Meet an Expert on McGraw's Farm Bill Team
Photo courtesy of Lynn Tjeerdsma
Lynn is a senior policy adviser to U.S. Senator John Thune of South Dakota, and has been a vital part of writing five Farm Bills over the past 30 years. He's a farmer and pheasant hunter, and over the years has worked in the public and nonprofit sectors to advance conservation nationally.
The Center is developing a proposal that would harness GPS and other advanced technologies to identify the most environmentally sensitive areas and set them aside while allowing farmers to utilize the remainder of the surrounding fields. The idea is to maximize economic efficiencies while providing huge environmental benefits, particularly by filtering nitrates and other chemicals before they can reach waterways.
In this clip from the agricultural policy website Agri-Pulse, Lynn talks about his life's work:
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McGraw Helps Local Team to World Contest
By Shane McKenzie/McGraw
Photo courtesy of Keri Bowman
The call came from Abigail Bergan, a Barrington middle school student and part of an all-girls robotics team competing in the First LEGO League Championship, a competition designed to support and promote the core values of teamwork, discovery, and gracious professionalism. The theme for this year's competition was "Animal Allies" and teams were asked to identify and research a real-world problem concerning human/animal conflict and develop an innovative solution.
Who better to contact than the Max McGraw Wildlife Foundation's Center for Wildlife Research? Shane McKenzie, the Foundation's research scientist, answered the call and helped the girls understand more about urban coyotes and issues related to human/coyote conflicts.
The advice paid off: Team Phoenix, as the girls call themselves, came up with CLASS - the Coyote Light and Air horn with Strap to Scare. Earlier this year, Team Phoenix's project won the state championships and now they're headed to St. Louis to compete in the world championships.
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Are These America's Most Endangered Rivers?
Photo by Bureau of Reclamation/flickr
The America's Most Endangered RiversĀ® report is one of the best-known and longest-lived annual reports in the environmental movement. Each year since 1984, grassroots river conservationists have teamed up with American Rivers to use the report to save their local rivers, consistently scoring policy successes that benefit these rivers and the communities through which they flow.
American Rivers reviews nominations for the America's Most Endangered Rivers report from river groups and concerned citizens across the country. Rivers are selected based upon the following criteria:
- A major decision (that the public can help influence) in the coming year on the proposed action;
- The significance of the river to human and natural communities;
- The magnitude of the threat to the river and associated communities, especially in light of a changing climate
The report highlights ten rivers whose fate will be decided in the coming year, and encourages decision-makers to do the right thing for the rivers and the communities they support. It presents alternatives to proposals that would damage rivers, identifies those who make the crucial decisions, and points out opportunities for the public to take action on behalf of each listed river.
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Road Salt May Have Freshwater Lakes on Skids
By Ben Guarino/The Washington Post
Photo by Tydence Davis/flickr
In the 1940s, Americans found a new way to love salt. Not simply for sprinkling on food - we'd acquired a taste for the mineral long before that - but for spreading on roads and sidewalks. Salt became a go-to method to de-ice frozen pavement.
During the past half-century, annual U.S. sales of road salt grew from 160,000 tons to about 20 million tons, as a group of environmental scientists pointed out in a study
published
in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of the Sciences. NaCl kept roads free from slippery ice, but it also changed the nature of North America's freshwater lakes. Of 371 lakes reviewed in the new study, 44 percent showed signs of long-term salinization.
Extrapolating that finding for all of North America, at least 7,770 lakes are at risk of elevated salt levels - a likely underestimate, the researchers said.
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Dirty Birds: Living with Our National Symbol Isn't Easy
By Laurel Braitman/California Sunday Magazine
Photo by Jerry McFarland/flickr
Dutch Harbor is a small town on a small island far out in Alaska's Aleutian chain, nearly 1,200 miles from Anchorage at the edge of the Bering Sea. It's the most productive fishing port in the United States. Every winter the tiny population swells with thousands of people who come to work in the fish processing plants, on the crab boats, or out on the big cod and pollack trawlers. But they're not the only ones trying their fortunes in town or out on the boats.
People in town call them Dutch Harbor pigeons. The rest of us call them bald eagles. In a community of just over 4,700 permanent residents, there live an estimated 500 to 800 eagles. They stare judgily down from light posts, peer intently into people's windows, eat foxes and seagulls while perched in the trees next to the high school, and sit on rooflines like living weather vanes. Down at the docks, they swarm every boat that comes into port like some sort of Hitchcockian nightmare, fighting for scraps of bait, elbowing one another for prime positions, crowding together on top of crab pots, and squawk-cheeping their opinions.
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