1. Upper Gila Watershed Forum – How Do We Adapt to a Hotter and Drier Future?
September 28, 2018
Time/Location:
8:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. / Eastern Arizona College, 615 N. Stadium Drive, Thatcher, AZ
The annual Upper Gila Watershed Forum on September 28th in Thatcher Arizona will feature day-long discussion, presentations, and activities focused on “Adapting to a Hotter and Drier Future.” Explore how increasing heat and drought are affecting agricultural, business, municipal, and conservation practices, and what communities and individuals are doing to adapt.
Join us for the second annual Upper Gila River Watershed Forum on September 28th at Eastern Arizona College, in Thatcher, AZ.
This year’s topic, “Adopting to a Hotter and Drier Future,” will explore how, as community, we are adjusting our agricultural, business, and household practices to prepare for hotter and drier scenairos. The forum also provides a place to share experiences and lessons learned with neighborhood communities. All are welcome!
Check with Clara (clara@gwpaz.org) for more information.
Registration begins at 8:00 a.m. Lunch and field trips are included in cost of registration:
$25.00 Early Bird Rate (Now closed)
$35.00 Regular admission and at-the-door (Sept 8 – 28th)
2. Hot and Hungry: How Climate Change Affects the Nutrient Content of Our Food. Modern crops have lower nutrient density than they used to — and agricultural practices may not be the only cause.
For more than 25 years, researchers have been aware of the declining nutrient density in our crops. Many believe that the industrialization of agriculture is to blame, due to chemical fertilization techniques and declining soil quality. While these factors certainly contribute to the decline of our foods’ nutrient value, Irakli Loladze, a mathematician with a keen interest in biology, discovered a more ominous source of nutrient depletion: rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere.
Photosynthesize Me: C3, C4, and CAM
Some background on how plants use carbon dioxide will be helpful to understand why rising CO2 levels matter so much. All plants “fix” carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for fuel, using one of three photosynthesis methods, dubbed “C3,” “C4,” and “CAM.”
C3 photosynthesis transfers the carbon atom from carbon dioxide to a three-carbon molecule, which the plant then uses to produce sugars and starches. Of the three methods of photosynthesis, C3 is considered the least efficient, because in hot, dry conditions, the enzyme that “grabs” carbon dioxide from the air sometimes binds oxygen molecules instead. The plant then has to use extra energy — and release one of its hard-earned carbon atoms — to correct the mistake. About 85 percent of plant species are C3 plants. Rice and potatoes, as well as barley and wheat (the most studied of the cereal crops), are C3 plants, as are all woody trees, including nut and fruit trees.
Plants that use C4 photosynthesis have adapted to hotter, drier climates and have a more complicated process for carbon fixation that reduces the risk of fixing oxygen molecules. They use an enzyme with no affinity for oxygen to fix atmospheric carbon initially, and move the resulting four-carbon molecule into another cell, where the same enzyme used in C3 plants transforms it into sugars and starches. In hot, dry conditions, C4 photosynthesis is much more efficient than C3, but only 3 percent of plant species use this method of photosynthesis. Corn is the most commonly cultivated C4 crop; amaranth, millet, and sorghum are other commonly cultivated C4 crops.
CAM photosynthesis is mainly used by plants adapted to extremely hot, dry environments, such as pineapples, cacti, and other succulents. They alternate between fixing CO2 at night, and converting it to sugars and starches during the day. Very few CAM plants are used as crops, so we won’t go into further detail about this process.
Designing CO2 Studies
Researchers interested in the impact of rising CO2 levels can pump CO2 into a controlled greenhouse lab and study the results, but lab environments don’t accurately represent the complexity of open spaces. Weather patterns, interspecies competition, and other factors may all be of interest in studying the effects of CO2 levels on plants. Free air carbon dioxide enrichment (FACE) is a method developed to address this issue. Researchers can raise the concentration of CO2 in a specified open area and measure plants’ responses. It’s the current gold standard for
measuring CO2’s effects on plants, and FACE studies can also include plants that can’t be grown in small spaces, such as trees. However, FACE experiments are extremely costly and have their own limitations. Most FACE experiments are conducted in temperate climates, and because of the high cost of CO2, don’t keep CO2 levels elevated at night. We don’t yet have much information on how agriculture in tropical and arid climates may be affected by elevated CO2 levels, nor on the possible effects of constantly high CO2 levels.
To read the entire article, go to https://www.motherearthliving.com/food-matters/hot-andhungry-zm0z18sozpop?newsletter=1&spot=headline&utm_source=wcemail&utm_medium=email&utm _campaign=MEL%20Weekly%2009-06-8&utm_term=MEL_Weekly_eNewsAll%20Subscribers&_wcsid=BBDB80B32FF09720AB9DE30D2E1E599B31BF9487331FBDAC
3. Are Hybrid Car Batteries A Good Choice For The Environment? If you put the fanciest, nonhybrid Camry up against a cheaper hybrid Camry, the hybrid wins. You can shell out $35,100 for a Camry that only gets 26 miles per gallon, while the lowest-priced hybrid Camry sells for $27,950 and gets 52 miles per gallon. So, based on the assumption that the average car travels 11,244 miles a year, this makes for a difference of 432 gallons a year versus 216 gallons per year, amounting to $5,184 for gas in eight years (at $3 a gallon). Add that to the fancier nonhybrid Camry’s $7,150 more in base price and in eight years you spend more than $12,000 on that fancy, nonhybrid Camry than on the modest Camry hybrid.
Of course you could also save by going all electric with, for example, the Chevy Bolt, now available for $30,000 after you take advantage of the federal tax credit
From seven to 10 years after being removed from a hybrid car. They are already powering everything from data centers to streetlights, and after their second career is over, material in them will be recycled.
The mining of lithium used in the batteries is a relatively simple process, and more damage is done by mining the copper and aluminum they contain—so please, please, recycle your wires and beer cans! By 2050, it has been predicted that carmakers will have invested $550 billion in reclaiming the material in these batteries.
4. What Do I Do if the Water in My Kid’s School Has Lead in It? In May 2017, two maintenance workers came into Geneviéve Stockfisch’s second-grade classroom at Entz Elementary in Mesa, Arizona, unannounced and began tinkering with the sink.
When they left, Stockfisch noticed they’d left a sign behind. It said that the water was not to be used for drinking or cooking, because the water had tested positive for lead. Stockfisch had been teaching in that classroom, and drinking out of that sink, for 18 years. “I have three daughters,” Stockfisch said. “Teachers live in their classrooms. My girls drank that water for 18 years. Over 500 of my students drank that water.”
She asked other teachers whether the same thing had happened in their classrooms. She seemed to be the only one. Later that day, she got an email clarifying the results: Her classroom sink had tested as having 500 ppb (parts per billion) lead particles in the drinking water. Confirmation testing—which ran a second sample of the water in her sink—came back even higher, at 1,300 ppb, which is over 80 times the 15 ppb limit that the EPA considers the point where public health action is necessary. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that schools keep drinking water lead levels below 1 ppb.
Lead can have serious health impacts, especially for children. It is a potent neurotoxin; the World Health Organization states that it can cause behavioral changes, developmental disabilities and loss of IQ. Exposure to even low levels of lead can also increase cardiovascular risk. Although some experts don’t think that small amounts of lead in school drinking water is likely to cause cognitive impairment, the EPA states that there is no safe level of lead for a child to be exposed.
Meanwhile, the Arizona Daily Independent reported that at another school, Hopi Elementary, the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality encouraged the school not to inform parents of lead-testing results until they had been confirmed. The school waited weeks for the DEQ confirmation testing results, but after six weeks they broke down and told parents about the preliminary results anyway.
When Kara Cook-Schultz became toxics director for PIRG, she expected that parents would report schools in cities with dilapidated infrastructure. Instead, she found that problems with lead in drinking water cropped up everywhere—in urban centers, in smaller, rural areas, in affluent school districts and less-funded ones
In California, a recent law, AB 746, requires lead testing in all public schools built before 2010 (this is the majority of the state’s schools). So far, a little over 3,000 schools have been tested. According to Beti Girma of the California Water Board, this has resulted in 149 instances of “actionable level exceedances” at 99 schools (some schools had multiple sources of lead). Those schools are required to take corrective action or shut down the drinking water source and can apply for grant funding to do so.
Meanwhile, after almost two decades with her school district, Stockfisch chose to resign out of frustration with the way her school handled its lead problems. “This hasn’t been easy for me. I don’t like conflict. I like to make everyone happy. But when it comes to lead, I cannot just sweep it under the carpet. I am not OK with a school district doing that, or within the state.”
In May 2017, two maintenance workers came into Geneviéve Stockfisch’s second-grade classroom at Entz Elementary in Mesa, Arizona, unannounced and began tinkering with the sink.
When they left, Stockfisch noticed they’d left a sign behind. It said that the water was not to be used for drinking or cooking, because the water had tested positive for lead. Stockfisch had been teaching in that classroom, and drinking out of that sink, for 18 years. “I have three daughters,” Stockfisch said. “Teachers live in their classrooms. My girls drank that water for 18 years. Over 500 of my students drank that water.”
She asked other teachers whether the same thing had happened in their classrooms. She seemed to be the only one. Later that day, she got an email clarifying the results: Her classroom sink had tested as having 500 ppb (parts per billion) lead particles in the drinking water. Confirmation testing—which ran a second sample of the water in her sink—came back even higher, at 1,300 ppb, which is over 80 times the 15 ppb limit that the EPA considers the point where public health action is necessary. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that schools keep drinking water lead levels below 1 ppb.
Lead can have serious health impacts, especially for children. It is a potent neurotoxin; the World Health Organization states that it can cause behavioral changes, developmental disabilities and loss of IQ. Exposure to even low levels of lead can also increase cardiovascular risk. Although some experts don’t think that small amounts of lead in school drinking water is likely to cause cognitive impairment, the EPA states that there is no safe level of lead for a child to be exposed.
Stockfisch demanded that the school investigate all the sinks at Entz Elementary (they had only tested a few). She searched for old lead-testing results, only to find that the school’s sinks and water fountains hadn’t been tested since the school was built in the 1990s.
Stockfisch’s next step was to contact parents whose children had been in her class—they had been informed about the results but not about their severity. They had also been told that the water at the school was safe for drinking—Stockfisch wasn’t so sure. She asked school officials not to remove her classroom sink until the source of the lead was found, but it was replaced over her protests. While pipes and service lines installed after the mid-1980s are meant to be leadfree, sometimes lead can still be found in plumbing fixtures, like spigots and faucets.
Stockfisch also began using a Twitter account to share information about lead in school drinking water. She asked for public records on lead testing from the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality and found that most schools in Arizona had often tested only one sink or pipe in the school, rather than testing throughout.
Meanwhile, the Arizona Daily Independent reported that at another school, Hopi Elementary, the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality encouraged the school not to inform parents of lead-testing results until they had been confirmed. The school waited weeks for the DEQ confirmation testing results, but after six weeks they broke down and told parents about the preliminary results anyway.
While extreme, what happened at Entz and Hopi Elementary Schools are not isolated incidents. Detroit’s city school district recently decided to shut off all the drinking fountains in its schools, after testing revealed high lead levels at 16 of 24 recently tested schools. Although Flint, Michigan, is often (rightfully) referenced when discussing lead poisoning in the U.S., schools across the country, from New York to California, routinely test positive for lead in drinking water. A recent study by nonprofit U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) using data crowdsourced from parents across the nation found that parents in 27 states reported getting letters from their schools about high lead-test results.
When Kara Cook-Schultz became toxics director for PIRG, she expected that parents would report schools in cities with dilapidated infrastructure. Instead, she found that problems with lead in drinking water cropped up everywhere—in urban centers, in smaller, rural areas, in affluent school districts and less-funded ones.
In California, a recent law, AB 746, requires lead testing in all public schools built before 2010 (this is the majority of the state’s schools). So far, a little over 3,000 schools have been tested. According to Beti Girma of the California Water Board, this has resulted in 149 instances of “actionable level exceedances” at 99 schools (some schools had multiple sources of lead). Those schools are required to take corrective action or shut down the drinking water source and can apply for grant funding to do so.
There were 16,125 samples taken from 14,782 fixtures for 1,427 schools from 180 school districts across Arizona, with the help of 14 analytical labs and six city partners.
Sampling
ADEQ and its partners collected 16,125 samples from 14,782 fixtures at all public school district schools, taking immediate corrective actions and retesting fixtures in buildings that tested higher than the screening level.
Results
96 percent of all fixtures screened were found to be protective and required no corrective action.
5. OSHA 8 Hour Refresher. An 8 hour OSHA refresher class will be held on October 8, 2018 Columbus Day, in Glendale.
If you are interested in attending the class, contact D. Salzler at (623) 930-8197 or at sconflict@aol.com. Cost is $80 per student. A light breakfast with coffee is provided and lunch is provided at no extra cost
