Environment – Page 12 – Things Are Good

Leaf Blowers Getting Blown Away

Leave your leaves alone! Leaf blowers, like lawn mowers, are counterproductive to a productive piece of land. If you want a better, healthier, garden next year then you should let leaves lie over winter instead of blowing them away (the same is true for lawns, but you probably don’t have a lawn anyway). If a healthy land isn’t why you stop using leaf blowers then you may find your local municipality banning them for a variety of reasons. Indeed, in Toronto’s mayoral race Gil Penalosa wants to ban them city-wide, just like any world class city already do.

The American Lung Association recommends electric leaf blowers over gas-powered ones because “old two-stroke engines like lawnmowers and leaf or snow blowers often have no pollution control devices. They can pollute the air even more than cars, though engines sold since 2011 are cleaner.”

According to a study from Washington University, in addition to air pollution, when heat and sunlight react with nitrogen oxides and Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs)emitted from combustion engines—such as gas-powered leaf blowers—ozone becomes a problem.

Farm Fields of Solar Produce Bonuses

In the UK the average person wants to get off fossil fuels, but the Conservatives in power want the opposite. Obviously this is not good, and it gets worse: the new PM Liz Truss wants to ban solar panels on farms, Conservatives clearly don’t understand how the world works.

The good news comes from research proving that agrivoltaics (agriculture + solar voltaic panels) are a boon to farmers. Solar panels on farms are good for revenue for farms, renewable energy, and the very crops farms are growing. Yes, solar panels on farm increase crop production!

“One study found certain peppers will have three times the production,” said Bousselot. “That’s a shocking number.”

As global temperatures rise, the panels can also help to conserve dwindling freshwater supplies by reducing evaporation from both plants and soil.

What evaporation does occur underneath the panels has the added benefit of cooling the PVs and boosting their electricity production, according to Randle-Boggis, a research associate at the University of Sheffield.

Flooding a Slovakian Forest to Improve it

The good folks at Mossy Earth are flooding a forest in Slovakia, and it’s to protect the environment. You might think that flooding a forest would be a bad thing since we need forests to store carbon and clean the air; however, wetlands are far better at storing carbon than forests. Wetlands are wonderful for carbon capture and are even better as a habitat for many at-risk species. Whenever possible, we need to protect our wetlands (if you’re in Ontario let your anti-wetland Conservative MPP know you want wetlands saved).

This ambitious project aims to restore an area of degraded wetland by digging water channels that will reconnect the site to a nearby river. These channels will enable water to travel from the river to the core area of the wetland and restore a more beneficial flooding regime. The project will also remove encroaching woody vegetation that is outcompeting the native wetland plant communities.

Over time this intervention will:

create suitable conditions for the regeneration of the wetland plant communities;

suppress the expansion of non-native plant species;

create suitable habitat for a diversity of invertebrates, amphibians, birds and mammals;

and finally, sequester vast amounts of carbon.

Within the next two years, we will be supporting our partners Broz to create 650 meters of water channels to restore a 64ha wetland.

Patagonia Billionaire Donates Company to Fighting Climate Change

The family who owned the Patagonia clothing company recently gave the company to a new trust which will take all the profits and dedicate it to fighting climate change. Meaning that the $3 billion company will now spend the $100 million in profits it generates annually on good things. The billionaire family hopes that their action will inspire other insanely wealthy people to do the same with their companies.

“Hopefully this will influence a new form of capitalism that doesn’t end up with a few rich people and a bunch of poor people,” Mr. Chouinard, 83, said in an exclusive interview. “We are going to give away the maximum amount of money to people who are actively working on saving this planet.”

Patagonia will continue to operate as a private, for-profit corporation based in Ventura, Calif., selling more than $1 billion worth of jackets, hats and ski pants each year. But the Chouinards, who controlled Patagonia until last month, no longer own the company.