in Rhode Island.

IT’S HIGH TIME FOR LIDAR
By Nathan Vinhateiro

Global climate change and its impacts have begun to take on a high profile in Rhode Island. The University of Rhode Island’s prestigious Honors Colloquium is kicking off a three-month series of public programs titled “People and Planet: Global Environmental Change,” and just last month Senator Sheldon Whitehouse chaired a field briefing of the United States Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works at URI’s Graduate School of Oceanography to examine the implications of climate change to Narragansett Bay.

At the hearing, Senator Whitehouse heard a consistent and unanimous message from several expert witnesses: the evidence for human-induced global warming is unequivocal. Warmer surface temperatures are leading to wide-scale systematic changes to the planet, with tremendous consequences for human health and well being. Coastal communities, including those that share the state’s 420 miles of shoreline, are on the front line of this battle as they confront the most clear and present danger: a warmer atmosphere is causing the world’s ice to melt and sea level to rise.

Rising sea level has the potential to erode beaches, drown wetlands and barrier islands, intensify flooding from hurricanes and nor’easters, threaten coastal infrastructure and drinking water, and ultimately displace populations. What’s particularly alarming is that observations of sea level rise have been consistently higher than recent projections—the data seem to be lining up with worst-case scenarios for future inundation.
 
The time for debate about human-induced warming is over. Sea level is rising and it is now time for the dialogue to shift to adaptation.

If the state is to meet this challenge successfully, scientists agree, accurate and high-resolution elevation measurements are needed to understanding the consequences of sea level rise and storm surge. Accurate elevations and can be easily acquired using a state of the art mapping technology known as LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging).

LIDAR is a technology that uses properties of scattered light from a laser beam to determine the distance to an object or surface. Much in the way that SONAR uses acoustic waves to measure distance to objects underwater, LIDAR instruments, when mounted on aircraft, can produce very accurate measurements of the distance to the earth’s surface over large areas. LIDAR elevation points are typically accurate to six inches, a vast improvement over existing data. This information is fairly simple to obtain during the winter and early spring when deciduous trees have dropped their leaves.

To understand and communicate true risk and vulnerability from future hazards LIDAR elevation data are needed on a statewide level, not only for scientists, but for planners and emergency management officials as well.

At the Senate hearing, Rhode Island’s coastal experts repeatedly stressed that the current lack of accurate elevation information makes it impossible to understand and mitigate the impacts of sea level rise. Presently, the best statewide elevation data are built from the same contour maps that have been around for decades. In fact, the difference between elevations represented on these maps and actual heights “on the ground” can vary by eight feet or more. This presents problems when trying to map areas that will be inundated by a five-foot rise in sea level, or a 15-foot storm surge from a hurricane that makes landfall.

For medical professionals, diagnosis of disease has moved ahead light years as CAT scans and MRI instruments have replaced or augmented X-rays to allow more precise visualization of the human body. In the same way, new mapping technologies offer far more realistic and timely information for coastal managers. The cost and time required to acquire LIDAR elevations depends on the ultimate accuracy desired, but when compared to the economic and environmental value of our state’s coastal resources, the price tag is nominal. Moreover, the investment in LIDAR could save millions of dollars in future siting of coastal infrastructure.

Of course there are factors other than elevation that determine how susceptible coastal areas in Rhode Island will be to inundation. The shape of the coastline, the amount of sand being delivered by rivers and streams, tidal range, wave height, and coastal protection structures like breakwaters all play a role in the actual impacts of accelerated sea level rise. However, the detailed analyses required to consider these dimensions would be futile without reliable elevations. All of the speakers at the Senate briefing were clear—now is the time to get to work on replacing our inaccurate elevation information and identifying areas at risk. We simply cannot afford to waste time debating that which is unequivocal: climate change is our present and future.

To open the hearing, Senator Whitehouse called global warming “the most serious threat our environment faces,” and stressed the need for action now. The panel’s response was of one voice—climate change mitigation starts with reliable information, and statewide LIDAR is the first step. Given the scope of human, environmental, and economic impacts to our state, the cost of addressing this problem pales in comparison to the cost of ignoring it.

- Nathan Vinhateiro is a fellow of the University of Rhode Island’s Coastal Institute.

Monday, September 01, 2008

Global Climate Change:  It’s He-eeere!

By Chip Young

Rhode Island focuses on GCC in two major events

The message that is being sent in Rhode Island about climate change is to the point:  If you don’t want to believe in it globally, believe in it locally.  Because it is already right here.

Two current local events have and will help point out the seriousness of the issue to Rhode Islanders.

On August 21, our own U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse presided over an official briefing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on “Global Warming’s Impacts on Narragansett Bay” at the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography.  The big statement from the presenters?  “Unequivocal.” That one word projected on a huge, single slide by GSO associate dean and international climate change expert, Kate Moran. As in the opinion of the vast majority of world’s scientific community is unequivocal that global climate change exists and that humans are the cause of global warming.

Sticking with the brevity idea, here’s a good deal of what came out of the presentations and back-and-forth prompted by questions from Sheldon Whitehouse, which should have the impact of two-by-four to the forehead.  Remember these little items when the yahoos begin blathering, “There’s your global warming for you!” if we start experiencing an extremely cold winter this year, oblivious to the fact that a major feature of global climate is amplified swings in weather conditions—like, say, a nice summer and then extra cold winter.

Just the facts, ma’am.  Narragansett Bay’s average temperature has increased two degrees in the last 30 years.  In ecological terms, that is a huge jump.  The Bay is now becoming like a Mid-Atlantic estuary, along the lines of Chesapeake Bay or those in North Carolina.  Warmer temperatures make the possibility of lower oxygen levels in the water more likely—think suffocating fish and large fish kills.  Fisheries populations are adapting and changing, possibly for better, possibly for worse, but both economically and ecologically.  Predatory jellyfish that consume fish larvae before they can grow up are in the Bay earlier and longer.  Whoops.

How about sea level rise? It is already creeping up on us, no pun intended. Take a look at the graphic at the top of this piece, a vision of Providence in 2100.  Everything now under that layer of blue is underwater.  Check out the mid-upper left, where the State House is.  Hey, we’ll be able to have “Waterfire” on the first floor of the Providence Place Mall!  How convenient.  Plus, State House workers will have their own little riverside beach to relax on during lunch break.  Sweet.

But let’s up the ante on what you are seeing.  Scientists are often portrayed as hysterical Chicken Littles, running around screaming horror and destruction to whoever will listen.  But the predictions that scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading body on GCC, made about this frightening factor in 2000 are now considered extremely conservative based on what we are actually seeing occur via satellite observations.  And that doesn’t even take into account the startling new impact of increasing loss of ice sheets in Greenland or glaciers in the Antarctic, which aren’t even included in the already threatening equation.  For naysayers on global warming, it is kind of like one of them flipping the bird to an average-looking guy in a traffic incident, and finding out he is an Ultimate Fighting champion.

Behind the scenes, sea level rise as the result of global warming is being taken very seriously by state and municipal planners and the business community.  Want to build a waterfront restaurant in Newport?  Better put it on Spring Street, which runs parallel to Thames Street up the hill from Newport Harbor, because that’s where the water will be heading by 2100.  (See the graphic below.)  Need upgrades to the wastewater treatment plant at Field’s Point in Providence?  You might not want to invest millions of dollars in a sewage facility that figures to be underwater.  That’s right, “Coming soon to your neighborhood…”  And if you have been waiting to retire and buy that little cottage on the salt pond in Misquamicut?  What salt pond?  Those barrier beaches that form them will be where the waves are breaking over the sandbars out there in a few decades.  Surf’s up, gang.

One of Senator Whitehouse’s telling points during his committee briefing was in response to what business and industry always refer to as the prohibitive cost of doing what is needed to reduce the human impacts that create global warming.  He observed, “It would be nice to put a price tag on what happens if we do nothing.”  Get out your calculators and raise the alarm, ladies and gents.  If you don’t, we’ll have to pay a very wet piper.

GET SMART!

If you want to learn lots and lots more about global warming and climate change, the information is coming to you this fall in a very interesting and understandable manner via the University’s Rhode Island’s 2008 Honors Colloquium, “People and Planet—Global Environmental Change.”  The series of free, weekly events featuring international experts and URI faculty members will run from September 9 to December 9.  Most events will take place on Tuesday evenings at 7:30 p.m. in the auditorium of the Chafee Social Science Center on the Kingston campus.

“It won’t be an indictment of how we got to where we are,” says URI professor, occasional Gamm Theater director, and Little Rhody all around creative ace Judith Swift, one of the Colloquium’s coordinators.  “Instead, we will look to the future on these issues—what do we know, what do we need to know, what are we going to do to address it, and what are the consequences of those choices.”

This is going to be a treat, as not only will this will venture into science as we knew it when Mr. Wizard ruled the educational arena, there will be a touch of John Waters meets Al Gore thrown in.  Or haven’t you ever seen a cabaret act based upon coastal ecological functions?  Other entertaining ways to learn more about problems staring us right in the grill are URI faculty members who will use documentary film clips to unwrap the GCC arguments in a discussion entitled “The Great Global Warming Hoax?”, and examining excerpts from Hollywood movies to interpret climate change issues through the respective lenses of a scientist and a cinema buff.

People and Planet —Global Environmental Change, kicks off on September 9 with the renowned Elizabeth Kolbert, staff writer for The New Yorker and author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature and Climate Change.  For more info on all aspects of what should be a great ongoing event, go to URI Honors Colloquium, or contact the URI Honors Center at (401) 874-2381.

Be there or be square.