Cartoon: Jim Hunt
These days most adult-types under the age of, well, 100 find themselves more frequently communing with computers than with Mama Nature. But unlike the many of us who grew up running around outside all day, today’s kids are less connected to the environment than ever.
Yes, in a schedule packed with piano lessons, soccer practices, and quantum physics training at age eight, the once timeless command to “go outside and play” has become antiquated. So now what?
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Cartoon: Jim Hunt
Miss seeing a few of your favorite trees around town? You can shake your fist at a tiny, most unwelcome guest: the emerald ash borer.
This invasive wood boring beetle has killed tens of millions of ash trees in the United States and is on its way to damaging millions more. Removing trees is just one strategy to get rid of the bugger and save the remaining ash forest, but it’s not enough of a solution on its own, as we learned here at EcoMyths. To explore what all the fuss is about, we consulted several experts, including scientists, arborists, and city foresters.
Emerald ash borer (EAB) is an exotic insect that’s native to China and eastern Asia, and hopped a ride to the U.S. in cheap wood packing material more than ten years ago. The adult beetles do little harm, aside from feeding on leaves. It’s the larva stage, however, when EAB chew through the trees and damage their vascular systems – the tissue right under the tree bark that’s responsible for transporting water and nutrients from the roots to the top leaves and branches.
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Cartoon: Jim Hunt
With so much control over our crop species, it’s hard to believe that a plant as important to our everyday lives as (gasp!) coffee might actually be in danger of extinction. But a recent study found that in as little as 65 years, a warming planet could make the vast majority of wild Arabica coffee’s native habitat, well, uninhabitable—at least for the coffee plant. And since Arabica makes up 70 percent of the global coffee market, our morning cup o joe could seriously suffer.
And coffee is just a drip in the biodiversity bucket. To learn more about why we should care about conserving as much plant diversity as possible, we chatted with a few experts in the field: Nicole Cavender, PhD, vice president of science and conservation and Andrew Hipp, PhD, plant systematist, both from The Morton Arboretum; Andrea Kramer, PhD, PhD, executive director of Botanic Gardens Conservation International US; and Abigail Derby Lewis, PhD, conservation ecologist at The Field Museum.
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Cartoon: Jim Hunt
What to do when it comes time to ditch old and unused medicine? Flushing old pharmaceuticals down the toilet may seem like a better option than simply trashing them. After all, the FDA recommends flushing some drugs in order to keep them from being accidentally ingested by others. Problem is, like everything else we flush, medicine we send down the pipes ends up in waterways…and potentially beyond.
That’s part of what has prompted organizations like the Alliance for the Great Lakes and the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District (MWRD) to call for further investigation into the impact of chemical contaminants in our water, and to advocate safe disposal of medicines through local drug take-back programs. We talked with Olga Lyandres, PhD, the Alliance’s research manager, and Debra Shore, MWRD commissioner to find out why they think participating in drug take-back programs are the best option.
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