Green Thought Thursdays: Pumpkins

Once a week, I am offering up a tip or action or idea that we can all engage with to work towards living in ways that allow for more health and wellbeing for all aspects of the planet. Last week we talked about house plants.

This week the green thought is about pumpkins (in honor of Halloween!).

A collection of lighted Jack-o-lanterns ready for Halloween. Photo: Merriam-Webster.com

Growing pumpkins is a big deal in the USA. Over a billion pounds of pumpkin is grown each year. A lot of these end up canned as pie filling, and a lot become jack-o-lanterns for Halloween. Growing all these pumpkins has some serious implications on the environment. One is the use of pesticides. Since many insects and fungi like pumpkins, growers use quite a bit of pesticide to prevent infestations. Transporting food is another issue. Moving pumpkins around the world means the burning of quite a bit of fossil fuels. A third issue is the decomposition of jack-o-lanterns once Halloween has passed. The majority of the pumpkins that are carved into jack-o-lanterns end up in landfill after Halloween. As they decompose in landfills, they contribute to the release of methane which is a powerful greenhouse gas. All of these issues raise problems that we should all be aware of when carving pumpkins this Halloween.

Luckily, these problems have solutions! Buy organic pumpkins. Buy pumpkins that were grown close to where you live. Eat the pumpkin flesh and seeds. Compost the pumpkin or simply bury it in the garden. All of these actions reduce the environmental impacts of pumpkins and allow for a greener, healthier Halloween for all of us and the planet as well.

What do you think of these thoughts and the solution? Is this a step you will take? Do you have any other solution ideas?

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Green Thought Thursdays: House Plants

Once a week, I am offering up a tip or action or idea that we can all engage with to work towards living in ways that allow for more health and wellbeing for all aspects of the planet. Last week we talked about the 30-wears rule.

This week the green thought is about house plants.

Air pollution is a big problem that impacts the health of just about every living creature on earth, including humans. Car exhaust, as just one example, includes soot, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds (a previous Green Thought Thursday touched on VOCs), and small amounts of heavy metals. These are all unhealthy for most living organisms to absorb. In 2018, the World Health Organization found that nearly 91% of the human population of the world lives in areas where the level of airborne pollutants is above healthy levels (Health Effects Institute 2018).

Indoor plants can be grown at home or in the office such as around these cubicles. Photo Credit: Wiki Nursery Live

One partial solution is to grow house plants. Adding plants to your indoor spaces can have lots of great benefits. Different species of plant can absorb certain pollutants in the air and degrade or modify them to make them less toxic. Two specific examples are palms that filter out acetone, xylene, and toluene; and Philodendrons that remove formaldehyde. Indoor plants can also increase humidity which as health benefits such as reducing dry skin, reducing eye irritation, improving throat and airway health, and many more. There are also mental health benefits to being surrounded by living plants. Research has shown that stress and depression rates are lower among people who work and live with plants in their common spaces than in people with no living organisms in close proximity. Growing indoor plants is awesome!

What do you think of these thoughts and the solution? Is this a step you will take? Do you have any other solution ideas?

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Watching a Douglas’s Squirrel Harvester

A Douglas’s Squirrel sitting on a branch. Photo: National Park Service

In his “Wilderness Essays,” John Muir said that the Douglas’s Squirrel “…is the most influential of the Sierra animals, quick mountain vigor and valor condensed, purely wild…”

And a couple of weeks ago, while my family and I camped in Kings Canyon National Park, I got to see how some of this influence is wielded.

In the early morning, I spent a bit of time wandering through the forest around the campground. As I was exploring, and watching Mountain Chickadees and Brown Creepers and Williamson’s Sapsuckers and White-headed Woodpeckers, I heard a thud of something hitting the ground close to me. I paused and then heard another thud. I looked up and high above my head I saw a Douglas’s Squirrel (Tamiasciurus douglasii) moving through the branches of a pine tree.

The forests of Kings Canyon National Park are filled with Douglas’s Squirrels! Photo: Aaron N.K. Haiman

The squirrel was moving from branch to branch checking the various cones. It would climb out to the tips of the branches where the cones grow and carefully and quickly assess each cone to come to a decision on whether or not it was ready to be harvested. If it was ripe enough, the squirrel nibbled away any pine needles blocking the base of the cone, and would then chew through the stem of the cone.

Once it had the cone off the branch, the cone would fall from the squirrel’s mouth and plummet to the ground. At first, I thought that the squirrel had accidently dropped the cone. However, after watching this process repeat a couple of times, I realized the squirrel was intentionally dropping the cones, and attentively watching where they fell. After observing the fall of a cone, the squirrel would scamper to the next cone.

I watched this process repeat again and again for over forty-five minutes. The squirrel was very strategic in how it went about its harvest. It was clearly working its way down the tree from highest branch to lowest. It would run out a branch to check the cones on it, harvest the cones that it wanted, then run back towards the trunk. Then it would jump to the next lowest branch and repeat the check-and-harvest process. In this way, it systematically checked every branch on the tree.

In the time I spent watching it, this squirrel must have harvested and dropped at least twenty cones. In that time, it also took a break for a few minutes to stretch out on a branch and rest, it took a few shorter breaks to groom its fur, and it spent a bit of time calling out into the forest. I figured that once the squirrel had enough food down on the ground, it would come down and feast, but it never did. I had to carry on with my day, so I left the Douglas’s Squirrel to it’s.

When I returned home, I read up a bit on this harvesting behavior, and it turns out that my assumption that the squirrel would eat the fallen cones was wrong. Douglas’s Squirrels do harvest large numbers of cones, but they are for winter storage! Once the squirrel I was watching was done harvesting cones, it was probably going to come down to ground level and begin hiding all those cones away in various locations so that the squirrel can come back and dig them out once the snow is covering the ground and other food sources are scare.

Forests filled with, and shaped by, Douglas’s Squirrels. Photo: Aaron N.K. Haiman

And this is where a big chunk of that influence comes in because the squirrels never make it back to eat every cone that they stash. These uneaten cones, and the seeds they contain, are where new trees sprout, so by hiding cones and then leaving them, these squirrels are shaping the forest of the future! That is some serious influence!

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Green Thought Thursdays: The 30-Wears Rule

Once a week, I am offering up a tip or action or idea that we can all engage with to work towards living in ways that allow for more health and wellbeing for all aspects of the planet. Last week we talked about Low-VOC Paints.

This week the green thought is about the 30-Wears Rule.

When buying clothing, ask if an will be used 30+ times. Photo: Ecobnb

Clothing uses a lot of resources to make and transport. And that is not where the issues with clothing ends because once purchased, those clothing items are often not used all that much! On average, an article of clothing is worn seven times before being discarded. That results in over 16 million tons of fabric being thrown away around the world every year. That is a huge environmental impact!

One solution is to follow the 30-wear rule. Before purchasing an item of clothing, we can all ask ourselves if we will wear the item 30 times or more. If the answer is 100% yes, that item might be a good buy. But if the answer is anything less than 100% yes, we should all choose to not buy the item. And when we do decide to buy something, we all then have the responsibility to follow through and actually wear the item 30 or more times. This will help reduce waste, and also tend to slow clothing production which both will help the environment.

What do you think of these thoughts and the solution? Is this a step you will take? Do you have any other solution ideas?

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Green Thought Thursdays: Low-VOC Paints

Once a week, I am offering up a tip or action or idea that we can all engage with to work towards living in ways that allow for more health and wellbeing for all aspects of the planet. Last week we talked about carpooling.

This week the green thought is about low-VOC paints.

Painting is a ton of fun and can really change the feel of a room, but more happens when any of us paint something than a change in color. As paint dries, scintillating as that is to watch, it releases a whole suite of different chemicals into the air. That smell of fresh paint is a result of those chemicals drifting around in the air. These chemicals are all grouped under the label Volatile Organic Compounds or VOCs. The problem with VOCs is that they contribute to fine particulate pollution in the air, and also cause health impacts in humans (and likely in other animals as well) including eye irritation, headaches, nose and throat irritation, nausea, loss of coordination, kidney damage, and central nervous system issues among others.

Some cans of low-VOC paint of various colors. Photo: Stelzer Painting

One solution is to buy and use low-VOC, or zero-VOC, paints. Some paints are made with chemicals and materials such that they release relatively low levels of VOCs. This means that the paints are likely to have fewer impacts on the health of us humans, and also have less of a negative impact on the environment.

What do you think of these thoughts and the solution? Is this a step you will take? Do you have any other solution ideas?

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