and keep tasting as you cook.
Bay area. It sits in the middle of the food chain, eating plankton and serving as a food source for larger species. American Shad are anadromous; like the better known salmon, they are born in freshwater streams, live in the ocean for most of their lives, and return to their natal streams to spawn (up to 100,000-600,000 per female per spring, according to the Chesapeake Bay program!) Here’s another cool think about shad – do you have serviceberry in your yard? Serviceberry is also known as “shadbush” locally, because it blooms at about the same time as the shad begin their migration in the spring (there’s even a book about it, When the Shadbush Blooms).June 18 to 24 is National Pollinators Week – time to think about the important role pollinators play in our environment and how we can help protect these valuable species. As we all learned in elementary school, plants are fertilized through pollination. Poll
e to try to cross-pollinate the roses at our house!
To my father-in-law, who raised my husband to love the great outdoors and still hikes regularly with my mother-in-law (an expert hiker in the Pacific NW). He and my mother-in-law live in an entirely green high-rise in Portland OR. My husband still talks about their first backpacking trip in the Rockies!
We’ve been assigned our stream for monitoring – it’s in Eudora Park in Vienna VA! The stream is part of the Difficult Run watershed that eventually feeds to the Potomac River and then the Chesapeake Bay. It’s a beautiful spot off the hike-and-bike trail; a small stream with good flow that provides oxygen for all the little critters. 4 times per year we’ll be invading th
Anyone who’s been to the greenmomster’s home knows that we’re dog people. When you’re visiting, the dogs will greet you, and you will probably share the couch with a dog or two. The dogs “own” a specific section of the backyard, and we know all the other
We know that people have “environmental footprints” (the impact of our daily living on various aspects of the environment), but what about Fido’s footprint? How do our dogs affect the environment and how can we decrease their impact on the environment? In the book, Time to Eat the Dog, A Real Guide to Sustainable Living by Thames and Hudson (full disclosure, I have not read this book), the authors have been reported to claim that a pet dog’s carbon footprint is double that of an SUV, because dogs are carnivores. Remember, we know from earlier posts that eating high on the food chain does, in fact, lead to higher CO2 emissions, because of the way our food is produced. That said, the statement about Fido’s footprint being greater than an SUV has led to a lively discussion on the internet. An article in the Daily Green disputed this conclusion on both qualitative and quantitative grounds. The Daily Green writers claim that the actual calculation of the amount of food eaten by an average dog is off by about double, and they state that because dog food is actually made up of scraps and byproducts of the meat industry, the impact of their carnivorous diet is lower than calculated.
Regardless of the actual numbers, since dogs are carnivores they’re going to have an impact on the environment based on their diets. What about other impacts? Dog waste is often cited as a source of nutrient runoff to lakes and streams (10,000,000 tons of poop annually as estimated by webvet.com), and wrapping dog waste in non-biodegradable plastic bags just adds to the waste problem. In order to keep our dogs free of fleas and ticks, we often use chemicals to kill the insects – how should we dispose of these products and are there any environmentally friendly alternatives?
Since I don’t know of anyone willing to get rid of his or her dogs for the sake of sustainability, here are a few tips for making Fido’s footprint a little smaller:
