Sad News

I'm saddened this evening to read that Grace Pierce-Beck has died. I remember her as petite, quiet, polite, ridiculously intelligent, determined, and very effective. Grace Pierce-Beck was an environmental leader and leading light in Delaware and on the national stage. You may not have heard of her, if you have not been intimately involved in the environmental movement. She got a huge amount done very quietly and behind the scenes.

I was lucky enough to have met her in the early 1990s, when I was working for DNREC -- Delaware's environmental agency -- and got to interview her for a magazine story.

The News Journal story linked above includes a recent photo of her. It looks like she had been fighting an illness recently, but she still had that spark in her eye that I remember. It looks like it is from earlier this year, on the occasion of her induction into the Hall of Fame of Delaware Women.

Grace Pierce Beck was a wonderful person. I'm thankful to have known her.

Another Way to Save Gas and Reduce Air Pollution Emissions

I've been looking for ways to off-set the effects of the larger amount of gasoline I'm burning now that I have shifted from a Prius to a Scion. I think I have found it in the state van-pool system.

As of August 6, I have become a member of a van-pool that runs between Five Points, about a mile and a half from my home, and downtown Dover. I don't expect to ride it every day, but I have been keeping track and find, so far, that I ride the van a bit more than three quarters of the time. (I'm curious to see whether or not the pie chart at right will update here as I enter new data in mycrocosm; adding it as a graphic here is partly an experiment)

UPDATE: The mycrocosm site has recently added the ability to post linked dynamic versions of these charts. I have replaced the old static version with the linked version at right. Though it is bigger, and technically dynamic, I am interested to note that the ratio of Car to Vanpool is just about what it was when I first posted this.

There are (I think) 14 members of this van-pool; we've never all been on the van at the same time, at least not in my brief experience. The members share a $525 monthly rental fee that covers the van, gas, roadside assistance and a guaranteed ride home (if something odd happens). A subset of members pay a bit less but share the driving chores. My cost is about $40 a month.

I have averaged 33.3 miles per gallon in the Scion over the first 1,488 miles I've driven. My cost, not counting oil and other maintenance, has averaged eleven cents a mile. My commute is about 80 miles round-trip. That costs me about $8.80 a day. Allowing a little leeway for the few miles I drive to the van-pool pick-up site, I figure that I've saved my monthly cost to take the van after the first five days I ride the van. The rest of the month is profit.

I'm also pleased to think that when eight or ten of us ride together it means 7 or nine fewer tailpipes adding to our air quality problem.

And I can read, or listen to music, or doze, or chat with my fellow passengers,

There is some irony, though. As a result of a reduction in the percentage of my driving time in the Scion that is highway driving, I'm seeing a slight drop in fuel mileage.

I Thought This Must Be A Joke

But it is not. It is simply tragic irony that Russia is sending an expedition 14,000 feet below the surface of the Arctic Sea to plant a Russian flag at on the sea floor below the north pole.

According to the news reports I've heard, Russia is making a symbolic claim while also searching for geological evidence to support a claim of about half of the Arctic Sea. Why?

Melting ice in the Arctic has raised hopes of accessing energy reserves.

Russia's claim to a vast swathe of territory in the Arctic, thought to contain oil, gas and mineral reserves, has been challenged by other powers, including the US.

So. Because of climate changes, arguably the result of our (humanity as a whole) over-use of fossil fuels, the sea ice is retreating, making it easier to access the supposed so-far untouched cache of fossil fuels under the Arctic Sea.

And the natural reaction to that fact is a determined effort to lay claim to, extract, and burn more fossil fuels?

I think that kind of sucks.

Two Good Ideas in One in Wilmington

The City of Wilmington is starting a pilot program to reduce the number of cars in their "city car" inventory and to reduce the environmental impact of those cars that city employees do drive.

According to a story in the News Journal yesterday, the city will replace a number of the cars in its fleet with hybrid ride-share vehicles. They'll use cars from PhillyCarShare, one of a number of ride-sharing businesses that have popped up in cities in the last few years. My eye is always drawn to the ZipCar ads when I ride the Washington Metro.

It's not an approach to transportation that is likely to work where I live (small-town, long commute), but if I ever get myself settled in a city somewhere, I'll hope to take part in a ride-share program.

I think this makes great sense for government agencies in which staff don't have to have a car or truck available on-call at all times. Most of us government workers can plan any trips we must make far enough in advance that shared transportation works well.

The other part of this story, of course, touches close to home. For six years now I've been a proud Prius driver. And I take this opportunity to repeat that it is not to save money on gasoline that I drive a Prius; I want to reduce the emissions I cause. My Prius helps me do that.

A Boat Rowed Around It

A fellow affiliated with the Delaware Museum of Natural History is about to start on an intriguing adventure. John Wik plans to row a small rowboat around the Delmarva Peninsula as an educational adventure and to raise awareness about the museum.

It is called A Delmarva Odyssey (WARNING: embedded and apparently unstoppable video).

Mr. Wik will leave from the City of New Castle this week and row down the Delaware River, through the Delaware Bay, around Cape Henlopen, down the Atlantic Coast, around Cape Charles, up the Chesapeake Bay, through the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, and back to New Castle.

Not all in one go. He plans to do a few days a week, stopping along the way to record video lessons about the region and its ecology for school children. The Delmarva Odyssey site already has a few videos up detailing plans for the trip, the equipment, and some basic information about the region.

I'm ashamed to say I missed Molly Murray's story on this trip from a few days ago (A Delmarva trek, from bay to bay). I learned about the Odyssey from the Delmarva blog Shore Things (which I only just discovered).

According to Molly's story, the trip was to have started tomorrow, Mother's Day. The Odyssey web site, however, gives Tuesday, May 15 as the starting date. I imagine it may have been changed for various logistical reasons in the nearly two weeks since Molly's story came out. I know the last thing I would want to do on Mother's Day is start a major me-centric adventure. Better to wait a few days.

I hope to track this trip. The News Journal appears poised to offer regular updates, and I will return to the Odyssey web site from time to time. It would be helpful if there were regular text updates from the Odyssey site, and not just the collections of videos that appear planned. An RSS feed would be helpful, as would a schedule of whens and wheres so those of us inclined to could go on-site for a look.

When, for example, will Mr. Wik be passing my town of Lewes?

A Road Runs Through It

There's a new study published in the journal Science that looks at roadless space in the continental United States. It finds the remarkable fact that no point in the continental US is more than 22 miles from some sort of road.

The Science magazine website is by subscription, but the abstract of the study, Roadless Space of the Conterminous United States, notes that the authors have created a new way to measure roadlessness:

We introduce a metric, roadless volume (RV), which is derived from the calculated distance to the nearest road. RV is useful and integrable over scales ranging from local to national. The 2.1 million cubic kilometers of RV in the conterminous United States are distributed with extreme inhomogeneity among its counties.

The map image above shows RV by County. The scale ranges from high RV areas, shown in blue, where there are more areas without roads, to low RV areas, in red, where there are more roads.

Discovery News presents a longer overview of the study (Roadless Space Uneven Across U.S.) which discusses the relationship between this new measure of roadlessness and habitat fragmentation, and notes that the study found that, in some areas, we seem to build roads in the wrong places:

And when the scientists compared the roadless space with the number of people in a given area, they sometimes found a mismatch: that is, too many roads for too few people.

The study's abstract, by the way, offers a lovely example of scientific obfuscation. That poetic phrase "distributed with extreme inhomogeneity" means, I think, "not in any regular way that this highly trained scientist can see."

"Light Green." Makes a Certain Amount of Sense

John Mayer has an interesting thought on global warming:

It seems to me that when it comes to this issue, we've been given only two sides to pick from: side one says the future of global warming does not present a doomsday scenario, almost chuckling the matter aside. Side two says it is a dire issue (which it is), and then goes on to inundate side one with so many separate nakedly-scientific points that they make naivete' seem cozy by comparison.

Mayer presents another approach. He calls it "Light Green."

Rather than try to change the world all at once -- or waiting for the world to change -- he argues that we should just take small steps, as individuals.

Pick one thing to change this year, and keep the rest of your life the same. After all, the only message the charts with escalating red lines are meant to send is that the red lines have to stop escalating, not that they have to drop to the bottom of the graph by next Tuesday.

Good point. Why not take small, positive, realistic steps?

I am reminded of Reinhold Niebuhr's Serenity Prayer.

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

Mayer promises to report back on his efforts in this regard over the next few months. I plan to keep an eye on his blog to see where this leads.

The Final Crop?

We live in eastern Sussex County, Delaware, an area that has grown at what sometimes seems an alarming pace in the 21 years we've been here. Sussex has traditionally been a rural county, with an economy dominated by agriculture. Eastern Sussex, where our town of Lewes is located, is a retirement and resort area, featuring beaches, ocean and bays. We still have farmland, but it is devolving into developments around us.

That's why I'm fascinated by an art project in Arizona, near Phoenix. Matthew Moore is an artist who is watching his family farm fall to encroaching development. His response has been a series of art projects using the remaining fields as his canvas.

Rotations: Moore Estates is an exact replica of the first planned community being built on my family's land. The homes have been planted in sorghum and the roads in a black-bearded wheat. The project is a third scale of the actual development, which can be seen to the east of the project.

Mr. Moore has also carved a new-home floor-plan into a 20-acre field of barley.

I've always enjoyed corn mazes, but this is something bigger.

(With thanks to WFMU's Beware of the Blog)