Every now and again, an invention comes along that is so good, so elegant and so universally useful, it is hard to imagine life without it. Yet there was a day before—about 6,000 years ago—when there was no wheel. Then, of course, the day came. And all across the Neolithic world, people who saw a wheel for the first time grunted, "Yeah, that's better," and started making them.The future on a roll.

Tech is about insight. It goes beyond the "aha" of understanding how things work to the spark and sparkle of seeing how else they might work. A sense of play and humor help, liberating box-bound "what is" thinking for a considerably more fun, imagination-fueled "what might be" point of view (see Montessori and Maker Faires). The wheel? If not from the mind of a child, then clearly from the mind of someone in close touch with his / her inner child (which might not have been that difficult given a Neoltithic life expectancy of about 20 years).

Tech is also about connection. Inventions just don't survive long in isolation. Not only is it a matter of sharing ideas, but of mixing and matching them to in ways that lead to the new discoveries. "Iteration" is just "tech-speak" for evolution. Grow, change, develop, adapt...lather, rinse, repeat.

Which is a round-about way of sharing our favorite new wheel here at TrackerNews: InSTEDD's Reporting Wheel (disclosure: the TrackerNews project was incubated at InSTEDD).

Described as "IT without software," the wheel—actually three circular pieces of cardboard or plastic with a grommet in the center—was developed to help health workers in Southeast Asia more accurately report data.

Although the InSTEDD team (special hat tip to Nico di Tada and Eduardo Jezierski) had developed some pretty nifty software called Geochat for SMS reporting, and done their homework in the field to come up with a syntax to codify disease reporting, the logistics of texting turned out to be a deal-breaking stumbling block. In the rural areas of Cambodia and Thailand:

• Most people do not know how to send SMS.
• Some of them do not know how to read an incoming SMS.
• Support for Khmer and Thai characters is not common in the handsets and carriers most people use.
• Even if there is support for the characters, writing SMS using them is much more difficult than writing in English due to the amount of letters in the alphabet.

These posed a huge barrier to solve even before the reports could be collected.

This wasn't only a setback for local public health, but also for global health efforts. The region is often among the first to see the emergence of new, deadly strains of influenza. Early reporting can mean the difference between a contained local outbreak and a global pandemic.

The answer wasn't to be found adding more bits, bytes or bandwidth, but in understanding that the the bits, byte and bandwidth were about "channel," not reporting.

What if we decouple the process of structuring the report from the channel through it was sent? If you ask someone to send a telegraph, he does not need to know Morse code. In the same way, we could allow health workers to create the report outside the constraints of the tool being used to transmit it.

Brilliant. Each of the wheel's three levels focus on a different question: for example, date, disease and number of cases. The wheel itself is printed so that as answers are slotted in, they correspond to error-proof three-digit codes printed on the outer rim.

The codes for each reported value are selected in a way that not only allow the dectection of errrors in the typing, but also enables the detection of the kind of wheel used to report. With the method we developed, a total of more than 600k different wheels can be created and each can be uniquely identified with no additional information—only the 9-digit number reported is required. That means the same reporting hotline can be used to receive report from a wide variety of sources.

The wheel: 6,000 years and still astonishing.

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RELATED:

• IT Without Software, InSTEDD

• InSTEDD videos

• iLabs: Community, Connection and a Culture of Innovation: a conversation with InSTEDD's CTO Eduardo Jezierski, TrackerNews Editor's blog

— J.A. Ginsburg, TrackerNews, Editor's Blog @TrackerNews

At TrackerNews, we celebrate the clever solution, which is why Inventables—"the innovators' hardware store"— is such a favorite. From fish leather, illuminating resins and non-toxic decorative wood composite to hand-moldable plastic and light reflecting glass cloth, a wander through the company's website is at once an uplifting confirmation of human ingenuity and an homage of sorts to the wacky, though always useful, inventions of Ron "Pocket Fisherman" Popeil.

From the sublime to the superficially silly, prototype-size samples are for sale, priced from under ten to several hundred dollars. This is quite a radical departure from the company's original business model, which targeted Fortune 500 companies, offering vetted selections of material goodness designed to inspire R&D departments. Although this "jelly of the month" approach—as CEO Zack Kaplan has described it—was financially successful, the slow pace of corporate innovation was personally frustrating. So, much to the shock of his board, Kaplan traded in lucrative exclusivity for mass availability in an effort to attract smaller, and presumably more nimble, inventors and level the creative playing field.

Inventables also makes money as a broker, connecting customers directly to suppliers when larger quantities are required.

But clearly mission is the driver: Kaplan and crew really really want to how these materials might be used. Along with co-sponsor IDSA Chicago, the company just launched the first of what will likely be many "Rebuildables" competitions.

The inaugural challenge:

• Create a product that utilizes hand-moldable plastic while being:

• Beautiful: the product should look professional.

• Functional: the final product cannot be merely ornamental. It has to do something.

• Easily recreatable: instructions for building your product must be posted online.

• Appealing to a high school or college student: We hope to inspire building among the age group.

In addition to imaginative design, teams also have to show some entrepreneurial spunk. Submissions must be posted on crowd-funding website, Kickstarter. Winners will be announced in June.

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MATERIAL GOOD

Last summer, Poptech, an "innovation network" known primarily for its annual conference, held its first "Ecomaterials Lab," bringing together more than three dozen scientists, designers and industry professionals tasked with developing a global and national materials strategy.

This is no small undertaking. While most of us don't give much thought to the complex and often fraught supply chains embodied in what we wear, use and eat, everything—whether a pair of shoes, a cotton t-shirt, a smart phone or a steak dinner—has a story, many of which turn out to be fairly troubling.

The Poptech report starts off with a barrage of startling statistics:

In the past 50 years, humans have consumed more resources than in all previous history.

• The U.S. consumed 57% more materials in the year 2000 than in 1975; the global increase was even higher.

•  With less than 5% of the world’s population, the U.S. was responsible for about one-third of the world’s total materials consumption from 1970-1995. The average American consumes more than 46,000 pounds of materials in a year.

• That is the equivalent of 23 full dump trucks worth of materials for every man, woman, and child in the country.

• In 1900, 41% of the materials used in the U.S. were renewable (e.g., agricultural, fishery, and forestry products); by 1995, only 6% of materials consumed were renewable. The majority of materials now consumed in the U.S. are nonrenewable, including metals, minerals, and fossil fuel-derived products.

• Our reliance on materials as fundamental ingredients in the manufactured products used in the US— including cell phones, flat- screen monitors, paint, and toothpaste—requires the extraction of more than 25,000 pounds of new nonfuel minerals per capita each year

In short, we are running out of stuff for our stuff.

If that were not enough, the poisonous cherry on top of this sad little sundae is that we are  fouling the environment, and ourselves, in the process. Deforestation, soil erosion, polluted water, energy-intense manufacturing—how we make what we make makes a difference.

Action is critical, as these trends are accelerating at a geometric, not arithmetic rate: projections suggest that between 2000 and 2050, world population will grow by 50%, global economic activity will grow 500%, and global energy and materials use will grow 300%.

It seems clear that, to avoid a future of disruption, exhaustion, or collapse, we need a global and national materials strategy that helps humanity live lightly upon the Earth. Key to that strategy will be redesigning materials and materials streams for efficiency, longevity, reuse, safety and biodegradability. It will pose new questions: can a required material property be obtained with less environmental load? How can materials (and products) be designed to improve recyclability? How can maximum performance be acquired with least consumption of resources? And ultimately, how can we decouple wealth and consumption?

There are few easy answers and a lot of hard questions. What, for example, qualifies as an ecomaterial? Genetically modified crops may be more efficient in terms of water use, but raise thorny ethical issues. Scalability is another big problem. Even recycling isn't always an obvious slam / dunk. Polyester can be recycled but the process may release a toxic byproduct.

John Warner, co-author of “Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice," and Ecomaterials Lab participant, cuts right to the chase: "Instead of relying on exposure controls, we need to make the molecules safer in the first place."

Piece of (biodegradable) cake.

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RELATED

• The Story of Stuff Project (video)

• George Carlin Talks About "Stuff" (video)

• TEDxWindyCity - Zach Kaplan (video)

• Tom Waits: "Step Right Up" (video)

— J.A. Ginsburg TrackerNews, Editor's Blog, @TrackerNews

Wasps. The very picture of lethal efficiency. Nothing warm, fuzzy, buzzing or bumbling here. It's all sleek lines, skinny waists and hypodermic stingers.

I spent the last few days watching a paper wasp—the kind of wasp you think of when you think "wasp"—that had become trapped by the closing of a window. For hours on end, she patrolled the surface of the screen looking for an exit—a sight at once so riveting and awful, I planned to set her free that night when she grew drowsy enough to capture in a glass. Darn, though, if she didn't crawl up into the most inaccessible spot. The following day, a second wasp appeared, and then a nascent hive spotted wedged into the thin groove of the window frame. So much for our social-animal-to-social-animal solidarity. The clock was ticking in the eggs of that tiny perfect hive, just one inch across. How many hours, minutes left?

I returned at sunset, armed with the eco-friendliest collection of killer chemicals I could find, determined to protect my turf, but the two insects had somehow managed to escape. I opened the window, sent a few spritzes into the air to discourage a return and zapped the nursery.

The point between awe and horror turns out to be needle sharp, venom-filled and NIMBY-driven.

So who would want to invite wasps into a bedroom—into an actual bed? Meet Glen Rainsand and Joe Lewis, a couple of scientists in Georgia for whom wasps are Nature's go-to trouble-spotters. While the rest of us are focused on the back end threat, these two have been studying the Hymenopteran talents up front. Wasps, it turns out, have an excellent sense of smell. And they're trainable.

Their olfactory system – the wasp’s nose, if you will – rivals that of a dog and can detect certain odors within five minutes. (A bloodhound, meanwhile, takes six months and $15,000 to fine-tune its sniff-ability.)

The half-inch long, black wasps can be trained over their 3-week life span to detect the pheromones of a bedbug in downright Pavlovian fashion. Lewis introduces the bedbugs’ odor to the hungry wasps. Then the wasps receive sugar water as a yummy and positive reinforcement. Repeat three times and the wasps associate bedbugs with candy.

“You suddenly gain a whole other level of respect for this organism with a brain the size of a pinhead,” Lewis said.

— Atlanta Journal Constitution

Yes, bedbugs, those gnarly nasties currently staging a massive continent-wide comeback. Hence, the "Wasp Hound," a gizmo developed by Rainsand and Lewis that looks a bit like a hair dryer. Indeed, one end houses a fan, designed to suck up the little baddies. The other, a replaceable wasp-filled cartridge, outfitted with a tiny "wasp-cam" that hooks up to a laptop. If the (notably stingerless) wasps are spied "dancing," there's trouble between the sheets...

The inventors, who hope to raise $500,000 to develop the product, are aiming at the travelers' market, though one wonders how live wasps would pass muster at a TSA inspection. Still, since wasps can also be trained to sniff out "explosives, dead bodies, diseased plants, arson accelerants (and) illegal drugs," one day they may be TSA agents.

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MERCY, MERCY, MRSA

If the hotel market fizzles, Rainsand and Lewis might want to try hospitals. According to a new study out of Canada, bedbugs can carry drug resistant germs, including MRSA (Multi-Drug Resistant Staph Aureus) and VRE (Vacomycin Resistant Enterococcus). The study was tiny—a sample size of just 5 bugs—but the fact that they found anything suggests a rather urgent need for further study. Although transmission to humans by bite is unlikely, a bug meandering into a cut, scrape or surgical wound could deliver a potentially lethal dose.

The authors point out that several research groups have tried in the past to link bedbugs and disease transmission (of hepatitis, for instance) and have failed. They certainly have not proven transmission in this case. But they also say that there is a density of these two organisms in the area where the men (note: on whom the bedbugs were found) live that make it more likely that bedbugs could be involved in diseases pingponging through the neighborhood. First, there’s the high density of bedbug presence, in 31 percent of Downtown Eastside residents. Second, there’s the high prevalence of MRSA, in 58 percent of the skin infections in the St. Paul’s ER. And third, there’s the previously recorded and persistent presence of VRE in in-patients at St. Paul’s.

—Wired

So, pesticide-impervious bugs carrying antibiotic-impervious microbes.

Blimey.

I miss my wasps.

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RELATED

• FDA clears quick MRSA test

• The Bedbug Registry

— J. A. Ginsburg, TrackerNews, Editor's Blog, @TrackerNews

 

 

With all due respect to Shakespeare: "What a piece of work is man." Period. End quote. Would that our "noble faculties and reason" were used just a little more. But after watching the new bee documentary, "Queen of the Sun," it is hard to sort out how, given an Eden hundreds of millions of years in the making, we could have made such a mess of it in a mere 10,000 years —mostly in the last hundred. Homo callidus, maybe. But sapiens? Not so much.

The specifics of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) still remain a bit of a mystery, but it is clear that a decades-long assault of globetrotting pathogens, parasites and pesticides have knocked the resilience right out of an insect so wondrous, generous and critical, its decline has profound cascading implications for pretty much everything else on the planet. Beyond the 40% of commercial crops that rely on honeybees for pollination, bees—wild and domestic—play a pivotal role keeping all sorts of habitats healthy. "Bees are a plant's legs," explains the ever-quotable Michael Pollan, who appears in the film. They are how plants, bound to the soil by their roots, spread their genes around. 

The drive to solve specific problems with one-note answers, rather than take a systems-thinking—specifically an ecosystems thinking—approach, at best delivers short term gains. Long term, it almost always leads to environmental and economic disaster.

Director Taggart Siegel deftly weaves together a litany of jaw-dropping details:

• 600,000 acres of almond trees in California—a nearly 1,000 square-mile monoculture bio-desert, incapable of supporting a single bee. The crop is so lucrative, three-quarters of all commercial bees in the US are delivered by truck in late winter to pollinate it, jump-started from their seasonal torpor with a shot of antibiotic-laced high fructose corn syrup. Tally up the fertilizer needed to grow the corn, then the fuel needed to turn the corn into HFCS and ship it to market, along with the fuel to truck the bees from hither to yon and that's a hefty carbon footprint in the nut bowl long before the nuts themselves are harvested.

• Artificially inseminated queen bees. Rather than allow queens to take a matrimonial flight to flirt and mate with a dozen or so ardent, competitive suitors, they are stuffed into little metal "stalls" and inserted with semen. So much for royal dignity, not to mention genetic diversity. In the old days, a queen might reign for as long as four or five years. These days, she is lucky to last a season.

• Genes from GMO crops survive in bee guts. Exactly what they might be doing there is unclear, but there they are. Could GMO genes survive in our guts? Are we all becoming, in effect, accidental GMOs (and, if so, do we need to pay Monsanto a royalty)?

There is something deeply wonderful about a scene, repeated often throughout the film, of small-scale beekeepers opening up a newly smoked hive to discover a magical golden world of honey-drenched comb. By contrast, commercial beekeepers live a grey existence, wrapping bee boxes in plastic for long-haul interstate migrations, pouring HFCS into hives by the gallon, themselves surviving on HFCS-enhanced fast-food fare. They are cogs in an increasingly fragile agro-industrial machine.

Millions of bees die just waiting in truck yards to go out on their next gig. Many millions more, of course, are dying of CCD.

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BIODYNAMIC FARMING & WHY THE WHOLE IS GREATER THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS

As disturbing as "Queen of the Sun" may be, Siegel also provides the inspiration of better answers. His heroes, true sapiens all, are "biodynamic" farmers following in the green footsteps of philosopher Rudolf Steiner.

Biodynamic farming is basically organic farming to the nth: "a unified approach to agriculture that relates the ecology of the farm-organism to that of the entire cosmos." In short, micro to macrobiology, to infinity and beyond...and back again. It is about learning to work with constantly shifting rhythms of interlocking cycles of life. 

In more prosaic terms, it comes down to the health of the land, as Aldo Leopold put it. Since everything connects, it doesn't really matter where one begins. Happy bees require an abundance of nectar-rich flowers, which require fertile soils, which require frisky microfauna, which lead to bounteous microbial populations, which dance with mushroom mycelia, which help plants take up water and nutrients, which lead to more flowers, which attract bees. What's planted where, the shape of the land, soil minerals, proximity of streams and aquifers, along with wildlife, wildlife migrations and the movements of sun, moon and earth are all part of the greater scheme.

So whether, like Gunther Hauk, you run a honeybee sanctuary that looks like farm, or a farm that provides bees a good living, same difference. Just lay off the neonicotinoid pesticides, antibiotics and HFCS and things should start to get better.

______________________________________

A SMARTER HIVE: BEEPODS

These days, some of the best places for bees can be found the middle of bustling hives of humans. From London to New York, and from Paris to San Francisco, urban beekeeping is cool. No longer eccentrics in netting, beekeepers have street cred. Indeed, no self-respecting urban garden is complete without a stack of bee boxes (I am looking at you Chicago City Hall...).

But the romance of tending to nature's little wonder bees can wear thin as summer days grow hot and bee boxes heavy with honey. It was a problem solved, as it happens, centuries ago in Kenya. Greeks and Romans on military march—but always on the look out for any good idea to do with food—took note:

It turns out that, while conquering the southern Mediterranean regions of Africa, both the Greeks and Romans discovered Kenyan tribes who harvested the golden nectar from bees the tribes kept in hollow fallen tree trunks. Prior to this, man had never found a way to keep bees alive once they harvested the honey. Ancient Egyptians created clay and straw skeps, or domed hives, but they had to drown or kill the colony before harvesting the honey. So, it was in ancient Roman texts that the Kenyan Top Bar Hive design was first recorded.

—Charlie Koenen / Milwaukee Examiner interview

Over the several years, Koenen and his friends adapted the design, crowdsourcing advice from both veteran and novice beekeepers. In March, the new and improved "Beepods2011" model was unveiled:

We've designed Beepods to be easy to use. Instead of stacking the hive vertically, we've refined an ancient top bar hive design which spreads out horizontally makingthe hive far more accessible for care and safe viewing. Did we mention that Beepods are much cheaper to purchase and maintain than traditional hives? They are.

At $495, it is more than a jar of honey, but for the dedicated urban farming operation, pollination services provided by a healthy hive are more than worth the investment.

Spikenard Farm has also been working on a top bar hive design, with a percentage of the profits going to support Gunther Hauk's work.

Even if keeping bees isn't on your "bucket list," there are still many ways to show solidarity with workers and royals alike: "Ten things you can do to help bees." (note warning about Chinese honey).

We need to help bees as if our lives depended on it. They kind of do.

— J. A. Ginsburg, TrackerNews, Editor's Blog, @TrackerNews

What a Spring. All the wrong kinds of records are being smashed by waves of killer cluster-bomb tornados strafing the southern tier of the US. Last week, all eyes were on Bertie County, North Carolina. This morning, the Weather Channel's Jim Cantori—never someone you want to see wandering your neighborhood—is on disaster patrol in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, or what's left of it. 

After a while, subdivisions of shredded homes, upended cars, bark-stripped trees, smashed gas stations and pulverized shopping malls, all ringed by tangles of mangled power lines, start to look alike. Sunny suburbs transformed into war-ravaged slums in a blink. Whatever's left standing, weakened.

If there is any sliver of silver lining to be found in these dark swirling clouds of bleak, it is the hope to "build back better"—a rallying cry first raised in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and now a familiar refrain invoked in the aftermath of calamities from Port-au-Prince to Sendai.

With the help of an ingenious Escher-ish construction module called QuaDror, unveiled at the Design Indaba conference in South Africa last February, that may now not only be easier, but more affordable, too.

Invented by New York-based Israeli designer Dror Benshetrit, one of the most innovative epiphanies in building construction to come along in many years made its improbable debut in a design for a ground-based Swarovski crystal-bejeweled chandelier.

Indeed, it was in party mode that QuaDror first came to life. In 2007, Benshetrit was invited to create a chandelier for one of the Milan Furniture Fair’s glammest events: the annual Swarovski Crystal Palace exhibit, where major designers are asked to envision the various loopy things you can do with Swarovski crystals as a basic building block.

Like others in the show, Benshetrit created a lighting fixture that glittered with a thousand sparkly crystals. But its elemental form was an angular frame that sat on the floor instead of hanging from the rafters.

“The geometry first intrigued me for aesthetic reasons,” Benshetrit says, “but then I realized its real structural strength was its simplicity and adaptation of scale.”

—Linda Tischler, Fast Company

Four years later, blessed by structural engineers as "outstanding" ("the stability and load-bearing capacity of a cube with only 1/5 of the volume"), Benshetrit's clever little interlocking form is inspiring ideas for everything from bridge supports to acoustic buffering walls to emergency housing.

Since the modular QuaDror form ships flat, 1,750 "kits" can be packed into a single 40-foot container for quick, simple assembly of a home's frame, with locally-sourced materials used for floors, walls and roofs.

The first QauDror homes are planned for Brazil and Sierra Leone next year. But perhaps a few kits will find a way to North Carolina and Alabama for what promises to be a long, hot summer of reconstruction. And as the region looks to repair its battered infrastructure, perhaps QuaDror interlocking concrete blocks will play a role.

In the meantime, QauDror is in the running as a semi-finalist in the Buckminster Fuller Challenge, with winners to be announced in May.

From another dimension, no doubt Dymaxion, Bucky is surely smiling.

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CLASSIC REVIVAL

Down in Carbondale, Illinois, however, the original "Dome Home," Bucky's first geodesic domicile—and the only one he himself ever lived in—is in desperate need of a renovation estimated to cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Made of plywood, chosen because it was cheap, the house has taken a beating from over a half-century of brutal winters, broiling summers and soggy springs.

An effort to restore the dome has been given new life with the recent award of a Save America's Treasures matching grant to the tune of $125,000. "He envisioned the dome as a house. It was the first dome home. It's the only one he ever lived in," says Janet Donoghue, development director of the nonprofit RBF Dome NFP, which is looking to resuscitate the worn structure.

The group has its work cut out for it. "When it was built, he said the material he needed to make it waterproof wasn't invented yet," says Donoghue. The Bucky Dome is in rough shape. Sad brown shingles cling helplessly to the outside, mold has taken hold on the inside, and many of the plywood triangles are water-damaged.

— Amanda Kooser, CNET

Patented in 1954, the geodesic dome, with its signature honeycomb hexagons, still manages to look cutting edge. Its brilliant simplicity and strength, as well as its "vision of the future" vibe are just as exciting to see at The Eden Project, the world's largest greenhouse built on an abandoned strip mine in Corwall, England, as it was over four decades ago at Expo '67, a 200' tall bubble of breathtaking engineering genius.

Like QuaDror, the geodesic design is both sturdy and comparatively easy to assemble, making it a tempting choice for disaster response. Intershelter domes—which can cost thousands of dollars—are sturdier than tents and, according to the company, just as easy to assemble: 

Built to sustain hurricane strength winds or earthquakes and insulated to stay warm in extreme arctic sub-zero degree weather or cool in hot desert climates, these structures can be assembled in just a few hours by three untrained people. The pieces can fit in the back of a pick up truck, single helicopter sling, or a bush cargo plane and can be set up on almost any terrain.

—Intershelter

Sounds perfect.

— J. A. Ginsburg, TrackerNews, Editor's Blog, @TrackerNews

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RELATED:

• Project H Design's "Studio H" project / Bertie County, NC

...(Q)uit thinking about decent land-use as soley an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stabilty, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.  —Aldo Leopold, "The Land Ethic" from "A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There," 1949

Over the arc of more than a half century, Leopold's guidance rings as true as ever. The good news? We know how to make things right. The bad? We don't do it. Even worse, the exact wrong things are rewarded by farm subsidies, according to a gobsmacking new study, "Losing Ground," released by the Environmental Working Group (EWG). 

Over the last few years, food prices have soared to record levels, driven by an ever-increasing global demand and mandates for biofuels. Farmers are encouraged to plant "fence row to fence row," squeezing every last plant possible onto land now literally a fraction of its former self.

With less than 1% of the US population working on farms (~ 2% living on farms), most of us have no idea what goes on, much less how it directly affects us. EWG sent a film crew...

From the air, the damage to the skinned and gully-scarred land is obvious. Without buffers of grasses and trees to protect streams and rivers, soil—by the hundreds of tons—runs off the land, gone forever. Laced with pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, it pollutes the drinking water of cityfolk living downstream. And it triggers massive algal blooms that suck so much oxygen out the water, fish either sink or must swim away from these toxic hypoxic "dead zones."

"Losing Ground" focuses on Iowa, a mostly agricultural state, and on storm damage data. It shoots a hole through the "average soil loss" stats used by USDA, pointing out that this isn't the kind of damage that "averages." It's like tellilng someone who has had a hand amputated that on average he has  lost only a small percentage of his body. Yes, but...

The whole truth? Some areas are losing as much a 12 times the state average of ~ 5 tons per acre per year. A single storm can cause staggeringly severe erosion—now more of a concern than ever as scientists start to be able to link wacky weather with climate change.

Slowly, painfully and at great expense, most of the property damage from last week's massive three-day, 13-state, 243-tornado outbreak will be repaired. Homes will be rebuilt. Power lines replaced. New trees planted. But the biggest loss won't show up on any insurance claim. There isn't a slot for it. It is the land, washed away. Forever.

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HOW TO FIX IT: LESSONS OF THE PAST

By EWG's estimates, $51 billion is spent annually in the US on farm incentives to boost production, while $7 billion goes toward protecting soil and water. The result in Iowa: In a single year, 10 million acres lost "dangerous amounts of soil."

Yet "97% of soil loss is preventable by simple conservation means." In short, there's hope, but we've got to get cracking.

"Green Fire: Aldo Leopold and a Land Ethic for Our Time," a new documentary the conservationist's life and legacy, includes a section on the first watershed conservation project in the US, the restoration of Coon Valley, just north of LaCrosse, Wisconsin, in the 1930s. Leopold, a strong believer in community buy-in, helped develop a plan that involved 400 local farm families, assisted by "hundreds of young men in the Civilian Conservation Corps, and experts in agriculture, soil erosion, forestry, wildlife, and engineering." Today, Coon Valley is the very picture of the American rural ideal, an over-the-river-and-through-the-woods kind of place, with softly rolling hills, fertile fields and plenty of stream-protecting, wildlife-friendly habitat.

Leopold's own patch of Eden restored, made famous in "A Sand County Almanac," is now home to the 260+ acre Aldo Leopold Foundation. Just up the road from the International Crane Foundation and near the delightfully named town of Baraboo, Wisconsin, it is worth the trip, if only to see the forest of 60-foot pines, planted decades ago by Leopold's family during the Dust Bowl years.

Nina Bradley, Leopold's 90-something, cross country skiing-loving eldest daughter and the Foundation's emeritus conservationist, has kept records for decades, tracking over 300 data points about the land—everything from weather to plants to migrations.

We have compared out phenological data with my father's data and a third of the items are coming two to three weeks earlier than when Dad was here. We've been moving gradually toward climate change. Now, all of the sudden, we're seeing major changes.

— Nina Bradley, "Climate Wisconsin: Stories from a State of Change / Phenology" (video / article)

Will this rapid change finally be the "teachable moment" where conservation—and a land ethic—finally go mainstream?

There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot...

...Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamanic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the esthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture...

...In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conquerer of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for fellow-members and also respect for the community as such.

—Aldo Leopold, "A Sand County Almanac"

How better to celebrate Earth Day than to keep the earth from floating away?

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RELATED:

"Project Noah: Taking Attendance on the Ark" (re crowdsourced nature guide app)

— J. A. Ginsburg, TrackerNews, Editor's Blog, @TrackerNews

Behold the mushroom! Or what you can see of it...

There is actually quite a bit more to 'shrooms than delectable (sometimes poisonous) perky little "fruiting bodies." Neither plant, nor animal, but of the Kingdom Fungus, they operate by their own rules in realms about which we have barely a clue.

They have spores, not seeds, and send out miles-long filements of mycelia, not roots, to absorb nutrients. It is to a humble, mostly hidden 'shroom that the title "World's Largest Organism" goes. They can live for millenia. And though associated with death and decay, they make life a we like it possible by helping deliver food and water to plants.

In short, it is a mushroom planet and we're just lucky it is.

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PACK THAT, Part 1 (from plastic peanuts to magic mushrooms)

We have been following Eben Bayer's merry crusade against styrofoam (a.k.a. "toxic white stuff") since his 2009 talk at the PopTech conference. A mechanical engineer by training, raised with a good green heart in the Green Mountain State of Vermont, Bayer developed a way to grow mycelium in molds filled with locally-produced feedstocks (e.g,, agricutural wastes) to create eco-friendly packing and insulating material. Brilliant.

The good gets better, too: The higher oil prices spike, the more Bayer's answer greens up bottom lines. Unlike oil, which needs to be pumped, transported and refined before it can be turned into polystyrene, local feedstocks are plentiful and supply chains, by definition, short. It is also more energy efficient to produce ince you don't have to heat anything up. Inject the mycelium into the molds and wait a few days. At end-of-life, styrofoam just sits there, the #1 space-filler in landfills, taking decades/centuries/millenia to degrade. Meanwhile, "fungi-foam" turns to compost in a month.

Furniture-maker Steelcase was the first major manufacturer to use "EcoCradle" biopackaging. In the last few weeks, Bayer's small company, Ecovative Design, scored two more big hits:

• Dell announced plans to start using it to pack computer servers

• Ford Motor Company plans to use it "to cut down on about 30 pounds of petrol-based foams in its automobiles" (really, who knew?) The biggest hurdle: scaling up production.

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PACK THAT, Part 2 (a box and then some)

For the legendary founder of Fungi Perfecti, Paul Stamets, everything—and we mean everything—is better with mushrooms. For years, we heard murmurs of something called The Life Box, a packing box infused with seeds and mycelium. Every now again, we would stop by Stamets' website to check on progress. Finally, it's real!

While growing many wood-decomposing mushrooms, my friends and I discovered the ‘wonders of cardboard’ for growing mycelium. Silky, diverging forks of mycelium would happily race down the valleys within the folds of corrugated cardboard. Having myco-mulched with cardboard for many years, I realized that cardboard could become a growth medium for encouraging guilds – communities – of fungi and plants symbiotically working together. Then, the epiphany hit me like a lightning bolt. Why not re-invent the cardboard box so each box becomes a designed ecosystem?

Small quantity consumer orders are handled through Fungi Perfecti, here, while commercial orders are being handled by the newly formed Life Box Company.

Imagine: a forest product that turns back into a forest. Now, add ecocradle packing material and it's an Eden-to-go.

(see Stamets' TED talk: "6 ways mushrooms can save the world")

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EAT THIS (but you darn well better save some for me...)

April showers bring...morels. With their distinctive, if slightly disconcerting, honeycombed heads (an easy home to whatever crawls, so by all means soak, then spread out to dry overnight) and color schemes to match winter-weary leaf litter, these are 'shrooms among 'shrooms. Saute in butter and it's culinary heaven. Serve with that other vernal miracle, asparagus—a plant that also seems not so much to grow as to simply appear fully formed one day—and all the cold and dreariness of the previous several months fade away, forgiven. If it takes a winter to make such lovelies thrive come spring, then so be it.

Although fresh morels can be found at farmers' markets for a small-fortune-per-pound, it is really much more fun to forage for your own if you can. Once your gaze clicks into "morelvision," the world will never look the same again.

Good. 

* Morel Hunters: 2011 sighting map, exhange, recipes, videos

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Related TrackerNews Editor's Blog post: "Plastics: Eco-Comedy / Eco-Tragedy"

— J. A. Ginsburg, TrackerNews, Editor's Blog, @TrackerNews

Finally, a mind map we can get our brain around. Or a brain map we can get our mind around. Either way, impressive. 

The Allen Institute for Brain Science (as in Paul Allen as in Microsoft) just released an atlas of the human brain and it's online, available for researchers to use. 

It is a staggering accomplishment: "a unique, multi-modal digital atlas that integrates extensive gene expression data with anatomic information. The atlas currently features MRI, DTI, histology, microarray, and in situ hybridization data." 

Based on two healthy brains, meticulously sliced, stained and digitized, researchers discovered nearly identical average gene expression (94%). A stunning 82% of the entire human genome comes into play, which Wired's Jonah Leher notes is a reminder that "the brain is one awesomely complicated piece of meat." (Read Leher's q & a with Allan Jones, the Institute's CEO: "The Human Brain Gets a New Map")

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HOME-GROWN

Meanwhile, at the Salk Institute, the focus is on diseased brains. Scientists have figured out how to grow neurons in a petri dish, which is even more amazing in that they started out as skin cells altogether, manipulated in the lab to become "induced pluripotent stem cells." 

Neurons grown from the cells of a schizophrenic patient actually behave a bit different than those grown from a healthy control. 

When the authors transformed the iPSCs into neurons, they noticed that the patient-derived cells made fewer connections, or synapses, with other neurons in the same dish than did neurons from people without psychiatric disorders. However, tests showed that the patients' neurons conducted electrical pulses just as well as normal neurons did.

Interestingly, the antipsychotic medication loxapine, used to treat schizophrenia, boosted the number of synapses formed by the patient-derived neurons to normal levels.

— Ewen Calloway, NatureNews

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CONNECTOME

Okay, a three-fer. All this brain-dicing reminds of us of a fascinating PopTech Salon talk by MIT professor, Sebastian Seung describing the "connectome," a kind of genome of the mind. Seung's new book, "Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are," has a pub date of February, 2012.

Our neurons can barely contain themselves.

— J. A. Ginsburg, TrackerNews, Editor's Blog, @TrackerNews