E.O. Wilson "The End of the Anthropocene."

[Rebek56]

Originally Posted by EllenW

I think anything we do like planting natives and removing non natives helps Rebek.

Part of the pollinator course I'd doing for retirees will focus on "pollinator pots" for decks, balconies, and patios. Besides the usual suspects (and I do grow lantana in pots for the butterflies and hummingbirds), quite a few of our smaller natives do fine in containers.

[EllenW]

Look at all the wildlife Sage attracts on her balcony. She just raised monarch butterflies. Yes I think many native plants will grow well in pots. What a wonderful course you are teaching Rebek.

[Gloria]

"Biological diversity is the key to the maintenance of the world as we know it." E O Wilson

[Gloria]

For the last couple of years I have been experimenting with native plants in containers. Prairie dropseed does well and returns each year and looks good with blacked eyed susan. I like threadleaf coreopsis with switchgrass in a container but the switchgrass was slow to return the following year. It does not get very tall but looks good and stand erect even with all the heavy rain and storms this year. Purple coneflowers are good but Echinacea pallida tended to flop after first couple of seasons. Needs a really big container. Trying out some spring additions next year.

[Gloria]

None of this means that I am against urban ecological initiatives. We need everyone involved. Half the earth to other species will need many places were sharing is necessary.


Urban Wildlife Refuge Partnerships

http://www.fws.gov/refuges/vision/ur...nitiative.html

With 80% of the U.S. population currently residing in urban communities, the challenge to ensure our natural resources are conserved and valued by the American people has become even more complex. Demographically, over half of the population will be diverse by 2042. Young adults and children everywhere have different perceptions, values, and relationships with land and wildlife compared to previous generations. To ensure that we nurture a new conservation constituency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service must promote strategies to engage these audiences in meaningful, collaborative ways that build sustainable, broad-based support for the their mission.

To address this challenge, the Urban Wildlife Refuge Initiative implementation team has developed a framework to engage communities, where awareness of the Service is minimal to lacking, in order to encourage and nurture an appreciation of wildlife conservation to new audiences. The National Wildlife Refuge System is designating these “Urban Wildlife Refuge Partnerships” in eight demographically and geographically varied cities in 2013, with additional designations to follow by 2015. The team formally designated and announced the pilot Urban Wildlife Refuge Partnerships at the Urban Academy in September 2013, at the National Conservation Training Center.

http://youtu.be/6TNGLskLEpM

[Rebek56]

Gloria, I got the idea for the pots when I started collecting plants to take when we move and discovered that they're doing fine. The favorite container right now is rudbeckia hirta, switchgrass, and New England aster. I also have a lot of wild ageratum in pots and am trying obedient plant, echinacea, and little bluestem. The next experiment will be "Fireworks" goldenrod.

[Gloria]

Wilderness as an economic engine.

It took many years and several rewrites but the National Wilderness act passed with only one dissenting vote in 1964. Wish todays legislators could put benefit above political gain and work as a coalition toward a mutual goal.


http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/sep/03/open-space-parks-federal-divestment-states-rights-sustainable-economy-wilderness-act-50

Wilderness, and the Wilderness Act, support our economy. "As much as open spaces are a sanctuary from human activity, they're a huge economic generator and the ultimate basis for a sustainable economy, according to the Outdoor Industry Association. In a 2013 report, it calculated that outdoor recreation contributes $646 billion to the US economy and directly supports 6.1 million jobs."

Andrew Hyde, founder of tech company Startup Weekend, an annual conference that stretches to 142 countries, bears that out. He moved part of his company from Seattle, Washington, to Boulder, Colorado, because of the access to public lands.
“I really liked the proximity to open space, being able to hike or bike to work through some amazing wilderness,” he says.
Startup Weekend is part of an influx of tech companies to Colorado that has been explained, in large part, by quality-of-life considerations. “The tech scene is quite hot here, and it’s a lot of people that could make it anywhere, but want a great place to raise their kids with access to wilderness as well,” Hyde says.

This allure is clearly going unnoticed by the current US Congress, whose past two terms has been marked by exceptionally little movement on public land protections, according to the Wilderness Society, a non-profit conservation group whose former leader, Howard Zahniser, authored the original version of the 1964 act.

“Over the last four years, we’ve seen one of the least productive Congresses on wilderness and public lands,” Rowsome says, citing the creation of just one new wilderness areas in the last two congressional sessions, compared with 757 designated since the act’s passage.
“There are nearly 30 wilderness bills in the house and senate, many of which have had hearings and markups to try to get through the committee process and haven’t made it through that gauntlet.”

That downward trend has gone hand in hand with a strong showing by the outdoor economy during a time when most industries are retreating.
“Jobs that are connected to our environment can’t be exported,” Rowsome says. “They are a natural legacy of our country. The more we invest in conserving public lands, the more return we will see.”

[Gloria]

Keeping the Wild | Island Press

Against the Domestication of Earth

[Gloria]

Is There a Future for Wilderness? | Observations, Scientific American Blog Network

That’s what Roger Kaye, an environmental thinker and wilderness coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska, argued in his history of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the International Journal of Wilderness back in 2010, the 50th anniversary of the designation of that refuge. The wildness of wilderness is what needs preserving most now, the plants and animals and even geology of a given place’s ability to determine its own fate. Kaye means that an ecosystem should be left to its own natural devices. Plants and animals can take their own course, without any planning, and may change not to anyone’s liking. That in itself may be the ultimate resource wilderness provides—something outside the totality of human civilization.

In the Anthropocene, we will have our novel ecosystems that mix old and new plants and animals, and perhaps even missing species resurrected thanks to synthetic biology. We may even intervene purposefully on a planetary scale to stave off the worst warming from ever-rising CO2 levels as we burn more fossil fuels. But the wilderness will remain in some form, going about its own business in its own way.

[Gloria]

Keeping the Wild | Island Press

"Keeping the Wild: Against the Domestication of Earth is an extraordinarily important book. It identifies the great and irreversible damage to Earth's biodiversity that will follow if the 'Anthropocene' ideology is allowed to stall the global conservation effort."

Edward O. Wilson, University Research Professor Emeritus, Harvard University