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Sanctuary City: Beaver, Washington

Rhonda Winter — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 04:07:33 +0000

Editor’s note: This is the sixth installment of Sanctuary City, a fictional apocalyptic serial that appears regularly in Ecolocalizer. Read the previous chapter here.

The sun’s rays were beginning to break through the river mist as Haskal J. Lonesome finished digging his way to the edge of Beaver, Washington. For several days he had traversed the moss-draped rain forests, and even floated for part of his journey on a broken branch, as it drifted for miles down the waters of the Sol Duc River. Haskal’s thick moist pelt shivered in anticipation when he finally entered the perimeter of the village.

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Ants

Jo Podvin — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 06:28:35 +0000

The ants arrived in my kitchen the other day, a thin line trailing by the compost to the water filter. I ignored them for a day or two, hoping that I could avoid dealing with it, so, of course, the line turned into a highway, and small groups of scouts headed out across the walls, over the breadboard, onto the stove. Untenable situation.

I like ants. I do not like wiping up hundreds of them. I recalled something I read recently about Bali, where food offerings are made to the spirits every morning at different spots around the family compound, and the ants eat the offerings and don’t enter the structures.

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Sanctuary City: Beavers

Rhonda Winter — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 09:12:48 +0000

Editor’s note: This is the fourth installment of Sanctuary City, a fictional futuristic serial that appears regularly in Ecolocalizer. Read the previous chapter here.

Castor canadensis

“We, the North American beavers, Castor canadensis, are what is known as a ‘keystone’ species. Unlike your kind, we play a critical role in maintaining the health, structure and balance of ecological communities. Our dams and labor create new habitat where multitudes thrive; subsequently, relative to our biomass, we have a disproportionate influence upon species diversity and stability. We are integral allogenic ecosystem engineers; and just as with a keystone in an arch, the entire structure collapses when we are removed.

Your kind, however, is what is known as a destructive parasite. You prey upon and violate everything within your grasp. You continually rape and poison the land, air and water, ravaging shared resources, making mere existence unbearable or impossible for thousands of other species. The resolutely thoughtless manner in which your species behaves is utterly baffling, completely unsustainable and diseased. You are a toxic cancer that will be excised. Once your kind has been removed, perhaps fragile ecosystems may be able to re-balance themselves and become relatively healthy again some day. Although so much has already been forever lost. You are well aware that the demise of your species is imminent?“

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Sanctuary City: Chemical Rain

Rhonda Winter — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 01:09:20 +0000

Editor’s note: This is the third installment of Sanctuary City, a fictional futuristic serial that appears weekly in Ecolocalizer. Read the previous chapter here.

Chemical Dispersants & Acid Rain

At the beginning of the apocalyptic oil spill disaster, the criminal British Petroleum cartel flushed billions of gallons of untested chemical dispersants into the Gulf of Mexico in a feeble attempt to make the evidence of their catastrophe disappear. Each day millions of gallons of toxic crude and monstrous poisonous methane clouds continued to spew from the chasm that they tore into the earth’s crust back in 2010. The experimental chemicals created massive oil plumes beneath the water’s surface which spread for thousands of miles. Then the dispersants were absorbed up into the atmosphere and came back down as acid rain, scorching and withering all life that it fell upon.

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Maddow Highlights New Oil Spill Horrors in the Gulf

Rhonda Winter — Tue, 25 May 2010 05:46:20 +0000

Dr. Rachel Maddow updates the extent of the devastating impact that BP’s increasingly disastrous oil spill catastrophe is having in the Gulf of Mexico. Louisiana’s coastline and sensitive marshlands are being consumed by toxic torrents of crude, and thousands of animals are being killed. The expanding horror of this is nauseating and utterly gut wrenching.

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Why Biodiversity Matters and What You Can Do on World Environment Day

Satinder Bindra — Mon, 24 May 2010 04:46:35 +0000

Fast is not always good. Species are becoming extinct at the fastest rate known in geological history, and most of these extinctions are tied to human activity. This year is the UN Year of Biodiversity and it seems as if in the blink of an eye, we are already half-way through it. This was a year that many of us had long looked forward to, perhaps with a mixture of excitement and trepidation.

This was the year we had set a collective alarm clock as the deadline to achieve a significant reduction in the rate of loss of biodiversity. Now it is ringing rather loudly. All assessments of progress indicate that we are far from reaching the goals we set in 2002.

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Animalia: Animated Stories of Collapse, Calamity and Departure

Rhonda Winter — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 00:01:42 +0000

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This is an enchanting short trailer for Animalia, a dark and beautifully surreal Illustrated fairy-tale. The animation was created by my friend Ryder Cooley, and was brought to life by Bart Woodstrup; the music is by Fall Harbor. The collaborative film is a work in progress.

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Goats are Our Sustainable Future: City Grazing

Rhonda Winter — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 16:19:01 +0000

City Grazing’s goat herd lives on Cargo Way, near Heron’s Head Park in San Francisco.

Landscaping by goat is becoming increasingly popular in urban areas across the nation. Besides being amazing and engaging creatures, goats are much more sustainable and environmentally friendly than a gas-powered lawn mower. The animals also provide organic fertilizer, which can help to restore degraded earth and natural soil organisms. Goat grazing is also much safer to our water supply than the use of toxic herbicides and chemicals. Even corporations like Google are now using goats to control their weeds at their headquarters in Mountain View, California.

In San Francisco, City Grazing is leading the way for the burgeoning goat landscaping business. They have a growing herd of lively goats, which they rent out for sustainable maintenance projects around the Bay Area. “We’re proud to offer this sustainable, natural weed control solution,” says Carla Brauer, Communications Director for City Grazing. “Our goats are not only great at their jobs; they’re also the cutest and friendliest weed eaters I’ve ever seen.”

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Plastic Garbage Found in Stomach of Dead Gray Whale

Cindy Tickle — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 21:35:10 +0000

Biologists discovered a surprising amount of human debris and plastic among the stomach contents of a dead gray whale that stranded in West Seattle last week.

Sightings of grays are rare in Puget Sound and extremely unusual in Elliot Bay. But at the end of March, a gray whale was spotted close to the West Seattle shoreline to the delight of many spectators. Scientists were a bit concerned over the sighting fearing the animal may have been looking for food. The next day it had disappeared.

No one knows for certain if this is the same gray whale that died after stranding itself on a West Seattle beach. The gray died on April 14th and was towed to a remote location and examined by a team from the Northwest Marine Mammal Stranding Network. Biologists with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and Cascadia Research led the examination to determine the cause of death. What they found may… or may not surprise you.

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The Great California Dust Bowl

Susanna Schick — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 03:45:30 +0000

Yes, that’s right. It’s a dust bowl. Sure, it resembles a verdant field backed by an orchard in bloom, but according to the California Farm Water Coalition, it’s a dust bowl. I took this photograph last month on I-5, heading back to Los Angeles from San Francisco. The whole trip via highways 101-152-5 was a Springtime Wonderland. Each of these signs was backed by acres of green. All of the fruit trees were in bloom, except for the orange trees, they’re already producing fruit. There were free-range, grass-fed sheep and cattle grazing all over the place. The California Farm Water Coalition posted these signs to raise awareness of the fact that California State Congress had cut them off. Having been in a drought for the past few years, and accustomed to heavily subsidized water, California farms had been wasting too much of what little water the Sacramento Delta had to spare.

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