Quote for Tuesday, May 29, 2007

"Do not burn yourselves out. Be as
I am– a reluctant enthusiast…a part time crusader, a half-hearted
fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure
and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more
important to enjoy it. While you can. While it is still there. So go
out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble
out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizz, climb the
mountains, and bag the peaks…. and I promise you this much: I promise
you this one sweet victory over your enemies, over those deskbound
people with their hearts in a safe deposit box… I promise you this:
you will outlive the bastards."

-Edward Abbey

Quote for Tuesday, May 22, 2007

"Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world."

Immanuel Kant

Quote for Monday, May 21, 2007

"We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it – and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot-stove lid again, and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore."

-Mark Twain

Who Killed the Electric Car?

The Cottonwood Institute recently showed Who Killed the Electric Car? at our Change the World Movie Night at the Fluid Coffee Bar in Denver.

I really enjoyed how this film presented and analyzed the various suspects that contributed to the life and death of GM’s Electric Vehicles (EV). Suspects included the California Air Resources Board, Batteries, the Federal Government, Consumers, Car Companies, Oil Companies, and Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles.

Guiding Question: With global warming gnawing at our environmental consciousness and higher gas prices burning a hole in the wallet of the average America, what do you think would happen if GM re-release their Electric Vehicle line in 2007?

Quote for Thursday, May 17, 2007

"There are risks and costs to a program of action.  But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction."

-John F. Kennedy

Quote for Tuesday, May 15, 2007

"Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Just walk beside me and be my friend."

-Albert Camus

Survival Priorities: Shelter is Key!

When you head to the hills for a weekend backpacking excursion, you are not typically thinking about what you would do if you were in the middle of nowhere and your pack accidentally sailed off a cliff.

This happened to one poor student that took a survival course with an organization I used to work for in Southern Utah. It was day one of a three-day traveling solo in cloudless 90-degree heat. After navigating and scrambling through the desert slick rock alone, the student took a picturesque lunch break on the edge of a rocky cliff band. When it was time to leave, he accidentally knocked his pack off the cliff, which was much too high and treacherous to down climb, leaving him with nothing but the clothes on his back. Because it was day one of a three-day traveling solo, nobody would be looking for him for at least another 2.5 days.

Whether you are in the desert or in the mountains, there are some crucial survival rules that come into play. Some refer to it as the Survival Rule of 3’s, which says that, in general, you can live three minutes without oxygen three hours without shelter, three days without water, and three weeks without food.

Knowing your survival priorities can help save you precious time, energy, and calories in a survival situation. Some people panic and immediately start thinking of food. If you spend the first few hours of a survival situation looking for food, you could neglect other more important priorities like shelter and water and go down on the books as another search and rescue statistic.

Whether it is –20 in the mountains during the winter or 100+ in the desert heat, shelter is #1. It is easy to see how you could freeze to death in 3 hours in the winter without shelter and warmth, but even in the summer heat, shelter is key. With water being your next priority, you need shade to conserve your energy, slow the speed of dehydration and conserve your fluids, and to stay out of the relentless heat of the sun until a cooler part of the day to begin your search for water. Look for a natural rock outcropping, build an impromptu lean to with sticks or other debris, or weave a sun hat out of Yucca leaves, but find shade as soon as you can.

The mountains of Colorado can be much cooler in the summer depending on your elevation, so you may not be seeking shade like you would in the desert. Many people think of the classic debris shelter as the perfect 3-season survival shelter, but this can be a very labor/calorie intensive shelter to build if you don’t have adequate water to stay hydrated and maintain your energy. The last thing you want to do is “bonk” in a survival situation when your life is on the line.

If you are caught out in the mountains alone before dark with nothing but the clothes on your back, you may consider making a pine needle bed to make it through the night. You can then continue to improve your shelter and convert it into a debris shelter if your survival situation is prolonged over several days.

To make a pine needle bed, scan the environment to find a good location, taking the direction of the weather, the depth of pine needle duff on the ground into account, the proximity to your water source, widow makers towering above, and creepy crawlies into consideration. You don’t want to spend a lot of energy on a shelter and realize you built it over an underground hornet nest or on an ant pile or you will have the most uncomfortable night of your life to say the least. 

Begin by piling up pine needles so you have at least 1 foot of insulation between you and the ground. This is important so you don’t sleep directly on the ground and lose heat through conduction. Then continue to pile up pine needles on both sides so you make a bathtub the length of your body. Crawl into your pine needle bathtub and start covering your feet, legs, torso, and the rest of your body with the pine needles you piled up on the sides. You want to have 1-2 feet of pine needles on top of you because this is your insulation that will trap your body heat the same way your cushy down sleeping bag works.

Pine needles are not quite as comfy as down feathers, but they do the trick. They will trap your body heat, keep you warm, will shed rain, sleet, and snow, and will even keep you warm if it gets wet. If you get caught in a survival situation, remember the Survival Rule of 3’s and remember that shelter is key!

Quote for Monday, May 14, 2007

"When a man throws and empty cigarette package from an automobile, he is liable for a fine of 50$.  When a man throws a billboard across a view, he is richly rewarded."

-Pat Brown, Quoted in David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1985

Myrtle Spurge: A Menace to the Neighborhood!

Myrtle Spurge is a funky little plant that has stealthily crept its way into the many rock gardens and landscapes of Park Hill. While this plant is aesthetically pleasing, requires little water, and has a beautiful yellow glow when it flowers in the spring, this plant is a menace to our neighborhood!

So what’s the problem? Myrtle Spurge was brought to Colorado from Asia by well-intentioned gardeners and greenhouse buyers because it is a cool looking plant that is drought resistant, which is perfect for Colorado’s dry climate. However, once it was brought here, naturalists and land managers realized there was a problem because there were no predators in our ecosystem that would eat the plant and keep in it check, so there was no natural control. Myrtle Spurge spreads very easily because the plant has seed pods that can shoot seeds 10-15 feet each spring. Plants spread from garden to garden and then spread to open spaces where it flourished and dominated local native plants, which in turn began to affect other species food source. This was enough to put Myrtle Spurge on the State of Colorado Class A noxious weed list which is designated for eradication.

Another problem with Myrtle Spurge is that it has a milky white sap that is a blistering agent, which makes it dangerous to humans, especially in neighborhoods like Park Hill that have a lot of children. The sap acts like poison ivy and the blistering agent will spread when scratched or rubbed. It can cause permanent scarring your skin and face or cause blindness if it gets in your eye. Please use caution when removing it from your garden.

How do I get rid of it? Because the sap is dangerous, you need to take a few precautions. Wear long sleeved shirts, long pants, boots, eyewear, and wear rubber gloves over your gardening gloves to prevent the sap from touching your skin. If you do get the sap on your skin, wash it off immediately with Tech-Nu, which can be found at local gardening stores and hardware stores. To remove Myrtle Spurge, use a shovel and at a minimum make sure you sever the taproot a minimum of 2-4 inches below the soil, although removing the whole root is ideal. Myrtle Spurge is a stubborn plant and is likely to pop up again once it is removed and may take up to 8 or 9 years to completely remove from your garden! In the name of environmental sustainability, I am personally a big advocate of manual removal vs. chemical removal.

More Information: To download a brochure with more information about Myrtle Spurge, Click Here.

About the Author: Ford Church is the Founder and Executive Director of the Cottonwood Institute, an educational nonprofit based in Park Hill that develops school-based programs and summer courses that blend adventure, wilderness survival, and environmental service for adventurous high school students and adults. Ford first learned about Myrtle Spurge when his class chose to educate the community and promote an awareness about this invasive plant as part of their environmental action project through the Community Adventure Program at New Vista High School. For more information about the Cottonwood Institute check out our 2007 Summer Course Schedule.

Carbon Neutral Action Project, 1st Quarter 2006

This quarter’s CAP class’
action project focused on educating people about the practice of being “carbon
neutral” and supporting renewable energy sources. In order to do this we studied conventional
energy sources, alternatives to these, and what it means to be carbon neutral.

In order to fully understand
carbon neutrality you have to know how the conventional energy grid works. We found out that fossil fuels, such as coal
and natural gas, are turned into energy at power plants and then that
electricity is sent to the “grid.” The
grid is best thought of as a general pool of electricity that is fed through
infrastructure like power lines, transformers and household sockets. All the houses and businesses in the
community are connected to the grid and use the electricity from it. Unfortunately, in order for this handy system
to function, we learned that the fossil fuels must be burned to generate this
energy. When fossil fuels are burned
they emit carbon dioxide into the air. In fact, when carbon dioxide is emitted into the air it combines with
other molecules and triples in weight, so for every 6 pounds of gasoline
burned, 18-20 pounds of carbon dioxide and other gases are created.  The existence of these gases in the
atmosphere is regarded by the general scientific community to be a significant
factor in climate change and, as such, the reduction of these gases would
benefit our ecological well-being. Also,
only 15-40% of the carbon dioxide emissions each person produces come from
their personal actions (driving a car, heating a home, etc.). The other 60-85% comes from goods and
services you consume via factory emissions, energy used for transport,
etc.

Becoming carbon neutral helps
to fix this problem. To be carbon
neutral means to balance the amount of CO2 you put into the air by either
producing no carbon emissions whatsoever (which is very difficult and nearly
impossible) or by supporting a Green Tag/Sustainable Energy Credit/Renewable
Energy Credit programs. These programs
function by calculating an individual’s carbon emissions and, based on the
amount, providing a dollar amount that then goes toward the subsidizing the use
of renewable energy infrastructure. Much
confusion arises from the question of if you get strictly wind energy once you
buy a Green Tag. The answer is no. The money goes to adding more renewable
energy to the “grid” in the hopes that in the future this alternative energy
will push out conventional sources like coal or natural gas.

We talked to Diane Dandeneau
from the ConservED program about local businesses and companies that are
involved in the carbon neutral movement and we even created a website that
should be up and running soon. In addition
to surveying people and then educating them about what they could do to both
cut down their carbon emissions and support renewable energy to supplement
their emissions, we spent over 35 hours researching the details of this
complicated and controversial topic. When it was all said and done, we learned a tremendous amount regarding
where we get our energy and how we can do very easy and tangible things to
alter this. Ultimately, this will be our
generation’s duty to convert the existing energy structures into more
ecologically sound and efficient ones.