McGraw Member Works to Provide Clean Water to Nepal
McGraw member David Sterner (left in above photo) recently traveled to Nepal to work with a nonprofit that helps provide people with daily access to clean water. Below is David's report:
I believe that everyone in the world should have access to clean water. It is for this reason that I volunteered with the not for profit organization Wine to Water. Over the past ten years, this non-government organization has provided over 600,000 people with daily access to clean water. Wine to Water was started in 2004 by Doc Hendley, a bartender, from North Carolina. Doc was nominated as a CNN hero of the year in 2009. Read more about Doc
here
.
In 2015, Nepal was hit by a devastating earthquake that killed thousands of people. Professors at Appalachia State University, with close connections to the region, contacted Wine to Water and asked for help. Wine to Water has been on the ground in Nepal since that call and it is here where I volunteered for two weeks to help bring clean water to these people.
A group of 18 volunteers ranging in age from 18 to over 50 (I was the over 50) helped with a water project in the town of Dahakhani in an area near the foothills of the Chitwan Jungle. The town has 160 families with a population approaching 1,000.
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Destructive Weed Spreads Through CRP Seed Program
Reuters
Photo by Penn State/flickr
A U.S. government program designed to convert farmland to wildlife habitat has triggered the spread of a fast-growing weed that threatens to strangle crops in America's rural heartland.
The weed is hard to kill and, if left unchecked, destroys as much as 91 percent of corn on infested land, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). It is spreading across Iowa, which accounts for nearly a fifth of U.S. corn production and in 2016 exported more than $1 billion of corn and soy.
The federal Conservation Reserve Program pays farmers to remove land from production to improve water quality, prevent soil erosion and protect endangered species.
The destructive weed - Palmer amaranth - has spread through seed sold to farmers in the conservation program, according to Iowa's top weeds scientist, Bob Hartzler, and the conservation group Pheasants Forever.
"We are very confident that some of these seed mixes were contaminated," Hartzler said.
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Dove Hunting with Lead Shot vs. Steel: The Results Are In
By Tom Roster/Shooting Sportsman
A two-year study in Texas has some surprising news for dove hunters: Nontoxic steel shells proved equally effective to traditional lead loads in the field.
More than 50 hunters shot more than 5,000 rounds in the course of the study. The shells were custom loaded: A 2¾" 12-gauge 1 1/8-oz load of hard No. 7½ lead shot at 1,200 fps and 1-oz loads of No. 7 and No. 6 steel, both at 1,300 fps.
When the smoke cleared, several analyses run could not detect any statistically significant differences among the performance of the three loads. The results indicate that pattern density on such small body sizes as doves is the key to lethality. Further, switching from lead No. 7½s to steel No. 7s especially should not impact either bagging or wounding rates.
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Are These Shells Too Pretty for Their Own Good?
By Sarah Kaplan/The Washington Post
Photo by David Eikhoff/flickr
Nestled in their box, the cowries reminded me of a child's marble collection. Each oblong shell had the same basic shape: a rounded, impossibly smooth top and a flat bottom with a slit-like opening in the center. The smallest was no bigger than my thumbnail, with green and brown speckles dotting its slick surface. The largest was as big as my palm. It had a lovely orange hue, and I flipped it over to reveal an opening edged with fine purple teeth.
Drawn by their exquisite appearance, humans have been collecting cowries for tens of thousands of years. They may well be the original collected objects - the prehistoric predecessors to diamonds and gold. The oldest examples of jewelry ever found, dating back as early as 100,000 years, were made of cowries and other shells. As time went on, cowries became symbols of power and a form of currency. European explorers filled their curio cabinets with the creatures. Today, collectors search the tropics in search of ever-rarer and more perfect specimens.
"For whatever reason, people are just fascinated," Chris Meyer said. "And that's what we're trying to understand. What is it that is attracting people to have this fascination? What do people value about them?"
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Coexistence Appears to be Best for Sheep and Wolves
By Brandon Keim/Anthropocene
Photo by The Shared Experience/flickr
In 2007, a family of wolves in Idaho's Sawtooth National Forest killed nine sheep. Ranchers who owned the sheep asked government wildlife managers to kill the wolves; but local wolf supporters and conservationists protested, asking instead for a non-lethal solution. So began what became the Wood River Wolf Project, a landscape-scale, multi-year experiment in how ranchers, livestock, and wolves can live together peacefully.
Nearly a decade later, the results are in-and it was a resounding success. In one of the most intensively grazed regions around, non-lethal wolf control led to "the lowest loss rate among sheep-grazing areas in wolf range statewide," write Wood River Wolf Project researchers
in the Journal of Mammalogy
. Coexistence, not killing, was best for livestock.
The study's lead author is Suzanne Stone, a wolf conservation expert at Defenders of Wildlife, a prominent animal advocacy group. The second author is ecologist Stewart Breck of the US Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Services program, which over the last several years has been widely criticized for wantonly killing predators. That ostensibly opposed parties should find common ground seems fitting.
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