Todd and I sold our house on Wednesday and left Broomfield, Colorado, on Thursday. We put some things in a 10 by 15 storage unit, but most of what we owned ended up being given away, sold, or recycled.

And what a recycling job it was!

For our technotrash, we used Green Disk, headquartered in Sammamish, Washington. When we mailed them CDs and VHS tapes and cables and diskettes and other unusable electronic bits, we sent them to Missouri. We sent them over 100 pounds of technotrash.

For less esoteric items, we went to Eco-Cycle’s Center for Hard-to-Recycle Materials (CHARM)  in Boulder, Colorado. There we recycled Todd’s huge box of cables, which cost only the $3 entrance fee, since cables are free to recycle at the CHARM; at Green Disk, it would have cost a lot more. We also took in 4 boxes of papers to be shredded, styrofoam, scrap metal, shoes and clothes and fabrics, books, and compostable items.

Hazardous waste could be disposed of at Boulder County’s facility behind the big blue recycling center at 63rd and Arapahoe. We took in compact fluorescent light bulbs, paint, spackle, shoe polish, expired medicine, and lots of batteries. One cool thing about this place: the staff saves items that still have some use (like half-full cans of varnish) and lets people check them out and use what they need. That is so great!Is my BlackBerry taking crappy photos, or what?

And, of course, we used our curbside recycler, Waste Connections, for the regular stuff. They have single-stream recycling, so we can throw it all in one bin. We had to schedule an extra collection, though, because we had filled up our bin a week before we were supposed to move.

If you ever want to downsize, or even get rid of most of your stuff, as we did, I suggest you start a year or two in advance. We did most of our downsizing in a month, and it was painful. Even now our old neighbors are probably still mocking us for all the stuff we tried to palm off on them.

How is this restoration?

It’s preventive. The less we use, the less we need to extract.

Where are we going?

Check out 12 Cities, 1 Year to find out.

Bees, bats, birds, and amphibians have been experiencing declines worldwide since the mid-1990s, but the problem has become truly terrible since the early 2000s. Researchers have noticed these species dying from a variety of diseases, but now some think the real problem is that pesticides are compromising the immune systems of animals, causing them, like people with AIDS, to be killed by diseases that creatures with healthy immune systems can defeat.

The public have little knowledge of these widespread crises affecting the environment. In 2011, we now have the situation in the US (and, at present, to a lesser extent in Europe) in which there are widespread declines (and in some places areas of local extinctions) in populations of amphibians, bats, honey bees, butterflies, moths, hoverflies, bumble bees and birds. In several areas of the US whole populations of bats and amphibians have been “wiped out.” As far as we know, the declines are continuing. Many organisations, including the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), have warned of a global crisis in pollinators which is likely to threaten global food security.

The paper in which that quoted appeared, “Widespread Immune Deficiency Disease in Wildlife: A Hypothesis,” was written in April 2011 by retired Welsh scientist Rosemary Mason, MB, ChB, FRCA, and Palle Uhd Jepsen, former Senior Adviser in Nature Conservation and Wildlife to the Danish Forest and Nature Agency. The PDF is available on the website of the Boulder County Beekeepers Association.

I wrote a related article in December 2010, which provides some background information on the neonicotinoids, the class of pesticides held responsible by the paper’s authors.

Thanks to Laura Tyler of Boulder Media Women for this information.

Inspiration. It’s what we all need, right? So head on over to Midway Journey on Facebook. A small group of people traveled to Midway Atoll to take still pictures and video of the birds of Midway Atoll and show how the presence of plastic trash was affecting the parents and chicks. Amazing pictures of birds, people, cameras, you name it, by Kris Krug and others.

You can also check out the Midway Journey website. I think the photos are easier to access on Facebook.

In addition, a student on the voyage, Emily, has her own blog.

How is this restoration?

The participants in Midway Journey are using their artistic skills to help us deal with the environmental hazard of plastic in our oceans.

They came to the conclusion that all the chicks on Midway have plastic in their stomachs.

California nonprofit 5 Gyres Institute will conduct a study of the plastic pollution in the South Pacific Gyre, sailing a boat from Valdivia, Chile, to Easter Island. The group has already sailed through the other four ocean gyres: North Pacific, North Atlantic, South Atlantic, and Indian Ocean.

Why should I care?

Here’s a quote from the press release about 5 Gyres’s voyage to the South Pacific gyre:

Most ocean plastic pollution takes the form of tiny plastic bits resulting from degraded fishing gear or plastic waste flowing out to sea from land. Sea turtles, marine mammals, birds and fish ingest these plastic particles, potentially causing internal blockages and an increased accumulation of synthetic chemicals in their bodies. The debris may also kill seabirds and marine animals that can die of starvation, their bellies full of plastic mistaken for food. 5 Gyres is also studying whether humans are being harmed by eating fish that have ingested debris contaminated with PCBs, DDT, and other toxins.

…

While the plastic marine debris problem is typically described as a well defined “garbage patch,” plastic pollution at sea takes the form of a thin, diffuse soup. Either way, it cannot be cleaned up by any practical means, so society must stop the problem at its source, the researchers stress. They advocate improving the recyclability of plastics, legislation requiring companies to take responsibility for recovery and reuse of their products, and curbs on single-use disposable products.

How is this restoration?

Before we can restore any ecosystem, we must understand the state of that ecosystem. That is 5 Gyres’s purpose: to educate people about marine debris and the “plastic soup” that has developed in areas of the Earth’s oceans.

I take issue with the idea that this problem cannot be cleaned up “by any practical means.” We may not be able to strain out all the tiny plastic particles, but we can go pick up some of the trash in these gyres. We can also pick up trash on land.

I want to go on one of these expeditions someday.

Here’s an example of how to deal with plastic pollution: make plastic waste into a surfboard! All the lighters that went into the surfboard were regurgitated by birds. (Isn’t that gross?)

As part of Rodale’s Plastic-Free February, I have been looking for items that don’t contain plastic. Although I have not succeeded in avoiding plastic during the first two weeks of February, I have discovered some interesting products.

Grocery stores generate a lot of plastic. Nearly everything in a grocery store comes packed either in plastic (I should have taken a picture of the dolly loaded with crates wrapped with clear plastic) or in cardboard or metal lined with plastic. There are some companies that claim to be lining their cans with plastic free of bisphenol-A, but that claim is disputed.

The one place in the grocery store where a consumer has a choice to use plastic or not is the produce section. And for years, I’ve kept taking the occasional plastic bag, especially the gathered ones, because they can accommodate heads of romaine lettuce. So yes, I’m using plastic, but I’m also reusing it.

I think Belief Beyond Bags (3B Bags) has liberated me. The lettuce in this oversize produce bag is red-leaf lettuce, but romaine would fit in that bag. Each set of bags costs about five bucks and contains one oversize bag. I bought two sets, one for me and one for my husband since we still drive two vehicles (yet another enviro issue).

Two notes on the cardboard packaging stuck in my mind. First: “This product is suitable for packing and carrying produce. It is not suitable for long term storage of produce.” I translate that as, “Don’t store potatoes in this bag all winter.” I fully intend to keep lettuce in these bags in the veggie compartment of my fridge. Second: “Made of 100% nylon. Responsibly made in China.” I realized I didn’t know what nylon is made of, so I looked in the dictionary. Turns out it’s a polyamide, which is derived from ammonia.

So here I am replacing my plastic bags, made from petroleum, with nylon bags, which consist of polyamides, which are made from ammonia, which is a volatile organic compound. An amide is an inorganic compound. I don’t know what that means for the environment. Perhaps nylon production is a toxic process. In any case, it is better to use fewer bags in the course of a year. Perhaps I should have looked for bags made closer to home, but I was in Vitamin Cottage (a Colorado-based company) and there they were.

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Another item I was thrilled to find at Vitamin Cottage was this dental floss packaged in cardboard. I have never understood why floss cannot be bought in bulk, but since it can’t, I’ll use this one. It’s as sturdy as the King Sooper’s brand of dental floss, though not quite as sturdy as Glide Floss. It fits easily between my teeth, and it’s “Vegan Waxed!” I’m not sure why that warrants an exclamation point.

Gentle Floss is not completely plastic-free: The floss itself is kept in a plastic bag. But it uses less plastic than those hard plastic dental floss dispensers, and its plastic is recyclable. At 100 yards, it will last longer than a typical Glide Floss, thus making it more economical.

I’m less thrilled by the AirPouch EarthAware packaging. I suppose I should be grateful that it is made from recycled film, but I still believe companies should eliminate plastic packaging wherever possible, even if the alternative is less convenient for the corporation or the consumer.

How is this restoration?

It’s future restoration. Right now, we need to recycle plastic and eliminate plastic packaging and clean up plastic waste wherever we find it, even in the middle of the Pacific. But our current efforts must be matched by reducing our own use of plastic so there will be much less plastic to clean up and recycle in the future. Even the AirPouch does that to some extent.

“River of Raptors“: The title of this article from the September–October issue of Audubon sends shivers down my spine. And the way they describe the spectacle: “Day after day, through most of September, October, and November, the birds pour southward, something between four and six million hawks and vultures in all.”

I want to go. I want to go so badly to this strip of land along the Gulf of Mexico centered on the city of Veracruz. There are places near Denver where birders go to watch the hawk migration (Dinosaur Ridge, for example), but I don’t think anyone has reported millions of raptors flying past Denver. There are so many of them going through the Centro de Veracruz (the name of the Important Bird Area) because it’s the logical way for them to get to their wintering grounds in Central and South America. And there are lots of trees to roost in at night—or there used to be.

The article details Audubon’s and ProNatura Veracruz’s efforts to convince farmers to preserve forest along the coast. It’s traditional for farmers to run cattle and grow sugarcane in the area, but the recent drought has made those businesses less profitable. Some locals have decided that restoring the forest with government help and then letting people hunt on their land may be better choices.

The article also briefly mentions that uncertain prospects in the area are driving human migration to the United States. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could find a way to pay those young men and women to stay in Veracruz state and restore the land?

How is this restoration?

More birding = more restoration, in my book.

Two Denver-area women, Stephanie Peller of Broomfield and former Broomfield resident Tais Field, plan to climb Kilimanjaro to help raise money for the A21 Campaign (“abolishing injustice in the 21st century”), a charity that fights human trafficking. They are part of a 19-women-and-2-men team who want to do “an extraordinary thing to stand together IN UNITY against Human Trafficking.”

The money raised by publicizing the climb (and thus the issue of human trafficking) will be used to support a shelter for trafficked people in London. Peller and Tais hope that someday there will be a similar shelter in Colorado. In an article in the Broomfield Enterprise (“Local Women Trekking Up Kilimanjaro to End Trafficking,” Dylan Otto Krider, December 26, 2010), they note that Colorado is a major hub for victims of trafficking, but there is no shelter specifically for them in the state.

How is this restoration?

It’s restoration of people who’ve been damaged by forces outside their control. It will enable them to lead lives of their own choosing.

This post was updated in May 2011.

Niwot, Colorado, beekeeper Tom Theobald has been concerned about the effects of pesticides on honeybee populations for some time, and that concern motivated him to release a November 2010 EPA memo relating to Bayer’s application to expand registration of clothianidin, a pesticide in the neonicotinoid class, to mustard and cotton crops.

In an article in Bee Culture, Theobald explains how he first began to investigate neonicotinoids, which are sprayed on seeds and persist in every part of the plant throughout its life cycle. In other words, the seed sprayed with one of these highly sophisticated pesticides will grow into a plant that has neurotoxins in its leaves and pollen, where bees (and the targeted insect pests) can be poisoned by them.

Along with other beekeepers, I have been concerned about clothianidin for some time, in part because it is not the first neonicotinoid to cause problems. Imidacloprid, the first, was registered in the U.S. in 1994 and was soon implicated in widespread bee kills. Several commercial beekeepers in North Dakota filed suit because of damage from imidacloprid used on sunflowers and similar damage in France from use on sunflowers led to a ban there in 1999. However it is still used without change in the U.S. France declined to even register clothianidin.

I became concerned about clothianidin in 2007 as the possible cause of a break in the Fall brood cycle I was seeing in my bees and in early 2008 I began digging into the facts surrounding its approval. (Source: “Do We Have a Pesticide Blowout?” Tom Theobald, Bee Culture, 7/12/2010, PDF available on the website of the Boulder County Beekeepers Association—scroll down to Articles)

In fact, clothianidin has never been properly approved. It was given conditional registration in 2003, but Bayer was required to conduct a study of the effect of the chemicals on bees throughout a full life cycle (about 2 months). The study was not even completed until 2006, and then it was conducted using canola plants in Canada, instead of corn plants, the crop most heavily sprayed with clothianidin in the United States. EPA considered the study to be sound, but the November 2010 memo released by Theobald shows that not everyone at EPA agrees with that assessment.

Since EPA seems to have repudiated the study on which the conditional registration was based, beekeepers and environmentalists thought the time was perfect to ask EPA to withdraw its registration of clothianidin. That letter, dated December 8, 2010, is also available on the Boulder County Beekeepers Association website, as is the 99-page memo.

What is conditional registration?

According to Theobald, conditional registration of a pesticide is granted for a variety of reasons, some of which are as minor as labeling issues, and some of which are serious, as in the possibility that neonicotinoids might cause massive bee die-offs. In summer 2010, Theobald asked EPA for a list of pesticides granted conditional registration and learned that 94 pesticides  have come onto the market since 1997, with more than two-thirds of them granted conditional registration.

I’d love to blame George W. Bush’s anti-science administration for all that, but I’d bet the EPA under Clinton was also guilty.

How is this restoration?

If this class of pesticides was banned, then perhaps bee populations would recover somewhat. It’s a big if, since viruses and mites have also been blamed for colony collapse disorder (CCD). Here’s Theobald’s take on it:

I think pesticides are the portion of the problem that can be most immediately addressed, without any new money, any new people, any new laws, and we may find that these viruses do play a role, but it’s like the polio vaccine, you know, we may find the vaccine and administer it to everyone and then tell the children to go out and play in heavy traffic. If we don’t solve these pesticide problems, these other things aren’t gonna matter. (Source: Radio interview with Tom Theobald, KGNU, 10/8/10; available on Boulder County Beekeepers Association website)

One undoubted bonus, in any case, would be that pollinators and people would no longer be serving as test subjects for pesticide makers. I find it infuriating that the EPA grants conditional registration at all.

***

The subject of pollinator die-offs is complex. For more information, try this article: “Leaked Document Shows EPA Allowed Bee-Toxic Pesticides Despite Own Scientists’ Red Flags,” Tom Philpott, Grist, December 10, 2010.

Thanks to Laura Tyler of Boulder Media Women for alerting me to this story.

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Update from May 22, 2011: I received another email from Laura Tyler with a link to the following paper: “Widespread Immune Deficiency Disease in Wildlife: A Hypothesis.” It was written in April 2011 by retired Welsh scientist Rosemary Mason, MB, ChB, FRCA, and Palle Uhd Jepsen, former senior adviser in nature conservation and wildlife to the Danish Forest and Nature Agency. The link is on the website of the Boulder County Beekeepers Association.

Here’s a quote from the end of the paper:

There is evidence that immune compromise in wildlife is now widespread. A series of unrecognised pathogens are driving worldwide extinctions in a variety of species, including amphibians, bats, birds, invertebrates (and in particular, pollinators).

In other words, all those species are experiencing something like acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), which makes them vulnerable to a variety of diseases and conditions that kill them. The real cause of the problem, according to Mason and Jepsen, is the neonicotinoid pesticides that have been used with increasing frequency since the mid-1990s. These pesticides are sprayed on seeds and thus become an integral part of the plant.

Many people have heard of the Maasai of Africa and their cattle. But how many know that some Maasai in Tanzania are turning to camels after their cattle herds died in an extended drought?

The drought in Tanzania has lasted since the 1990s, but things became desperate around 2007. A couple of years later, Heifer Tanzania persuaded villagers in Ketumbeine to accept some camels as substitutes for their doomed cattle.

Imagine that you were used to herding cattle and you suddenly had to herd an animal that might be twice your height and weighed 1,000 pounds. People in the village are still getting used to the camels, but they have discovered one happy advantage: the camels can carry heavy loads.

Now the women have help not only from the camels that carry water but also from the men, who used to leave the water-fetching to them. Now the men will lead the camels and help to load water or firewood. In this way, the separate spheres have begun to overlap a little more.

Camels produce milk throughout the dry season, and they don’t need to go as far as cattle do to find forage.

How is this restoration?

It’s restoration of people and culture with a twist. It’s a clever adapation, I think. But if camels can find forage closer to home than cattle, then areas closer to settlements may become overgrazed.

One of the 12 cornerstones of Heifer projects is environmental restoration, so I’m sure the project manager has brought up the subject in this village. But in an area suffering a prolonged drought, restoration will be very difficult.

Source: “Maasai Adapt to Survive,” Donna Stokes, World Ark, Holiday 2010

Related article on this blog: Do Ecosystems Need Disturbance?

Over on my other blog, Beth at Home and Abroad, I wrote about the comeback of Root tea, a true American liqueur.

Now when I planned this blog to be about restoration, I wasn’t thinking of everyone getting all likkered up. But I do like the idea of reviving a liquor that has a long history in this country, possibly even going back to pre-Columbian times.

Now if we could just get Root tea (made by Art in the Age) to give a bunch of money to restoration organizations like Wildlands Restoration Volunteers.