Over the past few weeks, I’ve learned that there are a number of environmental and social concerns around the farming of cut-flowers- there are questions about pesticide and water use, about the impacts on families and communities, about poaching and introduced pests. But there are also quite a few organizations working to improve the conditions […]
Author Archive
A sustainable rose would smell as sweet
Natural born flowers
In my last post I talked about some of the environmental concerns surrounding the cut flower industry, namely pesticides, water use, and the movement of parasites and diseases. While there are many other facets to growing flowers for bouquets, I want to highlight two other issues, both of which I think we can influence: wildflower […]
The smell of pesticides in the morning
I had been a little worried that I wasn’t going to be able to find much research concerning the cut-lower industry, or that, if I did, it would all be about developing new varieties of popular flowers. In fact, I was surprised at the extent of the literature- researchers have been paying attention to multiple […]
Hoping to say it with flowers
When I started thinking about a blog topic for this month, I looked back through the posts from the last few months and noticed that my last four topics have centered on animals. Probably a good idea to show plants a bit more appreciation, and it is February after all- pictures of flowers are pretty […]
Making room for seabirds
Over the last few weeks I’ve described some of the problems facing colonial seabirds around the world (and some of them are pretty serious), but I’ve also pointed out that we are making progress at fighting some of these challenges. Birds in general get a lot of attention from researchers and the public- they are […]
Removing obstacles for colonial seabirds
Drama on the seas and islands and beaches
Danger in numbers?
As we start 2016, I’m trying to be more conscious of conservation issues that I interact with on a regular basis but might not really spend a lot of time contemplating in detail. For example, I know that carbon dioxide emissions are a major cause of global warming, so I try to turn off lights […]
Along came a spider conservation program…
In my previous post I said I was going to look into ways to get involved in spider conservation- I’ve done that, and there are definitely ways to get involved, but not in the same numbers that I usually see with other conservation topics. My guess is that spider conservation is both relatively new and […]
Creating a safety net for spiders
As I mentioned in my last post, we are still very much in the beginning stages of understanding spider conservation. At this point, it may be that we can really only speak to general trends, rather than specific conservation situations, but certainly we’ve got a starting point. Spiders are particularly sensitive to vegetative structure, meaning […]