For more than 20 years, Corwin Bell has been on a mission to save the honeybees.
In 2005, after a decade of refining his beekeeping hobby, he launched BackYardHive in Eldorado Springs, Colorado. Besides selling beekeeping accessories and build-your-own hive supplies, the blueprints for which he designs, the site provides learning tools that act as an alternative to conventional beekeeping methods. Bell believes that by arming people with a convenient, actionable way to combat one of the greatest environmental challenges of our time, we can help honeybees survive and thrive — and do so right from our own backyards.
Though the rates of Colony Collapse Disorder — first identified in 2006 after colonies of worker bees mysteriously disappeared — have declined in recent years, honeybee populations continue to be threatened by pesticides, mite infestation, low genetic diversity and climate change.
In 2017, beekeepers across the U.S. lost 40 percent of their colonies, which Bell attributes in part to extreme temperature shifts that are occurring more and more frequently.
To that end Bell, who had already been making hives based on the traditional top-bar design, eventually invented what he calls the “cathedral hive” to help bees survive cold winters and preserve their genetics.
Aside from saving bees, Bell’s bigger vision includes educating more backyard beekeepers. Through BackYardHive, he offers bee guardianship courses ranging from the beginner level to intensive, hands-on workshops.
“We have bee guardians all over the U.S., and for sure all over the world, that are creating this extended habitat for the bees,” he says.
Watch the video above to learn more about the plight of the modern honeybee and how Bell’s efforts are helping this very vulnerable population.
Tag: Conservation
How Kayakers Saved a River and Started a Movement
While most mines in the eastern region of the Appalachian Mountains are no longer in operation, they are far from inactive.
In lightly populated places such as Albright, West Virginia, water with heavy metals seeps from mines into tributaries — the small streams that flow into rivers — finally pooling in reservoirs near the Chesapeake Bay. It’s also here where a group of kayakers made it their mission over 20 years ago to clean up one of the most polluted rivers in America: the Cheat River, a 78.3-mile tributary that runs through eastern West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania. And they’re still at it today.
Jim Snyder, a 64-year-old thrill-seeker who lives on the banks of the Cheat River near Albright, was one of those initial kayakers.
“The pollution there would burn your eyes,” Snyder says, recalling the condition of the river in the mid- to late-’90s, when a series of underground coal mine blowouts released orange-tinged water thick with heavy metals into the river.
The first blowout, in 1994, lowered the pH of the water to dangerous levels, killing off fish as far away as 16 miles downstream. Another blowout a year later eventually devastated the area’s tourism industry, known for its whitewater recreation. The Cheat River soon after became ranked as one the nation’s most endangered.
To reckon with the pollution and damage to the river’s ecosystem, Snyder and other kayakers in the community formed Friends of the Cheat to clean up the dirty streams and creeks that fed into the Cheat River. Their efforts helped the river recover and, with it, a tourism industry centered around its rapids.
“I’d never done much work on committees at that time so it was an awkward fit for me, but we kept making it work,” Snyder tells NationSwell. “We were rookies, but we endured.”
After the mine blowouts, the whitewater industry suffered from more than a 50 percent drop in business, while whitewater participation increased nationally by 33 percent during the same time period.
“Twenty-thousand people were going down the canyon annually in the ’80s and ’90s,” says Owen Mulkeen, associate director of Friends of the Cheat. “Albright [became] a ghost town compared to what it was like at the height of rafting.”
Friends of the Cheat led an effort with the Environmental Protection Agency to use various methods of water treatment, such as limestone filtration, to clean up the tributaries in the area. The success Snyder and the others had with bringing back the Cheat River became widely considered one of the most successful conservation stories.
“[Kayakers] have a passion and that usually keeps them in West Virginia,” says Mulkeen. “We are blessed with the natural beauty and recreation here.”
And that has helped keep the organization’s ranks filled — a necessity, given that mine pollution is still a very real problem in the waters around the Cheat.
Over 7,500 miles of streams in Appalachia are still polluted by heavy metals from abandoned mines, according to data collected by Friends of the Cheat. Before the passage of the Surface Mining and Reclamation Control Act in 1977, mining companies could seal their operations in whatever way they liked, with little or no oversight. And over the decades many of those seals have busted open.
“Mining had a huge impact on the industrial revolution, and allowed us to win or at least participate in two wars,” says Gavin Pellitteri, a recreational kayaker and outreach specialist for the nonprofit Eastern Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation. “There’s a lot of that culture and pride left in the area.”
Pellitteri’s coalition works to correct for acid mine drainage, known as AMD. Similar to Friends of the Cheat, EPCAMR’s treatment strategy is to find an empty piece of land that can be filled with mine water into a pondlike basin. Limestone is used to neutralize the water’s acidity, and exposure to oxygen removes iron and drives off sulfates. Once done, the clean water is put back into a river.
“If you look at where these impacts are, it’s the spine of Appalachia — Northern Georgia, Tennessee, West Virginia, up to Pennsylvania,” says Pellitteri, who estimates that there are over 400 billion gallons of mine water in the Scranton, Pennsylvania, area alone.
As water conservationists like Snyder and Pellitteri continue to clean up the area’s waterways, where a virtually endless flow of polluted water streams from abandoned mines, there’s a fear that they’ll fail to attract a younger generation of outdoor activists to the mission.
“Unfortunately, there’s a brain-drain out of West Virginia,” Mulkeen says. “But we’re born and bred by paddlers, and we hope to continue that relationship. That’s our base.”
Because unlike a tree falling in the forest, a blown-out mine will matter, even if no one is around to witness it.
A Green Hardware Store on Every Corner? It’s Not As Far-Fetched As You May Think
The house in Boulder, Colo., was beautiful. The floors were cork, the carpets were made of recycled plastic bottles — the whole place was being redone on sustainable, environmental principles. “It was mind-expanding,” says Jason Ballard, the co-founder and CEO of eco-friendly home improvement retailer TreeHouse. The house belonged to Ballard’s instructor in a wilderness EMT program. Ballard was staying there shortly after college, and he was inspired by his instructor’s efforts to remodel his home to make it more environmentally friendly. “It was such a lovely vision of what was possible,” he says.
But the more Ballard learned about sustainable home improvement, the more he realized how difficult it was to find attractive, well-designed products. That insight — and that vision of what was possible in the home — led Ballard to create TreeHouse, a company that’s aimed at transforming the home improvement market and, with it, the home itself. Among the wares and services available are recycled glass countertops, electric lawn tools and solar-panel installation. Ballard says customers often call his company “the Whole Foods of home improvement — and it’s not too far from the truth.”
Ballard has always had an eco-conscious mindset. His grandfather was an early role model. “He wouldn’t have called himself a conservationist,” Ballard says, “but he gave me both a conservation ethic and a tremendous sense of wonder about the natural world.” He studied conservation biology in college, where he started to learn about the enormous impact our homes have on the environment. “All we hear about on TV is gas-guzzling SUVs,” he says, “but the real problem is the buildings we’re living in every day.”
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Private residences are the biggest users of energy, the biggest users of renewable and nonrenewable materials, the biggest producers of landfill waste and the second-biggest users of water. Most exposure to toxins also takes place in the home. “I realized that if I wanted to make an impact with regard to these existentially challenging issues, then the best area for me to focus on was, in fact, the home,” says Ballard, who’s currently completing a Social Impact Fellowship with GLG, a membership-based learning platform. Through GLG, Jason and his team have learned about inventory management, retail strategy, in-store user experience and customer data management to help the company implement best practices across multiple locations.
Learn more about the GLG Social Impact Fellowship, including information on applying.
After college, Ballard worked in green building for a while, learning all he could about the market. “What I noticed was that everyone had the same set of problems,” he says. It was hard to find sustainable products, and when he did find them, they were expensive, and only available from a few boutique companies. “The obvious blocker to the whole industry moving forward is access to products at a decent rate, and with some level of curation and education around those products,” Ballard says.
TreeHouse is built on a few core ideas. First, Ballard says, most home improvement products are terrible — poor quality, toxic and unsustainable. Second, most home improvement services aren’t very good, either. Anyone who’s ever embarked on such a project knows that they’re often delayed and routinely run over budget. The industry also hasn’t gone digital yet, making it difficult to get information on the status of your project when you want it. “The whole experience around home improvement needs to be reimagined,” Ballard says. “We are now trying to make not just the products great, but the technology great and the service great.”
TreeHouse aims to make sustainable options appeal to more than just die-hard environmentalists. “If we want healthy and sustainable homes to be the norm, they have to be better than conventional homes. And everything around the process has to be better,” Ballard emphasizes. That’s part of why he decided to start a for-profit company to accomplish his environmental goals. “If you’re in a for-profit business, all of your assumptions are tested all the time,” he says. “It forces you to very quickly arrive at what works to affect change.”
Ballard has ambitious goals for TreeHouse. Today, the company has one brick-and-mortar store in Austin, Texas, and is opening two more this year, including one in Dallas. Within the next two years, he plans on opening still more stores, and expanding beyond Texas. Right now, TreeHouse touches only a tiny fraction of the 80 to 100 million homes in the country, Ballard says. He believes 20 stores — a benchmark he hopes to hit in five years — would drive that figure up to 10 percent. The ultimate goal: Launch 300 stores nationwide to reach 80 percent of all the homes in the U.S.
“Our plan is to run hard at those milestones,” Ballard says. “We don’t have a thousand years to figure this out. We are making decisions in the next hundred years as a species that we will have to live with for the next two thousand years.”
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GLG Social Impact is an initiative of GLG to advance learning and decision-making among distinguished nonprofit and social enterprise leaders. The GLG Social Impact Fellowship provides learning resources to a select group of nonprofits and social enterprises, at no cost.
Homepage photo by Kirsten Kaiser
Can Citizen Science Save Us From Environmental Disasters?
During the rush-hour commute on Tokyo’s trains, it’s easy to spot riders gaming on their phones, sorting sweets in Candy Crush or mustering armies in Clash of Clans. But Kevin Hemphill, a geeky ex-pat, played a different game on his iPad, flipping through images of forests and meadows in Pennsylvania that had been cleared. Tapping the screen, he marked the location of ponds and transmitted the data to a nonprofit halfway across the globe.
Through the web-based FrackFinder, a project of the nonprofit SkyTruth, Hemphill, nostalgic for his childhood home in the Rust Belt of Ohio, pored over the images of the Keystone State. He was looking for evidence of hydraulic fracturing. Better known “fracking,” it’s the process of blasting chemicals, sand and water into underground rock layers to dislodge natural gas — a controversial method of energy extraction that’s brought jobs to the region while potentially putting locals’ health at risk. In a uniquely digital “citizen science” effort, Hemphill and hundreds of volunteers around the world have plotted Pennsylvania’s energy infrastructure, creating a detailed map that can be shared with activists, regulators and academics.
Biologists have long relied on group expeditions to study wildlife populations, but FrackFinder brings the process online, giving anyone with a keyboard the chance to participate. As users click through FrackFinder, SkyTruth’s team hopes the abstract science of environmental exploitation becomes tangible. Their pictures, shot from aircraft and 400-mile high satellites, clearly depict the damage that can be hard to visualize, and even harder to reverse.
“We can look at not just one township or county or state. We’re able to look at changes across entire regions over decades. That’s almost like having access to a time machine,” says David Manthos, SkyTruth’s program coordinator. “It’s the region-wide perspective we offer that you just can’t get from one place on the ground.”
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Geologist John Amos founded the nonpartisan Skytruth, which collects satellite images of potential eco-hazards, in 2001, moving it to tiny Shepherdstown, W.V., two years later. A former consultant for a natural resources exploration firm, Amos put similar tracking tools into the hands of conservationists, as a way to atone for his past “disservice to the planet.” But for nearly a decade, SkyTruth remained a one-man shop. Few donors could see how SkyTruth’s aerial imagery might help the environmental movement. That all changed in April 2010, when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. BP and the Coast Guard estimated 1,000 barrels of oil were gushing out each day, but after studying photos of a vast, shimmering pool of oil on the ocean’s surface, he and oceanographer Dr. Ian MacDonald calculated the spill was more than 20 times worse than officials claimed. After publishing a critical blog post, the federal government quickly revised its numbers upward.
Now a 12-person staff, SkyTruth has used their planetary perspective to create the first repository of mountaintop-removal mining sites in Appalachia; to film flaring over North Dakota’s Bakken oil fields by equipping a high-altitude hydrogen balloon with a camera; and to track unregulated commercial fishing in the world’s most remote waters. After wrapping up in Ohio, FrackFinder will launch in its third state, West Virginia, early this year. Analyses of other states will likely follow.
How is this data used? FrackFinder’s crowdsourced analysis confirmed the exact location of 1,400 active wells and 7,835 wastewater ponds, allowing a team of public health researchers at Johns Hopkins to verify a list of drilling permits provided by the state. Guided by that knowledge, paired with extensive medical records, the university epidemiologists proved that asthmatics were 1.5 to 4 times more likely to have an attack near the drilling, and mothers were 40 percent more likely to give birth prematurely near the most active sites. The researchers weren’t able to pinpoint why locals sickened — maybe sleeplessness from noisy, earth-shaking vibrations, stress from dropping home values or the chemicals themselves — but SkyTruth’s data helped them prove a point.
Surprisingly, crowdsourcing the information is actually harder for SkyTruth than sifting through the images themselves. But the team continues to invest in citizen science because they know the value of the public’s involvement. “It actually puts an image of what’s going on in the world in front of citizens, so they can see for themselves,” Manthos explains. “What kinds of regions are being developed? Is it all forest, rural land or a little of the suburbs? We’re exposing people, up close and personal, to these images. That’s a formative process, and they can draw their own conclusions.”
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Hemphill, for example, says he used to support fracking as a reasonable way to bring much-needed economic growth to Northern Appalachia’s struggling towns. His support persisted, even as he analyzed nearly 5,000 images of Pennsylvania’s scarred terrain. “Wow, they’re really tearing up the earth,” he thought, almost disinterestedly. But because of his exposure to the issue through FrackFinder, he began paying more attention to relevant news stories, reading, for instance, that some homeowners could set the contaminated water in their kitchen sink on fire. Eventually, he turned against the unconventional drilling method for good.
The process influenced Hemphill in another way, too, by reaffirming his faith in technology’s possibilities beyond our social media addictions and diversionary entertainment. “People are on the internet a lot. What do you have to show for so many hours of your life?” he asks. “Especially for millennials, where does it go from here? It’s not a guaranteed thing that we all will just watch Netflix forever. The internet needs to go beyond that now.”
Hemphill imagines closing our Tetris-stacking apps, halting the Instagram scroll and doing something meaningful online. With just a few clicks, he still believes, the Earth can be improved.
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This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st-century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future-forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.
Harnessing the Power of Technology to Help the Environment
From a young age, NationSwell Council member Chris Thomas was interested in the way technology affects human behavior. “How does it augment or utterly interrupt our lives?” he wondered. “How does it make life better or worse?” That line of thinking took him to a series of lucrative corporate jobs. But seven years ago, burnt out on the commercial applications of tech, he took a job at Greenpeace and transitioned into advocacy. Now the chief innovation officer at Sierra Club, one of America’s oldest conservation groups, Thomas is building a tech platform to better engage the club’s members. He’s still asking himself similar questions — “How does technology get people to actually change their world?” — but they feel all the more important, as the earth warms and climate skeptics take prominent government positions. NationSwell spoke to Thomas at his office in San Francisco.
People tend to describe the public versus private sector as diametrically opposed: one’s idealistic, the other greedy; one’s slow to act, the other efficient and innovative. Did you have any difficulties in your transition out of the corporate world?
To me, it felt quite seamless. I quickly saw that a lot of what we’re trying to do in nonprofits is similar to the profit-driven world. A lot of it is about educating people, getting them passionate or interested in what you do, then converting them to — for lack of a better word — transactions, whether they’re buying something or taking action. We are idealists, but we’re also very businesslike in the way we employ technology and use data. The history of these movements is very much driven by ideology: showing up, power to the people. Those are all great constants, and they work really well. But to do them at scale and to get into the minds of a more diverse, broader group of people, we have to employ the technology in a similar way that Nike or Apple would market and convert people to buy their products.
In your experience, what’s the most effective way technology can benefit the environmental movement?
Climate change is a really big issue. It’s complex, long-term, and its urgency is hard to grasp. People feel like it’s in the hands of big corporations and governments, and therefore they’re completely disempowered by the scale of the problem. It doesn’t feel like enough to recycle or buy a hybrid car. That’s a challenge for us.
One thing we can do, using tech, is to provide people with a broad array of opportunities to take action. Traditionally, we’ve asked people to show up for meetings or rallies, and that requires a deeper level of investment than doing something online. The key thing we can do here is to turn all those transactions into data, then use that to create meaningful feedback for the user. If we can give content back to them, then that creates a much more empowered feeling: “Me and other people like me are actually moving the needle on this.” You start to close the power gap. Tech removes the vagueness of “I took an action,” “I showed up” or “I gave money.” A great example is recruiting 25 friends from Facebook, and they go out and each recruit three or four more people. We can track the different concentric circles radiating out from that one recruitment that you did, and we can show the impact you’ve had. At the end of the day, maybe you recruited thousands of people.
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What’s the next generation of the environmental movement going to look like?
Older organizations, including my own, have always had this model where we’re doing the work on behalf of society, and they support us either by signing petitions or giving us money. What organizations like us need to do now is come down off that hill and actually create communities and empower people. The next generation is less interested with what you represent on some vague emotional level, but more about what you can do to help them engender change, to connect them to solutions. They don’t want to hear the talk; they want to see the action. We know what the solution can be, but we need to create tools for them to access it.
What do you wish someone had told you when you first joined the organization?
If you ask our really passionate grassroots organizers in the field, they don’t quite see how what I’m describing fits with the work that they’re doing. They’re out in the streets and working very directly with people, in a community-oriented way. When you start talking about scale and tech projects, they’re not sure where you’re coming from. And I don’t blame them! We have to figure out how it fits with the legacy models of organizing and movement-building that we’ve employed, in this organization’s case, over 125 years. Where does tech fit with that, and where does it depart from that?
In my approach, as a technologist, I started by laying out our essential problems and then trying to figure out solutions for them. One thing I could have done differently, in retrospect, is getting more familiar, at a deeper level, with organizers, understanding what their direct needs are and what they’re trying to accomplish, rather than coming at it from a top-down executive approach. Getting my hands dirty with them for some months would have been a potentially more helpful way of approaching my projects, and it would have built more connections and trust at that level. That is stuff I’m doing now. But we’re also very far along in the work we’re doing, so I’m having to put things back together: introducing stuff to them and answering questions about why we chose to make it in a certain way.
What are the most pressing environmental issues that the next administration must address
Certainly we need to deliver on the promises of the COP21 that happened in Paris, being part of that accord that every major nation on the planet has signed on to. All the leaders of the world currently believe that climate change is real, and that we have a responsibility to do something about it. Our president-elect, shockingly, does not fit with that. He’s in complete contradiction with the will of the rest of humanity, and that, to us, is really alarming, very dangerous and destructive to the work that we’re trying to do. We’re trying to find a way forward, especially in clean-energy solutions. We think this is a pivotal point for humanity, where we have a world that every year is getting hotter and hotter. We’ve got to do something about it: It’s more urgent now than ever.
How a Cannon Could Save the Wild Salmon Population
The advent of hydroelectric dams has disturbed the crucial upstream migration of wild salmon for years. But a company called Whooshh Innovations aims to change that.
Their Salmon Cannon is derived from technology originally designed to assist apple and pear pickers in Washington’s orchards. The “cannon” is really just a tube lined with a “soft material [that] creates a seal around them, generating a vacuum effect that transports [the fish] through at 11-22 mph.”
Protecting the precious cargo is a system of baffles that keep the salmon from banging into the sides of the tube. The end result — launching the salmon upstream and up to 30 feet in the air — has passed safety tests at multiple sites.
Of course, this isn’t the first human effort at assisting salmon in bypassing manmade river-obstructions in their mating waters. Everything from ladders and elevators to trucks and even helicopters has been tried and proved expensive and inefficient.
Of the cannon, however, Washington’s Dept. of Fish and Wildlife Greg Haldy says, “It’s hard to tell, its early in the year, but it seems to be working way better than what we had in the past, way more efficient and I think it’s more fish-friendly.”
The salmon can be loaded by hand and even have demonstrated a willingness to enter the transport tube on their own.
The company’s very own Todd Deligan sums it up nicely: “Worldwide, there is the need to transport fish, whether they be live or dead, differently and more efficiently.”
From where we’re standing, it doesn’t look like a problem anymore.
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Wanted: Knitters for the Cutest Wildlife Project Ever
Knitting is for the birds. Literally.
Using just a little bit of yarn, crafters around the country have answered the call to help save one of nature’s tiniest and most vulnerable creatures: The baby bird.
When young birds fall out of their nests, they are pretty much on their own. Most mothers don’t pick up their chicks after they fall, and since these little creatures cannot regulate their own body temperature, they might not survive without a parent or a warm place to cozy up to.
As SF Gate reports, wildlife conservation group WildCare has come up with a creative solution. The Marin County, California organization takes care of a thousand orphaned birds a year, and instead of putting them in typical plastic containers (which were found to bruise the tiny birds), they have something that works even better: Knitted nests.
As it turns out, these yarn bowls are just as soft and warm as natural nests. In need of more knitted bird cozies, the San Rafael-based nonprofit put out a mass request to knitters back in April for knitters to grab their needles.
MORE: These Women Are Doing Something Amazing With Simple Plastic Bags
The organization, which treats 4,000 wild animals a year, quickly found that their project was too adorable for people to not help. According to the Wildcare website, as of last month, they’ve received 878 knitted nests from California, Minnesota, Texas, Florida, New York, Ontario, Washington, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Indiana.
The great news is that there is always a need for these nests, so any yarn/animal lover can contribute (the organization has a goal of 1,414 nests). Click here for nest patterns and instructions on where to send your completed creations.
Get your knit on.
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DON’T MISS: Expressing Her Love of Nature Through Art: How One Girl Works to Restore the Gulf
Which City Has the Best Tap Water?
Not all water faucets produce equally. In fact, tap water can vary a lot these days — from grimy to cloudy to just simply flammable.
In Boston, however, you can find some great water. That’s because the city just won a national tap water taste test competition (yes, that exists) organized by the American Water Works Association.
The annual competition (which, by chance was held in Boston this year) revealed the secret to Boston’s delicious H2O: Watershed protection, according to Yes!
The city purchases its water from the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, which for the better part of the last 30 years has been buying conservation land near the Quabbin and Wachusett reservoirs — both of which are the sources of Boston’s water.
This uninhabited, undeveloped space naturally filters the water before it reaches the reservoirs, as well as during its journey to the city, purifying it. This natural cleansing doesn’t just make it healthy and tasty; it also just about eliminates the need to use expensive chemical filtration on it, too.
The tasty tap water doesn’t come cheaply, though. It has cost the Authority billions of dollars to purchase the four hundred square miles of protected forest surrounding Quabbin and Wachusett Reservoirs, as well as their cleanup and conservation efforts along the Charles River and in Boston harbor.
Though with the huge improvement in quality made since 1985 (when the Authority was established), it seems like money well spent.
MORE: Extreme Makeover: 8 Inspiring Urban Renewal Projects