Our Planet and Sustainability

Why is Biodiversity so important?

The air we breathe, the water we drink, the foods we eat – all rely on biodiversity, defined as the variety of life forms on Earth and the way they interact. We wouldn’t have oxygen without plants, honey with honey bees or nuts and fruit without the many kinds of bees, butterflies and moths that pollinate those trees’ and plants’ blossoms every spring. How species rely on and interact with one another on land, in the air and below the surface of oceans, ponds, lakes and streams is a balancing act. And that balance is tipping drastically. This year, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations issued a report on how well countries around the world are doing at maintaining the biodiversity so necessary for healthy and robust agriculture and food production. Based on information from 91 countries and 27 international organizations, the UN

took a look at why biodiversity among plants and animals is so vital to sustainable food production. According to the report: “Biodiversity makes production systems and livelihoods more resilient to shocks and stresses, including those caused by climate change. It is a key resource in efforts to increase food production while limiting negative impacts on the environment. It makes a variety of contributions to the livelihoods of many people, often reducing the need for food and agricultural producers to rely on costly or environmentally harmful external inputs…. Using multiple species, breeds or varieties, integrating the use of crop, livestock, forest and aquatic biodiversity, or promoting habitat diversity in the local landscape or seascape, help promote resilience, improve livelihoods and support food security and nutrition.”

We’re getting bad grades in biodiversity, and that’s not good for the future of our food supply or our planet. Of the more than 6,000 species of plants that have been cultivated for food, today, only 9 account for 66 percent of total crop production. One-third of fish are overfished. Climate change, deforestation, water pollution, habitat loss…. the depressing list goes on.

What can we do? Start with our own backyards. Take the Healthy Yard Pledge sponsored by The Great Healthy Yard Project. Check out the website of the Garden Club of America and read its position papers on such topics as Sustainable Agriculture, Clean Water, Waste Management and National Parks — all under “What We Do” and “NAL Conservation.” Education is key to learning how we can make a difference.

How Much Plastic Can You Get Out of Your Life?

Since August 1, the plastic shopping bags used at checkout have come at a cost — $.10 per bag in CT. And consumers have not wanted to pay the price. The Office of Fiscal Analysis now projects the new law will generate $7 million in revenue during this fiscal year – not the $27.7 million included in the state budget. Good for us.

You probably already recycle plastic, glass and cardboard. It’s the law, after all, and here in CT if you knowingly mix recycling and solid waste (aka garbage), you can be fined up to $2,500 (for a list of what can and can’t go in that bin, check this site). So how else can you get plastic off your shelves?

Wash out your plastic bags, then reuse them. Those zip lock bags can stand up to multiple washings.
Bring your own bags for produce when you shop. The internet is full of all sorts of cute bags to buy, but you can also just reuse ones you already have from past shopping trips. And if your container isn’t see-through, take a tag off your produce and put it on the outside; the checkout people will thank you.
Buy in bulk. Bring plastic or glass containers you already own for oats, nuts, seeds, olive oil, honey and peanut butter or anything else you regularly buy from the bulk food department.
Take your own containers to restaurants for leftovers. Styrofoam never dies and dirty cardboard food containers aren’t recyclable.
Don’t buy prepackaged produce or meats. *Use a powdered laundry detergent that comes in a cardboard box and ditch the liquid version in the plastic container. Then recycle the box.
Do you really need that new lipstick? Or are the ones in your drawer pretty much all the same color? Use up what you have. (I have to confess I am not always good about not indulging myself.) And pay attention to the packaging around a product. What may seem luxurious at first glance is … just garbage shortly after you get it home.
Are you addicted to soda water? Make your own at home from one of the various machines now available for your countertop and keep plastic bottles out of recycling bins.
Whenever you can, buy products wrapped in paper, not plastic. Paper, even when it goes in the garbage, does disintegrate; plastic, not so much!
Buy brands that are making an effort. Check the bottom shelf, for instance, in the cereal aisle; often that’s where products sold in bulk and without the cardboard box can be found. Yes, you’ll buy some plastic, but less than if you were buying individual boxes. And more and more household and beauty products are available with less packaging.
For some other ideas, check out this site

How Healthy Is Your Diet -- For You and the Planet?

A good diet once meant meat and potatoes every night. Those days are long gone as we learn more and more about the ramifications of too much saturated fat, sugar, salt, and chemically laden processed foods. But our food choices don’t just affect our individual health. What we eat also makes a mark on the well-being of Planet Earth.

In early 2019, 37 scientists and other experts from 16 countries, issued the EAT-Lancet Commission report on Food, Planet and Health. (Click here for the report.) They note that food production is the source of 30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and 70 percent of freshwater use. As more and more land – today, nearly 40 percent of the earth’s surface – is converted to food production, biodiversity loss increases. Still, 820 million people go hungry every year, while 2 billion adults are overweight and obese. What’s wrong with this picture?

The report’s aim was to outline a healthy diet that would feed the nearly 10 billion people who will live on Earth by 2050 –while combatting chronic diseases in wealthy countries like the U.S. and creating a map for better nutrition in poorer countries. The conclusion? “Foods sourced from animals, especially red meat, have relatively high environmental footprints per serving compared to other food groups. This has an impact on greenhouse gas emissions, land use and biodiversity loss.”

So, what does a healthy diet look like? Picture a dinner plate: one half is full of fruits, vegetables and nuts while the other half contains whole grains, plant proteins (beans and lentils, for instance), unsaturated plant oils (olive oil on a salad, for instance), modest amounts of meat, fish or dairy and some added starchy vegetables and, maybe, a touch of sugar.

Good eating isn’t about deprivation!

Nor should it mean the end of pizza or tacos. In fact, these are both perfect foods to focus on substituting beans and/or vegetables for some of the meat. Think about the foods you eat. How can you use meat as a condiment, not the main focus of your plate? (For menu ideas and recipes, check out some Planetary Health recipes here.) Bon appetit!

Species Spotlight: The Humble Bumblebee

With their furry coats and slow, hovering flight through the garden, bumblebees are immediately identifiable backyard visitors. But though most of us would probably say we have only one type of bumblebee flying around our yards – and he/she would be yellow and black – that description fits a number of Bombus native to New England. Bombus, Latin for a buzzing or humming sound, is the genus name for more than 250 species of bumblebees, insects that make their homes in countries around the world.

Chances are, the one flying around outside your window could be the improbably named B. impatiens; a bumblebee in a hurry? This Common Eastern Bumblebee (left), like all native bumblebees, has a densely furry coat encasing a plump body that looks too big for its short wings. How do bumblebees even get off the ground? By beating their four wings nearly 240 times per second and moving them back and forth, not up and down. “‘The wing sweeping is a bit like a partial spin of a ‘somewhat crappy’ helicopter propeller,’ researcher Michael Dickinson, a professor of biology and insect flight expert at the University of Washington reported in Life Science in 2011 (https://www.livescience.com/57509-bumblebee-facts.html). “However, the angle of the wing also creates vortices in the air — like small hurricanes. The eyes of those mini-hurricanes have lower pressure than the surrounding air, so keeping those eddies of air above its wings helps the bee stay aloft.”

Once upon a time, humblebee was a common name for what we now call bumblebees. Unlike honeybees, bumble bees don’t die when they sting. They can work in cooler weather than honeybees because their “fur” coats keep them warm. And Harry Potter fans might be interested to know that “dumbledor” or “dumbledore” is an old English word that means bumblebee.

Bumblebees are quite social creatures. They build their nests in compost or wood piles, rock walls or holes abandoned by squirrels or chipmunks. Though a honeybee hive might hold 50,000 bees, Bombus usually don’t make colonies larger than 500 – and often as few as 50. The queen rules the roost – and she is the only member of the colony to live through the winter.

Bumblebees are among the first pollinators to begin buzzing around; their thick coats help keep out the cold and their rapid wing beats generate heat. When she wakes in early spring, the queen leaves her hibernation spot and begins to forage for early nectar and pollen. She finds a place to nest and starts building a new colony. She lays the fertilized eggs she’d been carrying since the previous fall, then stores food for herself and the new larvae.

This very busy bee then tends the eggs for a couple of weeks, shivering her body to generate heat to keep them warm. When the eggs hatch, the queen feeds the larvae until they spin their own cocoons and develop into adult bees. When they hatch, they will be the female worker bees. They’ll guard the nest, find food and take care of the next group of new bees since the queen’s job is now to lay eggs and care for new larvae.

As the colony grows, eventually the queen will begin to lay eggs that become males and new queens. After mating, the males die, and the new queens head off to find nesting sites where they’ll overwinter.

Bumblebees are particularly good pollinators. Their coats easily carry pollen from flower to flower. And bumblebees are specialists in buzz pollination or sonication. Grabbing a flower, they move their “flight muscles” – attached to their wings — to dislodge firmly fixed pollen for harvest, pollinating plants as they move from flower to flower. Tomatoes are one type of plant that is pollinated this way. To watch a bee in action, click here.

Some bumblebee species also have particularly long tongues, the better to reach into flowers for the nectar hidden there. Pollen and nectar are the food of bumblebees. And by chewing pollen and mixing it with their saliva, bumblebees make a kind of honey eaten by the queen and the larvae developing in the hive

Though bumblebees may seem prevalent, many are making their way onto the endangered species list. Here in New England, the rusty-patched bumblebee (B. affinis, left) was listed in 2017, and several New England states have watches on a variety of other Bombus – B. pensylvanicus, B. insularis and B. terricola to name just a few. According to the XercesSociety for Invertebrate Conservation (www.xerces.org) “more than a quarter of North American bumble bees are facing some degree of extinction risk.”

The Queen’s Duties

Think about what the queen’s job is as she emerges by herself from hibernation in the spring. She bears complete responsibility for making a home and for creating and feeding the next generation. So how can we help her?

In the spring and summer:

Make sure to include a diverse selection of early blooming plants for the queen to forage.
Avoid raking and mowing in early spring to avoid disturbing the queen. April and May are better raking times, according to Xerces (https://xerces.org/sites/default/files/publications/12-020_01_BumbleBeeConservation_web.pdf
Keep patches of land unmowed and untilled for nesting sites.

In the fall and winter:

Include late blooming plants such as milkweed, aster and goldenrod in your landscape.
Leave downed logs and uncut bunch grasses for possible hibernation sites.
Late fall and winter are the best times for a high mow.
Leave sections of your land untilled as a refuge for small animals and bumblebee queens.