New Guide: Restoring Ecological Landscapes at Home

THE DIRT

ASLA 2016 Professional Residential Design Honor Award. Kronish House, Beverly Hills, California / Marmol Radziner. Over the four-year construction period, the addition of hundreds of mature trees and countless flowering shrubs, perennials, and groundcovers, brought in a flood of nesting birds and insect pollinators.

Plants are central to a functioning global ecosystem. Plants oxygenate the atmosphere and reduce atmospheric pollutants. Ecological restoration in both developed and developing countries is a primary strategy for mitigating the impacts of climate change. Native plant communities are not only key to the global ecosystem, but also crucial to environmental and human health at the residential and neighborhood scales.

In the United States, urbanization has fragmented what were ecologically-productive landscapes. According to the Audubon Society, the continental U.S. has lost 150 million acres of wildlife habitat and farmland to urban sprawl over the last century. Sustainable residential landscape architecture practices can help build a network…

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Septic systems are a major source of emerging contaminants in drinking water

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Giving Dead Migrants a Name

From Scientific American by Barbie Latza Nadeau:

“By pushing forensics to its limits, a courageous scientist is attempting to identify the badly decomposed remains of 700 people who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea.”

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/giving-dead-migrants-a-name/

 

Claim: Trump “Denies” Climate Change Because he Hates Wind Turbines

Watts Up With That?

Donald Trump, By Michael Vadon – https://www.flickr.com/photos/80038275@N00/20724666936/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42609338

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

Tom Cheshire, Sky Technology Correspondent, has claimed that President-elect Donald Trump is a “climate denier” because of his legal battle to prevent offshore wind turbines messing up sea views at his Aberdeenshire Golf Course.

Sky Views: Why Trump denies climate change

Tom Cheshire, Technology Correspondent

When the oceans rise and the world ends, do remember to thank the RSPB for their small part in armageddon.

I’ll get round to the twitchers’ role in our doom shortly, but that doom feels closer than ever.

Mr Trump’s incoming administration will likely be the most anti-scientific and anti-technological in a while.

The President-elect is a climate change denier, one of his few consistent positions.

…

Trump denies climate change because he hates wind turbines. Can’t stand them.

Trump didn’t care about global warming until a…

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NOAA’s Climate.gov Says Natural Wetlands, Tropical Agriculture Responsible For Methane Increases, Not Oil and Gas

Watts Up With That?

From the NOAA global air sampling network are plotted since the beginning of 1979

From Western Wire

by Michael Sandoval July 18, 2017

“Agricultural and wetland emissions” from the planet’s tropical areas, not oil and gas activities in the United States, are more than likely responsible for a post-2007 global increase in methane levels, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate.gov.

But regulating or mitigating those methane sources could be difficult or impossible.

“Both of the likely contenders for the recent increase in emissions could be tricky to mitigate,” wrote Climate.gov’s Rebecca Lindsey and Michon Scott. “In developing countries with burgeoning populations, methane control could wind up pitted against the need to expand food production. If natural wetlands are the main source of the increase, control may not even be possible,” the authors wrote.

According to Climate.gov, following a 1999 to 2006 global methane plateau scientists attempted…

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People You Meet

Orlando Espinosa

We meet so many people throughout our lives. Some become vital, while others become obsolete. But in the end we will learn lessons from everyone we meet.

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A Fantasy Subway Map of Ancient Roman Roads

From The Atlantic CITILAB by John Metcalfe:

“They say all roads lead to Rome, but they also lead outward to a number of intriguing places. There’s Antinoopolis in northern Africa, Londinium in what we now know as the U.K., and—should funding from the mighty Emperor Hadrian arrive—the yet-built Panticapaeum station along the Pontus Euxinus, or Black Sea.

Or so says this wonderfully thought-out fantasy transit map from Sasha Trubetskoy, showing the major thoroughfares of the Roman Empire circa 125 A.D. as dozens of stops along multicolored subway lines. Trubetskoy, who when not dabbling in history has explored the judgmental cartography of the Bay Area, started poking into the idea after noticing there was a dearth of good maps of Rome’s old road network, let alone train-themed ones. So he decided to go for it, pouring about 50 hours of research and design work into his sprawling “Roman Roads.” ”

https://www.citylab.com/design/2017/06/a-fantasy-transit-map-of-the-roads-of-ancient-rome/529404/?utm_source=nl__link6_060817

Thank you, Duane, for pointing out this article. — Jenny