Monday, December 31, 2007

Lauren Hawkins celebrates sunset on New Year's eve 2007 on wpwp


Please click on photo to enlarge.
Lauren Hawkins spends the afternoon of New Year's Eve, Dec. 31, 2007, removing Japanese honeysuckle from World Peace Wetland Prairie.

Sunday, December 30, 2007

Tuesday, December 25, 2007

Friday, December 21, 2007

T'was the night before winter ....



PLEASE CLICK ON PHOTO OF PINNACLE FOODS PLANT FROM HOODENPYLE YARD to see steam rising from Pinnacle Foods production facility.

And all across the prairie ....



Please click on the photos to enlarge.

View across part of Aspen Ridge and World Peace Wetland Prairie and Pinnacle Prairie to the Pinnacle Foods plant. Wide angle view same as above.

Friday, December 14, 2007

Commission selects global-warming strategists

Read about the work of the nonprofit consulting firm hired to provide information for the Arkansas Governor's Commission on Global Warming to use to prepare its recommendations to the legislature at the following Web site link:


The Center for Climate Strategies


Please read and sign the petition to the governor at the following link:


Petitions of interest

Friday, December 7, 2007

Aspen Ridge's new owners approach park board Dec. 3, 2007

http://www.accessfayetteville.org/government/parks_and_recreation/documents/agenda/PRAB_December_2007_Agenda_and_Packet_(1_of_4).pdf

Click on the following link for
UPDATE on Aspen Ridge Park dedication

Audubon Arkansas open house Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2007

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Energy bill needs support in congress this week


PLEASE CLICK ON PHOTO TO SEE THE SPARROW on World Peace Wetland Prairie up close.

With global warming threatening 30-40 percent of wildlife species, Congress MUST pass an energy bill in 2007 to lay the groundwork for strong global warming legislation in 2008 and beyond.

Let your representative know: "Americans need an Energy Bill with..."

Protections for wildlife and public lands from oil and gas development.
A Renewable Electricity Standard of at least 15 percent by 2020.
A fuel economy standard of at least 35 mpg by 2020.
We believe a bill with these three things can pass in the House and Senate, making a terrific down payment on an upcoming global warming bill!

Speak up today and help get the energy bill to the finish line:
http://online.nwf.org/finishline

Thanks so much! Stay tuned to hear how the vote goes.


Kristin Johnson
Grassroots Mobilization Coordinator
National Wildlife Federation
alerts@nwf.org

Inspiring Americans to protect wildlife for our children's future.

Forward this email to a friend or family member. If you were forwarded this message, sign up to receive wildlife news and updates from the National Wildlife Federation.

We look forward to receiving your feedback. For general comments or membership questions, please email info@nwf.org or call us at 1-800-822-9919. Send mail to: National Wildlife Federation, 11100 Wildlife Center Dr., Reston VA, 20190

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© 2007 National Wildlife Federation. All rights reserved. Read more about NWF and your privacy.

Monday, November 26, 2007

Dr. Jocelyn Elders to speak at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday Nov. 28 in Fayetteville, Arkansas

WEDNESDAY 28TH Planned Parenthood will celebrate 26 years of being in Northwest Arkansas. The event will be from 5:30 to 7 P.M. at the Unitarian Church at 901 Cleveland in Fayetteville. Dr. Jocelyn Elders will be their guest speaker.

Capping worldwide population growth is the quintessential way to cap worldwide production of CO2! Sequestration of CO2 is one of the many functions of protecting habitat such as World Peace Wetland Prairie.

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Arkansas public service commission approves coal-fired generating plant

http://www.arkansas.gov/psc/2007TurkPlantOrder.pdf

Why do we have a public-service commission if it only rubber-stamps such boondoggles and we have to read headlines such as
Texarkana coal-fired plant approved by Arkansas PSC

?????????

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Orange butterfly on World Peace Wetland Prairie on Nov. 18, 2007




PLEASE click on images to enlarge and scroll left to view on lower image to see butterfly on Japanese honeysuckle flower. Few other blooms were available on November 18, 2007, although a butterflies, including the one in the top image, were flitting from plant to plant seeking nectar as autumn falls toward winter in Northwest Arkansas.

It is to be hoped that, as Japanese honeysuckle is gradually removed from WPWP, flowering native plants will provide for late-season butterflies.

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Yellow butterfly on World Peace Wetland Praire on November 12, 2007



Please click on photos to enlarge

The monarch migration through Northwest Arkansas has been over for a couple of weeks but a few species of butterflies and skipper moths continue to find sustenance on World Peace Wetland Prairie even after a couple of nights with temperatures below freezing.

World Peace Wetland Prairie nominated for award


World Peace Wetland Prairie among the
2007 International Conservation Award nominees


Arkansas Audubon earned the nomination for honors for its administration of a Five Star Grant for work on World Peace Wetland Prairie.

Wednesday, November 7, 2007

Guardian article explores dangers of biofuel

An Agricultural Crime Against Humanity
Biofuels could kill more people than the Iraq war.
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 6th November 2007
It doesn’t get madder than this. Swaziland is in the grip of a famine and receiving emergency food aid. Forty per cent of its people are facing acute food shortages. So what has the government decided to export? Biofuel made from one of its staple crops, cassava(1). The government has allocated several thousand hectares of farmland to ethanol production in the county of Lavumisa, which happens to be the place worst hit by drought(2). It would surely be quicker and more humane to refine the Swazi people and put them in our tanks. Doubtless a team of development consultants is already doing the sums.
This is one of many examples of a trade described last month by Jean Ziegler, the UN’s special rapporteur, as “a crime against humanity”(3). Ziegler took up the call first made by this column for a five-year moratorium on all government targets and incentives for biofuel(4): the trade should be frozen until second-generation fuels - made from wood or straw or waste - become commercially available. Otherwise the superior purchasing power of drivers in the rich world means that they will snatch food from people’s mouths. Run your car on virgin biofuel and other people will starve.
Even the International Monetary Fund, always ready to immolate the poor on the altar of business, now warns that using food to produce biofuels “might further strain already tight supplies of arable land and water all over the world, thereby pushing food prices up even further.”(5) This week the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation will announce the lowest global food reserves in 25 years, threatening what it calls “a very serious crisis”(6). Even when the price of food was low, 850 million people went hungry because they could not afford to buy it. With every increment in the price of flour or grain, several million more are pushed below the breadline.
The cost of rice has risen by 20% over the past year, maize by 50%, wheat by 100%(7). Biofuels aren’t entirely to blame - by taking land out of food production they exacerbate the effects of bad harvests and rising demand - but almost all the major agencies are now warning against expansion. And almost all the major governments are ignoring them.
They turn away because biofuels offer a means of avoiding hard political choices. They create the impression that governments can cut carbon emissions and - as Ruth Kelly, the British transport secretary, announced last week(8) - keep expanding the transport networks. New figures show that British drivers puttered past the 500 billion kilometre mark for the first time last year(9). But it doesn’t matter: we just have to change the fuel we use. No one has to be confronted. The demands of the motoring lobby and the business groups clamouring for new infrastructure can be met. The people being pushed off their land remain unheard.
In principle, burning biofuels merely releases the carbon they accumulated when they were growing. Even when you take into account the energy costs of harvesting, refining and transporting the fuel, they produce less net carbon than petroleum products. The law the British government passed a fortnight ago - by 2010, 5% of our road transport fuel must come from crops(10) - will, it claims, save between 700,000 and 800,000 tonnes of carbon a year(11). It derives this figure by framing the question carefully. If you count only the immediate carbon costs of planting and processing biofuels, they appear to reduce greenhouse gases. When you look at the total impacts, you find that they cause more warming than petroleum.
A recent study by the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen shows that the official estimates have ignored the contribution of nitrogen fertilisers. They generate a greenhouse gas - nitrous oxide - which is 296 times as powerful as CO2. These emissions alone ensure that ethanol from maize causes between 0.9 and 1.5 times as much warming as petrol, while rapeseed oil (the source of over 80% of the world’s biodiesel) generates 1-1.7 times the impact of diesel(12). This is before you account for the changes in land use.
A paper published in Science three months ago suggests that protecting uncultivated land saves, over 30 years, between two and nine times the carbon emissions you might avoid by ploughing it and planting biofuels(13). Last year the research group LMC International estimated that if the British and European target of a 5% contribution from biofuels were to be adopted by the rest of the world, the global acreage of cultivated land would expand by 15%(14). That means the end of most tropical forests. It might also cause runaway climate change.
The British government says it will strive to ensure that “only the most sustainable biofuels” will be used in the UK(15). It has no means of enforcing this aim - it admits that if it tried to impose a binding standard it would break world trade rules(16). But even if “sustainability” could be enforced, what exactly does it mean? You could, for example, ban palm oil from new plantations. This is the most destructive kind of biofuel, driving deforestation in Malaysia and Indonesia. But the ban would change nothing. As Carl Bek-Nielsen, vice chairman of Malaysia’s United Plantations Bhd, remarked, “even if it is another oil that goes into biodiesel, that other oil then needs to be replaced. Either way, there’s going to be a vacuum and palm oil can fill that vacuum.”(17) The knock-on effects cause the destruction you are trying to avoid. The only sustainable biofuel is recycled waste oil, but the available volumes are tiny(18).
At this point the biofuels industry starts shouting “jatropha!” It is not yet a swear word, but it soon will be. Jatropha is a tough weed with oily seeds that grows in the tropics. This summer Bob Geldof, who never misses an opportunity to promote simplistic solutions to complex problems, arrived in Swaziland in the role of “special adviser” to a biofuels firm. Because it can grow on marginal land, jatropha, he claimed, is a “life-changing” plant, which will offer jobs, cash crops and economic power to African smallholders(19).
Yes, it can grow on poor land and be cultivated by smallholders. But it can also grow on fertile land and be cultivated by largeholders. If there is one blindingly obvious fact about biofuel it’s that it is not a smallholder crop. It is an internationally-traded commodity which travels well and can be stored indefinitely, with no premium for local or organic produce. Already the Indian government is planning 14m hectares of jatropha plantations(20). In August the first riots took place among the peasant farmers being driven off the land to make way for them(21).
If the governments promoting biofuels do not reverse their policies, the humanitarian impact will be greater than that of the Iraq war. Millions will be displaced, hundreds of millions more could go hungry. This crime against humanity is a complex one, but that neither lessens nor excuses it. If people starve because of biofuels, Ruth Kelly and her peers will have killed them. Like all such crimes it is perpetrated by cowards, attacking the weak to avoid confronting the strong.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. IRIN Africa, 25th October 2007. Swaziland: Food or biofuel seems to be the question. http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=74987
2. Energy Current, 29th October 2007. Swaziland joins biofuel drive despite mounting food crisis. http://www.energycurrent.com/index.php?id=3&storyid=6359
3. Grant Ferrett, 27th October 2007. Biofuels ‘crime against humanity’. BBC Online.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7065061.stm
4. George Monbiot, 27th March 2007. A Lethal Solution. The Guardian.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/03/27/a-lethal-solution/
5. Valerie Mercer-Blackman, Hossein Samiei, and Kevin Cheng, 17th October 2007. Biofuel Demand Pushes Up Food Prices. IMF Research Department.
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/survey/so/2007/RES1017A.htm
6. Jacques Diouf, quoted by John Vidal, 3rd November 2007. Global food crisis looms as climate change and fuel shortages bite. The Guardian.
7. John Vidal, 3rd November 2007. Global food crisis looms as climate change and fuel shortages bite. The Guardian.
8. Department for Transport, October 2007. Towards a Sustainable Transport System:
Supporting Economic Growth in a Low Carbon World. http://www.dft.gov.uk/about/strategy/transportstrategy/pdfsustaintranssystem.pdf
9. Department for Transport, 2007. Transport Statistics Great Britain 2007. Table 7.1. Road traffic by type of vehicle: 1949-2006
http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/statistics/datatablespublications/tsgb/2007edition/sectionsevenroadsandtraffic.pdf
10. HM Government, 2007. The Renewable Transport Fuel Obligations Order 2007. http://www.opsi.gov.uk/SI/si2007/draft/20078818.htm
11. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, October 2007. Biofuels - risks and opportunities, p4. http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roads/environment/rtfo/289579
12. PJ Crutzen, AR Mosier, KA Smith and W Winiwarter, 1 August 2007. N2O release from agro-biofuel production negates global warming reduction by replacing fossil fuels. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions 7, pp11191–11205. http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/7/11191/2007/acpd-7-11191-2007.pdf
13. Renton Righelato and Dominick V. Spracklen, 17th August 2007. Carbon Mitigation by Biofuels or by Saving and Restoring Forests? Science Vol 317, p902. doi 10.1126/science.1141361.
14. AFP, 17th October 2007. IMF concerned by impact of biofuels on food prices. http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5h0RVoVwPFlD8MXLYyQbxHamr9NYw
15. Lord Bassam of Brighton, 29th March 2007. Parliamentary answer. Column WA310. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200607/ldhansrd/text/70329w0004.htm
16. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, October 2007. Biofuels - risks and opportunities, p5. http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roads/environment/rtfo/289579
17. Benjamin Low, 24th February 2006. CPO Prices Seen Up In 06 As Biodiesel Fuels Demand
http://sg.biz.yahoo.com/060224/15/3yy2x.html
18. You can see the calculations here: http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/11/23/feeding-cars-not-people/
19. Helene Le Roux, 27th July 2007. Singer, songwriter and activist promotes green energy in Africa. Engineering News Online. http://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article.php?a_id=112872
20. John Vidal, ibid.
21. Mark Olden, 25th October 2007. Observations on: biofuels. New Statesman.
www.newstatesman.com/200710250020
This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 9:40 am and is filed under food, climate change. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.
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Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Wreath-weaving planned at World Peace Wetland Prairie



Please click on image to enlarge.

For Immediate Release:

Friends of the World Peace Wetland Prairie will hold a
Make-A-Wreath Day
Saturday, October 27 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Gather wreath-making material and turn it into a festive, harvest centerpiece from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, October 27, at Fayetteville's World Peace Wetland Prairie.

Gather pine cones, cut wild grape vines and honeysuckle for a down-home holiday wreath. Tips on assembling a wreath will be given by weaver Sharon Dollar. Tips on how to identify good vines and bad vines will also be provided. A little string, wire, ribbon, elbow grease and fun and. . .VOILA! A Holiday Centerpiece!

Long Sleeves, gloves, clippers and bag or box to carry your treasures in will be helpful.

The World Peace Wetland Prairie — at 1121 South Duncan Avenue in Fayetteville between 11th Street and 15th Street just northeast of Pinnacle Foods and southwest of Brenda's Bigger Burger — is a city park that is being preserved by the public as a remnant of a rapidly disappearing ecosystem — a natural rain garden and a sanctuary for all living things.

The park is in the Town Branch basin of the West Fork of the White River, which in turn flows into Beaver Lake — the region's major water supply.

Work on helping to shape up this public jewel is encouraged at anytime. Regular organized work dates have moved to an autumn/winter schedule of the last Saturday of each month from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Please call 479-444-6072 for details, or log onto www.worldpeacewetlandprairie.com and send a message.

Contact: Lauren Hawkins 479-444-6072, Get_Involved@WorldPeaceWetlandPrairie.com

Friends of the World Peace Wetland Prairie include the Town Branch Neighborhood Association, the Omni Center for Peace Justice and Ecology and Audubon Arkansas.


Step It Up