At the Frontlines of the Global Transition
Tonight Al Gore could win an Academy Award for “An Inconvenient Truth.” Later this year he could also win the Nobel Prize for Peace. And if he lost 50 pounds and jumped into the 2008 presidential race, he could win that, too. Ever since he published “Earth in The Balance,” his 1992 best-seller, Gore’s two issues have been global climate change and himself. The first, global climate change, is drawing the nation inexorably to logical choices about energy, …
Seven years ago New Yorker magazine writer Malcolm Gladwell published The Tipping Point, which explored the mix of episodic and serendipitous stages that turn a good idea into a cultural event. Gladwell’s book is as useful for explaining the genetics of a modern sensation as Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave was in the 1980s for understanding the economic and cultural consequences of rapid change. Both books are essential reading for grasping how global climate change has …
SILVER BAY, MINN. — Where land meets the cold waters of Lake Superior north of Duluth is where 4 billion year-old basalt, granite, sandstone, and shale welled up from volcanic fires in the years of Earth’s formation to eventually declare a treacherous truce with mankind. The shoreline is all hard rock and freshwater spray, a long ribbon of impenetrable defense against the sort of fierce storm surges and steady erosion that wash away homes and …
LAKE CITY, MI – Two facts about Michigan agriculture are scarcely recognized outside the fences and beyond the drainage ditches of the state’s 45,000 farms. The first: farming is among the most technologically sophisticated industrial sectors in Michigan and every other state. Second: livestock farms are the state’s largest source of water pollution from toxic nitrates and phosphorus, and air pollution from methane, a powerful climate change gas. Here on Michigan State University’s 1,100-acre livestock …
In 1990, following intensive field trials, a respected agronomist at Iowa State University named Fred Blackmer formally introduced an inexpensive tool to accurately measure how much nitrogen farmers actually require to produce abundant harvests of corn, the most heavily fertilized crop. Driven by concerns about rising production costs and increasing water pollution, Blackmer’s “late spring nitrate test†was stunningly simple in concept. His test focused on one essential data point: the optimum amount of nitrogen …
It’s been 33 years since an Iowa State University agronomist named Fred Blackmer thought he’d struck gold for Midwestern corn farmers. Using a fairly simple three-step method, Blackmer developed an analytical tool that could accurately tell farmers exactly how much fertilizer their fields needed to produce abundant harvests each season. The analytics Blackmer perfected showed not only how much fertilizer the corn crops would need to meet production targets, but also exposed how much could …
For decades, Americans mostly turned a blind eye to the industrial-scale livestock production operations that churn out cheap supplies of meat and dairy for the masses. Occasional opposition to local pollution problems and the casual animal cruelty that characterize conventional US dairy, hog, and poultry production did little to alter practices that are embedded in the rural landscape. That may be changing. A wave of frontline resistance is now breaking across the Upper Midwest and …
It was chilly and sunny the April day earlier this month when the truck from Kentucky arrived in Michigan. It held all of Gabrielle’s belongings. Over the next several hours we carried them into the Benzonia house. Though we’ve been married nearly five years, this transport of furniture and appliances, books, clothing, and all manner of other goods formalized a momentous change in our lives. For the first time we’d be living together at a …
My first months of 2021 were consumed with reporting and writing a three-part Circle of Blue project on global trends in water, sanitation, and hygiene. Our collaborator was the Wilson Center, the D.C. think tank that has been one of of our partners since 2010 in reporting the Global Choke Point chapters in China and India. As I noted in WASH Within Reach, as a Circle of Blue correspondent in Africa, Asia, and Latin America …
TRAVERSE CITY, MI –Intrigued by warming winters, researchers from the University of Michigan set out in 1989 to formally measure changes in the geographical distribution of plants and animals in the dense pine and hardwood forests of northern Michigan. Their laboratory, the university’s 10,000-acre Biological Station east of Petoskey, had advanced forestry and natural sciences since the field station’s founding in 1909. Few projects, though, attracted the same level of attention as the migration research. Completed in …
