Seeing Green

It’s going to be a big day tomorrow when the Oregon football team comes to town.  This year, we meet the team that handed us our only loss last season – but on our own turf.  And although Stanford has played (mostly) with convincing dominance this season (and Oregon’s already picked up one loss), we’ll take all the home-field advantage we can get.Sports fans everywhere understand the merits of playing at home: you know the quirks of the stadium, are acclimated to the local weather, and have a fan base that screams at your opponent and shuts up when you’re on offense.  It’s the classic recipe for success.But if you’re the rare team that plays best on the road, you might just shake up the league.

I met Makana in August 2005, where an old lava flow meets the ocean in a series of ledges and tide pools on Kauai, one of the Hawaiian Islands. He was a “local” of about my age who got his name (Hawaiian for “gift”) from the old volcano that formed the backdrop of our introduction. He wasn’t in college, but had a good job as a caddy at an upscale golf course, where Bill Clinton had tipped one of his buddies well the day before. In the afternoons, he and his friends came to this spot — still called “The Queen’s Bath” decades after the days of Hawaii’s royal rulers — to “talk story” and swap tales with an endless stream of tourists.

I haven’t had a TV in my life for the past few years. So, when I finally caught video clips from Cairo last week, I was astounded. Still images, no matter how provocative, miss so many dimensions of the conflict: the shouts and chants, the simmering resentment and dogged commitment, the flying stones and sounds of gunfire that turned a relatively peaceful protest violent. I find myself checking the news more often now, hoping that the Egyptian military remains ambivalent, fearing that the body counts will rise.For many of us, the walls of the Stanford bubble are thick and opaque; we can afford only a little time to think deeply about the Middle East’s state of unrest.

“What do you think we’ll fight World War III over?”It was an interesting question for a third date, and the first thing my (now ex-) boyfriend and I disagreed on.  I said “cheap oil” and he answered “water.”Our difference of opinion was largely a product of our upbringings.  I was raised on thunderstorms and flooded basements back East, while he grew up amid droughts and “water wars” in California.Months after we parted ways, I was reminded of that conversation as I drove through California’s Central Valley, past billboards plastered with water propaganda and tractors shadowed by dust clouds.

As a teaching assistant for the pilot section of Bio 44Y, I spend Wednesday afternoons accompanying 10 students of field ecology to Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. Only five miles from the main quad, we’ve battled rattlesnakes and squeezed past poison oak — but the nearest I’ve come to disaster was almost letting a wasp fly into our class van.When we’re worried about being stung (knock on wood, I’ve so far evaded the experience), we tend to see bees and wasps as the flying enemy, rather than as pollinators, critical to the reproductive life of most of the world’s flowering plants. Of course, the value of pollination isn’t lost on farmers or beekeepers: the former pay the latter to haul hivefuls of bees from crop field to orchard every spring.

COLUMBUS, OHIO -- After a full day in and out of airplanes and airports, there’s really nothing like stepping out of the terminal and taking your first breath of unfiltered, unconditioned, unpressurized air.  Sure, the curbside may be cluttered with exhaust fumes, and filled with the noise of honking taxi drivers, but it’s still undeniably fresh.Too bad that last Sunday, I took that breath in the state with the worst air pollution record in the country.

The news finally broke last week, months after the first anxious reports of browning and dying trees near lawns and golf courses across America.  Unlike their wild cousins in the Rockies and British Columbia, these conifers aren’t dying of pest outbreaks – they’re suffering from pesticides.

Between Easter’s religious reminders and a molecular evolution class overdose of population genetics, I shouldn’t have been surprised to wake up yesterday from an unsettling dream about taking my midterm exam on Noah’s Ark. The ocean was rising, Noah was hustling animals aboard, and I was battling asthma (thanks, furry animal allergies). But what bothered me most about all this wasn’t that I’d forgotten the formula for heterozygosity. It was that there were only two animals of every kind.Religious beliefs aside, today’s scientific consensus is that you need more than two individuals to save a species.

I’ve got to be honest.  Graduate student life comes with awesome perks: flexible schedules, fun-loving coworkers, and amazing travel opportunities.  But the green-eyed monster occasionally peers over my shoulder.

I don’t care how long (or short) of a time you’ve spent lounging in the Stanford bubble. If you haven’t popped out yet to see a sea otter, I have an assignment for you: Drop everything and get to the coast. Charismatic fur balls await.Today, sea otters are the poster children of cuddle appeal, but their endearing behaviors were lost on the fur hunters of the 1800s. Otter fur lined jackets (and the fur trade lined pockets), but soon otters no longer lined the Pacific Coast.The sea otter, however, is a “keystone species” — its impact on our coastal ecosystems is disproportionately large compared to its natural abundance in the marine community — so its removal had profound effects that we only noticed recently, as the otter staged a dramatic return over the last 70 years.

Last week, the United Nations added 18 sites around the globe to its list of biosphere reserves, bringing the total number of sites so designated under its Man and the Biosphere Program to 581.Most of us are probably more familiar with another U.N. collection: World Heritage Sites, which identify “universally” valued spots for conservation and awareness efforts. Indeed, some particularly special locales receive both designations.But the purpose of biosphere reserves transcends basic conservation. The reserves are intended to showcase ways that humans can reconcile our needs and activities with those of native flora and fauna. They highlight unique and innovative strategies that are working — right now.

Scattered across Santa Clara County — home during our tenure at Stanford — are 23 parcels of land so polluted that they’ve been targeted for government intervention.These “Superfund sites,”numbering more than 1,250 across the United States and its territories,are contaminated by heavy metals, organic solvents and petroleum residues. Some are at risk of contaminating the drinking water of hundreds of thousands of people; others already have. Some sites are sopolluted that their very soil must be scraped away; others will not befit for human habitation for generations.