Forty one years ago, Earth Day 1977, Appalachia- Science in the Public Interest filed Articles of Incorporation. Building on the growing awareness of anthropogenic impact on the environment, the organization was the first of its kind in Appalachia: using science and technology to affect change.  

When the modern environmental movement was at its genesis in the 1970’s, pollution was in plain sight. White birds turned black from soot. Smog was thick. Recycling was nascent. Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring published in 1962. It brought to light the dangerous use of a pesticide called DDT that was polluting rivers and destroying the eggs of birds of prey like bald eagles.

Then, in 1969, a large oil spill struck the coast of Santa Barbara, California. It moved then-Senator Gaylord Nelson from Wisconsin to put Earth Day on the national stage. More than 20 million people turned out.

It spurred a movement that pushed then-President Nixon to create the Environmental Protection Agency. In the 48 years since the first Earth Day, there have been more than 48 major environmental wins. Protections have been put in place on everything from clean water to endangered species. A federal agency was created to protect the environment; The EPA also works to protect human health. For example, lead and asbestos, once common in homes and offices, have been largely phased out of many common products.

So it seems that we’re on a pretty good track looking back over the past 41 years. A lot of our cumulative actions have had a real impact. However, as I am writing this, I am struck by my renewed sense of urgency in advocating for taking action; the current administration is rapidly dismantling policies and social norms established to protect the environment.

It’s personally terrifying to watch as decades of outreach and raising awareness that created localized change and led to changing policies can be unraveled in such a short time. I would be remiss to not mention the “Mission Accomplished” sentiment that has prevailed with Earth Day in the new millennium. This administration has proved that nothing is sacred, and crises like Flint, Houston and Puerto Rico prove that we still need to advocate for change and stand up for the earth and all it’s citizens. But that means we must still diligently work to protect the earth.
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So for Earth Day 2018, reflect on what has been done in the past 40 years (!!) and grow hope that we can still affect change. 

We breathe cleaner air. Los Angeles, for example, was infamous for its smog back then. Air pollution there, as measured by ground-level ozone, has dropped from 0.58 parts per million to 0.151 p.p.m. Yet this happened while car-loving California drove twice as much over that period.
. . . partly because gasoline-powered cars are more fuel-efficient. In 1970, the average for cars was 13.5 miles per gallon; now it’s 22.6 m.p.g. Light trucks: 10 m.p.g. vs. 18.1 m.p.g. But the overall fuel efficiency has improved less — 13 m.p.g. vs. 20.7 m.p.g.— because a higher proportion of S.U.V.'s and pickups are on today’s highways.

The per capita use of fossil fuels has decreased. America consumed 14.7 million barrels of oil per day in 1970. It consumed 18.9 million barrels last year, a 29 percent increase. But the United States now has 54 percent more people and the economy is 15 times larger. U.S. coal consumption of 731.1 MMst in 2016 was 8.4% lower than the 2015 level. Consumption peaked in 2015, after rising from 680 MMst to 1,125 MMst since 1977. The electric power sector accounted for about 92.8% of the total U.S. coal consumption in 2016.

We recycle more. In 1970, an average American produced 3.3 pounds of trash a day; almost all of it ended up in landfills or incinerators. By 2012, that American produced 4.4 pounds each day and sent 54 percent of it to landfills or incinerators. The rest was recycled, composted or burned for energy, options that barely existed in 1970. Plastics represented only 2.6 percent of the nation’s trash in 1970 but now account for 17.6 percent, posing a particular challenge since many types of plastics neither decompose in landfills nor recycle easily.

Rivers don’t burn. The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire in 1969 because it was so polluted. A survey at the time found that not a single species of fish existed in the lower part of the river, which empties into Lake Erie. Biologists recently counted 32. Average dissolved oxygen levels went from 2 milligrams per liter to above 6. Kayakers and canoers now jostle for room on the river along with ships.

The bald eagle is back. Spotting the national bird in 1970 was a rare treat. There were fewer than 800 breeding pairs in the lower 48 states in 1970. While they still can’t be taken for granted, the eagles are common along America’s waterways. The National Audubon Society, using its Christmas Bird Count, estimates there may now be more than five times as many, while federal government data suggests the population has grown more than 10 times.

But the atmosphere is still full of CFCs. At the time of the first Earth Day, chemicals known as chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs (among them the well-known brand Freon) were in worldwide use as refrigerants and propellants in aerosols. It wasn’t until later in the 1970s that scientists discovered their destructive effects on the ozone layer.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began tracking atmospheric concentrations of CFC-11, one of the most significant types, in 1977, measuring it at about 140 parts per trillion. That number nearly doubled, to 270 parts per trillion, in 1994 before beginning a slow decline as production was phased out and existing CFCs were replaced by other chemicals. In January 2016, the concentration measured 232 parts per trillion.

And the earth is warming. Since that first Earth Day, the world has been warming at an accelerated pace compared with prior decades, and scientists believe rising emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause. They calculate that the world has warmed by about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the 19th century, with about 1 degree of that occurring just since 1970. The warming has been sharply higher over land and in some polar regions. As a result of melting glaciers and the expansion of warmer ocean water, the sea level is rising ever faster. It rose at an average rate of 2 millimeters a year between 1971 and 2010, and even faster in the past decade, after rising at an average rate of 1.7 millimeters per year in the last century.

What to do today: 
The theme of 2018's Earth Day celebration is plastics—specifically how to decrease their unwanted impacts on our environment. What was perhaps set in place in the mid-20th century when plastic was manufactured on a large scale has come back to haunt us.

Plastic refuse is everywhere. It's bigger than Texas in the Pacific garbage patch, and it's as small as the micro plastics getting eaten by fish and churned out on our dinner plates.

Some environmental groups are leading grassroots movements to cut back on the use of common plastics like straws; the U.K. even recently proposed passing a law to ban them. Its one incremental way to cut back on the whopping 91 percent of plastic that isn't recycled.

It’s not an occasion to hang out with friends, although having company while doing laundry is never a bad idea. It’s a day to encourage communities to learn about the benefits of using a clothesline for drying laundry. It saves money, reduces energy consumption, makes your clothes last longer, and gets you outside. Some benefits:

• Save money

You can save more than $25/month off the monthly electric bill for many households. You can read about drying costs. Find out how much you spend on drying clothes by using the DOE’s appliance energy calculator. 

• Clothes last longer

Where do you think lint comes from?

• Pleasant Scent

Clothes and linens smell better without adding possibly toxic chemicals to your body and the environment. Yankee candle, Febreeze, Tide, and any number of high priced candles, air fresheners or room sprays strive for the smell of air lined laundry.    

• Saves Energy, Preserves Environment, Reduces Pollution

You could make your own clothes with needle and thread using 100% organic cotton sheared from sheep you raised on a Whole Foods diet, but the environmental quality of your wardrobe is ultimately determined by the way you wash it. A recent study by Cambridge University's Institute of Manufacturing found that 60% of the energy associated with a piece of clothing is spent in washing and drying it. Over its lifetime, a T shirt can send up to 9 lbs. of carbon dioxide into the air.  When they're clean, dry your clothes the natural way, by hanging them on a line rather than loading them in a dryer. Altogether you can reduce the CO2 created by your laundry up to 90%. Plus, no more magically disappearing socks.

• Healthy Work

It is moderate physical activity which you can do in or outside. You can even lose weight!

• Get the Sunshine Treatment

Sunlight is a natural disinfectant. Ultraviolet radiation of the sun kills pathogens that cause diarrhea. In fact, scientists have found that exposing a bottle of water to sunlight for 6 hours is an economical way to provide developing countries with safe drinking water 

• Replace another appliance

Indoor racks can humidify in dry winter weather.

• Avoid a Fire

Clothes dryer and washing machine fires account for about 17,700 structure fires, 15 deaths, and 360 injuries annually. The yearly national fire loss for clothes dryer fires in structures is estimated at $194 million.
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Don’t know how to dry your laundry? Here are some high quality tips to help you get that job done:

• When using a drying machine, make sure your clothes are well spun out before hanging them on a rack.
• If you have washed some delicate clothing, be sure you have removed as much water as possible by rolling the garment in an absorbent towel.
• Give your clothes a good shake to make them softer, prevent wrinkles and reduce drying time.
• Hang your T-shirts on a hanger. You can put them directly in your closet and they will be sleek. You won’t even have to iron.
• As for the jeans, you will need multiple hanging racks, so that they get as much air circulation as possible. To speed the process, when hanging your clothes, try to place them near the heating or the air conditioning vent. An air or floor fan will also speed up the process. The fabric is thick, so a good air circulation is important.
• Occasionally, we are in a rush and we need a particular blouse to be clean and ready within an hour, which means that there is simply no time to hang-dry. In this rare case, you should turn on the spin function on your washer. It will absorb all the water from your clothes and will take less time for the dryer to evaporate it from your clothes. It is better for the environment and much quicker for you as well.

This week is International Dark Sky Week, which draws attention to the problems associated with light pollution and promotes simple solutions available to mitigate it. Turn off the lights at night and experience the nighttime environment. Go outside, look up and look around. Explore!

Light pollution is reversible and its solutions are immediate, simple and cost-effective. Here are a few simple things you can do to confront the problem and take back the night:

• Check around home. Shield outdoor lighting, or at least angle it downward, to minimize “light trespass” beyond your property lines. Use light only when and where needed. Motion detectors and timers can help. Use only the amount of light required for the task at hand.

• Star Party! Many astronomy clubs and International Dark Sky Places are celebrating the week by holding public events under the stars.

• Download, Watch, and Share “Losing the Dark,” a public service announcement about light pollution. It can be downloaded for free and is available in 13 languages.

• Talk to neighbors and your community. Explain that poorly shielded fixtures waste energy, produce glare and reduce visibility.

• While you’re out there, take some notes. Become a citizen scientist and collect data about the night sky in your neighborhood for Globe at Night. It’s fun, easy and you’ll be helping scientists across the globe better understand the threat of light pollution to our planet.

• Photograph the sky and enter the 2017 International Earth and Sky Photo Contest, which aims to educate the public about light pollution (contest dates to be announced in early March).

Even though Rachel Maddow has been killing it on MSNBC, turn off the TV and go outside and observe a light-less night sky this week!

“No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth and no culture comparable to that of the garden.”- Thomas Jefferson, born today, April 13, in 1743.

April 13 is Plant Appreciation Day. As you start to tend your garden, consider gardeners over the centuries that relied on their gardens for food. They observed growing conditions like insects and soil health to improve productivity because they had no other choice. Like Thomas Jefferson, they traded and saved seeds and experimented with different varieties in order to maximize the benefits of the garden. You are participating in one of the most important and oldest activities to sustain life.

Experiment
Jefferson once wrote that the “greatest service which can be rendered to any country is to add a useful plant to its culture.” When he traveled throughout our young country and abroad, Jefferson often exchanged seeds and seedlings with other gardeners. He enjoyed cultivating those seeds and young plants in his Monticello garden.

Because he grew a variety of crops, including a mix of tropical species with cool weather crops, he devised a unique terraced landscape for his 1,000-foot-long vegetable garden. By placing the garden on a south-facing slope, he was able to capture abundant sunshine.
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Creating this unique form of “hanging garden” involved the removal of about 600,000 cubic feet of red clay and the creation of a 1,000-foot-long rock wall that was 15-feet tall in some places.

Grow what you eat
Jefferson loved to eat vegetables. His Monticello garden featured 330 different varieties of vegetables and 170 varieties of fruits. According to Monticello gardening expert Peter Hatch, Jefferson’s garden inspired a “revolutionary cuisine.” A Monticello recipe for okra soup, for instance, reflects influences from Native Americans (lima beans), Europe (potatoes and tomatoes) and Africa via the West Indies (okra).

Go natural
Jefferson would be quite at home with the organic gardening movement of today. When his daughter, Martha, wrote to him while he was in Philadelphia serving as secretary of state, she complained about insects damaging the vegetables at Monticello.

He responded, “I suspect that the insects which have harassed you have been encouraged by the feebleness of your plants; and that has been produced by the lean state of the soil.”

He recommended the garden be covered that winter with “a heavy coating of manure. When is rich it bids defiance to droughts, yields in abundance, and of the best quality.”

Keep notes
Jefferson had a scientist’s mind, and because of that, he kept scrupulous notes about what worked and what did not work in his garden.

He recorded his gardening efforts in his Garden Book, a personal journal he maintained from 1766 to 1824. Hatch reports that Jefferson was not afraid to admit defeat in certain gardening circumstances. “On one page in 1809 the word failed is written down 19 times,” Hatch writes.  “He had a holistic view, as we say today, of the gardening process. It is the failure of one thing that is repaired by the success of another.”

Make your garden a retreat
Jefferson enjoyed the restorative aspects of being a gardener and believed that gardens should be seen, experienced and enjoyed.

For example, he designed and built an octagonal pavilion in a central garden location at Monticello and used this spot as a location for reading, writing and even entertaining.

“No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth,” he once wrote, “and no culture comparable to that of the garden.”

I like to dig my hands into the earth.  I like to read seed catalogs.  I'm not so much into planning how many pounds of tomatoes my family needs and how many each type produces, etc. etc. etc.
But. . .
I just ate delicious pumpkin-apple soup and cornbread for lunch.  Tonight we'll have pesto for the adults and tomato sauce for the kids and spiced peaches for dessert.  It is February, the ground is solid and covered by a thin layer of ice and several inches of snow, and we are eating from our garden.  Even my haphazard planning is paying off, and it wasn't always so.  In order to eat all year - start planning now.

The first year of our own grown-up garden, we grew a lot of food.  The only things we had enough of to last throughout the year - squash (I've never had a squash year like it since) and cucumbers (bread and butter and dill - jars and jars).  A neighbor let us pick apples and pears and I dried and I froze.  We really enjoyed that fruit all year.  (Notice I did not mention the squash or vats of pickles.) 

The next year we grew all of our garlic for the year and tomato products.  I love green salsa, so we added cilantro and tomatillos the next year.  My husband rolls his eyes heavenward when eats pesto, so we grew mounds of basil, too.

Turns out a row of edamame was a great experiment and now we freeze bags of "pop beans." 

We stacked the winter squash in baskets on the porch and in the cooler parts of the house last year for decoration.  Every now and then I would check them and cook up the ones that looked like they might go soon.  We had so many, we lost some.  Winter squash is delicious.  A moment of silence.

We compete with the wilderness for our beans, but three years ago with good fencing we dried and froze enough for the year.

What you may notice is that not every type of produce gets mentioned for every year.  It turns out that whatever I plan for best (excepting flooding and drought conditions), does the best.  Load of composted manure to the tomato patch  = great tomatoes.  Fencing around the beans = bean-shelling party!  Each year the pantry is a little better, but planning is the key.  There are many methods of eating from the garden all season - cold frames, freezing, canning, drying, greenhouses, mulching, root cellars - but producing the right amounts of food for a family requires planning.

So we're planning.  We're planting a few of the little garden peach tomatoes my middle kiddo can eat until he's sick and the cherries right off the vine and 20 good paste and drying tomato plants.  We've reduced the greens to a good patch of sturdy greens that will keep us eating really late and really early, but the cut and come again lettuce gets a smallish- patch every two weeks.  There's only so much we can consume.  Mama's putting some fencing around the freezer peas to keep out the children - kids don't care, they will eat every whether its moniker containers Sugar or not - we'll add a lot more snaps for them, don't worry!

We are learning about quantity - we do not need 25 quarts of pickles at our house.
For us - about 25 quarts of tomato sauce in storage (not counting what we make fresh in season), 5-10 quarts of salsa, 5 quarts of frozen cherry tomatoes, 5 quarts of edamame is plenty, 20 pints of jam/jelly (We have three kids!), 3-4 quarts of pickles (that one year drove it out of us), and so on and so forth.
We also add giving to growing.  We visit our neighbors on winter solstice with loaves of bread and jars of jam.  We take jars on our journeys, sharing with those friend and family that live near great vacation spots, but have nothing like our Kentucky garden.

Our pesto demand may change as the kids' taste buds mature toward adulthood, and we are ready.  Right now we leave the mounds of extra basil in the front garden - seed is cheap, it smells wonderful, and the frost-killed, blackened stalks are a perfect backdrop for our Halloween party.

Planning Steps

• Estimate or even track how much your family consumes of the things you want to grow
• Does this reflect how much of those things you want to consume?  For instance, we don't eat pesto when we don't grow it - it is very expensive for our budget, or when I know I have a lot of beans to work with, we eat them because they are healthier than other types of proteins.
• Decide how you will store these foods - in the ground, root cellar, canned, frozen
• Make sure you have storage available.  Sometimes you can improvise - when we ran out of cans one year, I started freezing.
• Choose produce varieties good for what you need to do with them.  Paste tomatoes for cooking down, meaty tomatoes for drying. . .
• Decide how many pounds you will need to produce to meet your families' needs.  You can find great plant-yield ratio materials easily. 
• Create your garden plan, including dates to start seeds, plant outside, and estimated dates of harvest.  It's hard to put up a year's worth of strawberries, if you are on vacation!

ASPI relies on many types of support to complete its mission.  Many people don't know that much, if not most, of our labor (both office and outdoor) comes from volunteers or in-kind donations.  (We are a 501 c3, nonprofit organization.)

This fall 16 students from Notre Dame worked 5 days at the office (putting the gardens to bed for the winter with fall crops, moving compost, weeding, getting the attic ready for ceiling removal to install solar tubes, removing kitchen cabinets to install commercial kitchen grade sinks and cabinets) and at the Wilderness Site (completing the new Solar System Trail, installing a fossil dig, making a new exhibit for the nature center, painting, and leading a field trip of second grade students.)  

This fall nearly 100 cadets from the Appalachia National Challenge Academy cleared trails, painted, dug out a building, and put the Wilderness Site garden to bed.

We would not be able to have a progressive program without these folks.  Thank you to everyone who comes to ASPI for an hour or a week to help us continue to demonstrate and research sustainability.

Fall is also the time of year we sell the Simple Lifestyle Calendars which have become a part of the lifestyle of hundreds of people around the world.  ASPI's Mark Spencer creates the calendar with local artists.  They are beautiful, full of helpful hints, thousands of special days, and reflections on living a simple life.  If you are interested in ordering one for yourself or as a gift, please visit here: HOME and do so!  Just as we rely on our volunteers for the physical movement forward, we rely on the calendar sales to pay for supplies and though are bills are low (we are after all researching and educating about sustainability,) we do have to pay them!

The last Fall activity - when the volunteers are hopefully snug with a mug of cocoa and the calendar orders are in the mail, is our Thanksgiving Appeal.  We ask our sponsors, people interested in continuing the mission of ASPI, and those who are thankful that we have a means through which to educate folks about sustainable living to donate to ASPI.  If you would like to do so, please visit here:  SHOP

If you would like to support ASPI through attending our events and workshops - keep visiting the website - and follow us on Facebook - we'll be posting our Spring and Summer schedule of events and opportunities right after the New Year.

Thank you all, past, present, and future supporters of Appalachia - Science in the Public Interest!

    September, time to celebrate our labors, time to go back to school; a gateway month with sundown walking backwards, occurring earlier each day.  This month gives us our first intimations that winter is, indeed coming.  September has been designated: National Mushroom Month, Healthy Aging Month, National Piano Month, National Organic Harvest Month, Biodiversity Month, Classical Music Month, Honey Month, Hispanic Heritage Month (By Presidential Proclamation in 1989), National Yoga Awareness Month, World Animal Remembrance Month, and Better Breakfast Month.

    There are some important environmental observation days in September:  Conservation Week  (second full week) and Clean up the World Weekend (third weekend), an annual environmental campaign.  Coastal Cleanup Day (third Saturday) highlights the California Coastal Commission's year ‘round Adopt-A-Beach program; World Rivers Day (last Sunday) and World Water Monitoring Day (September 18) emphasize the importance of water to our world.  National Hummingbird Day (first Saturday), Fish Amnesty Day (fourth Saturday), International Rabbit Day (fourth Saturday), and National Wildlife Day (Sept 4) remind us that we share this world with an amazing variety of creatures both similar and dissimilar to ourselves, as well as the world community of plants, also celebrated by National Threatened Species Day (Sept 7), encouraging us to help conserve unique native fauna and flora.  In 1994, the UN General Assembly proclaimed Sept. 16 the International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer, commemorating the 1987 signing of the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer.  World Carfree Day (always Sept 22) is a showcase for how our cities might look, feel and sound without cars, and Public Lands Day, involves citizen volunteers in cleaning and maintaining nearby public lands.

We also celebrate people in September, with Labor Day (first Monday), Grandparents’ Day (first Sunday after Labor Day), Swap Ideas Day (Sept 10), Family Day and Stepfamily Day (Sept 16), Citizenship Day (Sept 16), Native American Day  (4th Friday in Sept), and  National Good Neighbor Day (Sept 28).  Some birthdays we celebrate this month are Jane Addams (born Sept 6, 1860), pioneer settlement social worker, public philosopher, sociologist, author, and leader in women's suffrage and world peace, “Grandma Moses” (born Sept 7, 1860), Anna Mary Robertson Moses, a renowned American folk artist, "Johnny Appleseed" Johnny Chapman (born Sept 26, 1774),  American pioneer nurseryman who introduced apple trees to large parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, as well as the northern counties of present day West Virginia, and Chinese philosopher Confucius (born Sept 28, 551 BCE), whose birthday is also called Teacher’s Day.