A capella group Washington Revels Jubilee Voices, at the Chesapeake Music Festival. (Credit: Kristen Minogue/SERC)
by Sarah Wade
This article originally appeared in the November issue of the Smithsonian’s Sustainability Matters newsletter.
One small bag that could fit into an office-sized trash can. That’s all the waste that remained after a concert with more than 300 attendees, over 50 staff and volunteers, eight performing groups and four food vendors. Surrounding it, eight recycling containers and four composting bins waited for pickup. By and large, the first Chesapeake Music Festival achieved its goal of near-zero waste, to the exhausted but happy relief of its organizers.
Months of effort went into that lone trash bag: working with vendors, buying supplies, and encouraging the public to bring their own water bottles to cut down on single-use plastics.
This October, you’re invited to meet a woman who has spent decades working to save the ocean. The journey has taken her from the coasts of Oregon to Panama, New Zealand, South Africa and the Seychelles. Her name is Jane Lubchenco. In 2009, she broke ground as the first woman to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). But her history with the ocean began long before that.
She’ll speak in person about the future of our global ocean on the evening of Oct. 15, as part of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative and the finale for the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center’s 2019 evening lectures. The full details are here. (Spoiler: It’s free.) But if you’d like a preview, here are a few snapshots from Lubchenco’s life, and her unconventional path to become one the most powerful people speaking up for the seas: Click to continue »
SERC education coordinator Karen McDonald shows the contents in a stuffed shark stomach: bits of bone, a toy turtle and plastic. (Credit: Kristen Minogue/SERC)
Move over, blue crabs. There’s a new predator in the education department. Sharks are making waves as the latest addition to field trips and engineering programs at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC).
This spring, SERC added sharks as another station in its “Shoreline Connections” and “Exploring Nature” field trips. The education staff also created a day-long program that lets students think like scientists by planning a shark tagging expedition and designing their own shark tags.
“Most of the students and teachers and even parents don’t realize that there are sharks and rays in the Chesapeake Bay,” said Karen McDonald, director of SERC’s education center. “So this is new to them. And typically the organisms are vilified. So this is a chance for us to show their importance in the ecosystem.” Click to continue »
The teachers on Alaska’s Pribilof Islands have a tradition. Every year for the last decade, they have invited scientists, educators and innovators from across the U.S. to take over their school for a week. The festival is known as Bering Sea Days. This year, marine biologist Linda McCann of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center joined a team of 22 scientists and educators, leading games and activities to teach the community about the research being done on the unique animals and environment of the Bering Sea. Read the first-hand narrative below for a glimpse inside this remote Alaskan community.
Students and educators hike through the rugged landscape of Alaska’s St. Paul Island. (Credit: Linda McCann)
Cartoonist Jim Toomey with two of his characters, Sherman the shark and Fillmore the sea turtle. (Image courtesy of Jim Toomey)
Since 1997, a great white shark named Sherman has put a wacky spin on life underwater in the comic strip Sherman’s Lagoon. Jim Toomey, the comic’s creator and conservationist, uses Sherman and his (usually more intelligent) friends to reveal real issues facing the ocean. In this Q&A, Toomey describes adding humor to environmentalism, and what happens when Sherman’s Lagoon meets Chesapeake Bay. Edited for brevity and clarity.
Want to dive deeper? Watch Jim Toomey’s TED Talk online. You can also meet Toomey at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center October 17 at 7pm, for his free evening lecture, “Drawing Inspiration from the Sea.” Details here.
What first sparked your interest in the sea?
I was a little boy, maybe six, seven, eight years old….Some of the TV shows I used to watch, the Jacques Cousteau specials and things were somewhat unique. And it just fascinated me. It really captured my imagination to see this team of scientists explore this completely alien world. Click to continue »
Community mural in a Baltimore neighborhood. (BES-LTER)
Preserving the environment is often seen as a battle of development versus nature. But in America today, roughly three-fourths of us live in metropolitan areas. To preserve our health and the planet’s health, we need to create something new: A sustainable city.
Enter urban ecology. Plant ecologist Steward Pickett of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies has been exploring the ecology of cities—hot spots where society, culture, economics and the environment collide—for more than two decades. In 1997, he and a handful of colleagues started the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, a long-term project that now involves more than 100 people. Pickett talks about some of their surprising discoveries in this edited Q&A. To learn more, you can meet him in person on Tuesday, Nov. 15, at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center’s keynote evening lecture.
*Note: Edited for brevity and clarity
Steward Pickett (Xiaofang Hu)
How strange was the idea of “urban ecology” when you began?
It was sort of a marginal pursuit. Most ecologists in the United States preferred to think they were working in pristine areas, or at least in areas where the human hand was relatively light on the land… There was this deep, deep bias in ecology to not look at places where people were part of the system … Urban ecology is kind of a way to say, let’s recognize this and see what it’s doing. Click to continue »
Middle school can be a tough and unforgiving rite of passage, filled with raging hormones, ill-fitting highwater pants, voices akin to trumpet-wielding geese, and a multitude of distractions. Trying to learn while being swept up in puberty’s turbulence can be challenging. Equally challenging is trying to teach science to often-distracted tweens and teens. Right now, as most U.S. schools begin a new school year, some science educators might be looking for ways to engage their middle-school students with science. One science educator suggests meeting them where their interests lie – comics.
by Maria Sharova SERC citizen science program assistant
Maria Sharova (right) sifts through oyster shells in search of tiny mud crabs with intern Caroline Kanaskie. (Monaca Noble/SERC)
I started working at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) one year ago this month. It had only been two weeks since I graduated from college with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology. Like any recent grad, I was excited and nervous to start my first real job—and, frankly, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect.
During my first week of work, I was involved with the Chesapeake Bay Parasite Project (a.k.a. the Mud Crab Project), a project that looks at the impact of an invasive, parasitic barnacle called Loxothylacus panopaei (“Loxo” for short) on native white-fingered mud crabs in the Chesapeake Bay. Like most of our volunteers, I’d never heard of either of these organisms, I had no idea why the project mattered, and I’d never been involved in any kind of ecology research before. I had no idea Loxo was able hijack a mud crab’s reproductive system, forcing them to nurse parasite larvae instead of crab larvae. Nor had I ever searched through crates of oyster shells looking for mud crabs the size of a quarter or smaller, as our volunteers were about to do. But in no time at all, I’d become an experienced mud crab finder!
Delving deeper into the dark side of taxonomy, we forge forth into the ether to uncover obscure and wickedly inspired scientific names. What’s in a scientific name? As described in The Dark Side of Taxonomy: Part One, some scientific names for organisms have dark and twisted origins. In part two of this three-part series, we peek behind the thin gauze-like veil, fearlessly sifting through time and lore to deliver a new collection of gruesome scientific names. Here we share ancient tales of Greek mythology, an Italian literary genius from the Middle Ages and the unforgiving Underworld.
Last year, Pantone chose Radiant Orchid as their 2014 color of the year. Pantone is the authority on color. Their color choice affects a variety of industries from fashion and make-up to home interiors (e.g. paint, upholstery, etc.). Once again orchids have sashayed their way into our everyday lives and in very big ways. Journey with us as we explore just a few fabulously fierce fashion pop-cultural orchid moments.
Christian Dior’s to Die for Couture:Paris Haute Couture Autumn/Winter
Belgian designer Raf Simons joined fashion power house Christian Dior in 2012. Just two years later at the 2014 Paris Haute Couture fashion show, he wowed the audience with walls dripping with 150,000 live orchids and an equally jaw-dropping runway collection of embroidered blooms and floral-inspired silhouettes. The Fashion Channel said the show felt “divine and ethereal, with models resembling graceful nymphs walking elegantly in an antiseptic white circular Olympus with silver walls adorned with pristine white orchids.” C’est bon! We don’t think we could have said it any better!
Watch: 2014 Christian Dior Paris Haute Couture Show
