Greenversations

En español: Cada semana hacemos una pregunta relacionada al medio ambiente. Por favor comparta con nosotros sus pensamientos y comentarios. Siéntase en libertad de responder a comentarios anteriores o plantear nuevas ideas. Preguntas previas.

Un pantano de agua salada, un marisma es un terreno fértil para muchas especies importantes de peces. Los depósitos de carbono y petróleo se formaron de plantas que vivieron millones de años atrás. Por lo tanto lo que parecen pequeños hechos reflejan sólo una parte de un medio ambiente más grande donde vivimos.

¿Díganos un dato científico que aprendió de niño que aún afecta sus decisiones medioambientales como adultos?

About the Author: Loreal Crumbley, a senior at George Mason University, is an intern with EPA’s Environmental Education Division through EPA’s Student Temporary Employment Program (STEP).

EPA works to increase public awareness on many issues. This year EPA is collaborating with a grassroots network called the Coalition on the Public Understanding of Science (COPUS) to initiate activism through science. The Year of Science 2009 is a year long nationwide initiative that encourages Americans to engage in activities that are related to science. For the past four months and the remainder of the year we will be celebrating the marvels of science as well as how we use science to protect ourselves and our environment.

Each month has a theme. EPA has a very informative site that highlights the theme for each month, and EPA environmental science events and activities. There are blog postings written by experts on the subject, along with podcasts, activities, and contests for people to join in and celebrate science.

These sites have helped me stay involved in celebrating this wonderful year of science!! May’s theme is Sustainability and the Environment. In order to celebrate sustainability we must celebrate the individuals and communities that have found ground-breaking ways to promote and live in balance with the environment. EPA’s website allows people from all over the country to post ideas on how to celebrate science.

You still have plenty of time left to get involved in the Year of Science. The remaining theme’s are:

• June: Ocean and Water
• July: Astronomy
• August: Weather and Climate
• September: Biodiversity and Conservation
• October: Geosciences and Planet Earth
• November: Chemistry
• December: Science and Health

If you haven’t started celebrating The Year of Science 2009, don’t worry there are still seven more months left to become informed and involved!! Let us know how you celebrate science.

Each week we write about the science behind environmental protection. Previous Science Wednesdays.

For each month in 2009, the Year of Science—we will pose a question related to science. Please let us know your thoughts as comments, and feel free to respond to earlier comments, or post new ideas.

The Year of Science theme for May is Sustainability and the Environment.

One of the most widely-cited definitions of sustainability is “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

What does sustainability mean to you, and what are you doing to achieve it?

Each week we write about the science behind environmental protection. Previous Science Wednesdays.

About the author: Alan D. Hecht is the Director for Sustainable Development in EPA’s Office of Research and Development. He has also served as the Associate Director for Sustainable Development, White House Council on Environmental Quality (2002-2003), and the Director of International Environmental Affairs for the National Security Council (2001-2002).

Charles Perrings, a professor of Environmental Economics at the Global Institute for Sustainability at Arizona State University, recently argued that the development of discipline-based science, while the source of nearly all the scientific advances of the past century, has limited the ability of science to address problems that span more than one discipline.

Sustainability science is a new discipline of a different kind: it draws upon many existing disciplines to forge a systems approach to environmental management. Its fundamental contribution is to solve problems.

Today, few of the world’s environmental problems can simply be addressed as an issue basically restricted to air, water, or chemicals. Sustainability science is the integration of all of these disciplines to better understand how humans and society interact as a system.

Sustainability science is asking the right questions:

• Why aim merely to reduce toxic waste when we can eliminate it with new chemicals and processes?
• Why handle and dispose of growing amounts of waste when we can more efficiently manage materials that eliminate, reduce, or recycle waste?

When EPA was created in 1970, its focus of attention was on reducing obvious sources of pollution to the environment. When the oil slick and debris in the Cuyahoga River near Cleveland, Ohio, caught fire in June 1969, it drew attention to other environmental problems across the country and helped to spur the environmental movement that led to the Clean Water Act of 1972.

Since its creation in 1970, EPA has been largely successful in addressing many of the most obvious and pressing environmental issues of that time, such as the quality of air and water. But new approaches are now needed to deal with emerging and newly recognized problems:

• the expanding population and economy and their demand for energy and materials;
• the changing rates of urban sprawl and loss of biodiversity;
• nonpoint, trans-boundary, and trans-media sources of pollutants such as storm water runoff;
• genetically modified organisms;
• the potentially harmful effects of these products as well as endocrine disruptors and nanoparticles; and
• the cumulative impacts of all these factors on the environment and public health.

Addressing these and other environmental issues in an integrated manner will demand a greater focus on sustainability and the vital need to develop sustainability science. We will need to apply what we learn to foster policies and best practices that can help people coexist with the planet.

The development and achievements of sustainability science deserve the increasing recognitions that it is receiving great deal of credit for this progress. Among this recognition is the May 2009 celebration of the month of Sustainability and the Environment as part of the Year of Science.

Each week we write about the science behind environmental protection. Previous Science Wednesdays.

For each month in 2009, the Year of Science—we will pose a question related to science. Please let us know your thoughts as comments, and feel free to respond to earlier comments, or post new ideas.

The Year of Science theme for April is Energy Resources.

Do you know what energy resource you get your electricity from? Have you looked into switching to a “green” alternative?

About the Author: Aaron Ferster is the science writer-editor in EPA’s Office of Research and Development, and the Science Wednesday Editor.

Coming home on New Year’s Eve this year we noticed a “squishing” sensation underfoot as we walked across the carpet in the downstairs playroom. A big, soggy wet spot had mysteriously formed in a place well away from any obvious source of water. Yuck. I pulled up a big swath of carpet to reveal a considerable puddle on the concrete floor beneath.

New Year’s celebration over.

One week, and a hefty plumbing bill later, the mysterious source water was revealed: a steel pipe behind the kitchen wall upstairs had rotted out.

Since we had to take the walls down anyway, we decided it was time to update the 1970s-style kitchen. This week our contractor led me into the basement. “You’re out of space,” he explained, pointing to where a neat circle of clean, new wires coming from the kitchen met the old fuse boxes. He gently informed me it was time for me to make yet another decision.

I had two options: (1) replace the fuse boxes with a circuit breaker with more lines available, or (2) “heavy up,” in which the electrician would also essentially double the flow of electricity that could come into the house, from 100 amps to 200 amps.

Apparently, sometime between when my house was built and the time the kitchen pipe failed, the standard for electricity changed. Today’s homes are typically built with a minimum capacity of 200 amps, so they can easily handle modern loads from clothes dryers, central air conditioning, home offices full of computers and other electronics, various chargers for cell phone batteries and the like, and mega television screens.

It seems like a safe bet that my family and I will want more juice flowing into our home at some point. Doing the heavy up now would allow me to expand in the future, and I’d get a discount by doing the work now instead of essentially repeating some of it later.

Then I got to thinking about this month’s Year of Science Theme: energy resources. Will the current emphasis on conservation, efficiency, and the need to develop new, clean alternative sources of energy lead us in a new direction?

Perhaps by the time the kitchen needs its next overhaul, the future owner will have a good laugh about how the previous owner once thought they needed the capacity to have some 200 amps of electricity flow into the house.

Now that’s something to celebrate.

Each week we write about the science behind environmental protection. Previous Science Wednesdays. 

For each month in 2009, the Year of Science—we will pose a question related to science. Please let us know your thoughts as comments, and feel free to respond to earlier comments, or post new ideas.

The Year of Science theme for March is Physics and Technology.

What technologies do you use to be more green? What one technology do you hope is available soon?

For each month in 2009, the Year Of Science, we will pose a question related to science. Please let us know your thoughts as comments. Feel free to respond to earlier comments or post new ideas.

Ponder. Observe and discover. We are all born scientists, naturally curious to figure out more about the world around us: how we affect the environment, and how the environment affects us.
2009 is the Year Of Science, the Year of Science theme for February is evolution.

How do you think environmental science is related to evolution?

Each week we write about the science behind environmental protection. Previous Science Wednesdays.

About the author: Dr. Mark Bagley is a research biologist and acting branch chief in EPA’s Office of Research and Development in Cincinnati, OH. Since joining the EPA in 1999, his work has involved application of molecular and population genetic methods to ecological questions.

The Clean Water Act charges EPA with protecting and restoring “biological integrity” to aquatic ecosystems. I’ve been wondering lately what we mean by that. The Agency generally uses a definition that refers to the structural and functional similarity to an undisturbed ecosystem—how those factors compare to what we would expect to find in some ideal system.

But who is to say there is just one path to biological integrity? And can we really ever say we have achieved it?
 
In practice, we evaluate biological integrity by surveying the complexity of an ecosystem, typically taking into account differences among species in their sensitivity to different disturbances. We then compare the species we find to those in ecosystems that have been judged to be minimally impacted.

This approach works reasonably well but reinforces a somewhat static view of biological integrity, since comparisons are based on historical notions of what an optimal structure should look like. There are efforts within EPA to more fully understand and evaluate ecosystem functions. At present, there is a strong emphasis on assessing the value that these functions bring to people in the form of ecosystem services (water quality, fisheries, etc).

I think biological integrity requires maintenance of important biological processes, regardless of their value to human well-being and the make-up of the biological community that provides them. In the natural world, species within communities can change without hugely affecting the overall functioning of the ecosystem.

At longer time scales, as environments change, some turnover of species probably has to occur in order for the system to continue to function at an optimal level. And that makes me think that what we’re really talking about is the capacity of the community of organisms within an ecosystem to continue to evolve so that it can find the best solution to sustainable transformation of solar energy and nutrients into biological matter.

Isn’t it this optimization process that really describes biological integrity? It’s an odd question coming from someone whose training is in evolutionary biology. In my work and that of my colleagues, we almost never talk about evolution or the need to preserve evolutionary processes because it seems well beyond the mandate of the EPA. But I’m not so sure anymore.

Maybe in this, the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, it is time to acknowledge that lasting environmental protection isn’t possible without evolution protection.

What do you think real biological integrity is?

For each month in 2009, the Year Of Science, we will pose a question related to science. Please let us know your thoughts as comments. Feel free to respond to earlier comments or post new ideas.

Ponder. Observe and discover. We are all born scientists, naturally curious to figure out more about the world around us: how we affect the environment, and how the environment affects us.
2009 is the Year Of Science.

If you could be any type of scientist, what kind would you be and why?