Click the link to read the New York Times obituary. Here’s an excerpt:

His rich baritone and gift for melodies made him one of the most popular artists of the 1970s with songs like “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” and “If You Could Read My Mind.”

Gordon Lightfoot, the Canadian folk singer whose rich, plaintive baritone and gift for melodic songwriting made him one of the most popular recording artists of the 1970s, died on Monday night in Toronto. He was 84…

Mr. Lightfoot, a fast-rising star in Canada in the early 1960s, broke through to international success when his friends and fellow Canadians Ian and Sylvia Tyson recorded two of his songs, “Early Morning Rain” and “For Lovin’ Me.” When Peter, Paul and Mary came out with their own versions, and Marty Robbins reached the top of the country charts with Mr. Lightfoot’s “Ribbon of Darkness,” Mr. Lightfoot’s reputation soared. Overnight, he joined the ranks of songwriters like Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and Tom Paxton, all of whom influenced his style…When folk music ebbed in popularity, overwhelmed by the British invasion, Mr. Lightfoot began writing ballads aimed at a broader audience. He scored one hit after another, beginning in 1970 with the heartfelt “If You Could Read My Mind,” inspired by the breakup of his first marriage. In quick succession he recorded the hits “Sundown,” “Carefree Highway,” “Rainy Day People” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which he wrote after reading a Newsweek article about the sinking of an iron-ore carrier in Lake Superior in 1975, with the loss of all 29 crew members…

For Canadians, Mr. Lightfoot was a national hero, a homegrown star who stayed home even after achieving spectacular success in the United States and who catered to his Canadian fans with cross-country tours. His ballads on Canadian themes, like “Canadian Railroad Trilogy,” pulsated with a love for the nation’s rivers and forests, which he explored on ambitious canoe trips far into the hinterlands. His personal style, reticent and self-effacing — he avoided interviews and flinched when confronted with praise — also went down well. “Sometimes I wonder why I’m being called an icon, because I really don’t think of myself that way,” Mr. Lightfoot told The Globe and Mail in 2008. “I’m a professional musician, and I work with very professional people. It’s how we get through life.”

[…]

Gordon Meredith Lightfoot Jr. was born on Nov. 17, 1938, in Orillia, Ontario, where his father managed a dry-cleaning plant. As a boy, he sang in a church choir, performed on local radio shows and shined in singing competitions. “Man, I did the whole bit: oratorio work, Kiwanis contests, operettas, barbershop quartets,” he told Time magazine in 1968…Mr. Lightfoot, accompanying himself on an acoustic 12-string guitar, in a voice that often trembled with emotion, gave spare, direct accounts of his material. He sang of loneliness, troubled relationships, the itch to roam and the majesty of the Canadian landscape. He was, as the Canadian writer Jack Batten put it, “journalist, poet, historian, humorist, short-story teller and folksy recollector of bygone days.”

Click the link to read the article on The Washington Post website (Matthew Cappucci and Kasha Patel). Click through for the video, photos, and Twitter stream. Here’s an excerpt:

A ‘severe’ solar storm triggered the outburst of auroras. Even California, Arizona, Arkansas and Virginia reported sightings.

Skywatchers in Europe, Asia and North America were treated Sunday night to perhaps one of the most widespread displays of the northern lights since the autumn solar storms of 2003. Equally impressive shows of the aurora australis, or southern lights, were spotted in Australia and New Zealand.

The northern and southern lights, collectively known as the aurora, are most common in the high Arctic and Antarctic regions around the poles, but they can venture to the middle latitudes on rare occasions during potent geomagnetic storms. The storms are caused by magnetic energy and electrons that are hurled into space by the sun. The stronger the solar storm, the greater the effect — particularly if the resulting outburst is directed toward Earth. Forecasters at the Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo., issued warnings for a Level 4 out of 5 “severe” geomagnetic storm, which happens on average only 60 times every 11 years. The episode may have been even more intense at times, sparking auroral displays as far south as California, Arizona, Arkansas and Virginia…

On Friday afternoon, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite recorded an explosion on the surface of the sun. The flare, rated an M2 on an ascending scale that climbs A, B, C, M to X, caused a radio burst on Earth eight minutes later. That clued NOAA forecasters into the fact that the energy was directed toward Earth…The flare was followed by a coronal mass ejection (CME) — a mass of solar plasma, charged particles and magnetism — that headed directly toward Earth at speeds of roughly 1.5 million miles per hour. That interplanetary shock wave collided with Earth’s magnetic field on Sunday afternoon Eastern time, which was after dark in Europe and in the early hours of Monday in China. Brilliant apparitions of the northern lights quickly appeared. The CME brought “severe” geomagnetic storming, stronger than what the Space Weather Prediction Center forecast when the CME left the sun Friday…

The colors of an aurora correspond to the type and altitude of the element that is excited in Earth’s atmosphere, Murtagh explained. Excited oxygen atoms glow red above 120 miles and glow green between 60 and 120 miles. Excited nitrogen atoms below 120 miles can glow pink or purple. Murtagh said a more intense aurora is typically higher, so lower latitudes will see more red.

“The bigger storms can light up the higher altitudes, which is largely going to [excite] the oxygen causing that red,” he said. “The further you are away, down south that is, you’re going to not see the green and yellow in the lower altitudes.”

Click the link to read the article on the High Country News website (Anna V. Smith):

The protest encampment was easily visible from Highway 40 going West from Needles, California — a cluster of olive-green Army tents that stood out from the low-lying creosote bushes and sagebrush that cover the expanse of Ward Valley. At its height, the camp held two kitchens (one vegetarian, one not), a security detail, bathroom facilities and a few hundred people — a coalition of five tribal nations, anti-nuclear activists, veterans, environmentalists and American Indian Movement supporters. They were there to resist a public-lands trade between the federal government and the state of California that would allow U.S. Ecology, a waste disposal company, to build a 1,000-acre, unlined nuclear waste dump that threatened both desert tortoises and groundwater. “It became like a little village, a working village,” recalled David Harper, a member of the Colorado River Indian Tribes who was a tribal spokesperson at the time.

The Bureau of Land Management had announced it would start evicting the protesters at midnight on Feb. 13, 1998. But that day, tribal elders decided that they would not leave. Federal officials and tribal spokespeople met to negotiate at a blockade on the highway overpass. The leaders of the standoff were committed to nonviolence, but the atmosphere felt tense and uncertain. At a press conference, elders in ribbon dresses and beadwork sat under the sun in folded chairs, backed by tall banners that read, in part, “Save the Colorado River.” “We can no longer stand by, as people, to allow this to continue to happen to us,” said then-Fort Mojave Tribal Chairperson Nora McDowell, her black curls framing her face and her voice quavering at times.

After 113 days, the BLM rescinded the eviction order. A year later, a federal court ruling finalized the victory: There would be no dump at Ward Valley. The protest served as a nexus of the decade’s political issues in Indian Country — a test of the Clinton administration’s commitment to tribal consultation and the Endangered Species Act, as well as of new federal laws and policies on environmental justice and sacred site protections. It was also a time of cultural upwelling — the camp provided space for elders to share stories, knowledge and ceremony with the thoroughly intergenerational community. Children and teens took part alongside everyone else. Doelena Van Fleet was one of those kids; her father, Victor, was a key organizer. The encampment period was a kind of “restoration,” she said. “Because of their actions, our voices can be heard now.”

ON A BRIGHT, chilly Saturday in February, a hundred or so people gathered at the same spot where the tents once stood in Ward Valley. The elders of that time have passed on, while others from the camp have since become elders themselves. The small children that ran around the camp are now on tribal councils. Nora McDowell, now in her 60s and project manager for the tribe’s Pipa Aha Macav Cultural Center, read a list of names in remembrance. Both Native and non-Native speakers shared memories: the sleet and hail, chasing after tents blowing away across the valley, reaffirming the power of collective action, and the importance of knowing — and standing up for — the place you come from. They celebrate every year, but this February was special; it marked 25 years since the encampment and ensuing victory, a mile marker of time.

Colleen Garcia, a Fort Mojave tribal council member who was at the encampment, stood at the microphone in front of the crowd. “We are Mojaves,” she said to shouts of confirmation. “Others will come and go. But we people here will be here forever.” 

“Others will come and go. But we people here will be here forever.” 

In Garcia’s comments, one can hear the echoes of the past — decades ago, the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe’s then-vice chairman, Llewellyn Barrackman, voiced the same sentiment to reporters. “For us, as Mojaves, we’re born and raised here and this is our roots,” he said. “U.S. Ecology people come here from elsewhere, and maybe 10 years from now they get transferred. But us, we’re going to be here until we die.” The BLM acreage of Ward Valley, like all public lands, is ancestral tribal land, in this case of the Mojave, Quechan, Cocopah, Colorado River Indian Tribes, Chemehuevi and others. And though Ward Valley was the focus of the nuclear waste dump conflict, it’s part of a broader region known as Avi Kwa Ame, which is just as important to the tribes in the region.

The landscape at Avi Kwa Ame is a reminder that rocks, in fact, move. Tilted granite shelves jut from the earth’s surface, rock walls crumble to the valley floor below. Shapes of smooth rock sag and gape like melted candles, while bursts of green yucca dot the landscape. This is the origin place of 10 Yuman-speaking tribes, and considered sacred by more. In 1999, the same year that a court ruling protected Ward Valley from the nuclear waste dump, Avi Kwa Ame was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, a first step toward legal protection. 

In March, at the White House Conservation in Action Summit, President Joe Biden signed a declaration that officially designated Avi Kwa Ame as a national monument, with the resulting protections covering more than 500,000 acres of BLM land just north of Ward Valley. The boundaries connect wilderness lands managed by the National Park Service and BLM — though, in truth, Avi Kwa Ame is boundless. The designation will do more than prohibit solar or wind development. It will also protect the core cultural traditions that were empowered in Ward Valley, with the declaration including a commitment to co-stewardship between the Interior Department and tribal nations. “Because we have the history of that work, it was really a strong argument for how this could be mutually beneficial, not just to solidify that work, but to honor and respect all of the blood, sweat and tears that have gone into protecting this landscape,” said Ashley Hemmers, Fort Mojave tribal administrator.

TODAY, TRIBAL NATIONSare working with a federal government that is more receptive to tribal knowledge and co-stewardship of public lands than it was in the past. In the 1990s, in response to concerns that tribes were not thoroughly consulted, then-Interior Deputy Secretary John Garamendi told Fort Mojave tribal member and Ward Valley spokesperson Steve Lopez that “the discussions really need to happen between the state and the Department of the Interior.”

But not far from Ward Valley, efforts to exploit ancestral tribal land continue: Corporations want to mine gold on Conglomerate Mesa in California; lithium in Thacker Pass, Nevada; and copper in Oak Flat, Arizona, despite sustained opposition from tribes and their allies, and an administration that has prioritized tribal sovereignty. Existing laws have so far failed to provide reliable protection for these lands. Even places with designated protection from development are threatened by increased visitation; lax oversight leads to problems like the vandalism of petroglyphs. Today, “there’s more knowledge about the responsibility that the federal government has for tribal consultation on projects on public lands,” said Daniel Patterson, an ecologist and former BLM employee who supported the tribes at the standoff. But consultation is inconsistent across the agency. “It seems like that’s being decided more in the courts instead of where it should be decided, which is with Native nations.”

The success of the 1998 encampment hinged on relationship building, and on non-Native allies’ recognition of the tribes’ cultural and political sovereignty. A similar spirit is evident around Avi Kwa Ame today, owing to the same tribes. Other national monuments, including Bears Ears, have faced opposition from locals and state and federal politicians. But the boundaries for Avi Kwa Ame have the support of nearby towns, their congressional representatives and all federally recognized tribes in Arizona and Nevada. “We really — as a tribe — learned through (Ward Valley) how to critically engage multiple stakeholders for the overall good of the landscape and environment,” said Hemmers.

Or, as David Harper put it, “In Ward Valley, the people’s culture rose.”  

Anna V. Smith is an associate editor for High Country News. She has placed in the Native American Journalists Association’s Native Media Awards in the category of Best Coverage of Native America three times. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

Click the link to read the article on the American River website (Amy Souers Kober):

My little boys are growing up. My older one starts kindergarten next month. My little one is charging out of toddlerhood, becoming more independent by the day. Life moves so fast, and the best way I know to slow things down and treasure the moments is to get out on a river.

So I took the boys to Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge. It’s in the heart of Portland, not far from our house.

A little piece of wildness on the Willamette River. An easy urban escape. It was cloudy, a welcome break from the record heat and drought we’ve had this summer. The alders and cottonwoods smelled so good as we walked the shady trails.

Walking down to the river, we talked, free of distractions. At home I feel as if I’m always trying to do five things at once and conversations are constantly interrupted. But here, it’s just us. No chores or emails, just walking and chatting. Just being, together. My five year old reaches out to hold my hand, and my heart melts. How much longer until he’s too old, too cool, for this?

As we walk, I’m thinking about a recent New York Times article, HOW WALKING IN NATURE CHANGES THE BRAIN. The story looks at how spending time in natural spaces reduces anxiety, worry and stress.

For me, rivers are medicine. I know when I need a break, when I need to get out for a float, swim, paddle, or streamside hike. If walking in nature changes our brains, then spending time on rivers must deliver an even bigger bang for the buck, right? I’m thinking of multi-day river trips. I’m thinking of finding peace and connection, of open hearts and strengthened spirits. Healing waters. I’m remembering floating on my back down the Salmon, nights in the Grand Canyon, early morning kayaking on the Potomac…

My boys, racing for the river’s steep bank, bring me back to earth. I snap out of my reverie and take their hands. Together, we carefully approach the eroded edge. A sailboat is anchored here, and kayaks paddle by. We wave, and they wave back.

My five year old asks if he can get a kayak for his birthday.

I think that’s his best birthday present request yet. And I’m game. Any excuse to get us out here more often. For fun, of course. But also to test our own mini science experiment that nature, that rivers, really are fundamental to our health, well-being, and relationships. That they are essential to our happiness, to who we are.

John Tobin, National Radio Astronomy Observatory

Without water, life on Earth could not exist as it does today. Understanding the history of water in the universe is critical to understanding how planets like Earth come to be.

Astronomers typically refer to the journey water takes from its formation as individual molecules in space to its resting place on the surfaces of planets as “the water trail.” The trail starts in the interstellar medium with hydrogen and oxygen gas and ends with oceans and ice caps on planets, with icy moons orbiting gas giants and icy comets and asteroids that orbit stars. The beginnings and ends of this trail are easy to see, but the middle has remained a mystery.

I am an astronomer who studies the formation of stars and planets using observations from radio and infrared telescopes. In a new paper, my colleagues and I describe the first measurements ever made of this previously hidden middle part of the water trail and what these findings mean for the water found on planets like Earth.

How planets are formed

The formation of stars and planets is intertwined. The so-called “emptiness of space” – or the interstellar medium – in fact contains large amounts of gaseous hydrogen, smaller amounts of other gasses and grains of dust. Due to gravity, some pockets of the interstellar medium will become more dense as particles attract each other and form clouds. As the density of these clouds increases, atoms begin to collide more frequently and form larger molecules, including water that forms on dust grains and coats the dust in ice.

Stars begin to form when parts of the collapsing cloud reach a certain density and heat up enough to start fusing hydrogen atoms together. Since only a small fraction of the gas initially collapses into the newborn protostar, the rest of the gas and dust forms a flattened disk of material circling around the spinning, newborn star. Astronomers call this a proto-planetary disk.

As icy dust particles collide with each other inside a proto-planetary disk, they begin to clump together. The process continues and eventually forms the familiar objects of space like asteroids, comets, rocky planets like Earth and gas giants like Jupiter or Saturn.

Two theories for the source of water

There are two potential pathways that water in our solar system could have taken. The first, called chemical inheritance, is when the water molecules originally formed in the interstellar medium are delivered to proto-planetary disks and all the bodies they create without going through any changes.

The second theory is called chemical reset. In this process, the heat from the formation of the proto-planetary disk and newborn star breaks apart water molecules, which then reform once the proto-planetary disk cools.

To test these theories, astronomers like me look at the ratio between normal water and a special kind of water called semi-heavy water. Water is normally made of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. Semi-heavy water is made of one oxygen atom, one hydrogen atom and one atom of deuterium – a heavier isotope of hydrogen with an extra neutron in its nucleus.

The ratio of semi-heavy to normal water is a guiding light on the water trail – measuring the ratio can tell astronomers a lot about the source of water. Chemical models and experiments have shown that about 1,000 times more semi-heavy water will be produced in the cold interstellar medium than in the conditions of a protoplanetary disk.

This difference means that by measuring the ratio of semi-heavy to normal water in a place, astronomers can tell whether that water went through the chemical inheritance or chemical reset pathway.

Measuring water during the formation of a planet

Comets have a ratio of semi-heavy to normal water almost perfectly in line with chemical inheritance, meaning the water hasn’t undergone a major chemical change since it was first created in space. Earth’s ratio sits somewhere in between the inheritance and reset ratio, making it unclear where the water came from.

To truly determine where the water on planets comes from, astronomers needed to find a goldilocks proto-planetary disk – one that is just the right temperature and size to allow observations of water. Doing so has proved to be incredibly difficult. It is possible to detect semi-heavy and normal water when water is a gas; unfortunately for astronomers, the vast majority of proto-plantary disks are very cold and contain mostly ice, and it is nearly impossible to measure water ratios from ice at interstellar distances.

A breakthrough came in 2016, when my colleagues and I were studying proto-planetary disks around a rare type of young star called FU Orionis stars. Most young stars consume matter from the proto-planetary disks around them. FU Orionis stars are unique because they consume matter about 100 times faster than typical young stars and, as a result, emit hundreds of times more energy. Due to this higher energy output, the proto-planetary disks around FU Orionis stars are heated to much higher temperatures, turning ice into water vapor out to large distances from the star.

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, a powerful radio telescope in northern Chile, we discovered a large, warm proto-planetary disk around the Sunlike young star V883 Ori, about 1,300 light years from Earth in the constellation Orion.

V883 Ori emits 200 times more energy than the Sun, and my colleagues and I recognized that it was an ideal candidate to observe the semi-heavy to normal water ratio.

Completing the water trail

In 2021, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array took measurements of V883 Ori for six hours. The data revealed a strong signature of semi-heavy and normal water coming from V883 Ori’s proto-planetary disk. We measured the ratio of semi-heavy to normal water and found that the ratio was very similar to ratios found in comets as well as the ratios found in younger protostar systems.

These results fill in the gap of the water trail forging a direct link between water in the interstellar medium, protostars, proto-planetary disks and planets like Earth through the process of inheritance, not chemical reset.

The new results show definitively that a substantial portion of the water on Earth most likely formed billions of years ago, before the Sun had even ignited. Confirming this missing piece of water’s path through the universe offers clues to origins of water on Earth. Scientists have previously suggested that most water on Earth came from comets impacting the planet. The fact that Earth has less semi-heavy water than comets and V883 Ori, but more than chemical reset theory would produce, means that water on Earth likely came from more than one source.

John Tobin, Scientist, National Radio Astronomy Observatory

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

On March 3, 1923, President Warren G. Harding wielded the Antiquities Act to designate Hovenweep National Monument in southeastern Utah. The designation put a few hundred acres and a handful of Puebloan towers and other cultural sites under the auspices of the National Park Service, and was mainly aimed at protecting the sites from further looting and vandalism.

“Few of the mounds have escaped the hands of the destroyer,” T. Mitchell Pruden wrote of Hovenweep’s cultural sites in 1903. “Cattlemen, ranchmen, rural picnickers, and professional collectors have turned the ground well over and have taken out much pottery, breaking more, and strewing the ground with many crumbling bones.”

The protections that come with a national monument arrived a little late and covered far too little ground and too few sites. Still, we can be thankful that some of the most prominent structures were kept from further destruction. But regardless of the national monument status, or which federal agency manages it, Hovenweep is a special place — one of my favorites. No one describes it better than the late scholar, potter, architect, and activist Rina Swentzell, Tewa, of Santa Clara Pueblo:

“I think that Hovenweep is the most symbolic of places in the Southwest…Hovenweep give me a feeling similar to what I feel when I’m participating in ceremonies which require a tacit recognition of realities other than the blatantly visual. During those times I know the nature and energy of the bear, of rock, of the clouds, of the water. I become aware of energies outside myself, outside the human context. At Hovenweep, I slide into a place and begin to know the flowing, warm sandstone under my feet, the cool preciousness of the water, the void of the canyon, and the all covering sky. I want to be a part of the place.” — Rina Swentzell, Tewa architect, potter and scholar, Santa Clara Pueblo.

Click the link to read the article on the Writers on the Range website (Richard Knight):

High on a mesa where everyone can see it, a trophy house is going up in the northern Colorado valley where I live. Some of my neighbors hear that the house will be as big as 15,000 square feet. Others say it will take three years to complete. Whether that is valley gossip or truth, the house is now the center of everybody’s attention.

Until this happened, my valley seemed to offer much of the best of what Colorado has to offer, including views of a snow-capped mountain range, and spread out below, irrigated hayfields with black cows on tan rangeland. But now, right in the center of the valley, will be one person acting out a lack of consideration for others.

Gigantic trophy houses seem to signal, “I built here to see, but also to be seen.” It’s a jarring reminder that we in the New West are remaking the Old West in our own image, a job that apparently requires a drastic redoing of topography. These big homes seem to follow a pattern of complicated rooflines, lots of windows that reflect the light and “ego gates” at the beginning of driveways.

Most of us in this valley delight in what we’ve been able to see from our front door: Uninterrupted ridgelines, cliffs, and the rounded slopes that converge to make foothills, which then rise into mountains. Nature made these views, and we’ve been fortunate to have them in our lives every day.

But more and more, houses that resemble castles are sprouting on ridgelines and hilltops, here and all over the mountains. And sometimes it’s ordinary houses or trailers that get built on ridgelines, interrupting the natural flow of the land.

Where only a few years ago our eyes might find comfort in tracing a ridge’s backbone — wondering how it got to be named White Pine Mountain when no white pines grow there — now we look at manmade structures that irritate the eyes.

People who have lived in my valley for decades share a different style. Appreciating what a winter wind can do to steal warmth from inside a house, they looked for sheltered areas to build. They saw it made sense to build low, tucking a home against the south side of a hill or cliff.

Most yard lights were few and hard to see, as were their homes. But the new Western lifestyle broadcasts yard lights at night for all to see, just as the homes are conspicuously visible during the day.

In this newfangled West that has “ranched the view,” people apparently need to stand out to enjoy an amenity lifestyle. Will these new folk ever take time to appreciate the human and natural histories of the place they live in now, to show respect for the land and its natural beauty? Will they learn to be considerate of neighbors and not take away from the views that define where we live?

It’s shameful to think that just as we first moved into the West to exploit its valuable resources, we now exploit the last resource our region has to offer — its heart-stopping beauty.

There is some good news, because in many parts of the West we are learning how to sustainably log, graze, divert water and develop energy. I hope it’s not too late for us to also realize the value of fitting into the land as residents, to keep intact our ridgelines, mesas, mountains and valley floors. Once a house caps a hilltop, however, that view is irretrievable, gone forever.

I hope we can learn how to value homes that blend with the land in shape, color and location. Maybe a new generation of home builders, architects, and developers will lead the way in paying due respect to our region’s natural beauty.

But I’m afraid that it’s too late for our valley. The great writer Wallace Stegner told us that the task of Westerners was to build a society to match the scenery. From what I see, we’re not doing the job. 

Richard Knight is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit that hopes to inspire lively conversation about the West. He works at the intersection of land use and land health in the American West.

Jennie L. Durant, University of California, Davis

Honeybees, which pollinate one-third of the crops Americans eat, face many threats, including infectious diseases. On Jan. 4, 2023, a Georgia biotechnology company called Dalan Animal Health announced that it had received a conditional license from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for a vaccine designed to protect honeybees against American foulbrood, a highly destructive infection.

To receive a conditional license, which usually lasts for one year and is subject to further evaluation by the USDA, veterinary biological products must be shown to be pure, safe and reasonably likely to be effective. Dr. Jennie Durant, an agriculture researcher at the University of California, Davis, who specializes in honeybee health, explains why this vaccine is potentially an important step in ongoing efforts to protect pollinators.

1. What threat does this vaccine address?

The new bee vaccine, Paenibacillus Larvae Bacterin, aims to protect honeybees from American foulbrood. This highly destructive bacterial disease gets its name from the foul scent honeybee larvae exude when infected.

An outbreak of American foulbrood is effectively a death sentence for a bee colony and can economically devastate a beekeeping operation. The spores from the bacteria, Paenibacillus larvae, are highly transmissible and can remain virulent for decades after infection. https://www.youtube.com/embed/VENKKufzMAE?wmode=transparent&start=0 How American foulbrood affects honeybee colonies.

Once an outbreak occurs, beekeepers typically have to destroy any bee colonies that they know were infected to avoid spreading the disease. They also have to destroy the hive boxes the colonies were stored in and any equipment that may have touched infected colonies.

Beekeepers have used antibiotics preventively for decades to keep foulbrood in check and treat infected colonies. Often they mix the antibiotics with powdered sugar and sprinkle it inside the colony box. As often happens when antibiotics are overused, scientists and beekeepers are seeing antibiotic resistance and negative impacts on hive health, such as disruption of the helpful microbes that live in bees’ guts.

In 2017, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration began requiring a veterinarian’s prescription or feed directive to use antibiotics for foulbrood. While this regulatory change sought to address antibiotic resistance, it limited beekeepers’ access to antibiotics and their ability to treat foulbrood preventively. The vaccine would ideally provide a more sustainable solution.

2. How effectively does the vaccine prevent infection?

Studies are still analyzing its effectiveness. One published study demonstrated a 30% to 50% increase in resistance to American foulbrood in a vaccinated queen’s offspring.

While this might seem low, it’s important to put the results in context. Given how deadly and contagious American foulbrood is, researchers did not want to directly expose an outdoor hive to foulbrood with an unproven vaccine. Instead, they conducted lab studies where they exposed test hives to around 1,000 times the number of American foulbrood spores a colony would typically be exposed to in the field. Dalan, the manufacturer, has field trials planned for 2023.

3. How do you vaccinate honeybees?

It’s not done with tiny needles – beekeepers mix the vaccine into bee food. This approach exposes queen bees to inactive Paenibacillus larvae bacteria, which helps larvae hatched in the hive to resist infection.

This is not a mRNA vaccine, like the Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines. It’s a more traditional inactive vaccine like the one we use against polio. To understand how the vaccine works, it’s helpful to know what queen bees eat: a protein-rich substance called “royal jelly” that is secreted from glands on the heads of young worker bees.

When queen bees are shipped to a beekeeper, they are typically placed in a small cage with 50 to 200 worker bees that have been fed something called queen candy. This substance is often made with powdered sugar and corn syrup and has the consistency of sugar cookie dough or modeling clay. Worker bees consume the candy, produce royal jelly and feed it to the queen.

The vaccine’s delivery method uses this unique system. A beekeeper can mix the vaccine with the queen candy, which is then digested by worker bees. They produce royal jelly and feed it to the queen, who digests it and then transfers the vaccine to her ovaries. Once she is transferred to the hive and begins laying eggs, the larvae that hatch from those eggs have a heightened immunity to American foulbrood. https://www.youtube.com/embed/PcDF23HdlUY?wmode=transparent&start=0 The new vaccine takes advantage of the queen’s central role in the hive.

4. Who will use the vaccine?

According to representatives at Dalan, limited quantities of the vaccine should be available starting in spring 2023 to commercial beekeepers and bee producers, with the aim of supplying smaller-scale beekeepers and hobbyists in the future.

5. How long will a dose last?

Dalan is still researching the specifics. Its current understanding is that it will last as long as the queen bee can lay eggs. If she dies, is killed or is replaced, the beekeeper will have to purchase a new vaccinated queen.

6. Is this a big scientific advance?

Yes – it is the first vaccine for any insect in the U.S. and could help pave the way for new vaccines to treat other issues that have plagued the beekeeping industry for decades. Honeybees face many urgent threats, including Varroa mites, climate change and poor nutrition, which makes this vaccine an exciting new development.

Dalan is also working on a vaccine to protect bees against European foulbrood. This disease is less fatal than American foulbrood, but is still highly infectious. Beekeepers have been able to treat it with antibiotics but, as with American foulbrood, they are seeing signs of resistance.

Jennie L. Durant, Research Affiliate in Human Ecology, University of California, Davis

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Very cool that the house my grandfather built almost made it to 100. Post construction mods included digging out the crawl space for a convection coal furnace and plumbing for a wringer washer. Along with my brother I built a model train layout with a slot car course on the dirt banks around the north end of the basement.

I hope the builders leave the Catalpa (Gertie planted it, generations used the bean pods for cops and robbers battles) and the Blue spruce tree.

I actually stole the Blue spruce as a seedling from Rocky Mountain National Park, back when I was a Cub Scout. My mother worried all the way back to Denver about the rangers busting us, but she really wanted a Blue spruce in the yard. The seedling had 3 branches when I dug it up but it soon crowded out the front yard rose garden.

Click the link to read the obituary on the Rolling Stone website (Jon Dolan). Here’s an excerpt:

Croz was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of both the Byrds and Crosby, Stills, and Nash

Crosby was a founding member of the Byrds, playing guitar and contributing harmony vocals to many of their most enduring songs, including “Eight Miles High,” “So You Want to Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” and “Turn! Turn! Turn!” Shortly after being forced out of the group due to personality conflicts with frontman Roger McGuinn, he formed the supergroup Crosby, Stills, and Nash with Buffalo Springfield’s Stephen Stills and Graham Nash of the Hollies. The trio – which became a quartet in 1969 when Neil Young joined their ranks – played a major role in the development of folk-rock, country-rock and the emergent “California sound” that dominated rock radio throughout the mid-Seventies. Croz wrote many of their most beloved tunes, including “Almost Cut My Hair,” “Long Time Gone” and “Deja Vu.”

[…]

“David was fearless in life and in music” — Graham Nash

[…]

In 1964, he joined a band called the Jet Set, consisting of Roger McGuinn and Gene Clark. They changed their name to the Beefeaters, and then the Byrds. Crosby’s gorgeous harmonizing, heard on hits like the Bob Dylan cover “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” was an essential component in the Byrds’ folk-rock sound…Crosby and Stephen Stills, who had recently disbanded Buffalo Springfield, began writing songs together in 1968. They were soon joined by Nash, who had just quit the Hollies, and the trio performed together for the first time at the L.A. home of Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas. Their self-titled 1969 debut was a hit, producing the classic single “Suite: Judy Blues Eyes,” about Judy Collins…Adding Neil Young later that year, the quartet played their second gig at Woodstock, in front of nearly 500,000 people, announcing the arrival of one of rock’s first — and greatest — supergroups.

Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):

$5 million in projects an important step in reimagining Colorado’s highways to accommodate wildlife

Although never a big-game hunter, I have killed three deer in Colorado and likely gave a bull elk a terrific headache. That’s not to mention my carnage among rabbits and other smaller critters.

Cars were my weapon, not guns.

Driving at dusk or into the darkened night will inevitably produce close brushes with wildlife, large and small, on many roads and highways. Even daylight has its dangers.

Colorado is now redefining that risky, ragged edge between wildlife habitat and the high-speed travel that we take for granted. State legislators delivered a message last year when appropriating $5 million for wildlife connectivity involving highways in high-priority areas.

In late December, state agencies identified seven locations where that money will be spent. They range from Interstate 25 south of Colorado Springs to Highway 13 north of Craig near where it enters Wyoming. New fencing and radar technology will be installed. Highway 550 north of Ridgway will get an underpass.

The pot wasn’t deep enough to produce overpasses such as two that cross Highway 9 between Silverthorne and Kremmling or one between Pagosa Springs and Durango. But $750,000 as allocated to design work for crossings of I-25 near Raton Pass with a like amount for design of an I-70 crossing near Vail Pass.

In this and other ways, Colorado can better vie for a slice of the $350 million allocated by Congress in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act for improved wildlife connectivity.

This is on top of the overpass of I-25 planned for the segment between Castle Rock and Monument to complement the four underpasses installed in the widening project of recent years.

We are pivoting in how we regard roads and wildlife habitat. We have long been driven to protect human lives and our property by reducing collisions. Our perspectives have broadened. Human safety still matters, but so do the lives of critters.

Before, says Tony Cady, a planning and environmental manager for the Colorado Department of Transportation, highway safety for people was the highest priority —and conservation for wildlife a distant second. “Now we’re seeing much more of a wedding or marriage of those tow values, safety and conservation.”

Biologists in the 1990s began emphasizing highways as home wreckers. Expanding road networks, they said, was creating islands of wildlife habitat. Fragmented habitat leads to reduced gene pools and, at the extreme, to the threat of extinction of species in some areas, called extirpation.

I-70 became the marquee for this. Wildlife biologists began calling it the “Berlin Wall to Wildlife.” The aptness of that phrase was vividly illustrated in 1999 when a transplanted lynx released just months before tried to cross I-70 near Vail Pass. It was smacked dead.

With that graphic image in mind, wildlife biologists held an international competition in 2011 involving I-70. The goal, at least partially realized, was to discover less costly materials and designs.

Colorado’s pace has quickened since a 2014 study documenting the decline of Western Slope mule deer populations. Also helpful was creation of the Colorado Wildlife and Transportation Alliance, a consortium of the state’s transportation and wildlife agencies along with federal land agencies and non-profit wildlife groups.

In 2019 an incoming Gov. Polis issued an executive order to state agencies directing them to work together to solve road ecology problems.

Two wildlife overpasses along with underpasses and fencing north of Silverthorne completed in 2017 have been valuable examples. Studies showed a 90% reduction in collisions.

“An 80% to 90% reduction right off the bat is pretty typical for these structures,” says Cady

Beginning in 2016 for the western half of the state, data have been crunched to delineate the state’s 5% highest priority road segments. These data may give Colorado a leg up on access to federal funds.

The two studies found 48 high-priority segments in western Colorado and 90 in eastern Colorado, reports Michelle Cowardin, a wildlife biologist for Colorado Parks and Wildlife. The Craig and Meeker areas have lots of high priority roads, but so is much of I-76 between Fort Morgan to Julesburg.

Some jurisdictions are diving deeper. Eagle County has completed a study of wildlife connectivity, and Pitkin County has secured funding for a first-step study that will identify highest-priority locations in the Roaring Fork and Crystal River valleys.

These new studies attest to a shift in public attitudes and a shift within the state agencies. Cady says that highway engineers still think about human safety first, but there has also been a shift.

“I think the mindset has shifted in the last four or five years. We are not having to justify the inclusion of wildlife components in projects. It’s more understood that these are necessary components.”

To be clear, remediation in Colorado is mostly done as part of road projects. The work on Highway 160 between Pagosa and Durango, for example, came in at $11 million, of which only $3.5 million went to the overpass and also an underpass as well as other measures with wildlife in mind.

Projects also tend to have multiple funding sources. For example, the Southern Ute Tribe provided $1.5 million for that project near Pagosa. The project on Highway 9 in Middle Park included $4 million from a local rancher.

Rob Ament of Montana State University’s Western Transportation Institute says wildlife connectivity is becoming institutionalized in how we think about transportation corridors. Instead of motivated solely to minimize risk to humans, there’s growing appreciation of the needs of wildlife, too.

There’s solely motivation an extravagance, he says, crossings are becoming a cost of doing business.

This is happening internationally, too. “My world is just exploding,” he said while reciting crossings for elephants in Bangladesh, tigers in Thailand and work for other species in Argentina, Nepal, and Mongolia.

Click the link to read the obituary on The New York Times website (Jim Farber). Here’s an excerpt:

Jeff Beck, one of the most skilled, admired and influential guitarists in rock history, died on Tuesday in a hospital near his home at Riverhall, a rural estate in southern England. He was 78…

In 1965, when he joined the Yardbirds to replace another guitar hero, Eric Clapton, the group was already one of the defining acts in Britain’s growing electric blues movement. But his stinging licks and darting leads on songs like “Shapes of Things” and “Over Under Sideways Down” added an expansive element to the music that helped signal the emerging psychedelic rock revolution…Three years later, when Mr. Beck formed his own band, later known as the Jeff Beck Group — along with Rod Stewart, a little-known singer at the time, and the equally obscure Ron Wood on bass — the weight of the music created an early template for heavy metal…he earned eight gold albums over more than six decades. He also amassed seven Grammys, six in the category of best rock instrumental performance and one for best pop collaboration with vocals. He was inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame twice, as part of the Yardbirds in 1992 and as a solo star in 2009…

He became attracted to electric guitar after hearing Les Paul’s work and was later drawn to the work of Cliff Gallup, lead guitarist for Gene Vincent’s band, and the British player Lonnie Mack. He became entranced not only by the sound of the guitar but also by its mechanics.

“At the age of 13, I built two or three of my own guitars,” Mr. Beck wrote in an essay for a book about his career published in 2016 titled “Beck 01: Hot Rods and Rock & Roll.” “It was fun just to look at it and hold it. I knew where I was headed.”

Click the link to read the article on the Colorado State Forest Service website:

Every year, trees grow two annual rings. In the spring, the usually wider and thinner-walled layer, called springwood, grows. In the summer, a thicker-walled layer, called summerwood, develops. Annual rings are typical in temperate forest trees.

Tree Physiology

• A tree is a tall plant with woody tissue. Trees gather light for photosynthesis through their leaves; this process creates “food” for the tree.
• Most of a tree trunk is dead tissue and serves only to support the weight of the tree crown. The outside layers of the tree trunk are the only living portion. The cambium produces new wood and new bark.
• The band of tissue outside of the cambium is the phloem. Phloem transports new materials (the sugars created from photosynthesis) from the crown to the roots. Dead phloem tissue becomes the bark of a tree.
• The band of tissue just inside of the cambium is the xylem, which transports water from the roots to the crown. Dead xylem tissue forms the heartwood, or the wood we use for many different purposes.
• Every year, trees grow two annual rings. In the spring, usually a wider and thinner-walled layer called springwood forms. In the summer, a thicker-walled layer, called summerwood, develops. Annual rings are typical in temperate forest trees.

Parts of a Tree

• Leaves – broadleaf or needles; primary location for photosynthesis and production of hormones and other chemicals.
• Twigs and Branches – support structures for leaves, flowers and fruits.
• Crown – the upper part of the tree composed of leaves, twigs, branches, flowers and fruit.
• Flowers – the site of reproduction. Trees can be male, female or both. Conifers, however, do not have petals and typical flower structures.
• Fruits and Seeds – all trees have seeds, most are inside of the fruit.
• Trunk – generally a single “stem,” but can be multiple-stemmed. Main functions are materials transport and support.
• Bark – main function is to protect the living tissue called cambium from damage.
• Roots – two main functions: (1) collect nutrients and water and (2) anchor the tree.

Trees Grow:

• At the twig tips (apical meristem)
• At the root tips (root apical meristem)
• At the cambium (old xylem cells become heartwood, old phloem cells become bark)

Why do Leaves Change Color in the Fall?

Chlorophyll production goes down as night length increases (fall and winter). The green colors are no longer reflected and other chemicals in the leaf become dominant, revealing red and yellow pigments. Weather during the period of declining chlorophyll production influences intensity of colors.

• Warm fall weather generally reduces color quality.
• Moist soils following a good growing season contribute to greater color intensity.
• A few warm, sunny days and cool nights increase brilliance.
• Drought usually results in poorer displays.

Leaves fall in autumn as part of a tree’s preparation for winter dormancy. Because it is too cold for water to remain in the plant tissues (freezing water would rupture cells in the tree), and because the water in the soil is frozen and cannot be absorbed, trees shut down major processes in the cold months. Deciduous trees drop their leaves; conifers have strategies to maintain their needles during the winter.

Rosalyn R. LaPier, The University of Montana

On the day of winter solstice, many Native American communities will hold religious ceremonies or community events.

The winter solstice is the day of the year when the Northern Hemisphere has the fewest hours of sunlight and the Southern Hemisphere has the most. For indigenous peoples, it has been a time to honor their ancient sun deity. They passed their knowledge down to successive generations through complex stories and ritual practices.

As a scholar of the environmental and Native American religion, I believe, there is much to learn from ancient religious practices.

Ancient architecture

For decades, scholars have studied the astronomical observations that ancient indigenous people made and sought to understand their meaning.

One such place was at Cahokia, near the Mississippi River in what is now Illinois across from St. Louis.

In Cahokia, indigenous people built numerous temple pyramids or mounds, similar to the structures built by the Aztecs in Mexico, over a thousand years ago. Among their constructions, what most stands out is an intriguing structure made up of wooden posts arranged in a circle, known today as “Woodhenge.”

To understand the purpose of Woodhenge, scientists watched the sun rise from this structure on winter solstice. What they found was telling: The sun aligned with both Woodhenge and the top of a temple mound – a temple built on top of a pyramid with a flat top – in the distance. They also found that the sun aligns with a different temple mound on summer solstice.

Archaeological evidence suggests that the people of Cahokia venerated the sun as a deity. Scholars believe that ancient indigenous societies observed the solar system carefully and wove that knowledge into their architecture. https://www.youtube.com/embed/on6JybDqLRc?wmode=transparent&start=0 Clip from ‘Cahokia’s Celestial Calendar (Woodhenge)’ episode of PBS’ ‘Native America.’

Scientists have speculated that the Cahokia held rituals to honor the sun as a giver of life and for the new agricultural year.

Complex understandings

Zuni Pueblo is a contemporary example of indigenous people with an agricultural society in western New Mexico. They grow corn, beans, squash, sunflowers and more. Each year they hold annual harvest festivals and numerous religious ceremonies, including at the winter solstice.

At the time of the winter solstice they hold a multiday celebration, known as the Shalako festival. The days for the celebration are selected by the religious leaders. The Zuni are intensely private, and most events are not for public viewing.

But what is shared with the public is near the end of the ceremony, when six Zuni men dress up and embody the spirit of giant bird deities. These men carry the Zuni prayers for rain “to all the corners of the earth.” The Zuni deities are believed to provide “blessings” and “balance” for the coming seasons and agricultural year.

As religion scholar Tisa Wenger writes, “The Zuni believe their ceremonies are necessary not just for the well-being of the tribe but for “the entire world.”

Winter games

Not all indigenous peoples ritualized the winter solstice with a ceremony. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t find other ways to celebrate.

The Blackfeet tribe in Montana, where I am a member, historically kept a calendar of astronomical events. They marked the time of the winter solstice and the “return” of the sun or “Naatosi” on its annual journey. They also faced their tipis – or portable conical tents – east toward the rising sun.

They rarely held large religious gatherings in the winter. Instead the Blackfeet viewed the time of the winter solstice as a time for games and community dances. As a child, my grandmother enjoyed attending community dances at the time of the winter solstice. She remembered that each community held their own gatherings, with unique drumming, singing and dance styles.

Later, in my own research, I learned that the Blackfeet moved their dances and ceremonies during the early reservation years from times on their religious calendar to times acceptable to the U.S. government. The dances held at the time of the solstice were moved to Christmas Day or to New Year’s Eve.

Today, my family still spends the darkest days of winter playing card games and attending the local community dances, much like my grandmother did.

Although some winter solstice traditions have changed over time, they are still a reminder of indigenous peoples understanding of the intricate workings of the solar system. Or as the Zuni Pueblo’s rituals for all peoples of the earth demonstrate – of an ancient understanding of the interconnectedness of the world.

Rosalyn R. LaPier, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, The University of Montana

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Thanks dad for saving the whole damn thing.

Click the link to read the obit on The New York Times website (Jim Farber). Here’s an excerpt:

As a singer, songwriter and keyboardist, she was a prolific force behind one of the most popular rock bands of the last 50 years...

Ms. McVie’s commercial potency, which hit a high point in the 1970s and ’80s, was on full display on Fleetwood Mac’s “Greatest Hits” anthology, released in 1988, which sold more than eight million copies: She either wrote or co-wrote half of its 16 tracks. Her tally doubled that of the next most prolific member of the band’s trio of singer-songwriters, Stevie Nicks. (The third, Lindsey Buckingham, scored three major Billboard chart-makers on that collection.) The most popular songs Ms. McVie wrote favored bouncing beats and lively melodies, numbers like “Say You Love Me” (which grazed Billboard’s Top 10), “You Make Loving Fun” (which just broke it), “Hold Me” (No. 4) and “Don’t Stop” (her top smash, which crested at No. 3). But she could also connect with elegant ballads, like “Over My Head” (No. 20) and “Little Lies” (which cracked the publication’s Top Five in 1987)…

All those songs had cleanly defined, easily sung melodies, with hints of soul and blues at the core. Her compositions had a simplicity that mirrored their construction. “I don’t struggle over my songs,” Ms. McVie (pronounced mc-VEE) told Rolling Stone in 1977. “I write them quickly.”

In just half an hour, she wrote one of the band’s most beloved songs, “Songbird,” a sensitive ballad that for years served as the band’s closing encore in concert. In 2019, the band’s leader, Mick Fleetwood, told New Musical Express that “Songbird” is the piece he wanted played at his funeral, “to send me off fluttering.” Ms. McVie’s lyrics often captured the more intoxicating aspects of romance. “I’m definitely not a pessimist,” she told Bob Brunning, the author of the 2004 book “The Fleetwood Mac Story: Rumours and Lies.” “I’m basically a love song writer.” At the same time, her words accounted for the yearning and disappointments that can lurk below an exciting surface. “I’m good at pathos,” she told Mojo magazine in 2017. “I write about romantic despair a lot, but with a positive spin.”