Tag: nature
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Earth Optimism in Times of Despair
Earth Optimism is a movement focused on the successes of people around the world to tackle a wide variety of environmental issues. It was started in 2017, a few years after the Ocean Optimism twitter campaign, by coral reef biologist Nancy Knowlton. Earth optimism has paved the way for people to be optimistic about other…
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Shattered Mushroom Dreams
After harvesting my first mushroom meal of fresh chanterelles I thought my new hobby would really take off. I was excited for the mushroom hunting apparel that I could don for future forest expeditions, namely the collection basket that allows the spores to spread as you walk. Instead what I found was that every other…
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Spooky Season
It’s that time of year when creepy pumpkins adorn porch steps, kids jump into piles of crispy leaves, and witches brew hard cider. It is what some like to call the “spooky season”. In the Northern Hemisphere, spooky season (i.e., meteorological fall) lasts from the first day of September to the last day of November.…
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A Sine of the Tides
My fourth week of fieldwork on Sapelo Island, Georgia started off with a drive through the small nearby town of Darien before we caught the ferry over to the long-term field site. The most popular place to grab a bite to eat in Darien, Georgia is probably Skippers’ Fish Camp, which offers all kinds of…
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Sapelo Island Week Three
Sea oats have everything you are looking for looking for in a plant: shade tolerance, perenniality, general hardiness. They provide food for small mammals and birds, can be used for bird nesting material, and host Skipper butterfly caterpillars. Gardeners and home decorators are encouraged to purchase sea oat seeds from nurseries rather than pick their…
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How Ecotourism Isn’t Eco-friendly After All
Others believe ecotourism is not a successful development tool because it is not environmentally sustainable. As Regmi states at the end of his 2016 article, ecotourism is a short-term solution in poor countries, but when it is developed past the point that it is manageable by the environment, resource base, and local population, it becomes…
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The Argument for Ecotourism
Some people view ecotourism is a successful development tool that discourages illegal, environmentally damaging and risky activities such as bushmeat hunting, the use of endangered species in traditional medicine, and deforestation. This is the perspective shared by Cate Twining-Ward and Colin A. Chapman on PlanetForward in the article, “Engineering Uganda’s conservation future to prevent the…
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Sapelo Island Week One
I recently returned from a week of fieldwork on Sapelo Island, one of the barrier islands along the coast of Georgia in the Southeast United States. It was a gentle introduction to fieldwork in a humid subtropical climate. Our small team of graduate students helped each other measure average stem height and stem count in…
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Mother Russia, Father Oil
A reindeer herder stares in dismay at the slick rainbow liquid suffocating the grass. It signifies another unreported spill by the oil and gas company that infiltrated the land some years back. The community has something of a partnership with the oil and gas company, despite the unfortunate outcomes for the local environment. Executives receive…
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Gone Crawfishin’
The domestication of Pacific whiteleg shrimp from the eastern Pacific Ocean by the United States Marine Shrimp Farming Program in the 1980’s had the reverse effect of domesticated plants such as corn, maygrass, pea, huckleberry, and others. The latter domesticated plants made life simpler, while shrimping appears to have only made it more complex. Although…
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