“As global warming intensifies droughts, floods and wildfires, Mr. Smith has become one of a growing number of ranchers, scientists and other “beaver believers” who see the creatures not only as helpers, but as furry weapons of climate resilience.
Last year, when Nevada suffered one of the worst droughts on record, beaver pools kept his cattle with enough water. When rains came strangely hard and fast, the vast network of dams slowed a torrent of water raging down the mountain, protecting his hay crop. And with the beavers’ help, creeks have widened into wetlands that run through the sagebrush desert, cleaning water, birthing new meadows and creating a buffer against wildfires.
True, beavers can be complicated partners. They’re wild, swimming rodents the size of basset hounds with an obsession for building dams. When conflicts arise, and they probably will, you can’t talk it out.
Beavers flood roads, fields, timber forests and other areas that people want dry. They fell trees without a thought as to whether humans would prefer them standing. In response to complaints, the federal government killed almost 25,000 beavers last year.
But beavers also store lots of water for free, which is increasingly crucial in the parched West. And they don’t just help with drought. Their engineering subdues torrential floods from heavy rains or snowmelt by slowing water. It reduces erosion and recharges groundwater. And the wetlands beavers create may have the extra benefit of stashing carbon out of the atmosphere.
In addition to all that, the rodents do environmental double duty, because they also tackle another crisis unleashed by humans: rampant biodiversity loss. Their wetlands are increasingly recognized for creating habitat for myriad species, from salmon to sage grouse.
…
Instead of killing beavers, the federal government should be embracing them as an important component of federal climate adaptation, according to two scientists who study beavers and hydrology, Chris Jordan of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries, and Emily Fairfax of California State University Channel Islands.
“It may seem trite to say that beavers are a key part of a national climate action plan, but the reality is that they are a force of 15-40 million highly skilled environmental engineers,” Dr. Jordan and Dr. Fairfax wrote this year in a perspective article in the research journal WIREs Water.
Dr. Fairfax’s recent research focuses on how beaver complexes interact with wildfires. For now, her findings indicate, they are too wet to burn. But as climate change makes wildfires more intense, she said, that could change.
“We cannot afford to work against them any longer,” she and Dr. Jordan wrote. “We need to work with them.”
…
“Mr. Smith’s father got so angry at beavers in part because the sides of their dams would fail during the rush of the spring snow melt, sending damaging sediment onto his hayfields. But the younger Mr. Smith decided to try a different approach to cattle management, moving them around his land and letting them spend less time around the creeks. That allowed shrubs and trees to grow in along the banks, making the whole area more stable. Eventually, if the beaver dams did give way, they would do so at the center, and the surge of water would stay in the channel.
Over time, beavers expanded the wetlands. New meadows grew in. Willows sprout from beaver dams, having taken root where the animals anchored them. The water runs clear. Fish and frogs have returned.
“Now the only time we get crossways with beaver is if they start building dams in our irrigation ditches,” Mr. Smith said. “But we’ve learned ways to discourage them from doing that.” Pulling out the dams a couple of times usually does the trick, he added.
Part of what has made the partnership successful is Mr. Smith’s flexibility. For example, beavers have completely rerouted one section of creek. But Mr. Smith doesn’t see the change as good or bad, “just different.” The most important thing, he said, is how much water they’re storing on the land.
Now more than ever, he said, “water is liquid gold.”
I’m reposting this story in it’s entirety because the situation is getting dire and no one’s helping.
[Top] Gina Reynolds, a University of Michigan Flint student majoring in social work, chants “clean water is a human right,” at cars passing by during a small protest Jan. 13
[Bottom] People bring water from their taps to show city officials at city meeting, Jan. 21
I made a post earlier about my city of Flint, Michigan’s water situation and I wanted to share this because our drinking water is literally making people and pets ill. I don’t want people to ignore this, I NEED people to know what’s going on here.
LeeAnne Walters, 36, of Flint shows water samples from her home to Flint emergency manager Jerry Ambrose on Wednesday after city and state officials spoke during a forum that addressed growing health concerns about the drinking water.
In a city where residents have felt under siege for years — from crime, bad press and an emergency manager some feel forced upon them — the newest threat pours from kitchen spigots and showerheads.
It’s the reason behind mysterious rashes on local children, parents say. Unexplained illnesses. Even sick pets.
Bethany Hazard said it’s the reason for the brown rust circles that began appearing just months ago around her drains and the oily film in her bathwater in her longtime east-side home.
On the west side of Flint, Corodon Maynard said it’s the reason he was bent retching violently over the toilet this month — just hours after chugging two glasses of water at bedtime.
“I was throwing up like bleach water. It came up through my nose burning,” said the 20-year-old.
The water from the city system is so corrosive, according to General Motors officials, that the automaker’s Flint Engine Operations pulled off the city water system, connecting instead into a water system operated by nearby Flint Township.
Adam Mays, an artist and Flint resident, protests the condition of the Flint water system at Fifth and Saginaw in Downtown Flint, Michigan, with a few handfuls of other protestors, Tuesday afternoon, January 13, 2015.
So what’s in Flint’s water and just how dangerous is it?
It depends on who you ask and what tests you’re referring to.
State tests suggest the water is clear of coliform bacteria, which can suggest the presence of other disease-carrying pathogens.
But as a result of treating the water to kill any dangerous microorganisms, the water now carries low levels of Total Trihalomethane, or TTHM, a by-product of the disinfectants. Years of exposure may cause liver, kidney or central nervous system problems and an increased risk of cancer, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The city maintains the water — pulled from the Flint River rather than the Detroit water system that had served the city for years —is safe.
Mayor Dayne Walling who was born and raised in Flint, said he drinks it.
The river, long known for the toxins left from Flint’s industrial years, is cleaner than it has been in years, “but that perception persists,” Walling said.
Flint resident Gladyes Williamson-Bunnell asks officials addressing issues with the water quality if they would drink some of the Flint water she held up in a gallon jug during the water meeting on Wednesday evening, Jan. 21, 2015, at the Flint City Hall dome in downtown Flint.
“I’ve taken to calling it ‘poop water,’ ” said Nayyirah Shariff, a community activist for the grassroots group Democracy Defense League.
Many said they are ready to abandon longtime homes.
“What we have is a full-blown crisis,” said GM retiree Claire McClinton who had bundled up against the snow earlier this week to run into El Potrero Mexican restaurant for a late lunch.
But she reconsidered at the last minute and walked out instead, worried about eating at restaurants that rely on city water in their kitchens.
She’s not the only customer who is concerned.
Business overall has been hit “probably 20 to 30%,” said manager Jorge Alcazar.
The restaurant’s lifeblood is in customers seeking a quick, affordable lunch, often with a glass of ice water.
Unwilling to drink the tap water, customers also don’t want to pay $2 or more for a pop or buy a bottled water.
Worse for waitress Ashley Trujillo, customers have argued with staff. One customer left three pennies as a tip after fuming about having to pay for water. Others have left nothing.
“Like we have something to do with it,” Trujillo said.
All of this — the frustration, the slump in El Potrero’s business, the jam-packed meetings with residents toting jugs of brown water and claims they are being poisoned — are the latest blows to a city that has felt swatted around for too long.
“People think all the crime happens in Flint and everyone is poor in Flint, so there’s this stigma. Now we’re fighting against dirty water. Really?” said radiology coder Cindy Marshall, who joined about two dozen protesters earlier this week.
“Are you trying to kill us?” read one sign. “No more poison,” read another.
McClinton echoed Marshall’s sentiments: “We’ve lost confidence in the city.”
A protestor holds a sign out for cars to see during the protest of the conditions of the Flint water system at Fifth and Saginaw in Downtown Flint, Michigan, Tuesday afternoon, January 13, 2015.
Soaring bills.
For years, residents in this city bleeding jobs and soaked in red ink have been facing growing water bills. Some have climbed as high as several hundred dollars a month.
“We have residents choosing between water and groceries and other bills,” said Hazard, whose own bill is about $100 a month for a single person.
“I feel like I’m going under,” said Hazard, who survived cancer twice and who was forced into early retirement and limited income.
The city eventually decided to dump the Detroit system in favor of the Karegnondi Water Authority, which is building a system to supply Genesee County with water pulled from Lake Huron. In the long run, this will mean lower water costs, officials have said.
Under the plan, Flint is temporarily pulling water from the Flint River until the water authority’s system comes online, expected in 2016.
In August and September, however, the city issued three advisories to boil the water after detecting coliform bacteria.
Just before Christmas, residents received notices that state tests indicated higher-than-acceptable levels of trihalomethane, the disinfectant by-product.
Hazard’s cats have been sick. So has she and several neighbors. Even her houseplant began to die.
Maynard threw up. Residents complained of rashes and mysterious illnesses.
“We just want safe water. How hard is that?” Hazard asked.
But assurances come with qualifiers.
The chlorine did its job and cleaned the water of microbial pathogens that can cause disease within days. That means the water is safe for healthy people to drink for a short time, said Michael Prysby, a district engineer in the state’s Office of Drinking Water and Municipal Assistance.
But the trade-off was TTMH — possibly a danger for the very young, the very old, or the very sick if they ingest it long-term, he added.
People with prolonged exposure to TTMH may experience problems with their liver, kidneys or central nervous system and have an increased risk of getting cancer.
“But we’re talking decades,” he said, adding that those who are worried should talk to their doctors.
“We don’t want to make a blanket statement to say water is safe or unsafe. It’s misleading both ways.”
That’s the kind of answer that infuriates Marshall, the protester and mother of a 5-year-old.
“They said it’s safe, but it’s brown water,” said Marshall, also a radiology coder, after the meeting. “Why do we have to drink brown water? No one else has to drink brown water.”
So, it's been about 9 months and the water has not gotten any better. As a matter of fact, it’s worse now. Here’s a picture taken just a few hours ago.
From the Facebook post associated with this picture “This fire hydrant in Flint, Michigan has been “flushing” for over 5-hours… after 5-hours, that’s not flushing… that is the water quality in Flint. ”
Fire hydrants carry CLEAN, TREATED water. This is our “clean and treated water”. This is the water that we have to drink.
And that’s not all. Water tests have been conducted in the last few days and in every district they checked, the amount of sites with over 15ppb of lead in the water has either gone up or stayed the same. You can see the results here at http://flintwaterstudy.org
Update for September 24th, 2015
Flint mayor Dayne Walling is letting his people be poisoned and is continuing to deny it.
The lead content in Flint children’s blood has spiked in the past year.
In perhaps the most dramatic proof yet of the toxic impact of Flint’s decision to draw municipal water from the Flint River, a new study released today shows that the amount of lead found in the bloodstream of Flint children increased dramatically following the switch from the Detroit water system in 2014.
The results — which are based on blood samples drawn from 1,746 children ages 5 and younger — were even more frightening in Flint neighborhoods where Virginia Tech researchers testing water from nearly 300 homes found the highest levels of lead in the city’s water. Analysis of blood samples from children living in those same high-risk areas showed that the number of kids with elevated levels of lead in their blood jumped from 2.5 percent to 6.3 percent.
The following statement was released by Congressman Dan Kildee earlier today:
“This new study showing elevated blood lead levels among Flint’s children is very troubling. People have the right to have confidence that their drinking water is safe.
Immediate action needs to be taken by the State of Michigan to ensure that relief is provided to people who are concerned about lead levels in their water. Today as part of my ongoing efforts, I talked with the EPA Region 5 Administrator about the State of Michigan providing emergency assistance, including lead-clearing filters and bottled water, until a more permanent solution can be determined.
This new study by the medical community also raises additional doubts about prior water testing done by the DEQ and EPA that stated the water was in compliance with federal law. I have been completely unsatisfied with their answers to my questions regarding their testing methodology, which is why I have called for additional immediate independent and scientific testing to be done.”
Scientists Discover The Oldest, Largest Body Of Water In Existence—In Space
Scientists have found the biggest and oldest reservoir of water ever—so large and so old, it’s almost impossible to describe.
The water is out in space, a place we used to think of as desolate and desert dry, but it’s turning out to be pretty lush.
Researchers found a lake of water so large that it could provide each person on Earth an entire planet’s worth of water—20,000 times over. Yes, so much water out there in space that it could supply each one of us all the water on Earth—Niagara Falls, the Pacific Ocean, the polar ice caps, the puddle in the bottom of the canoe you forgot to flip over—20,000 times over.
The water is in a cloud around a huge black hole that is in the process of sucking in matter and spraying out energy (such an active black hole is called a quasar), and the waves of energy the black hole releases make water by literally knocking hydrogen and oxygen atoms together.
The official NASA news release describes the amount of water as “140 trillion times all the water in the world’s oceans,” which isn’t particularly helpful, except if you think about it like this.
That one cloud of newly discovered space water vapor could supply 140 trillion planets that are just as wet as Earth is.
Mind you, our own galaxy, the Milky Way, has about 400 billion stars, so if every one of those stars has 10 planets, each as wet as Earth, that’s only 4 trillion planets worth of water.
The new cloud of water is enough to supply 28 galaxies with water.
Truly, that is one swampy patch of intergalactic space.
Equally stunning is the age of the water factory. The two teams of astrophysicists that found the quasar were looking out in space a distance of 12 billion light years. That means they were also looking back in time 12 billion years, to when the universe itself was just 1.6 billion years old. They were watching water being formed at the very start of the known universe, which is to say, water was one of the first substances formed, created in galactic volumes from the earliest time. Given water’s creative power to shape geology, climate and biology, that’s dramatic.
“It’s another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times,” says Matt Bradford, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and leader of one of the teams that made the discovery. (The journal article reporting the discovery is titled, without drama, “The Water Vapor Spectrum of APM 08279+5255: X-Ray Heating and Infrared Pumping over Hundreds of Parsecs.”)
It is not as if you’d have to wear foul-weather gear if you could visit this place in space, however. The distances are as mind-bogglingly large as the amount of water being created, so the water vapor is the finest mist—300 trillion times less dense than the air in a typical room.
And it’s not as if this intergalactic water can be of any use to us here on Earth, of course, at least not in the immediate sense. Indeed, the discovery comes as a devastating drought across eastern Africa is endangering the lives of 10 million people in Somalia, Kenya, and Ethiopia. NASA’s water discovery should be a reminder that if we have the sophistication to discover galaxies full of water 12 billion light years away, we should be able to save people just an ocean away from drought-induced starvation.
The NASA announcement is also a reminder how quickly our understanding of the universe is evolving and how much capacity for surprise nature still has for us. There’s water on Mars, there’s water jetting hundreds of miles into space from Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons, there are icebergs of water hidden in the polar craters of our own Moon. And now it turns out that a single quasar has the ability to manufacture galaxies full of water.
But it was only 40 years ago, in 1969, that scientists first confirmed that water existed anywhere besides Earth.
I find it oddly reassuring that the universe is so downright peculiar. Obviously, we need to hurry up with Star Trek transporters so we can beam some of that water down to east Africa - not all in one big splash, obviously. We’ll be sophisticated about it. We’ll just arrange for moderate rainfall late at night when most people are asleep, and sunshine during the day to help the plants grow back. Yeah, that’ll be good.
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