Program at Michigan State University green ink · ESPP serves as an umbrella for environmental research and graduate education at Michigan State ... green ink Newsletter of the

Volume 4 Issue 2 June 2009

environment.msu.edu274 Giltner HallEast Lansing, MI 48824t: 517-432-8296f: 517-432-8830

stories by Andy McGlashendesign by Andy Balaskovitz

edited by Maya Fischhoff

ESPP serves as an umbrella for environmental research and graduate education at Michigan State University. ESPP’s newsletter and Web site - www.environment.msu.edu - highlight the

interdisciplinary environmental work of faculty, staff and students at MSU.

Gull Lake, Michigan. Photo by Andy Balaskovitz

green ink

Newsletter of the Environmental Science and Policy Program at Michigan State University

Kellogg Biological StationMichigan State University’s hub for environmental researchThe Kellogg Biological Station is relatively close to Michigan State’s main campus, but few people ever make the trip. Spartans who run with an environmental crowd will have heard the acronym KBS, but what goes on there? What’s the place all about?

ESPP web assistant Andy Bal-askovitz and I wanted to know, and suspected we weren’t alone in our curiosity, so early this spring we made the hour-and-change drive to find out.

The station sits on 3,065 acres in the rolling farmland between Battle Creek and Kalamazoo, where retreating glaciers left a patchwork of kettles and kames, moraines and marshes, forests and fens. It’s primarily a place for agricultural research, but the diversity of its landscape makes KBS suitable for all sorts of envi-ronmental studies.

“We care about understand-ing the ecology of natural and manmade landscapes, and the interactions between them,” said Director Kay Gross.

There are a dozen faculty

members at the station, each of whom also teaches periodically in East Lansing.

Some study microbes, others are interested in plants or animals, but “they’re all ecologists of some

sort,” Gross said. Researchers from MSU’s main campus are also involved in projects there. KBS is home to 20 to 40 gradu-ate students, depending on the season, and nearly as many un-dergraduate interns and research fellows. Not to mention the staff it takes to keep the place running.

Mornings, ecologists on bicy-cles pedal the area’s quiet roads from their homes or rented lodg-ing to the university’s largest off-campus education facility, a clus-ter of buildings huddled along the edge of cold, deep and clear Gull Lake. There are dormitories and apartment buildings, a confer-ence center, research buildings and even an old-fashioned wind-mill, but the visual centerpiece of the complex is the Tudor-inspired Manor House, once the summer home of cereal tycoon W.K. Kel-logg, now a popular venue for

Continued on next page

Holstein cows grazing at KBS’s new Pasture-Based Dairy Project. Researchers are studying the effects of getting cows out of barns and milking them with robots. Photo courtesy of Mat Haan, project coordinator.

2 green ink | vol. 4 issue 2 june 2009

Environmental Science and Policy Program at MSU

Thomas Dietz directorJoe Arvai associate directorMaya Fischhoff assistant directorMarcy Heberer assistant to the directorDerek Moy webmasterAndy McGlashen news writerAndy Balaskovitz assistant web editor

Inside this issue...

Letter from the editor............

Five ESPP student profiles......

Faculty profile: Sandy Marquart-Pyatt.....................

ESPP’s class of 2009...........

MSU helps international ef-fort to fight poverty, climate change...................................

News briefs..........................

MSU students prepare for A&WMA environmental challenge..............................

Perspective: Comics and the environment: the case of the ‘Swamp Thing’...............

KBS in photos......................

Introduction

Flipping the carbon switch on ponds

Algae research heats up

Plants adapting to climate change

Cows assume new responsibilities as KBS shifts to pasture-based dairy

Feature: Kellogg Biological Station

weddings and other events. Much of the station’s work takes place at

its Long Term Ecological Research site, one of 26 such sites funded by the National Sci-ence Foundation, and the only one dedicat-ed to the study of agricultural ecosystems. Researchers at the LTER simulate four dif-ferent cropping arrangements, ranging from intensive, high-input agriculture to an organic system, to see how each influences and is influenced by the surrounding plants, ani-mals and microbes.

There’s a strong emphasis at KBS on fieldwork, Gross said. While some re-searchers are busy studying crops, oth-ers try to better understand succession in fallow fields and forests, propagate plants in a greenhouse or sample water from lo-cal lakes. Some observe cow behavior at the station’s dairy, while others use artificial ponds to explore processes occurring in lakes and estuaries.

A great deal of outreach work also goes on at KBS. There are public lectures and tours, programs for K-12 education and for everyone else. Ornithology courses at the station’s bird sanctuary are so popular there’s a waiting list.

Gross said there’s also an increasing fo-cus on living up to the KBS motto: “A legacy of conservation, a commitment to sustainabil-ity.” For instance, she said, “the conference center is becoming more and more engaged with our overall mission of sustainability.”

Kitchen scraps are composted for use in a community garden, and the cafeteria’s fare on Thursdays is mostly locally grown.

The station exudes a collegial atmo-sphere. The labs in the sunlit academic building are interconnected to allow the free flow of bodies, equipment and ideas. “We have a philosophy here of shared use of equipment,” Gross said.

Graduate students gather for soccer games after working in their shared office space, their cubicles decorated with post-ers depicting freshwater fish and Charles Darwin (in the fashion of a famous Barack Obama poster, with the slogan “Very Grad-ual Change We Can Believe In”). Students and faculty from different disciplines lunch together in the cafeteria; sometimes they discuss science, sometimes not.

But whether they’re researching in the field or just relaxing on the soccer field, ev-eryone at KBS is part of “a community of scholars,” Gross likes to say, and students there get the opportunity to “live and interact in a world of ecology.”

“Some of the barriers that students sometimes feel between the professional part of the university and the student part get removed, and I think that helps,” she said.

“That’s what’s unique about it for gradu-ate students, really being able to be im-mersed totally in the culture of research.”

From the Editor

A view of the Kellogg Manor House from below the hill.

Photo by Andy Bal-askovitz

KBS INTRODUCTION continued

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Members of the ESPP community study the environment ev-erywhere from the Alaskan taiga to African savannas and Asian megacities, but just down the road at the Kellogg Biologi-cal Station, researchers are trying to answer some of the most important questions about our state’s ecological future.

That’s why this issue of Green Ink highlights some – but only a small frac-tion – of the environmental research at KBS. We hope it offers a glimpse of the place, but we encourage everyone to plan a visit.

And, as always, we urge you to send news about environmental re-search at MSU to [email protected], and to check in with us peri-odically at environment.msu.edu.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy the summer!

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McGlashen

In aerial photos, the Experimental Pond Facility at KBS looks a bit like an empty egg carton: a three-by-six grid of near-perfect circles, each about 30 meters across and two meters deep.

The ponds’ uniformity provides control for experiments, and their artificiality lets scientists alter them without disrupting natural systems. “They’re easily ma-nipulable, unlike a lake system,” said Stuart Jones, a postdoctoral researcher at the pond lab.

Jones and microbial ecolo-gist Jay Lennon are beginning a National Science Foundation-funded round of manipulations of the ponds to see how freshwater ecosystems respond to different amounts of dissolved organic carbon from land plants.

Anyone who has visited the Upper Peninsula’s Tahquame-non Falls or a backwoods bog pond and remarked on the tea-colored water has seen dissolved organic carbon – decomposed plant matter that stains water

bodies. Some is normal in lakes, ponds and streams, but over the past decade or so, concentrations have been increasing around the world. “People have noticed on a global scale that lakes are be-coming browner,” Lennon said.

As microbes munch on the carbon dissolved in water bodies, they convert it into, among other things, carbon dioxide that’s re-leased to the atmosphere, con-tributing to climate change. The researchers want to find out at what point inputs of dissolved or-ganic carbon can turn freshwater systems from sinks that absorb carbon to sources of carbon emissions.

To find out, they’ll dose the ponds with different amounts of rich, molasses-like, organic goo that Lennon said is “on its way

to becoming coal,” while sen-sors monitor the ponds’ oxygen concentrations. As algae photo-synthesize, they release oxygen, but as microbes use organic ma-terial, they consume oxygen, so the sensors will indicate whether carbon-sequestering photosyn-thesis or carbon-emitting micro-bial respiration dominates each pond.

Relatively speaking, Lennon said, lakes are fairly small sinks – and, potentially, sources – of car-bon, but the same processes he and Jones observe in the experi-mental ponds occur in wetlands and estuaries, so their findings could have broad implications for biogeochemical cycles.

“There’s still a lot of basic sci-ence that needs to be done,” he said.


KBS Feature

Flipping the carbon switch on ponds

For more coverage of KBS research...

Visit the web site of the Environmental Science and Policy Program at www.environment.msu.edu.

The online package of stories includes all of the original text and photos in Green Ink, as well as short videos produced by ESPP’s Andy McGlashen and Andy Balaskovitz. Hear re-searchers discuss their work first hand and take a journey to their outdoor laboratories.

Researchers use these water tanks (top) to do aquatic research at a scale “between a pond and a test tube,” says microbial ecologist Jay Len-non. Bottom: One of the six demonstration ponds with remnants from one of the researchers’ controlled burns.

Photos by Andy Balaskovitz


Algae aren’t alone in heading northward as the planet gets hotter; all kinds of creatures are on the move. The pika’s retreat up the mountains of the Ameri-can West has been covered in the news because it’s cute and furry. But even though they lack big eyes and endearing manner-isms, plants, too, are threatened by climate change.

“In some cases we think it could even cause extinctions,” said Jennifer Lau, an assistant professor of plant biology at KBS. “But there’s really not a whole lot of good demographic data show-ing those effects.”

To fill that gap, she and col-leagues are studying how Ara-bidopsis lyrata, a small member of the mustard family and a close relative of what Lau calls “the lab rat of plants,” responds to warm-ing temperatures. Their goal is “to get an idea of how these en-

vironmental changes like global warming impact plant popula-tions immediately,” she said, “but then also whether there might be effects over longer time scales, because they might be evolving in response to these novel condi-tions.”

Plastic trays full of Arabidopsis specimens cover a row of tables in a greenhouse at KBS. Lau and others gathered seeds from all over the plant’s range, and are performing controlled matings to produce seeds for future experi-ments.

The researchers will then plant those seeds out into a field warming experiment. To mimic predicted future temperatures due to global warming, they have suspended small heaters above the soil to increase temperature by 2 or 3 ºC.

Comparing how well the plants do in warmed plots versus control

plots will help them understand whether populations in different regions are adapted to local tem-

peratures, and whether some will be more susceptible than others to climate change.

There’s a lot of climate change research happening at KBS, so you might mistake the clear plastic tubes filled with wa-ter and stored in a small room just down the hall from Elena Litchman’s lab for ice cores that some absentminded professor

allowed to melt.

T h e c o n t e n t s of these tubes aren’t cross-sec-tions of gla-ciers, but of lakes –

or, more accurately, simulations of lakes. Litchman, a KBS-affili-ated professor of zoology who

specializes in aquatic ecology, is interested in how shallow and deeper waters mix in lakes, and she uses the tubes to see how different environmental condi-tions, like nutrient concentra-tions and light levels, affect that mixing.

Mixing brings oxygen and nu-trients to different depths, so it helps determine a lake’s water quality, what types of fish can live in it and – most interesting to Litchman – the kinds and con-centrations of algae it supports. Poorly mixed lakes promote the growth of toxic algae, she said. “When there’s no mixing, they’re the king, basically.”

Harmful algae blooms are common, Litchman said, but in-

creases in average temperature and in nutrients from farm runoff have made them more common in recent years. And as the region’s average temperature rises, the blooms are expected to become even more frequent.

In addition to the laboratory simulations, Litchman spends a lot of time sampling actual lakes around KBS. “It’s a really nice place to do aquatic research,” she said, “because there are so many different lakes.” She then analyzes the samples in her lab to determine how well-mixed or nutrient-rich a lake’s water is, and how those factors relate to algae blooms.

By sampling year after year, Litchman is also able to see a

correlation between the blooms and weather data. “We can re-ally mechanistically explain this connection between the tem-perature and the occurrence of the blooms, which is really cool,” she said.

Litchman and her colleagues are also monitoring the spread of an invasive type of toxic cya-nobacteria, or blue-green algae, that’s native to tropic and sub-tropical regions but is increas-ingly common in Michigan.

“It produces toxins, and it fixes nitrogen, so it can have a big impact on ecosystems, on lakes and rivers. And what is interesting is that it’s spreading northwards because of chang-ing climate,” she said.

KBS Research

KBS Research

Algae research heats up in Litchman lab

Lau’s lab studying potential effects of climate change on plantsA lab where Jen Lau is growing Arabidopsis lyrata. She will study how its growth responds to warming tem-peratures.

Photo by Andy Balaskovitz

Litchman


KBS Research

If you’re one of the 90 or so Holstein cows at Kellogg Bi-ological Station’s dairy op-eration, you’re in for some real changes in 2009.

The existing dairy at KBS, in operation since the mid 1980s, is shifting from a typical confinement dairy operation to a pasture-based model, with attendant freedoms and responsibili-ties for the cows.

Previously, a typical day for the KBS cows was spent in the dairy building, where cows roam around large pens. Cows had three daily milkings, and were fed a corn silage-based diet har-vested at KBS. Their ma-nure was spread on fields to cycle nutrients.

Starting this summer, cows will travel widely, fertilize pastures themselves, and har-vest some of their own food. They will also choose when they want to be milked, by ro-botic milkers.

“They’ll take care of all that on their own,” said Mat Haan, coordinator for the new Pasture Based Dairy Proj-ect.

The changes are needed to modernize the dairy operation and connect it to other sus-tainable agriculture initiatives at KBS, Haan said. The opera-tion intends to provide an ex-ample for small and mid-sized dairy farms in Michigan.

The cows will have a new barn and 200 acres of pasture. They’ll transition from a corn silage diet to a pasture-based diet.

The lower-energy pasture diet will likely result in a drop in milk production, Haan said, but benefits will outweigh

drawbacks.Cows will leave their ma-

nure across the pasture, meaning less human la-bor to spread the manure. A pasture diet also means less need to harvest corn. A drop in milk production will likely be offset by a drop in in-put costs, Haan said.

Cow control extends to the milking experience. Holsteins will come to be milked in the barn at their convenience. They’ll enter the robotic milking stall, which will identify each cow by its electronic tag. A mechani-cal arm will reach beneath the cow and brush the ud-ders clean before milking. The ma-chine identifies when a milking is complete, de-taches itself, and sends the cow on her way. During

milking the robot also dispens-es a food reward, as incentive for the cows to return to the milker.

“They learn pretty well,” Haan said. “It’s impressive to watch.”

KBS is the second dairy op-eration in Michigan to employ robotic milkers, a technology originating in Europe during the early 1990s. The machines free up time for farmers, de-crease crowding, and provide

useful feedback on milk quality and cow productivity.

The Kellogg Biological Sta-tion will host a Grand Open-ing for the new dairy facility on August 19. From 1 to 4:30 PM the public will witness the dairy first hand and visit those involved with the project.

This story was written by ESPP assistant web editor Andy Balaskovitz.

Cows assume new responsibilities as KBS shifts to pasture-based dairyTwo heifers grazing on the new KBS pasture. Below: the new barn housing the robotic milkers.

Photos courtesy of Mat Haan, coordinator of the Pas-ture Based Dairy Project.


Faculty Profile

NEW STUDENT profiles

Wu YangFisheries & WildlifeWu Yang earned his bach-elor’s degree from Zhejiang University, the top-ranked uni-versity for environmental sci-ences in China. His research experience there ranged from ecological economics and ur-ban ecology to environmental modeling and conservation biology. He has been primary author of two papers, one of which was accepted by “Eco-logical Economics.”

At MSU, Wu plans to earn his master’s and Ph.D. in fish-eries and wildlife. He has

joined a study of human inter-action with giant pandas in Si-chuan province, China, led by MSU professor Jack Liu.

Wu is interested in inter-actions between human and natural systems, which he said have become unavoid-able. “Today, I think, there are no pure natural systems,” he said.

He said he hopes to inte-grate ecology, socioeconom-ics, management and environ-mental modeling in the study of those interactions.

Yet, no matter what specific project he’s working on, Wu’s

overall purpose is clear: “The final goal is sustainability,” he said.

Norbismi NordinPackagingNorbismi Nordin is at work on a Ph.D. in packaging, having earned a master’s degree in packaging from MSU in 2005.

She majored in chemical engineering as an undergrad-uate in Malaysia, but wanted her graduate work to connect her engineering knowledge to food packaging.

Nordin became part of the

ESPP specialization to learn more about social science, and her research examines packaging through that lens.

She’s especially interested in establishing labeling guide-lines for sustainable packag-ing, and for products that con-tain nanotechnology.

“People have a right to know what’s inside,” she said. “It’s their right to decide to buy what’s in a package.”

Nordin’s studies are spon-sored by the Malaysian gov-ernment, so when she finishes

Wu Nordin Rober Kelly Perdinan

Sandy Marquart-Pyatt arrives at MSU this fall as part of a hiring cluster in Coupled Human and Natural Systems (CHANS), the study of complex interactions within and among natural and human systems.

In her work, Marquart-Pyatt, who is jointly appointed in So-ciology and ESPP, has particu-larly unpacked the human side of the dynamic. Many layers are involved in articulating relation-ships between societies and en-vironments, including individuals, households, communities, states, regions, and nations. She uses multi-level or nested modeling to articulate these dynamics.

Marquart-Pyatt’s interest in questions of scale and compari-son has led her away from her or-igins as an English major; today, she’s a self-professed “statistics geek” and expert in stats-heavy modeling.

This toolkit has allowed her to explore a diverse set of issues re-lated to envi-ronment and politics. Most recently, as an assistant p r o f e s s o r

at Utah State, she has studied what influences environmental

attitudes and behaviors cross-na-tionally, and how these intersect with political beliefs and actions. She works on topics both local and global, from the sustainabil-ity of communities in Utah to en-vironmental concerns compara-tively. She’s also interested in environmental issues in Poland.

“I’m a sociologist by training,” Marquart-Pyatt said, “but my ar-eas of interest within sociology are pretty diverse.”

This fall, in addition to teach-ing a course in political sociology, she’ll work with Laura Schmitt Olabisi (Community, Agriculture, Recreation and Resource Stud-ies) and Arika Ligmann-Zielinska

(ESPP and Geography), also members of the CHANS hiring cluster, to see how her expertise fits into broader environmental modeling efforts at MSU.

Marquart-Pyatt said she “ab-solutely fell in love with the cam-pus” on a visit to MSU, and she’s excited about working at a school with a commitment to interdisci-plinary work.

“I’d heard a lot about MSU as an institution, and about ESPP as a program. There are so many great things going on at MSU that I thought my research would fit in well, and would also benefit from it. I’m really looking forward to the collaborative opportunities.”

Newest CHANS hire brings sociology, environmental modeling expertise

see STUDENTS on next page

ESPP welcomes five newly affiliated specialization students. Find expanded profiles of these and other students at www.environment.msu.edu.


Enthusiastic congratulations to five students gradu-ating with the specialization in ESPP. We wish them all the best in the next steps on their journeys.

Congratulations

ESPP’S CLASS OF 2009

Stephen Aldrich (Geography), wrote his dissertation on “Large-holder deforestation and land conflict in the Eastern Brazilian Amazon.” He will be an assistant professor in the Department of Geography, Geology, and An-thropology at Indiana State Uni-versity.

Marcia JnBaptiste (Crop and Soil Sciences) studied “Effects of gypsum, compost and cover crops on soil nutrient availability, corn yield and quality and soil quality.” She will be working with USDA’s Agricultural Research Service in Bowling Green, KY.

Jason Karl (Fisheries and Wild-life) wrote about “Object-based image analysis for scaling prop-erties of rangeland ecosystems: Linking field and image data for management decision making.” He will work for The Nature Con-servancy, Idaho. Sara Parr Syswerda (Crop and Soil Sciences) wrote her disserta-tion on “Ecosystem services from agriculture across a management intensity gradient in Southwest Michigan.” Her immediate plans include starting her own farm, helping to run the green business Heritage Antique Lumber, and coaching adult runners.

Pariwate Varnakovida (Geog-raphy) wrote about “Human-en-vironment interactions in urban environment and sustainable de-velopment: Spatial modeling and landscape prediction in northeast Thailand.” He will be an assistant professor in the Division of Chem-istry and Environmental Science, Geology and Physics at Lake Superior State University. He’ll pioneer curriculum and classes for a new Applied Geographic In-formation Science major.

Parr Syswerda

Varnakovida

Karl

JnBaptiste

Aldrich

her work here, she’ll return to her home and teach at Universiti Putra Malaysia, where she’ll turn the school’s few courses on food packaging into a comprehensive program.

“I intend to bring more perspec-tive on packaging than just food,” she said.

“It’s exciting, but it’s going to be a lot of work.”

Allison RoberZoologyAllison Rober conducts her re-search in the Bonanza Creek Experimental Forest, just outside Fairbanks, Alaska. She studies the role of algae as a food source in wetlands. “Algae are like little packets of sugar,” she says, im-portant food for numerous organ-isms.

As climate change causes per-mafrost to melt, more nutrients will be released into wetlands, Rober said, and she hopes to study what the effects will be. Nutrient-loaded algae in north-ern wetlands could potentially become inedible, making things tough for snails and other algae-eaters.

With little background in policy, Rober said the ESP specializa-tion suits her career plans well.

“I’ve always had this goal of learning to communicate science, and then to go into an environ-mental policy arena, to move things forward,” she said.

“That’s still the plan – I’m jus taking it one step at a time.”

Jennifer KellySociologyIn her final undergraduate year, Jennifer Kelly took a class that covered major environmen-tal issues like climate change, biodiversity loss, and overpopula-tion.

“And it changed my life,” she said. “I thought it was the most astonishing thing, and I felt like I’d been in the dark.”

She now holds a master’s de-gree in environmental science

and policy from the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. Her thesis examined changes in civic engagement with environmental issues among a group of college students after they spent time studying ecosystems in Costa Rica.

She plans to do doctoral re-search in environmental citizen-ship, but will include a focus on animals, since she’s also special-izing in animal studies.

Jennifer said the dual spe-cialization is well-suited to her broad interests, and that she’s excited to work with ESPP director Thomas Dietz and with sociology profes-sor Linda Kalof, who runs the animal studies specialization.

And it doesn’t hurt that Jen-nifer is “a total animal lover. Domestic, wild – it doesn’t mat-ter.”

PerdinanGeographyPerdinan, a new Ph.D. student in Geography, has a taste for just about everything related to the environment: agriculture, forest-ry, economics, meteorology, ge-ography – you name it.

“If you want to make a bridge between science and policy,” he said, “you have to understand a lot of things.”

But for Perdinan, it all comes back to climate. He’s researched the impacts of climate change on his native Indonesia, studied the economics of risks associated with global warming, and looked for ways of helping people adapt to a changing planet.

Perdinan is on the faculty of Bogor Agricultural University in Indonesia, and is here on a Fulbright scholarship. He said he hopes to learn how to put his experience to work on Indo-nesia’s recently adopted climate policy.

“How that policy can be imple-mented is a really tough question,” he said. “I need some tools in or-der to communicate my research findings to policy makers.”

STUDENTS continued


Michigan State is a key player in a new international initiative to alleviate poverty in the de-veloping world while slowing climate change and building healthier ecosystems.

The Carbon Benefits Proj-ect, initiated in May in Nairobi, Kenya, is a partnership among the university, the World Wild-life Fund (WWF), the United Nations Environment Pro-gramme (UNEP) and other institutions, and funded by the Global Environment Facil-ity.

The project was conceived in part by David Skole, a pro-fessor of global change sci-ence in the Department of For-estry. It aims to connect the rural poor with carbon markets created by greenhouse gas mitigation agreements so they can make money from envi-ronmentally sound land-use decisions.

The project grew out of Skole’s research program on agroforestry, climate mitigation and carbon markets, called Carbon2Markets (www.car-bon2markets.org) and funded by MSU’s Vice President for Research and Graduate Stud-

ies. Skole and colleagues organized a workshop in Nai-robi two years ago to discuss carbon markets with scientists at the World Agroforestry Cen-tre. A WWF representative attended the meetings, and a partnership with the university was born.

To help offset their own emissions of heat-trapping gases, some governments and businesses pay develop-

ing countries to build clean energy infrastructure. The United Nations may decide at its climate change summit in Copenhagen this December also to pay developing coun-tries for keeping their tropical forests intact, since deforesta-tion accounts for roughly 20 percent of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, according to the UN. Indonesia, for ex-ample, could earn up to $1 bil-lion annually in carbon offset payments for slowing its de-forestation rate by nearly 2.5 million acres per year.

“Farming carbon alongside farming crops is just one of the tantalizing prospects emerg-ing as a result of the world’s urgent need to combat climate change,” said UNEP Execu-tive Director Achim Steiner. “Managing the land and its vegetation in more intelligent and climate-friendly ways may generate multiple benefits from stabilizing soils, secur-ing water supplies, conserving

biodiversity and generating much needed income for poor and low-income communi-ties.”

But before farmers in Africa, Southeast Asia and elsewhere can collect a check for these carbon offsets, there must be a system in place to measure how much carbon their land sequesters.

“You’ve got to have sound science to establish carbon markets,” said Skole. But once markets are established, he added, the payoff is sig-nificant. “We can double the income of some of these very poor farmers.”

Computer models already exist that can show fairly ac-curately how much carbon will be absorbed if a parcel of for-est is planted, or how much will escape if the forest is cut to make way for agriculture.

“The scientific community has been developing carbon accounting tools for some time,” Skole said. “The trick is when you get into these sys-tems that have agroforestry. Then it’s more challenging.”

Agroforestry is a farming system that combines trees or

MSU helps international effort to fight poverty, climate changeResearch

Top: Dr. Usa (right), col-league from Thailand at Mahasarakham Universi-ty, discusses project de-tails with two participat-ing farmers in Thailand. Bottom: an MSU student making field measure-ment of tree height using LASER hypsometer.

Photos courtesy of David Skole.

“It’s not just a way to buy an indulgence. What we’re trying to show is that this has a social dimension that benefits the rural poor.”

David Skole, Forestry; ESPP

see CARBON on next page

NEWS briefs

MSU to host federal energy frontier research center

The U.S. Department of Energy tapped MSU in April to lead a new $12.5 million Energy Frontier Research Center, one of 46 to be established na-tionwide. The Center focuses on thermoelectric en-ergy conversion, which increases energy efficiency by converting energy currently lost as heat into electricity. Researchers in the College of Engineer-ing and College of Natural Science are involved.

Campus greening gains momentum

MSU’s campus-wide environmental stewardship initia-tive presented its second set of recommendations to the Board of Trustees this winter. The recommendations, currently being implemented, address the university’s use of materials, energy, water, and other natural re-sources. Actions will have environmental and economic benefits. More information about the university’s “Be Spartan Green” effort is available at bespartangreen.msu.edu. The initiative is led by the Vice President for Operations and Finance.

MSU unwraps sustainable packaging center

The College of Agriculture and Natural Resources announced the launch of its new Center for Pack-aging Innovation and Sustainability in January. The Coca-Cola Company provided $400,000 for the center, which will be housed in the School of Pack-aging and serve as a think-tank for reducing the en-vironmental impact of product packaging. With planned facilities in Dubai and Shanghai, the center is expected to have international reach. MSU to lead rural development in the Midwest

This summer Michigan State will become the hub of rural development and research in the Midwest, thanks to a nearly $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. MSU will host the Center for Rural Development for the next five years. The center is one of four in the nation that work to help land-grant universities develop and strengthen rural communities. “Ru-


see NEWS BRIEFS on p. 10

ESPP compiles monthly summaries of environmental news at MSU. These are available at our web site, www.environment.msu.edu, or by subscription (contact [email protected]). Here’s a recent sampling:

shrubs with crops or livestock on a single piece of land. It gives farmers a diversified crop, leav-ing them less susceptible to marketplace whims. It also offers a number of ecological services not provided by more intensive agriculture, such as cleaner water, decreased soil erosion and an in-creased capacity to store carbon.

Scientists affiliated with Skole will closely monitor test sites in Africa and China over the next 18 months to see how much carbon is stored in a range of soil types under various cropping systems. They can observe the net primary productivity of a parcel – which indicates how much carbon it captures – by using satellite observations and on-the-ground measurements of individual trees.

The protocol they develop can then be used elsewhere to determine the offset payments to which farmers are en-titled.

Critics of carbon offsets claim that measuring sequestration is too complicated and opportuni-ties for cheating are too numerous to make it an effective way to fight climate change. Skole said he hopes the project can show there are safeguards against shady accounting, and “that it’s not risky or as strange as some people think.”

“It’s not just a way to buy an indulgence,” he said. “What we’re trying to show is that this has a social dimension that benefits the rural poor.”

CARBON continued

Thai colleagues demonstrate meth-ods for measuring forest biomass in the field in Thailand.


ral America serves as the steward for the majority of our nation’s natural resources,” said Scott Loveridge, transition director of the center. “An understanding of these resources is critical to develop-ing programs and policies to improve the quality of life for rural people.”

Michigan researchers seek greenhouse gas controls

Scores of college and uni-versity researchers urged Michigan’s congressio-nal delegation to support strong federal policies to cut greenhouse gas emissions, including dozens of MSU scientists.

“We are convinced that immediate action is neces-sary to avoid the worst con-sequences of global warm-

ing on Michigan’s economy and environment, including the Great Lakes,” the group of more than 170 wrote in late May. “While slowing the damaging effects of climate change poses enormous challenges, we also believe such action presents Michigan with real opportuni-ties to reinvigorate our economy and improve the quality of life for all Michiganders.”

MSU also had a climate change teach-in on February 2; speaker videos are available at wmsu.org.

MSU-patented process can reduce the cost of making cellulosic biofuels

Bruce Dale, associate director of MSU’s Of-fice of Biobased Technologies, has developed a way to pretreat corn-crop waste before con-version into ethanol. Extra nutrients don’t have to be added, cutting the cost of making biofu-els from cellulose.

NEWS BRIEFS continued

MSU graduate students will par-ticipate in the environmental chal-lenge at the annual conference of the Air and Waste Management Association (A&WMA), which will be held in Detroit in June. The team consists of graduate stu-dents from Environmental Engi-neering, Biosystems Engineering, and one from the Department of Community, Agriculture, Recre-ation, and Resource Studies, to keep all the engineers from think-ing about just bolts and nuts.

Besides their diverse academ-ic interests and backgrounds, the composition of this team spans three continents - Africa, Asia and North America.

The A&WMA environmental challenge provides students with an opportunity to present ideal solutions to a mock complex en-vironmental problem. The chal-lenge this year is to design a mu-nicipal solid waste management facility for a town that is running out of landfill space, but not out of garbage, and to use the waste

as an energy source. Students are also required to evaluate the social, environmental and regula-tory implications of that design. As luck would have it, the ficti-tious town in which the challenge is based is nearly identical to East Lansing (including a college just about the size of MSU), ex-cept that it is located in the Upper Peninsula.

The students aim to design a system that reduces waste, in-creases recycling, provides sus-tainable energy, and creates jobs for the community. The prepa-ration process so far has been challenging yet exciting.

Industry experts will scrutinize the team’s design to test its vi-ability. As part of the scrutiny, an added complication will be intro-

duced at the conference and will have to be incorporated into the design. Teams with the top three designs will be awarded after the presentation.

The group hopes to emerge with a greater understanding of solid waste and energy sustain-ability, and of course a big tro-phy. It is their intent to share their knowledge and experiences from the conference with the MSU community. They are building on a legacy of Spartan success in A&WMA competitions; an MSU team won second place in last year’s contest.

This story was written by MSU’s environmental challenge team:Felix K. Yeboah CARRSBecky Larson Biosystems EngineeringIndumarthy Jayamani Environmental EngineeringBiao Chang Environmental EngineeringZiqiang Yin Environmental Engineering

MSU students prepare for A&WMA environmental challenge

Pictured from left to right, Biao Chang, Felix Yeboah,Indumathy Jayamani, Becky Larson, and Ziqiang Yin.

Student Competition


Comics and the environment: the case of the ‘Swamp Thing’ Perspective

These are the opening lines of a comic book. (Some people pre-fer the term “graphic novel,” but to me this phrase is pretentious.) Without the beautiful yet disturb-ing illustrations that accompany them, they can seem overly dramatic and the stuff of dime-

store novels. And yet, these words repre-sent the begin-ning of a bold and mature e x p l o r a t i o n of humanity’s fundamenta l

nature and our potentially tenu-ous relationship with the natural world. Heady content for a comic book.

The Swamp Thing was initially created and marketed as a hor-ror comic. Dr. Alec Holland was a government researcher working on a crop growth formula. When his experiment was sabotaged, the resulting explosion sent Holland and his chemical soup into the swamp where they mixed together to form the Swamp Thing.

The Swamp Thing has a man’s basic form, but is com-pletely composed of plant ma-terial and stands over eight feet tall. If Frankenstein’s monster was made of a wetland’s rem-nants, it would look something like the Swamp Thing. Despite his horrific visage, the Swamp

Thing is good at heart and fights evil scientists and super-villains. The Swamp Thing’s convention-al comic book feel was forever changed, however, when a new creative team, helmed by “Watchman’s” Alan Moore, took the reins in 1983.

Moore’s run on Swamp Thing can still be classified as horror, but in a way that veers away from the monster-movie tropes of earlier issues. Moore almost com-pletely removed any traces of Alec Holland’s consciousness from the Swamp Thing. Instead of being a man trapped in a monster’s body, the Swamp Thing became a creature with an intimate link to the natu-ral world and a weak memory of its human origins. As the series progresses, the Swamp Thing becomes increasingly removed from its human friends and finds solace in solitary communion with nature. Its focus becomes environmental protection.

The separation of humanity and nature is reinforced by Ste-phen Bissette’s and John Totle-ben’s art. When they portray

the Swamp Thing in natural set-tings, the scenes have an organ-ic beauty and calming presence. In contrast, the Swamp Thing’s interactions with humans feature

images that are awkward, and i n c r e a s i n g l y grotesque. The artists show humans funda-mentally clash-ing with the natural environ-ment, a concept they illustrate by their choice of color palettes. While nature and the Swamp Thing are de-picted in earthy tones of brown,

green and yellow, Bissette and Totleben portray humans in bright, garish colors such as red, blue and orange.

The dissimilarity of nature and man is highlighted in an early story of the new Swamp Thing that featured the Justice League (the super hero group composed of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern and oth-ers). The Swamp Thing, as the environment’s guardian, con-trasts with the Justice League, the protectors of mankind. While the Swamp Thing lives in swamps and damp forests, the Justice League’s headquarters

is a sterile, technologically ad-vanced structure on the moon’s surface made of steel and glass. During Moore’s tenure, his focus eventually strays from nature to questions of morality and the nature of evil (another column completely), but there is always an underlying theme that the Swamp Thing is not human and hostile to humanity’s constant in-trusions into its world.

The Swamp Thing’s divorce from humanity and complete acceptance of the natural en-vironment can serve as a com-mentary on humans’ relationship with nature, and it’s not a positive one. Moore suggests that there is a fundamental divide between humans and nature, and any relationship that exists between the two is one of necessity, at best. He suggests that humans are not part of the natural envi-ronment, but complete outliers, mistakes which have no place in a world that does not under-stand or welcome them. This no-tion and its ramifications for hu-manity and the environment are what truly make The Saga of the Swamp Thing a horror book.

Note: The newsletter’s Per-spectives column is a chance for ESPP affiliates to share in-sights and opinions. If you’d like to write a column, contact Andy McGlashen ([email protected])

Note: Members of the ESPP community know Assistant Professor Louie Rivers as a decision scientist, an officer of the Society for Risk Analysis, a former NSF program officer and founder of MSU’s pioneering conservation criminology pro-gram. But Louie also has a deep knowledge of and passionate interest in graphic novels, or as he prefers, comic books. Here he offers his thoughts on environmental themes in the work of one of the masters of modern comics, Alan Moore.

“There is a red and angry world, red things happen there.The world eats your wife, eats your friends.

Eats all the things that make you human, and you become a monster”

-- The Saga of the Swamp Thing #23 by Alan Moore, Stephen Bissette and John Totleben

Rivers


michigan state university274 giltner halleast lansing, mi 48824

KBS in Photos

Clockwise from top: one of the locations for the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Program. A pet turtle in Elena Litchman’s lab. Pathway along the shoreline of Gull Lake on KBS property. A view of Gull Lake from the KBS shore. The Pagoda and lakeshore gardens at KBS. Photos by Andy Balaskovitz

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