Month: November 2016

Thursday at 4 p.m.: The unsustainability of ‘Breaking Bad’

Image of Allen MacDuffie 2Allen MacDuffie (pictured), associate professor in the University of Texas at Austin’s Department of English, will present “Energy, Ecology, and ‘Breaking Bad’s’ Unsustainability” at 4 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 1, at Ohio State in Columbus.

Admission is free and open to the public.

MacDuffie, who’s the author of Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination, will discuss how narratives within the “Breaking Bad” TV series “register the cultural and environmental logic underlying our present moment of ecological crisis,” according to the event listing.

Ohio State’s Environmental Humanities program and Department of English are the event’s co-sponsors.

Details. (Photo: UT Austin.)

Can we keep our trash out of the Great Lakes?

There’s a conference tomorrow in Cleveland on how to eliminate marine debris (plastic trash and more) in the Great Lakes, including Lake Erie. It’s closed to the public, but there’s a second, public event planned for early 2017 to talk about goals developed during the conference. Elizabeth Miller writing for the Great Lakes Today website of WBFO, Buffalo, New York, has the story.

The story quotes, among others, Jill Bartolotta of the Ohio State-based Ohio Sea Grant program.

‘Tide turning’ in bloom battle?

Image of Lake Erie algal bloomA recent Columbus Dispatch article said there’s reason to be optimistic in the battle against Lake Erie’s algal blooms. Robyn Wilson, who studies risk analysis and decision science as an associate professor in CFAES’s School of Environment and Natural Resources, was one of the experts quoted. “I don’t think we need regulation,” she said in the article. “I think farmers have gotten a bad rap. They are highly motivated to fix the problem under their own terms.” Read the article. (Photo: Lake Erie algal bloom by Tom Archer, Michigan Sea Grant.)

Blue wind, green power drive Buckeyes’ national ranking

Image of Ohio State marching band flagDetails on Ohio State’s partnership with the Blue Creek Wind Farm, which is Ohio’s biggest wind farm, are in a recent story by Scott Smith of the Big Ten Network. The Blue Creek operation, according to a quote in the story from Scott Potter of Ohio State’s Office of Energy and Environment, generates the equivalent of 20 percent of the Columbus campus’s power load, a number that led Ohio State to a No. 6 national ranking in the U.S. EPA’s Green Power Partnership program. (Certain, ahem, wolverine-based universities didn’t make the list.) (Photo: University Communications, Ohio State.)

Science could help identify and track where Lake Erie’s phosphorus comes from

Satellite image of Lake Erie algal bloomOhio State scientists are developing ways to identify the many kinds of phosphorus getting into Lake Erie. To do it, they’re determining the compounds’ chemical signatures. The goal is to be able to link the compounds back to their sources — whether farm field, livestock facility, wastewater treatment plant or otherwise — and so better target efforts aimed at keeping phosphorus out of Lake Erie. Excess phosphorus is one of the causes of the harmful algal blooms plaguing Lake Erie and other lakes. CFAES’s Field to Faucet initiative is a co-funder of the research. Read Ohio Sea Grant’s press release on the work. (Photo: Western Lake Erie algal bloom, NOAA.)

Thursday at 4 p.m.: Future of Waterman Farm in Columbus?

Aerial image of Waterman FarmWhat’s a sustainable future for CFAES’s Waterman Agricultural and Natural Resources Laboratory (pictured) in Columbus? Faculty members from Ohio State’s Knowlton School of Architecture and CFAES’s School of Environment and Natural Resources will share their ideas in a seminar called “The New Waterman: At the Intersection of Productive Research, Education and Community Engagement.” It’s today, Thursday, Nov. 17, from 4-5:30 p.m. Free and open to the public. You can attend in Columbus, watch by videolink at OARDC in Wooster, or watch online on your computer or mobile device. More. (Photo: CFAES.)

Connect with people who share your passion: ‘Thousands of professionals in Ohio and beyond’

A reminder that, while you don’t have to be a member of the Environmental Professionals Network to attend its monthly programs, there are lots of good reasons to join anyway. (It’s free, too, so there’s that.) If you work in an environmental field, if you’re studying in an environmental field and hope to work in it eventually, maybe even soon, the network will link you to “thousands of professionals in Ohio and beyond,” its website says. “Professionals are thus connected in a ‘community’ of people who share their passion for our world and its environment, natural resources, people, and communities — local to global.” Visit the website here. Join here.