Ecological Relationships

Talking about the weather… it never gets old. I like to joke with folks how I am constantly surprised by people who are constantly surprised about fluctuations in temperature and precipitation. I mean… weather happens, and it has always happened, so when you ask me, “Can you believe this weather?” you’d better expect dead-panned “yes”.

Ok, ok… I know that weather is just small talk, and it . But that’s what you get for asking a scientist! 🙂

We spent most of Christmas day in the backyard. Barefoot. Playing soccer. Finding woollybears. Watching the bees (the ones that randomly moved in at our house). Soaking up some UV rays. No kidding!

As for what changing temperatures mean for Indiana, I’ll defer to the scientists at Purdue. They have released several sections of their Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment. Go have a look!

I thought you might enjoy this neat map by climate scientist Brian Brettschnider (@Climatologist49). It shows northern Indiana as having approximately even odds of having a “white Christmas” on any given year.

The day after Christmas, I was at work and took advantage of the weather. I was out by the solar panels prepping the ground for a winter-seeding of pollinator-friendly native plants (more on that in a later post).

While I was out at the solar arrays, I saw two foxes that many folks have seen scampering boldly around the grounds during the day. One is an adult and I believe the second one, which doesn’t have a full orange coat, is a juvenile. It was 9 am and the sun was just breaking above the tree tops, very beautiful. (Just hoping I can catch it sometime when I have my nice camera and not just my cell phone).

In addition to pollinator habit, the native vegetation and the cover provided by the panels themselves should also provide areas for other creatures to use: birds, mammals, herptiles (reptiles & amphibians) invertebrates, etc. I like seeing small microhabitat differences across the site: variations in shade & sun, wet & dry. It’s a great spot for a fox to hunt for mice.

One concern I had as a project manager was weather wildlife would impact the arrays (e.g. chewing on the wires). I was pleasantly shocked at how neat and clean Green Alternative’s installation was. There are few exposed wires, and underground wires are limited to the main runs to the buildings. Like any piece of infrastructure, we’ll have to keep tabs on things, but I anticipate few issues.

Snow or no, rain or sunshine, I wish you all a Merry Christmas season and a prosperous 2020.

I pray that we will have the imagination of Mary, who was attentive to the small things, and who foresaw the lowly lifted up, the hungry fed, and the rich sent away empty.

In a world with a lot of anger, rage, and fighting, I’m pondering the words of Buckminster Fuller:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

We like photovoltaic solar energy technology for a lot of reasons. It allows us to run everything from computers, heart monitors, heat pumps, and vehicles on sunshine. It’s modular and not very scale-dependent, so we can design arrays to match the size of our needs and add on as budget allows. It helps us get connected to the annual abundance of our earth and solar system, instead of lazily living off of millions years of compressed sunshine (fossil fuels) while passing the degradation off to the poor or our grand kids.

From the financial-resilience side, solar also helps us control our operational costs. When you write the check for a well-designed system, installed by a crew you know is going to be around for on-going support, you are locking in your energy costs.

We made a big investment in solar this year. To our knowledge, it’s the largest solar array at an Indiana institute of higher ed (at least until 2020). When we ran the numbers, we tried to make conservative assumptions about electric rates and energy production, not wanting to set unrealistic expectations. That is, we would love to be pleasantly surprised by any unexpected upside!

We have no battery storage with our arrays, so all the electricity produced has to be instantly transferred somewhere. If there is more energy than the building is using at the moment, it goes backwards through the meter and to the next available load down the power line. Our utility, NIPSCO, measures this energy and gives us a 1:1 financial credit for this excess, an arrangement called net metering.

So if we are paying, say, $0.12 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for energy consumed from the grid at night, then the value of our excess solar energy being pushed back to the grid at noon is also worth $0.12.

Which brings me to recent news. State regulators recently approved a rate increase for NIPSCO customers. In Indiana, these state-regulated utilities are businesses that are granted a captive market (monopoly). These utilities make rate increase petitions on a periodic basis, which usually prompts push back by consumer advocates like Citizens Action Coalition and environmental advocates like the Sierra Club.

Since the cost of each kWh has gone up, so too has the value of every avoided kWh through efficiency or through solar energy production… which means that our solar panels will be more financially valuable when 2020 rolls around and rates increase.

Now, I don’t want to give in to schadenfreude for all those without solar, but it is nice to see that an asset we invested in continues to pay us back.

Lastly, a bit of news and a note on the Lindenwood solar array.

Indianapolis Power & Light (another regulated utility/business) is going to be closing two coal plants… good news! One will go dark in 2021, another in 2023. They intend to keep two more plants running for decades… but I highly suspect that economics alone will compel them to shutter the other plants before the end of their service life. Good news for all creatures who drink water and breathe air.

Lindenwood Retreat and Conference Center received 41 kW of solar this year. We had some hardware issues that delayed it’s commissioning, but our vendor worked tirelessly with the manufacture to get it running.

We have a public-facing web site that shows the solar energy production in real time. Please give it a look! Unfortunately we are now entering the “solar doldrums” season of short and cloudy days, but it has already saved more than 1 ton of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of planting 54 trees.

UPDATE: We have a page live for our Moontree solar array (2018) as well.

PFAS Chemicals in Bloodstream of 99% of All Americans (Steve Glass blog) PFAS are used in many consumer products, included carpets, couches, and food packaging; this, in addition to their use in foam firefighting retardant… In an earlier report from the Environmental Working Group (EWG) PFAS compounds may be in the drinking water of up to 110 million Americans.

Brazilian Amazon Burns at an Accelerating Rate (Steve Glass blog, including his personal observations on a birding trip)

City Releases Climate Action Plan (City of South Bend) The Mayor Pete Buttigieg administration has released Carbon Neutral 2050, a climate action plan for the City of South Bend. The Carbon Neutral 2050 Plan sets ambitious community-wide goals to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, first targeting a 26% reduction by 2025, to demonstrate South Bend’s willingness to honor the U.S. commitment to the Paris Agreement. The implementation of these goals aims to culminate in South Bend becoming carbon neutral by 2050.

Galvanized by disaster: Mayor of Goshen, Indiana, sets town on sustainable path after devastating floods (Indiana Environmental Reporter)

Wild bee community change over a 26‐year chronosequence of restored tallgrass prairie (research article)… this is good news. From the abstract: Bee abundance and raw richness increased with restoration age from the low level of the pre‐restoration (agricultural) sites to the target level of the remnant prairie within the first 2–3 years after restoration, and these high levels were maintained throughout the entire restoration chronosequence. Bee community composition of the youngest restored sites differed from that of prairie remnants, but 5–7 years post‐restoration the community composition of restored prairie converged with that of remnants.

Report: Closing Coal Plants Would Save Indiana Customers Money, Reduce Pollution (WFYI)… The faster Indiana can transition from coal to renewable energy sources, the better for Indiana customers. That’s the takeaway from a new report prepared for the 21st Century Energy Policy Development Task Force charged with creating a statewide energy plan. 

Oklahoma approves largest single-day commutation in U.S. history: In a flurry of signatures Friday afternoon, Oklahoma moved one step closer to shucking its distinction as the state with the highest incarceration rate in the United States. On Monday afternoon, 527 people serving low-level drug and nonviolent offenses will go free in what Oklahoma lawmakers are calling the largest single-day commutation in both state and U.S. history. (MSN)

Yellowstone Bison Engineer an Endless Spring to Suit Their Grazing Needs (Smithsonian Mag) The cycle of grazing and fertilizing prolongs spring-like vegetation in grasslands and makes green-up more intense in following years

Indiana NAACP Environmental Climate Justice: Calling for Equitable Clean Energy -Indiana State Conference of the NAACP (Facebook video)

The Forest Service Is About to Set a Giant Forest Fire—On Purpose (The Atlantic)

A thread on “greenwashing,” how corporations attempt to put an eco-friendly veneer on unsustainable business practices (Twitter)

Diversifying Crops Is Good For The Planet. But Can It Be Good For Farmers’ Wallets? (NPR)

I know it’s risky to drop the F-bomb on a workplace blog post, but it’s time to confront something we don’t talk about enough.

Failure, with a capital F.

[cricket chirp]

At the 2019 Stewardship Network Conference at Michigan State University, we heard a presentation from Allison Catalano, a Ph.D student at the Imperial College of London. Her bio states that she is “researching how conservation professionals learn from failure. In particular, I am interested in the dynamics of confronting and managing failure from the perspective of individuals, teams, and organizations. I study how cognitive biases and past experiences affect an individual’s ability to discuss failure. I also research how psychological safety and other team learning behaviors influence group response to failure.”

She gave examples from the aerospace, where the harsh mistress of gravity ensures that the consequences of failure are often fatal. Here, the inability to openly discuss failure is not just poor practice, it could mean that someone has to make a phone call to a family explaining why mom wasn’t coming home that night. As a consequence, this industry has a much more developed system of openly discussing failure & learning from it.

The consequences in other fields are perhaps less abrupt, but no less catastrophic.

My field of ecological restoration is still in its infancy in many ways. Never before have humans so thoroughly & systematically disrupted nutrient flows, hydrology, soils, and habitat during industrialization. We then decided that we wanted to piece things together, and we do it mostly with Europeans trained in the university-industrial model without the consult of people who were indigenous to these ecological communities. The goal is to restore the thousands of unbelievably complex, dynamic relationships in a context that is continuing to undergo change.

This is an extremely tall order, and we should not expect the task to be easy. It is a context ripe for many theories and techniques to fail. And the consequences are severe. I’d like to avoid dramatics, especially in assessing the importance of my discipline, but in reality we are talking about nothing less than the health & continuance of the biosphere on this pale blue dot we call Earth.

So many of these crisis in relation to biodiversity are deaths by a thousand cuts: habitat loss, poaching, climate change, and pesticide use. All while field science departments continue their decline throughout academia.

It’s costly to admit failure. Embarrassing. At businesses, non-profits, churches, and relationships, we prefer to put our best foot forward. Only our closest friends get the unfiltered truth. 

But why should we expect everything, even most things, to succeed? It’s certainly not nature’s way, which is constantly experimenting & running trials to see which combination is best-fit for each context. Fear of failure prevents the opportunity for growth and evolution.

But let’s think through the consequences of indulging in this protective instinct. In the business world, we need to know if a product or service is truly needing the needs of our customers. We need to know early in the design process before lots of resources have been deployed.

In most Christian denominations in the U.S., weekly attendance has been in decline for quite some time. These challenges can be a moment of introspection for communities to question their role in the broader society, their ability to sustain a building or a large staff, etc. Inability to openly admit that changes have happened only delay the day of reckoning and narrow the options available. So many of my friends and family have been faced with this.

Professionally, if we think every project & initiative we do is God’s Greatest Unblemished Gift to the world, we fail to improve & hone our craft, or even to see where our behavior is detrimental to our co-workers or institution.

This blog is already getting lengthy, so let me begin to wrap up by repeating a great maxim that I heard recently. It comes in some variations, and deserves a whole post on it’s own: Fail fast, fail often, fail early, and fail cheaply.

One of my favorite examples of embracing failure is this SpaceX video. SpaceX makes rockets and is trying to start a human colony on Mars. It requires, well… actual rocket science, so one would expect a lot of mistakes. They livestream all of their rocket launches, so if something fails, the whole world sees it in real-time.

With the carnival-like music, this compilation of rocket failures looks like an attack video made by a competitor, not a professionally compiled series of videos by their own communications department!

And yet, what has been the the result of all these failures? SpaceX has revolutionized the space industry and captivated the imagination of millions from the broader public (like myself, if you couldn’t tell). My daughters and I try to watch all the rocket launches online now.

Here is another video, this time of a boat (“Ms. Tree”) catching the nose cone/fairing of a rocket that fell from space:

Rocket fairing falls from space & is caught by Ms Tree boat pic.twitter.com/nJv0Ry1iKk

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 7, 2019

If that wasn’t enough, they used a massive 3-piece rocket (the Falcon Heavy) to launch a sports car into orbit around the sun on its test flight. They then simultaneously landed two of the pieces upright at Cape Canaveral on live television. The 3rd piece attempted to land on an autonomous drone ship in the ocean (named Of Course I Still Love You). It failed, missing the ship and exploding on impact with the ocean surface.

Volkswagen is pretty well known for their massive moral failure to protect human health by lying about their vehicles’ emissions. It was one of the largest corporate failures in human history, and they were (rightly) fined billions of dollars, now being used to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles. 

Since then, they have become perhaps the leading legacy car company in regards to aggressively pivoting towards electric vehicles. This includes the recent European launch of the ID 3, a vehicle that is expected to sell in significant volumes. Say what you will about the relative “sincerity” of a global corporation making this pivot, but nevertheless, they are doing it.

This advertisement encompasses the entire story in a very poignant way:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMbPINvLp-I

Perhaps they went so low, so publicly that they had no other choice, but such an embrace of their failure is now setting the stage for the next step in their evolution.

The irony is amusing… long-term success depends on embracing failure, while penalizing failure ultimately undermines long-term viability.

In keeping with this spirit, stay tuned to hear of some of my less-than-successful projects (see, I just can’t bring myself to use the F-word!).

We are very excited to see yet another solar array going up in Marshall County! Cheers to Marianne & the Recycle Depot staff.

WTCA reporting:

During Monday’s Board of Directors meeting, Executive Director Marianne Peters presented members with three bids to put solar arrays on the property and use the electricity generated to operate the Recycle Depot and the main office building...

Peters said, “With the amount of money we have sitting in our rainy day fund I’ve been looking for a project that would use some of those funds to the benefit of Marshall County residents and reduce our costs.”  She went on to say, “We have the land, we have the available funds, it will reduce our utility costs tremendously and serve as an educational tool for people in the county who want to go solar and it’s part of our mission.”

After reviewing the bids submitted the board of director unanimously voted to go with Wellspring Solar at a cost of $51,068.19.  Peters will need to submit an additional appropriation from their Rainy Day Fund to the County Council for approval.  She is hopeful that the project could be completed before the end of the year. (full story here)

Sunday evening I attended an accountability session at St. Michael’s school, organized by a local chapter of Faith in Indiana. Faith in Indiana is a statewide faith-based organization that works with clergy and leaders from various faith traditions to address and resolve social justice issues facing rural, urban, and suburban communities; it is a catalyst for marginalized people and people of faith to act collectively for racial and economic justice.

I normally focus here on the various ecological concerns of our world, but of course there are many interconnected & multifaceted societal issues we are facing (which is kind of the point of integral ecology). I’ve taken interest in a few of these other issues as a member of our Justice Seekers group & as a citizen raising my family here.

At the session, heard testimony from local families, teachers, non-profit leaders, business people, and the school superintendent around two main issues: the need to address the opioid crisis with treatment, not jails; and exploring a City ID program for city residents who are unable to access State ID’s.

The quotes here I have excerpted from the Pilot News coverage of the evening (look there for complete coverage of the evening).

Both candidates were asked the same question, ‘Will you work with us in developing a strategy which includes prevention, treatment over incarceration, and finding alternative treatments to opioid addiction?’

Mr. Walker responded, “Absolutely. Yes. 100% percent… When we look at our county jail, we know that it is overcrowded. There is an issue with that because we cannot keep cramming people into a jail over low level drug and alcohol offenses. We need to do more to prevent those and to educate them… I believe that treatment and recovery are more effective than incarceration…”

Mr. Senter responded: “Absolutely… I would be more than happy to talk about prevention and treatment. As we know, the Marshall County Commissioners right now are talking about adding on to our jail. We do not need that. We really have to come up with a different plan.”

Both candidates were also asked, “Will you meet with us within 30 days of the election to work on these issues?” to which they both agreed.

The conversation then moved to the emerging need for a Plymouth City ID. There are many reasons for a municipality to initiate such a program, such as obtaining medications at a pharmacy, visiting your children at the public school, and identifying oneself when talking with the police.

Among the speakers was Sam Centellas, Executive Director of La Casa de Amistad, which administers City ID programs for South Bend and Goshen. He expressed his willingness to administer the program were it approved for the city.

Both candidates were asked the same question, ‘Will you support us to develop a city ID for the residents of Plymouth, Indiana?’

Mr. Walker responded, “Yes, absolutely…as I’ve been campaigning and meeting with people and families, Hispanic and Latinx families… this is the number one that continues to come to the forefront of the conversation… So yes, that will be one of my top priorities if I am elected mayor.”

Mr. Senter responded: “Absolutely… yes, my administration… we looked maybe a year and a half ago here at St. [Thomas] Episcopal, we had a meeting about that then… That is one of the subjects that came up that night. Yes, I would absolutely put a committee together.”

Both candidates were also asked, “Will you convene a meeting of yourself, the Plymouth School Superintendent, a representative of the Chamber of Commerce, the Chief of Police, and our leaaders within 30 days of taking office in order to work on a solution which is helpful to our families and to the Plymouth community?”

Mr. Walker responded, “Yes, absolutely.”

Mr. Senter responded: “Yes, I would.”

Election day is Nov. 5th. The 30 day deadline is Thursday, Dec. 5th.

Nissan has periodically been running these LEAF discounts through the electric utilities, so I thought I’d highlight this news here. Depending on one’s tax situation, this could be a very low cost-per-mile commuting car.

The LEAF was the first mass-market electric vehicle in the U.S. and has sold over 130,000 copies state-side, the 4th highest selling model to date. Worldwide, Nissan has moved nearly half a million LEAFs, enough to make it the world leader in sales.

We’ve been using a LEAF in our fleet for nearly a year now. Our drivers have found it easy to adapt to. Those new to EVs will certainly need to do some research, but with a little patience it’s not too complicated to figure out.

We’ve been working on developing a bed of blooming native species underneath the first phase of our solar arrays. I overseeded them last winter & this is the first growing season.

I hope we can really use this as a test site to enable other institutions to do the same, and do it well. I adapted frmo this great guidance document from Minnesota DNR. But the overall concept is simple enough: pick native, low-growing species that bloom throughout the growing season, use very occasional mowing/spraying to keep woodies & invasives out, and sit back and enjoy the ecological benefits!

I’m submitting and abstract for an upcoming ecological conference. They’ll be more data & details in time. But I want to just show off some of the plants that are still blooming as of Oct. 7th, and the many small visitors they are supporting. Our pastures have lots of grass – which is obviously great for the intended purpose of grazing – but almost nothing in bloom right how. Hopefully these little flower islands can make a difference.

Ok, this is truly a grab-bag of various things I’ve been reading. Enjoy!

Virginia saves our kids; becomes the catalyst for electric school buses (Electrek)
Chicago startup will help test hyperlocal electric vehicle incentive in California (Energy News Network)

The City of Goshen has purchased its first electric vehicle in an effort to further test alternative fuel cars and their impact to the City’s budget and the environment.

Greta Thunberg: Why the Right’s Usual Attacks Don’t Work on Her (Vox)

Ash tree species likely will survive emerald ash borer beetles, but just barely (Phys.org)

Huge decline in songbirds linked to common insecticide (Nat Geo)

Jeff Bezos is quietly letting his charities do something radical — whatever they want: Is that good? Is that bad? It’s definitely unusual. (Vox)

Indigenous Plant Agriculture – great insights from a pioneering restoration ecologist in OH.

Effect of Prescribed Fire on Timber Volume and Grade in the Hoosier National Forest (Purdue University Research) … ” Our results suggest that prescribed fire has a minor economic impact on standing timber, particularly when timber is harvested within two decades of the first fire. “

Prairie Resilience on Display (The Prairie Ecologist)

Indigenous Maize: Who Owns the Rights to Mexico’s ‘Wonder’ Plant? (Yale Environment 360)

How Solar Got Cheap (Planet Money podcast on NPR)

Bringing Together Young And Old To Ease The Isolation Of Rural Life (NPR)

Twice in September I had the privilege of being an educator & raft guide on an incredible, collaborative ecological education initiative on the Tippecanoe River. Arrowhead County Resource Conservation & Development celebrated its 25th year of bringing hundreds of local school kids out on the river to learn about forestry, water quality, and river ecosystems. It was my first year volunteering with the group.

Here’s some local press coverage of the event. I’ll let you read all about it there. It’s hard for me to overemphasize the importance of getting people – especially kids – out on the land and in the water. This is what we were made to do, and it’s almost always how we learn best. Without initiatives like these, some kids have such a limited experience with the beautiful, wild world around them.

My hat is off to Arrowhead County RC&D, their education committee, and all the dedicated volunteers. What a program!