The recession may have robbed city governments of the wherewithal to enhance public places. But some undaunted architects, planners, and community activists are trying urban design experiments that are deliberately cheap, temporary, and unofficial. And sometimes these modest but audacious interventions lead to altered municipal policies and lasting changes in the cityscape. Take an effort called the Better Block, which launched with an unofficial event in Dallas in April 2010. For one weekend, community activists anted up just under $1,000 and used mostly borrowed materials and their own ... Read More
Alligator River Refuge Rolls Back From Rising Sea
November 7, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Standing on a beach on the Albemarle Peninsula in North Carolina, Brian Boutin, a Nature Conservancy biologist, points to a rusted piece of rebar with a green tag a few inches from the water’s edge. “That was our original marker to show what was happening here three years ago,” he says. “It was 20 meters from the shoreline. Now, it is the shoreline.” To the south, waves hit the shore and explode into the air, little eruptions of erosion. To the north, the waves break, but more gently. Offshore, Boutin and his Nature Conservancy colleagues have built 500 feet of reefs designed to ... Read More
Long Slog for the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker
September 20, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Against all odds, the critically endangered ivory-billed woodpecker may still be hanging on in a desolate handful of bottomland swamps in the American Southeast. Depending on who's asked, the last putative sighting of the large black-and-white bird occurred in early 2007 in the Florida Panhandle or the spring of 2008 in a Louisiana bayou. And there hasn't been an undisputed report of ivory-bills for nearly 70 years, more than twice the bird's maximum lifespan. The putative rediscovery of the bird in 2005, announced with much fanfare at a Washington, D.C., press conference that included ... Read More
Black Rats Take the Bait on Palmyra Atoll
September 8, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
In a precedent-setting project for tropical restoration, invasive black rats that had been preying on native animals on a remote Pacific atoll were successfully eradicated this summer. "Although it will be two years before we can confirm rat removal, the operations were a great achievement," said Susan White of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who oversaw the operation on Palmyra Atoll. She explained how crews from several government agencies and nonprofit groups dropped poison by plane on Palmyra in June; spread it on the ground by hand and shot it by slingshot into palm trees ... Read More
Solar Energy Powers Cleanup of Superfund Site
March 3, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Last August, David Rosenfeld outlined on Miller-McCune.com how the tailing heaps and spoiled land leftover from mining in the American West might win a second act by serving as the home for land-hungry solar panels. ("Can Mining Provide a Renewable Energy Future?") As Tessera Solar's Janette Coates explained in his story, existing transmission lines, available water and roads capable of supporting wide loads provide ready-made infrastructure, while reclaiming large tracts of land — conveniently held by a single owner — that's already been disturbed reduces permitting costs. It also ... Read More
New T.C. Boyle Book Shares Interests With Us
March 2, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Miller-McCune is pretty much a nonfiction sort of place. But a new novel by T.C. Boyle caught our eye because it covers an aspect of several real-life stories we’ve written about. When The Killing’s Done, Boyle’s new book, looks at the efforts to restore the weedy and windy Channel Islands off California’s coast, once home to a barnyard of sheep and pigs gone wild. Amid the furious debate over whether to kill introduced species in order to protect native species and habitats, characters whose intentions are both laudable and incompatible collide. Of course, the peculiar genius of a ... Read More
Recovery of the Island Fox
January 10, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
One of the most dramatic and successful recovery efforts for an endangered species can be found in the Channel Islands, just offshore of Southern California. Even though the islands are currently almost unpopulated, they haven't been spared from the impacts of human actions. A combination of over a century of ranching and of the effects of the pesticide DDT had left many of the unique species on the islands teetering on the brink of extinction. In particular, the Island Fox, the most prominent unique species on the the Channel Islands, had quickly declined to under a hundred less than 10 years ... Read More
Grasslands Preserve the Lonely Prairie
November 23, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
West from Sioux Falls, hundreds of miles of rolling South Dakota corn eventually morph into one of this country's largest remaining national grasslands, a portion of what is now the North American continent's largest endangered ecosystem. Miles beyond the wide Missouri River, a small sign announces the beginning of the Buffalo Gap National Grassland's 600,000 acres; part of nearly 4 million acres of national grasslands administered by the U.S. Forest Service. The Buffalo Gap grassland is just one integral part of a tenuous sea of grass that stretches from southern Canada to Mexico; ranging ... Read More
Resurrecting the Dead Sea
August 23, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Fathi Huweimel leans carefully over the edge of a jagged slab of broken asphalt, peering down into a 60-foot-deep crater that was level ground just yesterday. All around him sprawl the ruins of Ghawr al Hadithah, once a farming village in central Jordan but now a jigsaw of broken houses, shattered roads and abandoned tomato fields growing wild amid the massive holes pocking the earth. To the east, the village gives way to desert fringed by stark, sere mountains. To the west, a few hundred yards away, lie the glimmering waters of the Dead Sea. "We've had about 75 holes open up in the last ... Read More
Can Mining Provide a Renewable Energy Future?
August 22, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
It's difficult to look out over miles of waste rock and tailings from a century of copper mining in the American Southwest and see anything but environmental destruction. But a growing number of mining companies and renewable energy developers are beginning to use these vast plains of disturbed dirt as the ideal spots for large-scale solar and wind power projects. Mine sites in the region attract developers such as Tessera Solar for several reasons, said communications manager Janette Coates. Existing transmission lines, available water and roads capable of supporting wide, heavy loads ... Read More
