Dragonflies are one of the insects tricked by false light (Photo courtesy of the EPA)
Bugs are getting confused by the
reflections from manmade structures.
Rebecca Williams reports on a new study:
Transcript
Bugs are getting confused by the
reflections from manmade structures.
Rebecca Williams reports on a new study:
If you’ve ever noticed swarms of insects hovering over your car, there’s a
good chance they’re mistaking it for water.
Smooth, dark surfaces like cars and asphalt reflect polarized light. That’s
what bugs see – and that tricks insects such as dragonflies.
Bruce Robertson is an author of the study in the journal Frontiers in Ecology
and the Environment.
“Asphalt actually reflects polarized light more strongly than water and so it
looks more like water than water! And so these organisms are thinking
they’re finding a place to breed and hunt and lay eggs and mate when in fact
they’re finding a place that’s very dangerous.”
Robertson says these bugs swarm over buildings and roads in huge numbers,
and can die of exhaustion.
But he says it might be possible to stop tricking the bugs. Things like
adding white curtains to dark windows or adding a little bit of gravel to
asphalt to make the surfaces reflect less polarized light.
The Adopt-A-Watt program allows people to sponsor clean energy (Photo courtesy of Adopt-A-Watt)
A new program gets businesses and
groups to pay towns to switch to alternative
energy. Lester Graham reports it’s a
little like an “Adopt-A-Highway” program:
Transcript
A new program gets businesses and
groups to pay towns to switch to alternative
energy. Lester Graham reports it’s a
little like an “Adopt-A-Highway” program:
Imagine seeing a bank of solar panels that power nearby street lights, and a sign
underneath which recognizes the company that sponsored the project.
Thomas Wither is the founder of the National Adopt-A-Watt program.
“Our program mimics the very successful “Adopt-A-Highway” program. Only instead
of giving supporters community recognition for picking up litter alongside the road,
we have come up with a means of giving community recognition for supporting clean
energy and the funding for alternative fuels.”
Wither says several airports are among the first to use the “adopt-a-watt” program.
Sponsors get the benefit of being connected to clean energy – like solar power – and
airports, towns, and other government entities get the cost of using clean energy
subsidized by those sponsors.
For The Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.
imothy D. Sands, at left, director of Purdue's Birck Nanotechnology Center in Discovery Park, and graduate student Mark Oliver, operate a "reactor" in work aimed at perfecting solid-state lighting, a technology that could cut electricity consumption by 10 percent if widely adopted. Purdue researchers have overcome a major obstacle in reducing the cost of the lighting technology, called light-emitting diodes. (Photo by David Umberger, courtesy of Purdue News Service)
Unless you like to live by candlelight,
you have to buy lightbulbs. But the options
out there aren’t that great. Jessi Ziegler reports how all that might change soon:
Transcript
Unless you like to live by candlelight,
you have to buy lightbulbs. But the options
out there aren’t that great. Jessi Ziegler reports how all that might change soon:
Plain-old incandescent lightbulbs are not efficient. That’s
old news.
And fluorescents? The color is funny and they have toxic
mercury in them.
So, what option is left?
LED lights. They’re as efficient as compact flourescents
minus the mercury.
The problem? They’re one-hundred-dollars-a-bulb
expensive.
But scientists at Purdue have been working on a way to
cut that cost.
Researcher Timothy Sands says in about 5 years, LEDs could
cost the same as the other bulbs.
“So, the nice thing about it is you can save energy, and
actually save money over the long haul – even though the
initial cost is very high right now, without changing what
you’re used to, or without lowering your standards for
lighting.”
And Sands says another big advantage of LEDs is you’d only
have to change the bulbs every 15 years.
For The Environment Report, this is Jessi Ziegler.
Photograph of illuminated incandescent-replacement fluorescent bulb. (Source: Jdorwin at Wikimedia Commons)
On Saturday night from 8 to 9 the World Wildlife
Fund is asking you to turn off your lights for Earth Hour.
Lester Graham reports sitting in the dark is supposed to
make you think about how you contribute to global warming:
Transcript
On Saturday night from 8 to 9 the World Wildlife
Fund is asking you to turn off your lights for Earth Hour.
Lester Graham reports sitting in the dark is supposed to
make you think about how you contribute to global warming:
The World Wildlife Fund is organizing the Earth Hour. Some have questioned whether
what some might consider a “publicity stunt” will really make a difference. Joe Pouliot is
with the group.
“Well I wouldn’t characterize this as a stunt. Climate change, unfortunately, hasn’t been getting a huge amount of attention. But because of the activities of Earth Hour, people are really beginning to focus on the challenges of climate change.”
Earth Hour wants you to shut off your lights for an hour because lot of electricity comes
from coal-burning power plants. They put out a lot of carbon dioxide, a main
greenhouse gas. Pouliot says people, organizations and cities on six continents are
participating in Earth Hour, including the cities of Toronto, Altlanta, Chicago, Phoenix
and San Francisco.
For The Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.
The US government will begin phasing out higher wattage incandescent bulbs in 2012. (Photo by Lester Graham)
One out of every five light bulbs sold in the U.S. is a compact fluorescent. That’s
according to new market data put out by the Environmental Protection Agency. Mark
Brush reports:
Transcript
One out of every five light bulbs sold in the U.S. is a compact fluorescent. That’s
according to new market data put out by the Environmental Protection Agency. Mark
Brush reports:
It appears the days are numbered for Thomas Edison’s most famous invention. That’s because fewer people are buying incandescent light bulbs. The EPA says that compact fluorescent light bulbs made up 20% of the overall light bulb
market last year. That’s more than double than the previous year.
Maria Vargas is with the EPA’s Energy Star Program. She says the compact fluorescent
bulbs – or CFLs – are more expensive to buy, but when you do the math, they’ll save
you money in the long run:
“A CFL lamp will save you about $30 or more in electricity costs over each bulb’s
lifetime. They use about 75% less energy and they last up to about ten times longer.”
The U.S. government will officially begin phasing out the higher wattage incandescent
bulbs in 2012.
Environmental groups say they’ve reached a landmark deal with auto and steel makers and the EPA that could prevent tons of mercury from getting into the environment in the future. The GLRC’s Tracy Samilton reports:
Transcript
Environmental groups say they’ve reached a landmark deal with auto
and steel makers and the EPA that could prevent tons of mercury from
getting into the environment in the future. The GLRC’s Tracy Samilton
reports:
The auto industry completely phased out mercury switches in lights and
antilock breaks in 2002, but as many as 60 million of the devices could
still be on the road today.
When a car is finally scrapped and melted down at the steel mill, the
mercury is released into the air. Auto makers and steel plants have
tentatively agreed to share the cost of a national retrieval program to
remove mercury switches from vehicles before they’re recycled.
The Ecology Center was instrumental in brokering the deal. The Center
says the program could potentially reduce overall mercury pollution by
ten percent, and keep 80 tons of mercury out of the environment. The
deal is expected to be finalized within a few weeks.
This fall, skyscrapers in New York City are dimming their lights to help migrating birds stay on course as they fly south. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kelly reports:
Transcript
This fall, skyscrapers in New York City are dimming their lights to help migrating birds stay on course as they fly south. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kelly reports:
The Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building are famous for lighting up the New York City skyline. But if you look closely this fall, you might notice that the lights have been turned down at several famous New York buildings.
It’s part of a voluntary effort led by the Audubon Society. City lights confuse migratory birds, who typically use the moon and stars to navigate. Ornithologist Daniel Klem says thousands of birds die when they run into buildings or fall exhausted onto city streets.
“It’s an astronomical amount of unintended carnage in my view, and anything we can do to prevent it and make people more aware of it will be helpful.”
Klem says skyscrapers in Chicago and Toronto are also turning down their lights this fall to aid the birds on their passage.
"Green" single family homes built by GreenBuilt in the Cleveland EcoVillage. (Photo courtesy of Cleveland EcoVillage)
Kids entertained by a stiltwalker at the ribbon cutting for the W. 58th St. EcoVillage Townhomes, which are built to be more energy-efficient. (Photo courtesy of Cleveland EcoVillage)
Planting beds being prepared by neighborhood residents at the EcoVillage Community Garden on Ithaca Ct. (Photo courtesy of Cleveland EcoVillage)
In recent decades, rust-belt cities have seen neighborhoods deteriorate and surrounding suburbs sprawl with little restraint. Now, formerly industrial cities are looking to redevelop old neighborhoods and attract new people. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lisa Ann Pinkerton looks at how one old neighborhood is using sustainable ideas to attract new residents:
Transcript
In recent decades, rust-belt cities have seen neighborhoods deteriorate and surrounding suburbs sprawl with little restraint. Now, formerly industrial cities are looking to redevelop old neighborhoods and attract new people. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lisa Ann Pinkerton looks at how one old neighborhood is using sustainable ideas to attract new residents:
(sound of street)
The morning sun is peaking through an overcast sky along a street lined with simple Victorian style homes. In this Cleveland neighborhood, two of these homes are brand new. Unlike their century old neighbors, they’re green buildings… built with the environment in mind.
One, is the home of David and Jen Hovus. It was built to actively conserve resources and to have a low impact on the environment. For example, all of the lights are on timers.
“I had to go out of my way to find timers that would control compact fluorescent lights, so that I wasn’t wasting too much electricity.”
Even the fan venting moist air from the bathroom… is on a timer. The furnace too, is a high-efficiency unit.
(sound of walking)
Hovus’s environmentally friendly surroundings don’t stop at the backyard gate. He lives in a special neighborhood called the Cleveland EcoVillage. And on his way to work, he sees green building principles and sustainable practices all along the way. Like the community garden, where even the tool shed is made of recycled material.
“There was a 120-year-old maple tree that was cut down. Folks brought a portable saw mill and they sawed it into lumber and that’s what they used for the framing. It’s actually a strawbale construction as well.”
The idea to revive a struggling neighborhood with sustainable solutions, started with the city’s environmental planning organization, EcoCity Cleveland. Back in 1997, they investigated dozens of the cities neighborhoods. And choose the west side neighborhood where Hovus lives, because it was close to transit, had a strong Community Development organization and had support of the local councilman.
David Beach is EcoCity Cleveland’s Executive Director. He says besides environmentally sound buildings, the neighborhood gives the option of a car-free life.
“Where everything you need is with in walking distance. So you’re living space, your work place, and some of your shopping can be right in that one neighborhood. And then you hop on that rapid transit and in five minutes your downtown or you’re at the airport.”
Everything within a half-mile radius of the transit station is in the EcoVillage.
Resident David Hovus stands at the entrance, with fierce wind coming off of Lake Erie.
“This used to be… there was literally a set of stairs leading down to the platform. There was essentially a bus shelter on the platform and that was it. And if you didn’t actually know where the entrances were, you’d never know there was a train station here.”
So EcoCity Cleveland and the neighborhood convinced Cleveland’s Transit Authority to spend nearly $4 and a half million dollars on a new station, based on environmentally sound principles. It’s the only Green Transit Station in Ohio.
“And now we’d got a nice warm building that uses passive solar heating and a lot of green building features.”
Mandy Metcalf is the EcoVillage Project Director. She continues our tour of the neighborhood down a walking path.
Four blocks later, twenty new green-built town homes come into view. In the same simple Victorian style of the neighborhood, they blend right in. They’re also very energy efficient.
“One resident said that his January bill was only forty dollars for gas, which is pretty impressive.”
But, the majority of the homes in the EcoVillage are more than a century old and very energy inefficient. While they’re considered “affordable housing,” a mortgage payment on top of a heating bill of more than $300 dollars makes them difficult to afford. So Metcalf’s organization helped homeowners discover where their energy was being wasted.
“What the best things, the most cost effective things that they could do to retrofit their houses. And now we’re going to match them up with loan programs and encourage them to go through with it.”
While older homes are being updated, the Ecovillage is making plans to improve the green space surrounding the local rec center. And within two years, they hope to entice a green building grocery store to the area.
In Chicago, many migrating birds are attracted by the lights on tall buildings. This attraction causes some birds to crash into the buildings, often resulting in death. (Photo by Lester Graham)
Scientists estimate up to a billion birds are killed every year when they collide into building windows in the United States. Now, a group of bird watchers, biologists and architects are working together… hoping to lower the death toll. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lynette Kalsnes has the story:
Transcript
Scientists estimate up to a billion birds are killed when they collide into building windows in the United States every year. Now a group of bird watchers, biologists and architects are working together, hoping to lower the death toll. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium Lynette Kalsnes has the story:
If you call the group the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, you’ll hear this message:
“If you have found an injured bird, please place the
bird gently in the bottom of a brown paper sack. A
grocery bag is just fine. Please put the bag with the bird in it in a quiet, dark place that’s warm. Inside, please.”
That’s the voice of the group’s founder and director Robbie Hunsinger. She’s followed those same instructions herself hundreds of times.
During migration season, in a single night, thousands
of birds fly over Chicago. They are attracted to the
lights on tall buildings and crash into the windows.
Hunsinger and other volunteers get up before dawn so
they can rescue the injured birds before the rats and
gulls get them.
After a morning of picking up injured birds, Hunsinger
has filled her car with brown paper bags containing
hurt swallows and cuckoos. Then, she’s driven up to 3
hours round-trip to get the birds to wildlife
rehabilitators.
She’s even cared for some of those birds herself.
Hunsinger has filled her music studio with mesh cages
and used up all her dishes for food and water. She says she decided to do something to help the birds three years ago after she saw 80 dead birds one morning in just a small area downtown.
“It was horrendous. Everywhere we looked, there were
birds, and they kept coming down. They were still
hitting when we were out there. So you’re standing
there, and birds were falling out of the sky.”
Hunsinger says she found the fallen birds clustered on
the sidewalks just as the busy city began to wake.
“It was rather surrealistic. Especially as the sun
started came up, and people started coming to work.
People were stepping over birds everywhere. People in
suits, people in high heels, coming in from the train
stations, going to their jobs in the Loop.”
Hunsinger says something changed in her that day. She
says she could no longer be an armchair
conservationist.
So, she formed a group of volunteers to help her save
the birds.
But rescuing injured birds didn’t seem to be enough.
Now she’s working with biologists, architects and bird-watchers to make buildings safer for birds.
Chicago already asks the managers of its tall
buildings to turn out the lights at night during
migration to avoid attracting the birds. But it’s
become clear that something more has to be done to
prevent so many birds from crashing into the building
windows.
This spring, the city and the Chicago Ornithological
Society will host what’s believed to be the first
conference on bird-friendly design. Those who’ve studied it say the problem is that birds
don’t recognize glass.
“The glass surface will act as a perfect mirror.”
That’s biology professor Daniel Klem Jr. of Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania. He estimates that collisions with windows kill a billion birds a year in the U.S.
“A bird is not capable of determining that that image
on the glass surface is not a real tree. It attempts
to fly to it. Or it attempts to fly to light seen in
the window, as if it was a passageway to safety. And
the bird gets whacked and dies.”
Klem says installing windows at an angle or using
patterned glass can help. So can shades or
decals. Klem’s also pushing for research to develop special
glass or coatings that would be invisible to humans
but visible to birds.
It’s a new field. Limiting bird crashes isn’t part of
building design. Ellen Grimes is an assistant architecture professor at
the University of Illinois at Chicago. Grimes says
architects think about light, heat, power, water and
human traffic, but not bird traffic.
“When architects have approached sustainable design,
it’s been an engineering question. But there has not been a lot of consideration of
the biological interactions.”
Grimes acknowledges the issue of protecting birds
might be a hard sell because it might mean
compromising other design elements. But she’s hoping bird friendly design becomes as much
a part of green buildings as energy efficiency.
The rescue group’s Robbie Hunsinger says we share the
migrating birds with other nations. We have an
obligation to be good stewards of the birds.
“This can be fixed. These our our buildings. And we
should do it. We, by God, should do it.”
Meanwhile. Hunsinger is among a group of bird
watchers pushing for a center in downtown Chicago to
care for injured birds that collide with the building
windows. She’d like to keep the cages out of her home music
studio so she can actually practice music.
A growing number of electricity customers in Ontario are
using so-called smart meters, which will charge more for electricity
used during peak hours of the day. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Karen Kelly reports:
Transcript
A growing number of electricity customers in Ontario are using so-called smart
meters, which
will charge more for electricity used during peak hours of the day. The Great Lakes
Radio
Consortium’s Karen Kelly reports:
Right now, electricity customers in Ontario pay the same amount to run their
dishwasher at 6 p.m.
– during peak hours – as they do at ten in the morning. But it costs the province
more to produce
that power during peak times.
The heavy demand is a strain on Ontario’s aging electricity plants. So, the
province plans to
install smart electricity meters in every home and business over the next five years.
Ted Gruetzner is with the Ontario Ministry of Energy.
“It allows people to track their energy use depending on the time of day and monitor
when they’re
using power so they can turn their lights off at certain times or use their ovens or
dryers at
different times of day.”
That’s because electricity used during peak hours will cost consumers more. Ontario
is the first
jurisdiction in North America to use this system.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Karen Kelly.
Dragonflies are one of the insects tricked by false light (Photo courtesy of the EPA)
