I’ve updated the About page on this blog and checked the links. Soon I will begin providing examples of DIY restoration projects.

All the old posts are still up, so you can still browse them for ideas about restoration. And be sure to check out the Links page to find out about organizations involved in restoration.

I’m working on changing this blog into more of a how-to site that tells people how to do little restoration projects on their own or get involved with groups that do bigger projects. Since I’m also writing Beth at Home and Abroad and 12 Cities, 1 Year, it’s going to be a slow process.

As an obsessive recycler, I look for recycling facilities wherever I go. I tried to find them in Baton Rouge when Todd had surgery on his ear, and I think I succeeded, though I apparently left no record of it on Beth at Home and Abroad except a note that I had emailed someone about it.

Missoula is a little more recycling-friendly. My landlady told me I could buy a blue trash bag, put all my recycling in it, and put it out next to the trash can. The trash company would then take care of sorting the paper from the cans and plastic bottles. I haven’t bought any of those bags because, as far as I know, they’re available only at the Missoula Recyclery, and if I have to go there I might as well just take my recycling there.

Until recently, glass wasn’t recycled in Missoula, but now it can be taken to Target or to the Recyclery. Glass doesn’t seem to be a profitable recycling material (glass isn’t recycled much in Kansas City, where I grew up, either), perhaps because so many things that used to be made of glass are now made of plastic.

When Todd and I did laundry last week, I noticed that Grimebusters wasn’t recycling. I was tempted to fish the plastics out of the trash can and take them home, but then my fear of being weird in public kicked in. Later I thought of asking the owners if I could collect their recycling for the month I was in Missoula. But then I thought, Am I going to do this for every non-recycling business I patronize in Missoula? That didn’t seem very practical either.

Correction: Grimebusters does recycle aluminum cans.

I guess I could take the recyclables I find on the days I do laundry there.

I was spoiled in Boulder; I know that. There were several trash companies that recycled; I could take my recyclables to Eco-Cycle’s centers in several cities nearby; I could take even more esoteric items to the Hard-to-Recycle Center in Boulder or the hazardous waste center in Boulder. Boulder residents enjoyed a “pay-as-you-throw” program which made it cheap for them to recycle.

Missoula isn’t that far along. When we attended the Out to Lunch concert and market on Wednesday, I noticed that cans and bottles were being recycled, but most people were providing plastic utensils with their food, which then get thrown away after one use. It wasn’t Zero Waste, but it was definitely better than nothing.

I need to figure out what I can do to promote Zero Waste on this trip. It’s hard to do much in a month, but there must be something I can do.

Here are a couple of interesting posts from the Chemicals and Nanomaterials blog written by Environmental Defense Fund. The first one I’m linking to here describes the process the European Union employs for regulating chemicals of “very high concern.”

Source: “More progress under REACH: 13 more chemicals en route to the Authorization list,” Allison Tracy, chemicals policy fellow, Environmental Defense Fund, June 20, 2011

And here’s what happens in the United States…basically nothing. It’s amazing that there are something like 80,000 chemicals in use in the world today, and the United States sees fit to take industry’s word on their safety.

Source: “Waiting for Godot: 405 days and counting at OMB on EPA’s modest proposal to identify chemicals of concern under TSCA,” Richard Denison, senior scientist, Environmental Defense Fund, June 21, 2011

The European Union is definitely way ahead of the United States in protecting the public from exposure to chemicals.

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.

Mexican poet Homero Aridjis has been working to save Monarch Butterflies for decades. He was one of the people who persuaded the Mexican government to create the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in 1986. Here’s a story about him:

“Saving monarch butterflies stirs the ‘poetical soul’ of Homero Aridjis,” Gary G. Yerkey, Christian Science Monitor, June 6, 2011

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.

On Saturday I hiked up Spruce Gulch, off Left Hand Canyon Road in Boulder, to see the weed research and eradication projects being conducted there. Tim Seastedt, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, says the landowners asked him and his colleagues to help control weeds without using herbicides. The owners didn’t want chemicals in the water supply.

We parked along a meadow where a student has installed rain-out devices to determine how cheatgrass (a winter annual) responds to different levels of precipitation. Seastedt said these devices keep 50 percent of precipitation off the grasses growing below them. Cheatgrass is classified as a noxious weed in Colorado, but it is on List C, which means the state will help cities and counties more effectively manage cheatgrass, if they wish to do so. In another experiment, the meadow was mowed regularly to 2 inches, which caused cheatgrass to yield to storksbill, another winter annual.

Up around the bend, we stopped to look at this patch of western wheatgrass. Plant ecologist David Buckner pointed out that there was little to no cheatgrass here because invasive species like cheatgrass cannot compete with native perennials. This conclusion has been borne out at other study sites in this area by planting spotted knapweed seedlings along with perennials. Only a few of the seedlings survived.

The chimney and foundation below are all that’s left of a homestead and blacksmith’s forge, destroyed in the Overland fire. Seastedt said his research team was planning on using the homestead as a staging site for their experiments.

Farther up the road, we passed the access for running water at the site, which Seastedt said is most helpful for conducting this kind of research. It is a siphon system, and he described how they had to pour many, many gallon jugs of water into a small hose in order to restart the siphon one year.

Despite the weeds invading this land, many native species still survive, such as these creeping mahonia, pussytoes (with white flowers), and horsetail. Ancient forests of horsetail were one of the sources of coal.

We walked through a fence that marked the boundary of the area where the landowner hand-pulled spotted knapweed. Seastedt and his colleagues also do hand-pulling of spotted knapweed, but they have introduced five different species of insects (biological controls) to make the job easier. The insects do not eradicate the plant—that would eradicate their food supply—but they do discourage it to the point that native plants can compete with spotted knapweed in disturbed areas.

Insects have also proven effective in reducing the spread of dalmation toadflax in Spruce Gulch. I asked Seastedt if the team studied the insects to ensure they didn’t spread to other plants. He said they had tried to force the weevils to eat penstemon, a close relative of toadflax, and the weevils didn’t like it.

As we hiked up to the ridge, we could see how the 1988, 2003, and 2011 fires had affected the area. Buckner said that studies of burned areas that have been “restored” show less diversity of plants than areas left to recover on their own.

Restoration is an ever-evolving science, as that conversation showed, and I for one hope that future “management” of ecosystems will use the lightest touch possible. We can’t avoid management in the future because we have altered ecosystems around the world so drastically, but we can point those ecosystems in a direction that will allow them to recover on their own.

The National Forest Foundation will spend the next five years planting trees in an area of Angeles National Forest that was scorched to the dirt.

The Station Fire, alleged to be arson, started in August 2009 and was contained in October 2009, burning 161,000 acres of the national forest near the city of Los Angeles. About 14,000 of those acres were deforested.

I liked this paragraph from the article:

Workers have been collecting seeds from other parts of the forest in elevations that correspond to the destroyed areas. The seeds have been sent to a nursery that has been growing the saplings being planted in the forest. Officials hope to plant a variety of fir and pine trees on an estimated 4,200 acres this year and already have planted about 500,000 trees.

In the last few years restoration has definitely gone local, with open space officials doing their best to plant seeds gathered locally in an effort to preserve biodiversity. For example, Boulder County holds numerous seed collection events. Those seeds are given to local farmers, who grow them and harvest the new bounty of seeds. Boulder County then uses those locally grown varieties of seed in its restoration efforts, making sure that varieties adapted to local microclimates are preserved.

But restoration is a complicated business, and we’re still learning how to do it well.

“What I’ve been told is that they’re planting Coulter pines in areas that used to have big cone Douglas fir and they’re doing it because that’s what they have available,” said Jon Keeley, research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey Western Ecological Research Center. “They have a lot of them, they’re cheap and they grow fast.”

Keeley says that is not good ecosystem management. Who knows? Maybe he’s right. Then again, maybe the big cone Douglas fir is one of those trees that needs fire to help its seeds sprout.

It’s very important to restore quickly after a fire, especially in a forest like this one so near a city. Erosion and mudslides have already caused damage in the area, so the most vulnerable areas should be reseeded and replanted with trees as soon as possible. Kudos to the National Forest Foundation for taking on this responsibility.

Source: “Parts of Fire-Ravaged Calif. Forest to Be Restored,” Noaki Schwartz, Associated Press, April 15, 2011

Ed Self, executive director of Boulder nonprofit Wildlands Restoration Volunteers, had a great article in the spring 2011 newsletter. I’m going to quote from it here.

We normally think of outdoor recreation as doing one of myriad activities such as hiking, mountain biking, skiing, rock climbing, horseback riding, etc. At these times we are “users” of public lands, aiming simply to have fun with friends and get some good exercise.

I’d like to introduce the notion of restoration AS recreation. Land stewardship and restoration work share all the features of recreation. When you participate in a restoration project, you have a ton of fun; spend time with friends; get great exercise; see beautiful places; eat delicious food; and you even get to camp out if it’s a multi-day project. And, you get one additional benefit as well. You get the satisfaction of giving something tangible back to the special places you love, rather than just “using” those places.

Thanks, Ed. I couldn’t have said it better.

If you like outdoor restoration projects, go to WRV’s website and look under the Projects tab. They have habitat restoration projects along the Front Range and elsewhere at various levels of difficulty, for adults and teens.