Iowa Flooding Could Be An Act of Man, Experts Say

Kamyar Enshayan, director of an environmental center at the University of Northern Iowa, suspects that this natural disaster wasn’t really all that natural. He points out that the heavy rains fell on a landscape radically reengineered by humans. Plowed fields have replaced tallgrass prairies. Fields have been meticulously drained with underground pipes. Streams and creeks have been straightened. Most of the wetlands are gone. Flood plains have been filled and developed.

“We’ve done numerous things to the landscape that took away these water-absorbing functions,” he said. “Agriculture must respect the limits of nature.”

[S]ome Iowans who study the environment suspect that changes in the land, both recently and over the past century or so, have made Iowa’s terrain not only highly profitable but also highly vulnerable to flooding.

via the Washington Post

I really miss our old neighbors. They used to throw parties in their back yard and were extremely friendly. The new neighbors have a loud gas-powered leaf blower and drive a huge Mercedes SUV.. I guess their goal must be to find as many ways as possible to waste gasoline. Anyway, Wendy and I came home the other day and I noticed that the neighbors have a new dog…and it’s in a small doggy prison / cage. It looks so sad. It was 98°F last Friday and the dog looked like it was in a coma. I’m not a fan of having pets in town. I’ve never had a house pet. My childhood was spent on 6 acres in Iowa at my parent’s property and our pets roamed around the entire space. This dog in a cage makes me sad. The cage sits atop a concrete patio. It seems so inhumane…

Oberlin College in Ohio was featured in this month’s issue of Vegetarian Times. Oberlin’s Office of Environmental Sustainability is working on a system to monitor water and energy use in Oberlin’s residence halls. It’s brilliant. The site, “Dorm Energy“, shows electricity usage for 18 Oberlin residence halls.

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Here is the first 30 minutes of Al Gore’s keynote at the NASPA/ACPA 2007 Joint Meeting. [27 mb mp3]

The talk was fairly similar to An Inconvenient Truth. Vice President Gore used an Apple MacBook Pro and Keynote 3.0 to deliver his presentation. It’s probably the best infographic talk that I have ever witnessed. The content and the presentation were stellar.

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The Allied Waste newsletter arrived in the mail today. The folks at Allied Waste put together a concise and easy to read mailing called “At Your Disposal.” I was reading the “Curbside Recycling Update” section when I read about the blurb on aluminum recycling.

Aluminum goes to ALCOA on the east coast and is made into aluminum cans again.

I think it is great that aluminum cans from Corvallis, Oregon are being recycled. However, what is the environmental cost for transporting west coast cans to the east coast for processing? The process seems a little counter intuitive to me. I wonder if environmentally conscious recycling / post-consumer recycling processes need to be analyzed…

What do you think?

I hope everyone received the memo:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2006

Nation’s Population to Reach 300 Million on Oct. 17

The U.S. Census Bureau today reported that the nation’s population will reach the historic milestone of 300 million on Oct. 17 at about 7:46 a.m. (EDT). This comes almost 39 years after the 200 million mark was reached on Nov. 20, 1967.

The estimate is based on the expectation that the United States will register one birth every seven seconds and one death every 13 seconds between now and Oct. 17, while net international migration is expected to add one person every 31 seconds. The result is an increase in the total population of one person every 11 seconds.

Breathing Earth “displays the carbob dioxide emission levels of every country in the world, as well as their birth and death rates - all in real-time.”