Christmas Reefs

It's Christmas, that time of year when so many of us decorate our houses with Christmas trees and wreaths. But what happens to those things when we're done with them? In most cases, we simply leave them on the side of the road to get taken to the dump. But other people have taken to doing more inventive--and environmentally-friendly--things with their old Christmas trees.
Take the case of Lake Havasu in California. Here, every year, dozens of discarded Christmas trees are dumped into the water. Believe it or not, this actually improves the ecological health of the lake. Ever since it was developed by local industry, the bottom of the lake has lost much of its organic material, such as dead trees and uprooted bushes. These serve an important function by providing shelter to the eggs and young of several species of fish in the lake. Once the dead trees originally in the lake are gone, fish numbers decline heavily.
This is where the Christmas trees come in. By providing artificial habitats for fish, they allow fish populations to increase and permit the ecosystem of the lake to be restored. This is actually not a new idea. The concept of "artificial reefs" goes as far back as the 1830s, when logs from log cabins were sunk into lakes to sunk off the coast of South Carolina to attract fish.
Using Christmas trees as artificial reefs may not be something most people would think of on the spot, but it is just another example of how, in order to preserves the ecosystems around us, we have to think outside the box. By looking at alternatives like these, we can see to it that less of the waste generated by our holiday activities ends up in landfills and incinerators. And that's sure to put anyone on the "nice list."
                                              
                 A boatload of old Christmas trees on Lake Havasu, about to be dumped into the lake.   After settling on the bottom, they will become habitats for fish and other animals on the lakebed.

Eco-tainment #8: The Glove of Darth Vader

It's happened. I've caught Star Wars fever. While I've been a fan of George Lucas's sprawling space saga for many years, that interest has only intensified with the release of its most recent installment, The Force Awakens, which opened in wide release today. So it's only natural that I should be making today's entry Star Wars-related.
The Glove of Darth Vader was a children's Star Wars novel written in 1992 and set after the movie Return of the Jedi. It focused on Luke Skywalker stopping the remnants of the Empire from hunting Whaladons--huge, intelligent, whale-like creatures from the planet Mon Calamari. The real-world parallel here is obvious. The Whaladons are whales, and the Empire's hunting of them is meant to represent the whaling industry that still exists in Japan, Norway, and Iceland.
As an environmental parable, there is nothing remarkable or exciting about The Glove of Darth Vader. In typical children's book fashion, the heroes and villains are distinct and unambiguous. The villains even go out of their way to refer to themselves as evil, by means of such phrases as "I bid you Dark Greetings" and "Dark Blessings".  While not as bad as Captain Planet or FernGully, this is still a very crude depiction of environmental issues.
This entry is less interesting for what it is than for the circumstances surrounding it. Like Captain Planet and FernGully, The Glove of Darth Vader was released in the early 1990s, at a time when enthusiasm for environmentalism seemed to be at an all-time high. During this time, environmental lessons were considered "cool" and shoehorned into popular fiction because they were thought to be what sold. Film studios, book writers and publishers, and TV executives all lunged at the marketing opportunity. Needless to say, this approach does not seem to have produced tangible results 20 years later.
The Glove of Darth Vader may just be an odd little footnote in the Star Wars story, but it shows how even the most unlikely franchises were cashing in on the environmentalism trend in the early 1990s.

Its story itself wasn't remarkable, but The Glove of Darth Vader is a perfect time capsule from a period when environmentalism was seen as a selling point--sometimes at the expense of common sense.

Can't Beat the Heat!

As I write this, the thermometer reads a balmy 64 degrees Fahrenheit --in the middle of December. This is something that I am fairly sure has never been encountered in recent memory. While it's certainly enjoyable to not have to bundle up in the winter, this is simply a mask for a much more serious issue. I've held off on doing an entire post dedicated to global warming on this blog for a variety of reasons. This is partly because I assume my readers are already familiar with it and I want to discuss things that need more time in the limelight, and partly because it's such a polarizing topic (even though it really shouldn't be).
Global warming, now better known by the annoyingly vague pseudonym of "climate change", is well understood to be the result of human activity--more specifically, the result of human industrial activity in the past 200 years. During this time, the average temperature of the Earth has increases to an even greater extent than it already had at the end of the last ice age. The most obvious symptoms of this are, of course, the loss of glaciers and ice caps, the desertification of tropical regions, and the acidification of the seas.
Those people who deny the reality of global warming tend to point out that snow and ice, sometimes in record-breaking amounts, continue to be a part of winter weather in many temperate areas. This is especially true, perhaps not coincidentally, in the southeastern United States. Now, of course, we find ourselves presented with a genuinely warm winter, with temperatures hovering in the 60s and even the 70s, and I can scarcely begin to imagine how global warming deniers might rationalize this.
While still focusing on the environmental aspects of global warming and how we can get people to acknowledge them, perhaps I should also mention a more aesthetic consequence. With global climate heating up, it may be that for may of us, snow in winter is going to become a thing of the past.