Greenversations

About the author: Lina Younes has been working for EPA since 2002 and chairs EPA’s Multilingual Communications Task Force. Prior to joining EPA, she was the Washington bureau chief for two Puerto Rican newspapers and she has worked for several government agencies.

Summer vacation is fast approaching and many parents are looking for activities to entertain their children during the summer months. Now is the best time to plan ahead so you and your children can find fun ways to explore the environment and learn about science at summer camps and children’s museums throughout the country. In the Washington area, there are many museum-related science enrichment opportunities for children. Organizations like 4-H, the Boys and Girls Scouts of America also offer fun and hands-on activities during the summer and year round. In fact, these organizations were engaging youth in environmental protection even before going green became the latest fad.

EPA’s website offers a variety of fun facts and projects for students and educators to learn more about the environment and the importance of science in our daily lives. For example, the Water Science and Technology Office, provides interesting activities, science projects and games. The Agency’s Office of Environmental Education offers educational resources, grants opportunities and fellowships to encourage individuals to learn more about how their actions affect the environment. This knowledge is essential to enable them to make better informed decisions to protect the world we live in.

In speaking with many of my colleagues at EPA and other federal agencies such as NASA,  NOAA,  USGS, there is one common theme in their motivation to pursue a career in the sciences. In the majority of the cases, their love of science did not start in the classroom. It started with personal experiences at home, a trip to the park, a visit to the beach, a fishing trip, a starry spring evening… These simple experiences helped awaken their sense of wonder and awe at an early age. This sense of exploration for the world around us is essential for any researcher or scientist. Why do we see lightning before hearing thunder? Why do certain elements react the way they do? What are the impacts of human activities on the environment?

We don’t have to have Ph.D’s to teach our children to explore their surroundings. There are simple steps we can take to protect our environment. And when you come to think about it, at the heart of many of these activities, you will find science. So let the fun begin!

About the author: Dale Haroski is the Science Advisor to the Office of Public Affairs. Even with years of field work and a doctorate in Ecology and Evolution, she has endangered her fiancé’s life several times after abandoning the driver’s seat (while moving) to flee from assorted small spiders and insects.

Ask any wetlands ecologist what life is like in the field and, if they’re honest, you be regaled with tales of long days and longer nights, weather, mud, being stuck in the mud, boats breaking down, people breaking down and bugs – lots and lots of bugs.

All of my graduate research took place in east coast estuaries where seemingly serene swaying fields of salt grass hide one of the most ferocious and fearsome predators known to ecologists and beachgoers alike: the greenhead fly. I know what you’re thinking, “It’s a fly! Sure they’re annoying but aren’t we being a little dramatic?” If you’re thinking this then you’ve clearly never experienced Tabanus nigrovittatus. With razor sharp mouth parts and giant green eyes capable of tracking a target with military precision, the greenhead is impressive, intimidating and seemingly indestructible. Smack, swat, slam or smash it and the greenhead pauses (probably chuckles evilly to itself) and swoops in for the next round of attack. Oh and I haven’t even begun to discuss the painful bites nor the resulting huge welts.

At this point you’re probably thinking, “Ok, they sound pretty nasty but one or two flies isn’t the end of the world.” Ah, but we’re not talking about one or two flies! Scientists at Rutgers University have collected over 1000 greenhead flies PER HOUR all seeking a “blood meal.” (shudder) If that number doesn’t give you nightmares then imagine my panic when greenheads even attempted to fly down my snorkel in their quest for blood! This is the stuff of horror movies folks yet wetlands scientists persist, nay even thrive, in such an environment. Perhaps the greenhead has met its match?

I’ve done field work all over this country and have encountered numerous creepy crawlies. Heck, I once even had an alligator try to bite a fish trap out of my hand yet greenhead flies stand out. And yet, when reflecting on my many wetland adventures, do I mostly remember the beauty and complexity of the estuary right down to that unique marshy smell (malodorous to some and perfume to others)? Absolutely. Did I tolerate greenheads because my fascination with wetlands overrode my seemingly genetically programmed response to flail my arms around while screaming and swatting? Absolutely. Would I do it all again? Absolutely!

Wetland field stories…if you’ve got ‘em, I’d love to hear ‘em!

About the author: Lina Younes has been working for EPA since 2002 and chairs EPA’s Multilingual Communications Task Force. Prior to joining EPA, she was the Washington bureau chief for two Puerto Rican newspapers and she has worked for several government agencies.

If you live along the Eastern seaboard, you probably were overwhelmed by the incessant rain we had experienced for the two previous weeks. I guess many people suffered from cabin fever due to the dreary weather. Nonetheless, there are some benefits from the rain that we are now enjoying. What benefits, you may ask? Well, prior to these storms, there were areas in Maryland and other Eastern states that had deficits in precipitation for 2009. Groundwater levels had been approaching potential drought levels which seem to have been erased with the recent rains. Furthermore, just prior to these storms tones of brown and chartreuse dominated the landscape of lawns and gardens due to the various pollens in the air. Now, everywhere you look, the gardens have been painted with lush greens and bright spring blooms. Another added bonus, at least during the rain, the pollen is at its minimum—a temporary reprieve for allergy sufferers.

In spite of the benefits of spring showers, we should also be mindful to reduce runoff and non-point source pollution after the rain. Here are some tips:

·    Consider greenscaping to protect the environment.

·    Consider planting native shrubs and trees in your back yard to reduce erosion.

·    Wait for the storm to pass before fertilizing.

And lastly, one final benefit after the storm? We can always look forward to the sunshine. Have a great day!

About the author:Bonnie Turner-Lomax came to EPA Region III in 1987 and has held several positions throughout the Region. She is currently the Communications Coordinator for the Environmental Assessment & Innovation Division.

It’s a very chilly 30 degrees and windy Monday in Philadelphia – typical for the end of February. A lunchtime walk took me past the Pennsylvania Convention Center where, in less than a week and despite the calendar and the outdoor temperature, it will feel, smell, and look like Spring.

I’m talking about the Philadelphia Flower Show – an annual rite of Spring that brings together garden exhibitors from all over the country to transfer the floor of the Convention Center into a magical Spring display.

The Philadelphia Flower Show is a sight to behold, taking visitors from Winter to Spring as they step into a wonderland of gardens, plants, and floral designs. Billed as the world’s largest indoor flower exhibit and the oldest (1829) in the nation, the Philadelphia Flower Show annually attracts more than 250,000 visitors from all over the world. 

Traditional gardens, despite their beauty and appeal, can cause serious harm to the environment, including pesticide runoff, and introduction of invasive species.
So, since 1993, EPA’s Mid-Atlantic regional office has used this wonderful venue to educate gardeners on techniques that protect the environment and at the same time create beautiful gardens.

Using native plants, and recycled materials, the EPA Flower Team of volunteers formulates designs, constructs, and creates an exhibit that vividly demonstrates the beauty and practicality of native plants and beneficial landscaping techniques. The 2009 exhibit features 75 native plant species. The plants must be forced to bloom by showtime, which is an especially delicate process. Plants cannot bloom too soon or too late. While the team members are experts in the field of forcing, it comes down to perfect timing, which is the key to successful forcing.
 
As a communications coordinator I have been involved in outreach for the Flower Show team for more than 10 years. It’s amazing to see each exhibit come to life, conveying environmental messages in its own unique way. But that’s to be expected, as my friends and coworkers who put so much effort into the Flower Show are just as energetic the other 50 weeks of the year doing their environmental jobs.

The 2009 Philadelphia Flower Show, runs from Sunday, March 1 through March 8 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. The EPA display, “L’acqua e vita La vita e acqua” or “Water is Life, Life is Water”, focuses on the life of a watershed beginning with the birth of a stream. If you’re in the area, stop by and see for yourself the beauty and environmental benefits of green gardening techniques. Whether you’re an experienced gardener or getting your hands dirty for the first time, there’ll be plenty to see and learn.

See you at the Flower Show.

About the author: Lina Younes has been working for EPA since 2002 and chairs EPA’s Multilingual Communications Task Force. Prior to joining EPA, she was the Washington bureau chief for two Puerto Rican newspapers and she has worked for several government agencies.

As I’ve mentioned before, my weekend agenda is pretty much controlled by the activities that my youngest has scheduled. Recently, she was invited to a friend’s birthday party in Pasadena, MD. The home where they were having the party was about 45 minutes from our house. I had never been to the area and it wasn’t until we got there that we discovered the house was right on the Chesapeake Bay! There was a beautiful view of the majestic Chesapeake, the largest estuary in the nation, right at our footsteps.

I started speaking with the mom and she told me how they had recently moved into their new home. She also mentioned that she was looking forward to the spring to start gardening and planting new flowers and trees in her yard. I recommended that she plant native shrubs and trees which would help protect the Bay. Native plants reduce the need to use pesticides and fertilizers. Letting these shrubs grow densely along the waterway prevents non-point source pollution and erosion. Greenscaping techniques are beneficial anywhere you live and near a watershed these techniques have an added value.

There are several simple steps you can take at home to prevent non-point source pollution from harming such a national treasure or any watershed for that matter. As we get closer to Earth Day, we can start to think of ways to encourage our children and communities to get involved in environmental protection. The protection of our waterways is a good place to start. With spring just around the corner, there are many green activities which the entire family will enjoy.

Each week we ask a question related to the environment. Please let us know your thoughts as comments. Feel free to respond to earlier comments or post new ideas. Previous questions.

Happy New Year! I will drive more efficiently. I will start a compost pile. I will read pesticide labels. I will …

Share what YOU will do in the coming year to help protect the environment.

What are your New Year’s resolutions to help protect the environment in 2009?

About the author: Brenda Reyes Tomassini joined EPA in 2002. She is a public affairs specialist in the San Juan, Puerto Rico office and also handles community relations for the Caribbean Environmental Protection Division.

“You don’t care about what you don’t know.” That phrase stuck with me long after watching the wonderful video, Wetlands & Wonder: Reconnecting Children with Nearby Nature. I was fortunate enough, as well as most of my co-workers, to grow up surrounded by beautiful open spaces. There was no satellite TV, no Ipod, no PlayStation nor the Web. If I wanted to play, I had to go outside to our backyard or go bike riding with my brother or cousins around the neighborhood. Every time we left the house. a whole new world of exploration and curiosity unraveled before our eyes. Many of the activities we did as young children were nature oriented. Our maternal grandparents had a farm and from our paternal grandmother’s backyard the nearby El Yunque rainforest was on full display. We got our feet wet in the Río Blanco River and plenty of times came home carrying treasures from the beach. Nowadays, I work as public affairs specialist at EPA in San Juan and my brother works as a marine scientist at NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle, Washington.

As a modern day parent, getting my kids out into nature can be a challenge. Even though I take them frequently to the country or on the occasional road trip, finding time to experience nature every day is very hard. Four children, a busy schedule, and living in the suburbs are not the right mix to provide for nature oriented experiences. Still,I carve out the occasional moment to give my kids outdoor experiences, like when I tend to my garden or let them play when I air-dry our clothes, Recently, I accidentally ran a cart over a small snake. Upon finding it, I took my three year-old son to the backyard to show him the dead snake. I ran my fingers over its slimy body and my son felt instant curiosity to know how it felt, and did the same. I told him about what snakes eat and how they hide in the base of the ginger and heliconia plants.

Kids don’t have to travel far or visit a museum to learn about nature; the easiest access is often found in our own backyards, in our parks, in the empty lot nearby our houses. If they get to know and experience, nature they will become adults concerned with safeguarding their surroundings and, thus, the environment.

Sobre la autor: Brenda Reyes Tomassini se unió a la EPA en el 2002. Labora como especialista de relaciones públicas en la oficina de EPA en San Juan, Puerto Rico donde también maneja asuntos comunitarios para la División de Protección Ambiental del Caribe.

“No se le da importancia a lo que no se conoce” La frase se me quedó grabada luego de ver la maravillosa película Wetlands & Wonder: Reconnecting Children with Nearby Nature. Me considero afortunada de haber podido crecer, al igual que muchos de mis compañeros de trabajo, rodeada de espacios verdes. No tenía televisión satélite , I-pod, ni un PlayStation. Si quería jugar, tenía que ir al patio o a correr bicicleta por el vecindario con mi hermano y mis primas. Cada vez que salíamos de la casa a recorrer nuestros alrededores, un nuevo mundo de exploración se revelaba ante nuestros ojos. Muchas de las actividades que realizábamos mi hermano y yo eran relacionadas a la naturaleza. Además de las visitas mensuales, pasábamos las vacaciones en la finca de nuestros abuelos maternos o en casa de nuestra abuela paterna desde cuyo patio se podía apreciar el Bosque El Yunque. Fueron muchas las veces que mojamos nuestros pies en el agua del Río Blanco y otro tanto que llegamos cargando “tesoros” de la playa. El resultado es que ambos tenemos una carrera relacionada al medioambiente, yo trabajo en la EPA en San Juan como oficial de asuntos públicos y mi hermano es doctor en ciencias marinas para NOAA en Seattle, Washington.

Hoy día como madre exponer a mis hijos a este tipo de actividad, que para mi era tan común, es un gran reto. Aunque suelo llevarlos al campo y a la playa ocasionalmente, hacer tiempo en nuestra rutina diaria para convivir con la naturaleza es difícil. Mi agitado estilo de vida, vivir en los suburbios unido a la crianza de 4 niños no son una receta fácil para obtener experiencias relacionadas a la naturaleza diariamente. Sin embargo trato de buscar esos momentos como cuando vamos a sembrar plantas en el jardín o secamos la ropa al aire libre, ocasión en que los niños exploran abiertamente sus alrededores o como cuando recientemente aplasté una pequeña culebra en nuestro patio. Cuando la encontré llevé a mi hijo de 3 años al patio para que pudiera verla. Al deslizar mis dedos sobre el cuerpo de esta, mi hijo sintió la curiosidad innata de hacer exactamente lo mismo. Aproveché el momento y le hablé sobre ellas y cuanto les encanta esconderse en la base de los jengibres y heliconias del patio.

Estoy convencida que los niños no necesitan viajar lejos o visitar un museo para aprender sobre la naturaleza. El acceso más fácil está en nuestro patio, en los parques de nuestra comunidad o en el terreno vacío a lado de la casa. Si conocen y experimentan la naturaleza crecerán convertidos en adultos conscientes de ella y por ende protectores del medioambiente que les rodea.

About the Author: As the news director for EPA’s Office of Research and Development, Melissa-Anley Mills is always on the hunt for good science stories. She joined the Agency in 1998 as a National Urban Fellow.

Oh boy, it’s Sunday night, and I can’t wait to get to work tomorrow and tell my co-workers that this weekend I met The Raging Blue Robots, Saturnalia, Nuts for Squirrels and the Taco Buddahs. Now these aren’t the names of the latest bands to hit the DC music scene who hope to win legions of adoring fans, these are folks with an entirely different focus: winning the Marian Koshland Science Museum’s first annual eco-scavenger hunt called “The Green Hunt.”

You see, on Saturday, I helped staff The Green Hunt for the U.S. EPA. Free to the public, the event honored Earth Science Week 2008 and was designed to inform people about climate and earth science, and show that urban environments provide great learning opportunities for outdoor science activities.

As we neared the start time, we were anxious to see who’d burst through the Koshland doors proclaiming “We’re here for the Hunt!” From 11 until about 4:30 a diverse set of teams arrived, all ready to run around the neighborhood, looking for science clues: Teams of friends, teams of big sister/mentors, teams of college students on a homework mission, mom-headed teams, dad-headed teams, mom-and-dad-headed teams, abuela y padres headed teams.

Once their time cards were stamped, they were off! Dashing about DC’s Penn Quarter trying to complete the clues and challenges as fast as possible. There were challenges for the observant, brain teasers, some math, and things that you had to track down and take photos of or doodle. Once the teams checked back in and had their return time recorded they headed to the registration desk to have their answers checked.

Here are links to the map and clue sheet from the hunt you can use to set up a similar science event in your own town, city, or school. So, what did folks think? The general consensus was: FUN – for both the teams and for me! Not bad for my Saturday at “work!”

About the author: Jeff Maurer manages Web content and does communications work for the Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response. He has been with EPA since 2005.

A recent trip to the EPA GreenScaping exhibit at the US Botanic Garden (recently featured in a Green Scene video) revealed this: my dad owes me compensation for hundreds of lost hours during my childhood. By my calculations, I am owed no fewer than 220 child hours, the equivalent of two-and-a-half trips to Disney World or 73 afternoons at Chuckie Cheese. I have already let Dad know that I expect to collect on these damages promptly. Here’s my reasoning…

We had a large yard growing up, which needed to be mowed every Saturday. Because we lived in the South, that realistically meant that it needed to be mowed every Saturday morning, unless you wanted to risk heat stroke trying to shove our dreadnaught of a push-mower across the grounds. Mowing in the evening was out of the question, as allowing our lawn to remain unkempt through the afternoon would have caused my family to become the subject of public ridicule. Or so went my dad’s logic.

With fall came Sisyphean bouts of leaf-raking. The leaves, of course, needed to be raked so that the grass wouldn’t die. For some reason, it never occurred to Dad that if we abandoned the leaf-raking task, the lawn mowing task would become unnecessary as well, which seemed like a total win-win to me.

Periodically throughout the year, we would fertilize the lawn. The fertilizer was bright green – not so much “grass-colored” green, but more “spent-nuclear-waste” green. The fertilizer’s primary function was to clog the machine that applied it.

These chores constituted a never-ending maintenance ritual that, though burdensome, I grudgingly acknowledged as necessary. And that is what I believed, until I saw this sign in our GreenScapes exhibit:

I went to the natural lawn care page on our GreenScapes site, and it turns out that if you run a mulching mower over fallen leaves, it creates a natural compost that fertilizes your lawn! We could have combined these three chores into one! And there are more lawn care tips like that one that could have saved me countless hours of poorly-paid child labor! If I had known that a mulching mower was all that was standing between me and Saturday morning cartoons, I would have gladly used my allowance to subsidize an upgrade. A recent question of the week also revealed that many people have known about this for years. Unfortunately, my dad isn’t one of those people, which is why he now owes me several Saturdays worth of cheese pizza and ski-ball tickets.