Sustainable Diet, Sustainable World: Community Supported Agriculture Makes Both Happen

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In her article on the Knowledge Driven Enterprise blog, Savanna Smith reports that “When you buy your groceries, the best and brightest fruits and veggies have usually traveled across the country and sometimes across the world to get to you. This supply chain bypasses the perfectly fresh produce local to your community. Our traditional market practices have enormously high transportation and carbon costs, create massive amounts of wasted food, and may leave our local farmers with unsustainable businesses.

So what can we do to address these problems?”

Smith discusses community supported agriculture options in Northern Virginia and elsewhere. And she offers a great list of resources for further reading.

Cicada Safari, Smartphone mapping app for citizen science

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Photo by Yuri Vasconcelos on Unsplash

Join Cicada Safari to help map the 2021 emergence of the periodical cicada Brood X.  Simply download the free app from the Apple app store or Google play, then go on a safari to find periodical cicadas.  Photograph and submit the periodical cicadas to Cicada Safari, and after the photos are verified, they will be posted to the live map. Cicada Safari was created by Dr. Gene Kritsky working with the Center for IT Engagement at  Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati.

More information here.

Earth Sangha seeks Volunteers Six Days a Week

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6100 Cloud Dr. Springfield, VA
Sundays- Fridays
9 am to Noon
Must sign up here.

Just in the first 5 weeks since Earth Sangha opened up its Wild Plant Nursery for the Spring season, they’ve supplied over 325 curbside pickup and Self-Service Sunday orders.

As they send out their local-ecotype native plants to their permanent homes, they’re just as busy growing new ones to take their places. Of course, these take some time to get ready: to sow the seed, pot seedlings up, or divide overcrowded pots.

Volunteers can help with a wide variety of tasks and do not need to have any previous experience!

Review of Never Home Alone, by Robb Dunn

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Review by FMN Kristine Lansing

How much serious thought have you given to the mold in your bathroom, the spider in your stairwell, or the camel cricket bouncing around your basement? Have you ever found yourself wondering what else might be lurking within the four walls of your home, and whether it’s a good thing . . . or not?

As master naturalists, we spend so much of our time observing and interacting with nature “in the wild” that it’s easy to overlook the veritable universe that dwells right alongside us, indoors. In fact, “every house is a wilderness brimming with thousands of species of insects, bacteria, fungi, and plants.”* And it appears new species are being discovered all the time.

In 264 well-crafted pages, Dr. Robb Dun explores the intricate relationships and co-dependencies that some of our tiny lodgers have cultivated not only with us but with one another. Our first instinct may be to get rid of all intruders, but disturbing this delicate balance can occasionally be detrimental to us.

Rather than trying to artificially control the species that surround us, Dunn suggests that we instead “rewild” our homes “to let the wilderness back in, albeit . . . selectively.” Once “the most dangerous beasts” have been tamed, we will be better positioned to “find joy and wonder in the bacteria, fungi, and insects in our daily lives.” Joy? Wonder? After reading this fascinating book you’ll never see your home in quite the same light again!

Rob Dunn is a professor in the department of applied ecology at North Carolina State University and in the Natural History Museum of Denmark at the University of Copenhagen.

  • This and all subsequent quotes are from Never Home Alone, Robb Dunn, 2018, Basic Books.

The Social Cost of Carbon

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Climate change is the central issue of our time, affecting everything connected to the natural world.

Economists have calculated the costs of climate change, one of which is the social cost of carbon (SCC). Watching this 3-minute video on SCC is an easy way to understand the reasoning behind the concept and what it means in terms of government decision making that affects all of us.

An additional resource is this explanation by Kevin Rennet and Cora Kingdon of Resources for the Future (excerpted here): “The social cost of carbon (SCC) is an estimate, in dollars, of the economic damages that would result from emitting one additional ton of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The SCC puts the effects of climate change into economic terms to help policymakers and other decisionmakers understand the economic impacts of decisions that would increase or decrease emissions. The SCC is currently used by local, state, and federal governments to inform billions of dollars of policy and investment decisions in the United States and abroad. This explainer reviews how the SCC is used in policy analysis, how it is calculated, and how it came to be.”

The Environmental Defense Fund offers accessible articles on SCC as well as an amazing podcast called Degrees. The host, Yesh Pavlik Slenk, interviews people who use their jobs and their time to make a real difference for their communities.

Want to reduce your own carbon footprint? Rare.org suggests 7 easy ways to start.

Art, Wonder and the Natural World, webinar May 6th

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Photo courtesy of Jane Kim

Thursday, May 6, 2021
7 pm
Fee: $10

To register, click here.

Join Audubon Society of Northern Virginia as they welcome Jane Kim, artist, science illustrator, and the founder of Ink Dwell, a studio that explores the wonders of the natural world. In this visually stunning presentation, Jane will take the audience on an artistic journey that explores the 375 million year evolution of birds, the migratory behaviors of some of our most beloved and endangered animals and the importance of creating urban monuments to nature.

This is a joint venture with the Oak Spring Garden Foundation.

City Nature Challenge: Upload and Identify Observations! Tuesday May 4 through Saturday, May 9

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Wednesday May 5, 7-9pm: Virtual Event: ID Party. Work together to identify DC area City Nature Challenge observations! You’ll learn ID tips and iNaturalist power user techniques.  Register here.

Save the Date!  Monday May 10, 7-8:30pm: Virtual Event: City Nature Challenge Celebration.   A festive virtual gathering to celebrate the discoveries! Once scheduled, details will be revealed here.

See the Resources page for recordings of last year’s virtual events. 

All observations April 30 through May 3 will count for the City Nature Challenge if they are made within the green line on this map:

Why are Invasives in the Trash?

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Photo courtesy of Fairfax County Park Foundation

Fairfax County requires yard waste to be placed in paper bags. So why does the Fairfax County Invasive Management Area Program use large plastic bags?

Because the size is needed, and those bags are packed with non-native invasive plants that must be incinerated. Invasives are burned, not composted. Material left curbside in paper bags is turned into mulch. Invasive plants in mulch would spread their seeds. At home, don’t put invasive plants in paper bags for pickup and composting. Trash them.

Birding by Ear

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Song Sparrow photo by Pat Ulrich

On line: Thursday, May 13, Tuesday, May 18 & Thursday, May 20
7:00 – 8:30PM
Field Trip: Saturday, May 22 (Limit 20), Place TBD
Fee: $75/Online only; $100/Online + Field Trip
To register, click here.

Sponsored by Audubon Society of Northern Virginia

Have you ever wondered what that song or ‘chip’ note was that you heard on a forest hike? Can’t tell the difference between a spring peeper and a wood warbler? How does one learn to memorize the complex and endless variety of bird sings? This workshop is designed for you. If you are a relative beginner, and want to start building a repertoire of learned bird songs and calls, here is the place. This workshop on Birding by Ear will help you phoneticize a variety of bird calls using mnemonic devices, understand the basic function and purpose of avian vocalizations, organize a library of calls and songs having similar characteristics, and improve your field birding skills.

Beat the summer heat with a native plant shade garden

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Photo by Plant NOVA Natives

They say shade gardens are the gardens of the future, since it will be too hot to spend much time in the sun. That’s pretty much the case already on most summer days. Although sunny butterfly gardens still provide hours of entertainment, a shady place to relax or play in your yard is a welcome addition. An added bonus is that gardening is a lot easier in the shade, because the weeds grow much more slowly.
 
There are plenty of native flowers available to provide color in a shade garden. You can see examples of them on the shade garden page of the Plant NOVA Natives website. Many of those species also make excellent ground covers. For example, Woodland Phlox and Golden Ragwort are evergreen and spread to make a mat, with blue and yellow flowers respectively in the spring. April and May are a particularly lively time in the shade, as spring ephemerals such as Virginia Bluebell and Spring Beauty pop up and bloom before the trees and shrubs leaf out, then disappear when the shade gets too heavy. They make perfect companion plants for the ferns and sedges that provide a cooling backdrop all summer long. Contrasting foliage textures create visual interest even without flowers.
 
Why choose native plants? A plant is native to our environment if it evolved within the local food web and has the intricate relationship with animals and other plants that this implies. Plants such as turf grass and many of the ornamentals that were brought here after the arrival of the Europeans are nearly useless (and sometimes actually harmful) from an ecosystem perspective. Choosing native plants allows us to fit into the ecosystem instead of displacing it.
 
Most native plants can be planted any time of year that the ground is not frozen or saturated. Spring is of course the most popular time for gardening (though fall is even better.) As consumer interest has grown, conventional garden centers have been providing an ever-increasing variety of native plants. In Northern Virginia, 22 garden centers have red stickers on their native plants, placed there by Plant NOVA Natives volunteers, so all you have to do is walk down the aisles and look for the stickers. In addition, several local garden centers sell only native plants, which gives you the best selection of all.
 
In some cases, the first step toward creating a shade garden will be to create the shade. A glaring hot lawn is uninviting and can be remedied by simply planting native trees.  Since most trees require full sun to grow, an empty lawn is the perfect location for a grove of trees that will beautify your property while reducing air conditioning costs. Underplanting the trees with shrubs will provide homes and food for the birds.