In 2003 the US Department of Agriculture created the Rural Energy for America Program (REAP, then known as “Section 9006”) to provide grants to farmers and rural small businesses to cover up to 25% of the total costs associated with purchasing and installing renewable energy systems and making energy efficiency improvements.

As with any government program however, there’s a tedious process to go through and paperwork to fill out before receiving the funds. One of the first steps in the process is having an independent professional engineer conduct an audit estimating the potential energy savings on the specific project that they’re applying for to receive grant money. Kurt Creamer, Ph.D., says that the “actual percentage energy savings, in some cases are quite phenomenal.”

That’s where Senergy Inc., the Apex-based company hired to conduct these energy audits, comes in. Kurt Creamer, PhD, president of Senergy, founded the company in 2003 in response to REAP while he was still enrolled in the Biological and Agricultural Engineering PhD program at North Carolina State University and working full-time at the school. Even though there was a new need for energy auditors, business remained relatively slow for a few years.

“In the early days farmers had to pay up front for the energy audits which were often times quite difficult for the farmers,” Creamer said. Business for Senergy spread solely through word-of-mouth and only those farmers that could afford to front the initial costs of an audit got on board for the first 5-6 years of the program.

But then, in 2008, the North Carolina Farm Bureau got involved. The Farm Bureau covers the costs of the audits up front so that the farmers are much more willing to go through the process of applying for the REAP grants. The program (and business for Senergy) skyrocketed. It’s “been a real boom to my business to have the Farm Bureau involved in the project,” Creamer said.

Senergy’s work

Senergy typically works with farmers in Eastern North Carolina specializing in grain farms, but has had the opportunity over the years to work with a variety of types of farms including tobacco farms, some on swine & poultry farms, and a handful of dairy farms, often times on some very nontraditional projects.

One particular project on a hog farm required comparing the energy efficiency of burning the dead hogs to composting them—composting is more energy efficient, in case you were wondering. Creamer has also worked on energy efficient organic dairy farm feed grinding systems, poultry barns, irrigation systems, and grain dryers. But he’s not just limited to working on energy efficiency projects. Kurt also works on some renewable energy projects, including one this fall where he’ll be working on a “project to look at the use of sweet potatoes in an anaerobic digester,” Creamer explained, that “could generate enough biogas from the sweet potatoes to meet the requirements of the farm.”

What’s next?

Creamer says that he would love to expand in several ways:

• Geographically: There is still plenty of opportunity to pursue this program in other parts of North Carolina and beyond
• Explore the energy needs of rural small businesses (outside of the farm base)
• Take on more renewable energy projects
• Improve his engineering methodologies

At the end of the day Creamer says he really enjoys the work he does and “it’s a really good program for the farmers, and a good program for the environment.”

What I wrote last month,

“I think of myself as a reasonably curious and informed person, and I have visited at least a couple of infrastructure plants, but almost every anecdote and every little tidbit of information were new to me. Scott’s point – that we don’t know almost anything about infrastructure – was thus proven to me.”

…was reinforced when I read the book itself: I don’t know anything about infrastructure. But after reading the book I can say I know a little bit, understand how much I don’t know, and realize how much more I’d like to know. I bet it was fun watching me as I was reading it, exclaiming on average five times per page “This is so cool”, and “Hey, this is neat” and “Wow, I had no idea!” and (rarely) “w00t! Here’s a tidbit I actually heard of before” and “Hey, I know where this is!” (as I lived in Raleigh for eleven years, I know the area well).

A few years ago, Scott was just as ignorant about infrastructure as most of us are. But then his curiousity got better of him and he started researching. He would start at his house in Raleigh and trace all the wires and cables and pipes going in and out of the house to see where they led. Sometimes there would be a crew on his street digging into the asphalt and fixing something and he would approach them and ask questions. At other times he would figure out where the headquarters are and who to ask to talk to:

“What Scott realized during the two years of research for the book is that people in charge of infrastructure know what they are doing. When something doesn’t work well, or the system is not as up-to-date as it could be, it is not due to incompetence or ignorance, but because there is a lack of two essential ingredients: money and political will. These two factors, in turn, become available to the engineers to build and upgrade the systems, only if people are persuaded to act. And people are persuaded to act in two ways: if it becomes too costly, or if it becomes too painful to continue with the old way of doing things. It is also easier to build brand new systems for new services than it is to replace old systems that work ‘well enough’ with more more modern ways of providing the same service.”

In a sense, this book is a memoir of curiosity as Scott describes his own adventures with a hard-hat, a modern Jean Valjean sloshing his way through the Raleigh sewers, test-driving the public transportation, and passing multiple security checks in order to enter the nearby nuclear plant.

But it is more than just a story of personal awe at modern engineering. Scott weaves in the explanations of the engineering and the underlying science, explains the history and the politics of the Raleigh infrastructure, the historical evolution of technologies underlying modern infrasturcture, and illustrates it by comparisons to other infrastructures: how does New York City does that, how did Philadelphia did it 50 years ago, how did London 500 years ago, how about Rome 2000 years ago?

“What is really astonishing is how well the systems work, even in USA which has fallen way behind the rest of the developed world. We are taking it for granted that the systems always work, that water and electricity and phone and sewers and garbage collection and public transportation always work. We get angry on those rare occasions when a system temporarily fails. We are, for the most part, unprepared and untrained to provide some of the services ourselves in times of outages, or to continue with normal life and work when a service fails. And we are certainly not teaching our kids the necessary skills – I can chop up wood and start a wood stove, I can use an oil heater, I know how to slaughter and render a pig, how to get water out of a well, dig a ditch, and many other skills I learned as a child (and working around horses) – yet I am not teaching any of that to my own kids. They see it as irrelevant to the modern world and they have a point – chance they will ever need to employ such skills is negligible.”

And this brings me to the point where I start musing about stuff that the book leaves out. As I was reading, I was constantly hungry for more. I wanted more comparisons with other cities and countries and how they solved particular problems. I wanted more history. I wanted more science. I wanted more about political angles. But then, when I finished, I realized that a book I was hungry for would be a 10-tome encyclopic monograph and a complete flop. It is good that Scott has self-control and self-discipline as a writer to know exactly what to include and what to leave out. He provides an excellent Bibliography at the end for everyone who is interested in pursuing a particular interest further. His book’s homepage is a repository for some really cool links – just click on the infrastructure you are interested in (note that “Communications” is under construction, as it is in the real world – it is undergoing a revolution as we speak so it is hard to collect a list of ‘definitive’ resources – those are yet to be written):

What many readers will likely notice as they go through the book is that there is very little about the environmental impacts of various technologies used to ensure that cities function and citizens have all their needs met. And I think this was a good strategy. If Scott included this information, many readers and critics would focus entirely on the environmental bits (already available in so many other books, articles and blogs) and completely miss what the book is all about – the ingenuity needed to keep billions of people living in some kind of semblance of normal life and the interconnectedness that infrastructure imposes on the society, even on those who would want not to be interconnected:

“There are people who advocate for moving “off the grid” and living a self-sufficient existence. But, as Scott discovered, they are fooling themselves. Both the process of moving off the grid and the subsequent life off the grid are still heavily dependent on the grid, on various infrastructure systems that make such a move and such a life possible, at least in the developed world.”

My guess is, if there’s anyone out there who could possibly not like this book, it will be die-hard libertarians who fantasize about being self-sufficient in this over-populated, inter-connected world.

At several places in the book, Scott tries to define what infrastructure is. It is a network that provides a service to everyone. It has some kind of control center, a collection center or distribution center. It has a number of peripheral stations and nodes. And there are some kinds of channels that connect the central place to the outside stations and those stations to the final users – every household in town. There is also a lot of redundancy built into the system, e.g., if a water main breaks somewhere, you will still get your water but it will come to you via other pipes in surrounding streets, with zero interruption to your service.

Scott covers surveying of land, stormwater, freshwater, wastewater, roads, power, solid waste, communications (phone, broadcast media, internet) and transportation (e.g., public transportation, trains, airplanes). These are the kinds of things that are traditionally thought of as ‘infrastructure’. But aren’t there other such systems? I’d think security has the same center-spokes model of organization as well: police stations and sub-stations (distribution centers) that can send cops out wherever needed (distribution channels), with potential criminals brought to court (processing centers) and if found guilty placed in prison (collection center). Similarly with fire-departments. Ambulances are just the most peripheral tentacles of the health-care infrastructure. The local-county-state-federal political system is also a kind of infrastructure. So is the military. So is the postal system. So is the food industry and distribution.

Thinking about all of these other potential examples of infrastructure made me realize how many services that require complex infrastructure undergo cycles of centralization and decentralization. For transportation, everyone needed to have a horse. Later, it was centralized into ship, railroad, bus and airline infrastructures. But that was counteracted by the popularity of individually owned cars. And of course taxis were there all along. And as each decade and each country has its own slight moves towards or away from centralization, in the end a balance is struck in which both modes operate.

You raised your own chickens. Then you bought them from mega-farms. Now many, but not most citizens, are raising their own chickens again. It is not feasible – not enough square miles on the planet – for everyone to raise chickens any more. But having everyone fed factory chicken is not palatable to many, either. Thus, a new, uneasy balance.

Nowhere is this seen more obviously today as in Communications infrastructure. We are in the middle of a big decentralization movement, away from broadcast (radio, TV and yes, newspaper industry infrastructure with its printing presses, distribution centers and trucks) infrastructure that marked about half of 20th century, and forward into something more resembling the media ecosystem of the most of human history – everyone is both a sender and a reciever, except that instead of writing letters or assembling at a pub every evening, we can do this online. But internet is itself an infrastructure – a series of tubes network of cables and it is essential not to allow any centralized corporation to have any power over what passes through those cables and who gets to send and receive stuff this way.

Finally, as I was reading the book I was often wishing to see photographs of places or drawings of the engineering systems he describes. As good as Scott is at putting it in words, there were times when I really wanted to actually see how something looks like. And there were times when what I really wanted was something even more interactive, perhaps an online visualization of an infrastructure system that allows me to change parameters (e.g., amount of rainfall per minute) and see how that effects some output (e.g., rate of clearing water off the streets, or speed at which it is rushing through the pipes, or how it affects the water level of the receving river). That kind of stuff would make this really come to life to me.

Perhaps “On The Grid” will have an iPad edition in the future in which the text of the book is just a begining of the journey – links to other sources (e,g., solutions around the globe, historical sources), to images, videos, interractive visualizations and, why not, real games. After all, it is right here in Raleigh that IBM is designing a game that allows one to plan and build modern infrasctructure – CityOne. These two should talk to each other and make something magnificient like that.

Dr. Laura Jackson of the EPA's National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory (NHEERL), a unit of the EPA’s Office of Research and Development that is housed in Research Triangle Park.

Dr. Jackson and her colleagues in this RTP lab—more than 100 scientists—conduct research on ecosystem services, those benefits provided by the environment over and above the psychological benefits of being out in nature. These services can have tangible and measurable economic value.

For instance, in a normally functioning ecosystem, vegetation would take up nitrogen and phosphorus from animal waste and keep those nutrients from overburdening groundwater and streams. In last week’s example, when hogs were added to an ecosystem, they knocked it out of balance by depositing more nutrients than the vegetation could handle and by removing plants that could take up the nutrients and provide erosion control. The researchers at the Center for Environmental Farming Systems were developing countermeasures to keep the water clean near hog farming operations and restore ecosystem function.

In addition to cleaning water, vegetation can also scrub pollutants from the air, and the EPA’s Dr. Jackson and her colleagues are looking into the capacity of plantings near roads to filter pollutants from vehicles. Given the connection between tailpipe emissions and respiratory illnesses, this promises to be a fruitful area of research: imagine the cost savings on medication and lost work time if nature can help prevent illness.

Another example of an ecosystem service, Dr. Jackson said, is the ability of urban vegetation to mitigate the “heat-island” effect, reducing the risk of heat stress in vulnerable populations. (Think green roofs.) In this example, nature would not only alleviate illness but eliminate some of the need to burn fossil fuels for air conditioning.

It’s already obvious that ecosystem services can be an important public health tool, and we haven’t even gotten to the topic I called Dr. Jackson to discuss: Lyme disease.

Lyme is of growing concern in the Research Triangle region; more on that in a moment. It is also of particular interest to me, because I am a renegade Durhamite living in New York’s Hudson Valley. My new home is not only the hotbed of Lyme disease but one of the hotbeds of Lyme disease research. It’s almost child’s play to get Lyme disease here, and nearly any symptom that brings you to the doctor will result in blood tests for Lyme and other tick-borne illnesses. They are that common.

At the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, where I am loosely affiliated as a science writer, Dr. Richard S. Ostfeld is leading a team studying the impact of biodiversity on Lyme and other tick-borne illnesses. Long-term research conducted by Ostfeld’s lab reveals that more people get Lyme disease when natural landscapes are fragmented by development and other human activities. Large carnivores who need lots of space are driven away, and white-footed mice, which carry the bacteria that causes Lyme, thrive in the absence of these predators.

Given my newfound geographical interest in Lyme, I was incredibly interested to hear that someone in the Triangle—my beat for this blog—is working on this same topic. Dr. Jackson talked to me about her research findings and about how the EPA is using research like hers to affect decision making.

Dr. Jackson initiated the Lyme research as part of her Ph.D. program in Ecology at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her primary research tool: satellite imagery upon which she plotted records of Lyme disease cases gleaned from existing state health department records. Using an off-the-shelf statistical program, she was able to identify the types of landscapes most associated with high rates of Lyme disease: places where the edges of forests intermixed with herbaceous cover such as lawn or pasture.

And these are the kinds of places where new neighborhoods are being developed, says Jackson. “It’s popular to build out towards ‘green fields’ or undeveloped land,” she says. “People want to be near forests.” On these edges, where deer, ticks, white-footed mice, and people all exist, it’s what she calls “a perfect environment” for the transmission of Lyme disease.

Figure from Hilborn E, Jackson L, Orme-Zavaleta J. 2010. Environment and Lyme Disease Risk. Pages 399-414 In: Holmgren, A. and G. Borg (eds.), Handbook of Disease Outbreaks: Prevention, Detection and Control. Nova Science Publishers: New York.

There is no vaccine against Lyme disease in humans; it can be treated with antibiotics, but people can get it many times if infected ticks bite them. Individuals can avoid the disease by dressing appropriately, using bug spray, and checking their skin for ticks. Education in these individual measures is one public health approach to disease prevention.

But to Dr. Jackson, a broader approach to risk is called for. One landowner on a forest edge can clear shrubs to discourage deer, or lay down a strip of wood chips as a buffer between forest and lawn, but unless all of the property owners along an edge do this, she says, the risk factors will remain for the entire nearby population. She believes that whole neighborhoods have to work in concert to reduce risk.

In addition, one goal is to “design out the risk” for Lyme and related diseases by making decisions about land use based on research findings. To that end, she and her EPA colleagues are partnering with Michigan State University’s Digital Watershed to create an online tool that will predict whether developing a particular landscape in a particular way will create a high or low risk for Lyme disease. It will become part of EPA’s online Environmental Decision Toolkit in the future. Using tools like this, it is possible that without spending an extra cent in development costs or public health money, neighborhoods could be designed that work with nature to reduce the risk of Lyme. That is the concept of ecosystem services at work.

Although Dr. Jackson’s original research focused on Maryland, it has implications for the Research Triangle area, where she grew up. “The tick is here,” she says, referring to the black-legged tick that carries the bacterium that causes Lyme. “And the disease is here.” As wildlife habitats are being converted for development, she says, we don’t have the expansive natural habitats that we used to have. Given the style of development happening in the Triangle, she says, “it’s not surprising that Lyme is here.”

Here’s the background. Hog production is one of the cornerstones of North Carolina’s agricultural economy, with more than 10 million hogs produced annually in the state, or roughly one pig per person. In recent years, most of these hogs have been raised in indoor operations known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs.

But consumer demand is driving a movement back to pasture-raised pork, and about 100 farmers in the state are responding to the call for hogs raised in natural conditions that many people consider more humane.

Consumers are driving the market for pasture-raised pork. Photo by Lisa M. Dellwo

There’s no doubt hogs raised outdoors are happy, says Silvana Pietrosemoli-Castagni, research associate at the Center for Environmental Farming Systems’ (CEFS) Alternative Swine Production unit. “Outdoor pigs can express their natural behavior,” including foraging, exploring, wallowing, roaming, and rooting, she says, resulting in less stress and therefore stronger immune systems. “Pigs are social animals and in these kinds of systems, they can interact and establish social relationships,” she says.

Silvana Pietrosemoli-Castagni researches ways of mitigating the environmental impact of raising hogs outdoors. Photo by Jennifer Curtis

Raising pigs in pastures also avoids some of the environmental hazards that indoor facilities are notorious for—noxious odors, air pollution, and risks of spills from waste lagoons.

But those happy hogs have the potential to damage the environment, too. The biggest danger is that nutrients from hog waste will reach waterways, causing water quality problems and changing aquatic habitats. This can happen when excessive nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen leach through the soil into the ground water or when the hogs’ natural rooting behavior causes erosion.

According to Jennifer Curtis, who heads NC Choices, a CEFS initiative that promotes sustainable food systems, there is no legal definition of “pasture,” and consumers might be shocked to see the moonscape left behind when mature hogs are removed from a field. Hogs will dig up plants by their roots, while grazing cows would merely mow them.

So how can farmers respond to consumers’ demand for hogs raised humanely while still protecting the environment and remaining profitable? Responding to requests from farmers for better management practices, Pietrosemoli-Castagni and her colleagues are exploring several alternatives:

• reducing stocking density, or the number of pigs raised in a particular paddock.
• using pigs as part of a rotation system in which crops are grown on fields formerly occupied by hogs, to trap and utilize the nutrients in the soil.
• creating buffers between hogs and waterways to protect against runoff.
• moving water and food stations to reduce soil compaction and distribute nutrients from hog waste more evenly.

With their natural rooting behavior, hogs will eventually denude a pasture. Photo by Jennifer Curtis

Rotating hogs with crops helps freshen pastures, keeping hog waste from waterways. Photo by Jennifer Curtis

The research is being conducted at CEFS’s 2000-acre Cherry Research Farm facility near Goldsboro. The farm and CEFS are jointly operated by N.C. State University, N.C. A&T University, and the N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. CEFS researchers include soil scientists and veterinarians as well as agricultural specialists studying organic cropping, best practices for small farms, pasture-based dairy farming, and even alternative energy sources for farmers.

The swine unit has been operating since 2004 and also conducts research on raising pigs in hoop houses, a common practice in Europe and in Iowa, the largest hog-producing state. In addition to research, they provide extension services, educating farmers on the best practices they’ve discovered.

So the next time you buy pork, ask your farmer: what steps are you taking to be a good steward of the land?

Higher concentrations of carbon dioxide are pumped into four of the experimental rings. Photo: Will Owen

Late in 2010, an epic ecological experiment in the Triangle will begin drawing to a close when carbon dioxide stops pumping from four massive rings of towers in the Duke Forest. Since 1996, more than 250 scientists at Duke and dozens of other institutions have measured the response of this forest ecosystem to the elevated amounts of carbon dioxide expected in the Earth’s atmosphere in the future. They’ve measured tree and plant growth, photosynthesis, leaf size, soil composition, root growth, and water use in the plots bathed in elevated carbon dioxide and in three other “ambient” control plots.

The first, prototype ring was built in 1994; six more came in 1996 (three controls and three experiments). Each ring consists of 16 metal towers in a 30-meter diameter. Computer-controlled instruments in the experimental rings bathe the interior of the plot in carbon dioxide. It’s called Free-Air CO2 Enrichment, or FACE. As opposed to “chamber studies,” in which plants are studied in carefully controlled growth chambers or greenhouses, the rings are open to nature. That means that mammals and insects can circulate freely and that natural events like hurricanes, ice storms, and droughts affect the research site.

Shannon LaDeau, who studied seed and pollen production at the site as a Ph.D. student, fondly calls it the EcoCircus, referring to both the ring-shaped sites and the riot of instruments, leaf-collection baskets, and colored flags staking out individual research groups’ claims to a particular layer of soil or stand of plants. LaDeau is one of at least 25 scientists who conducted Ph.D. research at FACE. “One of the really big bonuses of that site and others like it,” she says, “is that people are coming at it from different directions—biogeochemistry, biology, and so on.” There was an integration of ideas, she says, that “doesn’t happen naturally when scientists go out and choose their own site and do their own thing.”

Photo: Lisa M. Dellwo

I talked recently with Ram Oren, Nicholas Professor of Earth System Science at Duke and co-principal investigator for the project since 1998. He explained that the Department of Energy–funded project will enter a final phase this fall when the carbon dioxide is turned off. A scientific team will follow the trees for two more years to see how they respond to the “severe diet” that will be imposed on them when they are no longer receiving the added carbs.

Oren reminded me that when the experiment began, it was already well documented that trees grew faster under higher levels of carbon dioxide, especially when they were well nourished and watered. Retired Duke ecologist Boyd Strain and his students and colleagues had already established this in studies in which trees were isolated in growth chambers and treated with different regimes of carbon dioxide, nutrients, and water.

The FACE experiment was intended to test how entire ecosystems, not just trees, responded to additional carbon dioxide. In particular, researchers wanted to know if trees and soils would store or sequester extra carbon dioxide, keeping it from the atmosphere where it would contribute to a warmer climate.

The early major findings of the experiment were that, similar to the chamber studies, plants in the forest did indeed grow faster when exposed to extra carbon dioxide, especially in the presence of plentiful water and nutrients. And the ecosystem did store more carbon, but mostly in plant stems, not in soil as had been predicted.

Photo: Lisa M. Dellwo

A second wave of findings showed that the continuing growth response of plants to a “high-carb” diet depended on the native fertility of the site. Trees in fertile areas responded strongly to the carbon dioxide treatment and continued a higher growth rate, but trees in infertile areas didn’t retain their original growth response.

That’s important in the real world, because our most fertile soils tend to be cultivated for agriculture, leaving forests in less fertile areas. So we cannot expect trees to retain extra carbon in the forests of the future, says Oren.

While some scientists were studying tree growth and soils, others were finding that poison ivy has a remarkable response to higher CO2 conditions. Not only did it grow two times as fast as poison ivy in ambient conditions, but it produced much more toxin per leaf.

Shannon LaDeau, who conducted pollen studies, told me that the trees exposed to extra CO2 reached reproductive maturity at a younger age and smaller size. For those of us who suffer allergies, that is a bit ominous. While pine pollen—the yellow-green stuff that bathes the Triangle every spring—is not technically considered an allergen, other trees with true allergy-causing pollen may well have the same response as the pines, LaDeau says.

In 2004, when this photo was taken, the towers were still higher than the treetops. Now the trees have outgrown the towers. Photo: Lisa M. Dellwo

When the Department of Energy announced two years ago that it would cease funding the FACE project in Duke Forest—and similar projects elsewhere—Oren said that the project had not reached its true conclusion. He still believes that. But funding aside, there is a technical reason the project is drawing to a conclusion: the trees have outgrown the towers. When the experiment began, anyone who entered the site or who happened to fly over it could see the rings of towers clearly above the canopy. Now, trees that measured ten meters in 1996 are 21 meters high, and the towers have receded into the canopy.

In addition to the generation of ecological scientists trained at the site and the more than 250 papers reporting on the response of the ecosystem to elevated CO2, Oren believes that an important legacy of the FACE experiment will be the data gathered there over 17 years. Very few experiments last that long, and the accumulated data from FACE is being made available to computer modelers who will use it for years into the future to test and extrapolate responses to future climate change on a larger scope.

Today, I asked Emily Fisher from Oceana to answer a few questions:

Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

I grew up in Raleigh and Durham, North Carolina, and moved to Washington, DC about three years ago. I’m a writer and editor, not a scientist, but I’ve become more and more interested in science the last few years, which has surprised me. In school, science was always my least favorite subject and the one I did the worst in. The worst grade I ever got in high school was a C in physics, and that was after crying regularly during office hours. As an English major in college, I only took one science class: astronomy, and that was so I could go to UNC’s great planetarium.

I’ve always loved reading, writing and spending time in nature, so I’ve come around to science as an environmentalist. I want to spend my life helping protect the environment through writing and editing, so I’ve come to appreciate that I need to know the science behind what’s happening to the planet – and I’m increasingly curious about it. Scientific thinking doesn’t come easy to me, but maybe that’s also part of its appeal.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

My first job out of college was as an assistant editor for a small non-profit publisher that focused mostly on neuroscience. I learned a lot about the brain, though ironically I can’t remember most of it now…

After that I worked for a news aggregator web start-up called Brijit.com. We took long-form journalism (articles from the New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper’s, etc.) and published 100-word abstracts of the articles. It was like a thinking person’s Digg. It was a tremendously fun atmosphere — there were just a few of us editors, sitting around one big table in a one-room apartment in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of DC. We were churning out around 100 abstracts a day — we had it down to a science, really — and having a great time. We had a really cool thing going, but unfortunately the money ran out.

For the past two years I’ve worked for the ocean conservation organization Oceana as the web editor. I’ve learned so much about the threats facing the ocean, from ocean acidification to shark finning to bottom trawling, and I’ve become an ocean advocate myself.

Twice I’ve gone to the coast of North Carolina (Bald Head Island) to write about sea turtles for our blog and magazine — once I documented sea turtles hatching and once I wrote about nesting mothers. Both were incredible experiences.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?

At Oceana, I’m focused on making our website and blog the most readable and engaging place for ocean conservation information. I would love to make us the number one place online for the oceans.

More specifically, right now in light of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, we are trying to get 500,000 people to sign our petition to Obama and Congress stop new offshore drilling. So far we’ve gotten nearly 33,000 signatures.

I’m also passionate about sustainable food, so in my free time I spend a lot of time at the farmers’ market and trying out new recipes with friends. I also do a lot of yoga and am attempting to learn how to play the guitar.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

Blogging is a big part of what I do on a daily basis. I aim to post one blog a day on Oceana’s blog, The Beacon, and sometimes I do more. In the last few weeks, for example, I’ve been posting two, three, four posts a day because of the oil spill. I think a lot of folks at Oceana have recognized what an asset the blog is at a time like this, when we want to react swiftly to the crisis and get our voice out there.

I started our Twitter account last year, and a friend and colleague of mine has pretty much taken it over along with Facebook. She’s doing a great job getting people engaged in our work.

I think blogging and social media are a crucial part of our communications work at Oceana — it’s our primary method of interacting directly with our activist base, or Wavemakers, and hearing their ideas, concerns and questions. Our CEO, Andy Sharpless, is even tweeting now, at @Oceana_Andy.

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

I really enjoyed finally meeting people that I had online relationships with but never met in person, like Miriam Goldstein and the guys from Deep Sea News and Southern Fried Science. I also met some great new people, like the web editor from the New England Aquarium.

At the session about the future of science journalism, I realized that the line between blogger and journalist is truly blurred now. Similarly, at the session about social media from the Pacific Garbage Patch, I was impressed to see how science can be documented using social media tools like blogging and Twitter, even from the middle of the ocean. It was really striking to hear that the journalist’s New York Times story about the garbage patch was less effective and reached fewer people than her personal blog did.

I also really enjoyed the “blog to book” session. It’s my dream to write a book one day, and while a book project itself seems overwhelming, blogging doesn’t. It made a book seem like an achievable goal — some day.

It was so nice to see you and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Today, I asked Amy Freitag from Southern Fried Science to answer a few questions:

Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

Well, first, the basics: I’m a PhD student at the Duke Marine Lab in Beaufort, NC. My research looks at different types of knowledge relating to water quality out here on the coast and how they do and don’t mesh to form a cohesive, scientifically-based policy to protect our estuarine resources for future generations. My scientific philosophy is a bit different than your standard empiricist, a discussion I and my co-bloggers have had in great detail and in print on the blog. Since humans and their behavior and decisions are a large part of my research, I tend to have a difficult time separating research from activism and have to pay constant attention to my role in my research community, as it extends far beyond just observation. This creates both opportunities and responsibilities.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

I’m interdisciplinary at heart. I never could decide if I’d rather be out talking to people or in the field counting critters. But really, the unifying factor is the observational, exploratory nature of the research, something I’d like to continue. Whether doing interviews or planting data loggers in the intertidal, it’s a field experience – a type of lifestyle where surprises are the norm. You set out with a mission to study one thing and your dissertation ends up being on something completely different that emerged from experiences during the research process. That’s what keeps me ticking – those surprises keep life interesting.

One of my favorite research projects arose from a “study abroad” experience in Alaska Native territory. The motivation initially was to get to Alaska and pay for my adventures by doing fieldwork. A forestry professor hired me to help with a prescribed burn about 45 minutes outside of Fairbanks that he and “the hotshots” from the forest service were planning. My role was to hike out every day for a few weeks and basically map out what the forest looked like pre-burn – size and types of trees, animal paths, type of understory, topography, etc. Fairly basic forestry science, which had been part of my academic history as I had spent a summer as an intern in a sugar maple plantation. However, the summer was a wet one and after I was done with all those measurements, the burn was declared postponed until the following summer. I was offered the opportunity to be a roving field hand and help with any of the projects going on at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks (UAF) that needed help.

After project-hopping for a few weeks, I was invited to come along to Venetie, a small village of roughly 200 people at the foothills of the Brooks Range in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge that was concerned about their subsistence resources and had asked for research help from an anthropologist at UAF. I flew into town and got the tour, through a dusty general store and around the village, where there were no cars and the town activity for the day was to build a house for a recently married couple who had decided to move back to their hometown to raise their coming child.

The next day we met with the council of elders to discuss research needs and clarify the arrangement of intellectual property between UAF and the tribe. That evening, we went with one of the elders on a moose hunt, modern style – on the back of an ATV with a large rifle that could both spot and shoot across Big Lake. We didn’t see any moose that night, but did take home a duck for dinner. From a couple days’ experience, I became aware of the need for socially relevant research and collaboration with the residents in the area so carefully studied for the ecological literature. The project that resulted for me was a GIS analysis of changing subsistence resources (moose, caribou, berries, waterfowl, timber for wood stoves) under various models of increased fire due to climate change. From that, the tribe could predict which villages were the most vulnerable to resource shortages and plan for either moving them or subsidizing their needs from other villages.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?

As for a lot of PhD students, most of my time goes towards my research, which is luckily also a passion of mine. I’m very much in planning stages for my life for the next three years, which is both exciting and a little bit nerve-wrecking as well. Part of that is making the friends and contacts I will need in order to get good interviews over the next few years, gaining rapport within the community. That’s often just a fun social science excuse to get out and do fun things And hopefully, after my time here is done, I will have “an ethnography of water quality”.

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

Science communication is crucial to both my research and commitment to broader impacts. It’s critical for transfer of knowledge and the collaboration that is necessary for effective policy. Beyond my particular interests, though, I’m often baffled by how many scientific articles are difficult to penetrate even for people who know the lingo. My undergrad advisor once said that if you can’t explain what you do to a fourth grader, taking into account their attention span, you aren’t doing good science. I’ve taken that as a mission in my life and the use of the Web is a great way to reach all the fourth graders out there.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

I find blogging a good way for me to practice and refine my writing and keep my brain grounded in the real world in terms of the jargon I use. It’s a great way to extricate myself from the ivory tower. In addition, I find it super useful to have a blog up and running and respected when the time comes to write broader impacts statements. Through the summer, I will be blogging about my first time on a research cruise on the open ocean and potentially a trip to the Gulf of Mexico. In these cases, it’s both positive and necessary to blog and get immediate feedback. I credit our commenters and my Twitter friends for making me a better scientist.

When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?

I first discovered science blogs through friends, first the Cornell Mushroom Blog and then the one I now write for, Southern Fried Science. To be honest, I was more familiar with the political blogs, especially of the DC area where I grew up. It was a welcome find to discover science blogs and I am still surprised how welcoming the community has been. Like many before me have said, ScienceOnline is a great forum to put a face to a name on a blog and a personality behind the writing. It’s critical to keeping the community going and creating traditions and camaraderie between blogs (from singing sea shanties with the other ocean bloggers to planning Carnival of the Blue and swapping blog stories). I’ve met a number of awesome people just from one year attending ScienceOnline that are all easy to keep in touch with because we’re active over Twitter (like Jeff Ives of the New England Aquarium and Miriam Goldstein of Deep Sea News). These connections will definitely help me both professionally and personally in the future.

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

The tweeting of all five parallel sessions by practically everyone in them was a change of conference culture for me, but one I would like to see occur elsewhere. It brought unity to the conference and made one fluid conversation happen as people drifted from session to session. I can’t wait to go back next year!

It was so nice to meet you in person and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Today, I asked Russ Williams from North Carolina Zoological Society and the Russlings blog to answer a few questions:

Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

I’m an English major from Northeastern Pennsylvania who works at the North Carolina Zoo (24 years executive director, N.C. Zoological Society). I try to stay somewhat current, despite my age (north of 60). For example, I am listening these days to music by Death Cab for Cutie, Arcade Fire, Flaming Lips, Radiohead and Pole Cat Creek, along with the oldies (Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Hank [and Lucinda] Williams, Coltrane and Bach).

Started personally blogging about zoo animals and issues about five years ago. (Took an intro course in blogging at UNC-Greensboro by G’boro blogfather Ed Cone (Word Up). Found I was learning much from Google searches, and then by following the blogs and tweets of certain science journalists and bloggers, conservation researchers, etc. (The blogs and tweets of Wild Muse/@tdelene and you, BoraZ, are favorite sources.) Flickr and YouTube have provided much for my blogs and tweets too.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

Had no idea I’d work for a Zoo. (Even named a son Noah; would never do that to someone by plan!) Growing up, I knew I would have a career in advertising, like my father. Did do some retail advertising (broadcast and newspaper) after graduation – early 1970′s. Didn’t like it. Backpacked in Europe for two months. Returned to work with weekly newspapers. This led to public relations/communications for non-profits. This led to fund raising. This led to North Carolina (United Way in Winston-Salem, 1980-85). This led to the NC Zoo Society – 1985-now.

Result: accidental zoology tinkerer.

What does it mean to be the Director of the NC Zoological Society? What does the job entail?

Always remember that I have about 100,000 bosses, in about 27,000 NC Zoo Society member households. Our staff tries to provide excellent customer service to our members and to be their “champions” when it comes to getting a good return on their investments in the Zoo in general or a very specific program, like Field Trip Earth (recognized as a Landmark website by the American Association of School Librarians – one of 21, including Google Earth, Library of Congress, NASA and Smithsonian Education).

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?

Proud of my small role in how the NC Zoo and Zoo Society have grown and the creation of both Field Trip Earth (our educational website featuring journals and other media offered by conservation researchers around the world) and Sylvan Heights Waterfowl Park (the largest such gathering, offering and breeding of rare and endangered ducks, geese and swans in the world).

Really enjoy helping folks accomplish what they want to accomplish for the future of the NC Zoo through “The Lions Pride“, a grouping of people who have made planned arrangements for their Zoo, mainly through wills.

Capital campaigns, like Project: Pachyderms (African elephants and southern white rhinos) and Project: Polar Bears also meet my need to attain goals requiring some considerable preparation and effort. (I’ve also plodded through a few full, running marathons and to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro, at 55).

NC Zoo has something else unique about it – the Zoo School! Can you tell us more about it?

A “magnet” Asheboro City high school, the Zoo School is right on site here. It uses the Zoo as a teaching tool not just to study biology and geography, but for all learning, making use of the Zoo for English composition and communications, mathematics, business and many other studies.

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you?

Appreciate your prodding, Bora, to demonstrate Field Trip Earth at ScienceOnline2010. The Charlotte Observer science editor attended our demonstration and the result was an 85-column-inch article in both the Observer and Raleigh News & Observer by T. DeLene Beeland, whose Wild Muse blog and tweets were already favorites of mine, introduced by your RTs, Bora. I want to take in more of the sessions the next time. Only got to one session (other than our own series of demos) and it was exceptional.

It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I’ll see you at the Zoo soon….and at ScienceOnline2011, of course!

Today, I asked T. DeLene Beeland to answer a few questions:

Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

Geography: I live in North Carolina, but my heart is still in Florida, where I spent my whole life prior to 2009. Perspective: I love nature and learning about the natural world. I am a freelance writer with graduate training in ecology, natural resources management and journalism.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

It’s been more of a higgledy-piggledy switch-back path than a trajectory. Let’s see…I’m 33 and have been freelancing for a little more than one year. This is actually my second career – my first was as a commercial interior designer (not a decorator, an interior architectural space planner – very different). While working in design, I was bored down to my bones. I’d also had a health crisis that forced the soul-searching question: if I can do anything in the world, what would it be? My inner voice kept answering, “Be a writer, study ecology.” So I did.

While in grad school (Univ. of Florida) I worked for two years as a staff science writer at the Florida Museum of Natural History. The science divisions in this museum are vast, there are 20-plus scientific departments. I wrote about goings-on in ichthyology, herpetology, four different archaeology departments, a Lepidoptera center and of course, vertebrate and invertebrate paleontology – oh, and ornithology, palynology and paleobotany too! It was a cool gig, except for the money. Shortly after graduating I took a similar position with the Emerging Pathogens Institute at UF, except they were a start-up so I built their science communications from scratch.

Today, I’m building a freelance writing business and working on a natural history book. I feel like I’m at a point where I’ve struggled to the bottom-rung of the freelancing career and I’ve got a toehold but still have a marathon climbing trek ahead of me.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days?

Trying to afford health insurance. (Kidding! Sort of.) Seriously, trying to carve time to research and write my book; stay afloat with freelance work and expanding my professional network. Yep, that pretty much consumes most of my time. And watching the birds at my seed feeder – that soaks up a lot of time too. I like watching them over time and learning their seasonal behaviors.

What aspect of science communication interests you the most?

Finding an interesting story, pitching, finding the lede to a story… Figuring out how to break complex things down into interesting reads; making science relatable to everyday people who may not be into it – these are communication elements I’m interested in. I see my science writing as in its infancy. I’m still really focused on explanatory approaches (here is what they found, this is what the results mean, etc.) Which is fine for being a science evangelist and getting people interested, but in the future I hope to be doing more critical pieces and analysis; especially concerning conservation biology and species conservation and extinction, topics that I always feel drawn to. I am interested in learning to do profile pieces better too – getting at the personalities who do science. I’ve also been sinking time into reading about narrative writing craft and how to bring story-telling elements into science writing: using dialogue (well), orchestrating plot and conflict, stuff like that.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

It is a small part of my professional life. I write blogs for one client (Science in the Triangle), and I write a personal blog, Wild Muse. But blogging is not my primary writing outlet and is a small fraction of my income; and because of that, the majority of my time and effort goes into other types of print communication work. I started blogging as an experiment, mostly because all the freelance business articles I was reading said “You Must Blog. Period.”

I use my personal blog to explore things I’m interested in: wolf studies, birds, ecology the environment… It’s really more of an online journaling exercise. I’m a highly kinetic reader. I have to underline and scrawl copious notes in the margins in order to process ideas… and blogging, for me, is kind of the online analog to that learning process. The happy accidental side effect of it is that I’ve met many people through the process of blogging – like you – and now have a wider and richer online social network because of it.

Facebook I reserve for my personal life. Twitter, I treat a little more professionally. I’ve made a point to use it more tied to my online presence as a science and nature writer.

When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites?

Ah, British spelling?

Shortly after moving to N.C., and hooking up with the SCONC group. As for favorite blogs… I graze a lot. Since I’m new to the blogosphere – Wild Muse is only seven or eight months old – I flit around a lot and skim many people’s blogs just to see what is out there. Some faves in my Google Reader are: CreatureCast, Round Robin, Wolves of the High Arctic and Ralph Maughan’s Wildlife News… but if you notice, these are not blogs you go to for interesting writing or science news, my preferences are more clustered around content I find intriguing. Deep Sea News is great too because it has a unique tone. Scads of people have great blogs, but I can’t say I’m a very loyal daily reader of any single person’s blog. I get impatient, bored and turned off by blogs that are self-promotional or bloggers who take themselves too seriously, and usually won’t go back if I get that vibe from someone’s site. But if they have good content and package it well, I’ll flit back to it.

Is there anything that happened at ScienceOnline2010 – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job?

Hands-down, the fact-checking session won my interest. There are cases where you can’t just take your source’s word for it. Just because someone says something, does not make it true. Writers are not transcriptionists. You have to check with a second or third source to verify what the first said if something does not feel right or sounds off or contradicts what you know. This happened to me recently on an assignment… a project manager told me they had discovered one species trend, then a person collecting data on the project told me the exact opposite. So I had to run it by others to find out the reality. Sometimes people think they are telling you the “truth” but really they are only telling you their perspective of what they experienced – and it’s your job as the writer to sift through and drill down to the un-colored reality. So yeah, I’d say that was the best lesson and what I took home with me. You really get into the danger zone when you think you know something, but don’t check it to verify that what you think you know is in fact true.

It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I’ll see you around.