Students at Campus Middle School for Girls explore “The Story of Stuff” with guest speaker William Sullivan

Students at Campus Middle School for Girls explore “The Story of Stuff” with guest speaker William Sullivan

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My seventh-grade daughter is a student at Campus Middle School for Girls, which is housed in the Wesley Foundation on the U of I Campus, and which residents of Champaign-Urbana may know by its former name, Home Hi. Once each year, the students and teachers at CMS set aside the regular curriculum for a week in order to explore a single topic in greater depth.

This year’s topic was global warming, and the week was packed with activity, everything from experiments demonstrating the greenhouse effect to tours of the U of I Waste Transfer Facility, and the newest super energy-efficient house being built by E-co Lab in Urbana.

The featured speaker for this week devoted to the study of global warming was Professor William Sullivan, Director of the Environmental Council at the U of I. But he came to his talk without the standard material we’ve come to expect in presentations on global warming—data about changes in mean temperature, pictures of retreating glaciers, charts projecting the rise in sea level.

Instead, he introduced his middle school audience to “The Story of Stuff,” a 20-minute video by Annie Leonard, which you can view on the web at http://www.storyofstuff.com/.

“The Story of Stuff” encourages people to look at environmental issues—including global warming—from a broader perspective than we often do, and in combination with other issues, especially social justice. Throughout the video, Leonard asserts that the degradation of the planet and the social inequities that characterize today’s world are outgrowths of the consumer culture that has come to dominate American life since the end of the Second World War.

Most of “The Story of Stuff” is devoted to recovering the details that are omitted in more conventional descriptions of how material goods are produced, consumed, distributed and disposed of. Leonard emphasizes that Americans are able to buy material goods at impossibly low prices because our economic system allows for the real costs involved in making them to be shifted onto other people around the world.

But “The Story of Stuff” also makes the point that consumerism isn’t even truly beneficial for the people who are doing the buying. Americans can buy more stuff now than ever before, but they pay for it by having less time for the things that really make people happy--family, friends, leisure.

All of this stuff about “stuff” is connected to global warming: each step in the life-cycle of material goods contributes to the problem.

I think my daughter and her classmates found “The Story of Stuff” a little unsettling—and I do, too—because it doesn’t end with a list of ten easy things you can do to save the planet. But it does introduce some systems that people are developing right now that offer more substantial hope for the future: things like green chemistry, renewable energy, and zero waste production. And in the end, the point of “The Story of Stuff”—and, I think, Bill Sullivan’s point in introducing it to my daughter’s class—was that people can come to grips with serious problems, and that in response they can create something new.

25th Annual Insect Fear Film Festival features social insects

25th Annual Insect Fear Film Festival features social insects

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It may not reflect well on us, but I think we humans are never more fascinated with other forms of life than when they remind us of ourselves. Maybe that explains why social insects, which are the focus of this year’s upcoming Insect Fear Film Festival, make such good characters in animated films.

Since Hollywood insects play by their own rules, I checked in recently with members of the U of I Entomology Graduate Student Association, which hosts the festival, to learn about what makes real social insects so fascinating. EGSA members Nils Cordes, Rob Mitchell, and Annie Ray joined me today to tell us a little bit more about them.

[Nils] As scientists we describe true social insects as having three qualities. First, they work together to raise their young in a sort of society, called a colony. Second, they have a reproductive division of labor, which means that only some (or one) of the insects in the colony actually make eggs. And finally, there are overlapping generations within the colony.

[Annie] It turns out that everyone is familiar with true social insects, because they’re some of the most common insects around! Ants, bees, wasps, and termites all satisfy the conditions, and even children know a little about their life history. These insects live and work together in huge colonies, each with a defined job--a lot like how humans live in cities. But what most people don’t realize is that the analogy keeps going. Ants and termites have invented agriculture, and farm vast fields of fungus using scavenged leaves and debris. Ants will also ranch aphids as if they were cattle, “milking” them for sugary honeydew, protecting them from other insects, and even carrying them to new pastures. [Photo by Rob Mitchell: Carpenter ants tend aphids on a plant stem at Starved Rock State Park.] Termites erect what are essentially skyscrapers for their colonies, the largest of which may stretch to 30 feet in height – if you consider this on a human scale, these would be towers reaching thousands of feet into the air!

[Rob M.] Even though it’s winter, you can still find some social insects outside. Bumble bee queens are just starting to emerge from their winter sleep. Flip over an old log, or tear off some bark, and you can find termite workers and ants scurrying through wooden tunnels. And later in the spring, take a closer look at the aphids on your roses before you let loose with the insecticides, and you might even see some ants tending to their flocks.

[Annie] Of course you can also enjoy social insects, both real ones and Hollywood types, at the 25th Annual Insect Fear Film Festival this weekend. Displays at the festival will include live bee colonies, termite workers, and giant tropical ants, as well as many other (nonsocial) insects. In a break with tradition, the films to be shown at this year’s festival are neither horrible, nor scary. They are the 2007 feature, Bee Movie, written by and featuring the voice of Jerry Seinfeld, and the 1998 film Antz. As an added bonus, the director of Bee Movie, Simon Smith, will be on hand as a keynote speaker.

The 2008 Insect Fear Film Festival will take place Saturday, February 23 in Foellinger Auditorium on the University of Illinois Campus. Admission is free, and festivities begin at 6:00 p.m. More details are available via the Insect Fear Film Festival web page at
http://www.life.uiuc.edu/entomology/egsa/ifff.html.

U of I professor Susan Kieffer’s work on mega disasters

U of I professor Susan Kieffer’s work on mega disasters

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In order to prepare for the ups and downs of life, most people occasionally look ahead to anticipate what they would do if something really bad were to happen.

Susan Kieffer, a University of Illinois professor of geology and Resident Associate at the Center for Advanced Study, does something similar to that, but on a much larger scale. In cooperation with colleagues from a group known as the Critical Issues Caucus of the Geological Society of America, Kieffer studies the causes and consequences of “mega disasters,” events that result directly in large numbers of human deaths and severely disrupt life for many others.

In her work, Kieffer distinguishes between two types of mega disasters, “natural” and “stealth.” Natural disasters—including things like volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tsunamis—have occurred intermittently over time and will continue to do so. Natural disasters generally occur quickly, and many of the problems they cause can be resolved within a span of years.

Kieffer notes that the effects of large-scale natural disasters have already been amplified by increasing population densities, and that the trend is likely to accelerate. For example, she points out that the current population of the area devastated by the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 is now more than 17 times greater than it was then. An earthquake of similar size today would likely kill many more people than in 1906, even in spite of advances in earthquake engineering. Similar, or even larger events, will certainly occur in the future in the Seattle area.

Human population growth and the ever-increasing demand for resources associated with modernization combine to cause the large-scale disruptions that Kieffer labels stealth disasters. Stealth disasters develop over longer periods of time than natural disasters and include worldwide problems such as global warming, the loss of productive soil, pollution of the oceans and atmosphere, and the ongoing destruction of entire ecosystems for human development.

Unlike natural disasters, the effects of stealth disasters often are not subject to remediation on time scales that are relevant to us. For example, soil that is lost from a landscape through deforestation or poor agricultural practices is effectively gone for good, since it can take thousands of years for new soil to form.

Of course human populations have caused the kinds of problems that create stealth disasters before, but never on a scale affecting the entire planet. Kieffer emphasizes that the resources needed to sustain human life on earth are finite, and likens our situation to that of life on an island, one that cannot continue to accommodate more people using more resources indefinitely. She also emphasizes that whereas humans can not control natural disasters, they can change their own behavior and, hence, the unfolding of stealth disasters.

To stave off the worst consequences of the stealth mega disasters, Kieffer and her colleagues call for action on a global scale. From their perspective, science needs to play a much larger role in the formation of public policy than it does now, and stronger international frameworks are needed to promote truly sustainable modes of living.

Adapting to winter

Adapting to winter

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One of the great pleasures of coming to know the natural world is coming to see human strategies for coping with living on earth in a broader context.

Take surviving winter.

Sure, we’ve got central heat and funny hats, and some of us even avoid the cold by heading south. But in the natural world there are innumerable variations of those strategies, as well as some others that simply aren’t available to Homo sapiens.

Think of how complex the phenomenon of migration is. More people than ever, for example, are now aware that the monarch butterflies we see in August and September are on their way to spend the winter in the mountains of central Mexico to take advantage of the warmer climate there. But fewer people remember that the monarch butterflies that migrate through Illinois have never before been to Mexico before. They are generations removed from the monarchs that set out on the journey north the previous spring, and scientists have yet to discover how they know where to go. Imagine traveling south without directions and being able to find where your great, great, great grandparents spent the winter!

Of course the many Illinois creatures that do not travel to warmer places for the winter must adapt to the cold in one way or another. Most interesting among these are the select group of reptiles and amphibians that can actually tolerate being frozen. The young of our state reptile, the painted turtle, for example, hatch from eggs in the fall but remain in the nest where they are born until spring. In this situation they are exposed to temperatures so cold that all of the fluids in their bodies freeze. A complex set of physiological adaptations allows them to endure this freezing without damage to their cells or organs.

After their first winter, painted turtles lose the ability to recover from freezing, but as adults they possess another striking adaptation for living through winter. They have the greatest tolerance for oxygen-deprivation of any vertebrate animal, which means they can hibernate underwater for months on end.

Even some of our closer relatives, other mammals, employ strategies for surviving Illinois winters that we might envy from time to time. I’m thinking here of the true hibernators, mostly rodents and bats, which do everything but check out altogether for the coldest months of the year. (Although the animals most often associated with hibernation, bears, can sleep all winter without eating they do not experience the other physiological changes that true hibernators do.) During true hibernation a mammal’s body temperature drops, its metabolism slows dramatically, and its heart beats just fast enough to sustain life and prevent freezing. True hibernators are entirely undisturbed by winter storm warnings, and they have no use for the concept of the wind chill factor.

Of course you need not look past the birds and squirrels at your feeder to remember there are plenty of creatures that deal with winter in much the same way we do—a heavier coat, a little more to eat, a little less activity when the weather is at its worst.

Fortunately, winter doesn’t last forever.