Trustees of the Conservation and Research Foundation met on a beautiful fall day in Vermont to discuss current proposals. Stay tuned for updates on recently funded projects, and for more information on our proposal guidelines, please follow THIS LINK.
Living Oceans Society has worked for years to identify and protect important coral and sponge habitat off the coast of British Columbia from destructive fishing practices. In 2009 they conducted the Finding Coral Expedition to areas off the coast of British Columbia to locate deep-sea coral forests. The expedition was a successful, ambitious venture that took years of fund raising and months of planning by their science team and staff from Nuytco Research who built and maintained the submarines. Observations and underwater video recordings revealed that these beautiful corals and sponges provide crucial habitat for many species of fish and other organisms.
The Finding Coral Expedition also caught the attention of the B.C. bottom trawl fleet. Following the team’s return, Living Oceans and other environmental partners began discussions with the B.C. bottom trawlers to explore ways to reduce the fishery’s impacts on corals, sponges and other deep-sea habitat. As a result, after years of negotiations, on March 28th Living Oceans Society announced with representatives of the Canadian Groundfish Research and Conservation Society, a suite of substantial measures to reduce the bottom trawl fishery’s impacts on fragile deep sea ocean ecosystems.
The changes, which have been implemented by Fisheries and Oceans Canada for the 2012 fishing season, include:
These groundbreaking measures represent significant steps forward along the road to sustainability for this fishery. The Conservation and Research Foundation is proud to have contributed to the work of Living Oceans. For more information on their ongoing work, visit their web site at http://www.livingoceans.org/.
The Rushikulya sea turtle rookery, Odisha is a busy place. Thousands of endangered Olive Ridley sea turtles have reached the shoreline of Bay of Bengal and started their annual mass nesting. The other two mass nesting sites of Gahirmatha and Devi mouth in Odisha have also seen many Olive Ridley sea turtles. Although mass nesting (or arribada) takes place in these beaches, the adjacent beaches also contribute through sporadic nesting of sea turtles along 480 km long Odisha coast.
The volunteers of Action for Protection of Wild Animals (APOWA) have been monitoring the mass nesting and working to protect the species from undue disturbances. The mass nesting started the early evening of February 29th at the mouth of the Rushikullya River. Coastal erosion continues to be a threat, and the support of the Conservation and Research Foundation and many other groups has helped APOWA continue their efforts. Find out more about APOWA and their conservation efforts at http://www.apowa.org/.
The Conservation and Research Foundation continues to support the Western Lands Project (WLP) as one of the main U.S. organizations working to keep public lands public. WLP relies on a multifaceted strategy that includes government watchdogging, citizen outreach and education, advocacy and reform, and legal challenges. From improving projects at the grassroots level to shaping national policy, they are working to protect America’s national parks, forests, grasslands, and open spaces for the sake of future generations and for healthy ecosystems.
The public land deal process can stretch over many years. While some projects are on our docket for a few months, WLP tracks others for years as they wind through federal procedures. As a specific example, WLP continues to work with two Idaho grassroots organizations on a proposed exchange that would cede over 28,000 acres of National Forest land to Western Pacific Timber in exchange for more than 39,000 acres of clear-cut forest in the upper Lochsa River drainage. In November 2010, the revised Draft EIS was completed which included this option. The staff attorney for WLP submitted in-depth comments and continues to follow this deal closely and provide technical and legal assistance to local grassroots groups and concerned citizens.
Similar monitoring work is ongoing in a proposed land exchange within the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains National Monument in California, the Eagle Valley Land Exchange in Eagle County, Colorado, and a proposed land exchange between the BLM and Howell Petroleum Corporation in Wyoming. The WLP also has dozens of projects with a focus on citizen education and empowerment, policy reform and advocacy, and ongoing legal work including their longest-running legal battle challenging a proposed land exchange to expand an open-pit copper mine into adjacent wildlife corridors in Arizona’s White Canyon Resource Conservation Area.
For more information on the Western Lands Project, visit their web site here.
The Conservation and Research Foundation is pleased to have supported a new initiative at the Rocky Mountain Institute that is culminating in a book to be released later this year called Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era. Reinventing Fire has been an Institute-wide effort to create an integrated vision of a carbon-free economy and the pathway to achieve it, and has been structured around four main areas: electricity, transportation, buildings, and industry. The initiative is developing a set of pathways toward an ambitious but pragmatic energy transition led by business for profit and supported by novel public policy.
Reinventing Fire’s research phase had two main objectives: 1) to investigate the technical and economic feasibility of achieving at least an 80-percent reduction in total fossil fuel use below 1990 levels by 2050 and elimination of all oil and coal combustion, while sustaining or improving supply reliability, energy security, economic growth, and prosperity; and 2) to derive and illuminate the implications for the U.S. energy system over that period, especially the next five years. The resulting book (and supporting web site to be released simultaneously) is described on Amazon.com as follows:
Imagine fuel without fear. No climate change. No oil spills, no dead coalminers, no dirty air, no devastated lands, no lost wildlife. No energy poverty. No oil-fed wars, tyrannies, or terrorists. No leaking nuclear wastes or spreading nuclear weapons. Nothing to run out. Nothing to cut off. Nothing to worry about. Just energy abundance, benign and affordable, for all, forever.
That richer, fairer, cooler, safer world is possible, practical, even profitable-because saving and replacing fossil fuels now works better and costs no more than buying and burning them. Reinventing Fire shows how business-motivated by profit, supported by civil society, sped by smart policy-can get the US completely off oil and coal by 2050, and later beyond natural gas as well.
Authored by a world leader on energy and innovation, the book maps a robust path for integrating real, here-and-now, comprehensive energy solutions in four industries-transportation, buildings, electricity, and manufacturing-melding radically efficient energy use with reliable, secure, renewable energy supplies.Popular in tone and rooted in applied hope, Reinventing Fire shows how smart businesses are creating a potent, global, market-driven, and explosively growing movement to defossilize fuels. It points readers to trillions in savings over the next 40 years, and trillions more in new business opportunities. Whether you care most about national security, or jobs and competitive advantage, or climate and environment, this major contribution by world leaders in energy innovation offers startling innovations will support your values, inspire your support, and transform your sense of possibility.Pragmatic citizens today are more interested in outcomes than motives. Reinventing Fire answers this trans-ideological call. Whether you care most about national security, or jobs and competitive advantage, or climate and environment, its startling innovations will support your values, inspire your support, and transform your sense of possibility.
This peer-reviewed “grand synthesis” shows how the U.S. in 2050 could need no oil, coal, or nuclear energy to run a 158% bigger economy, $5 trillion cheaper (not counting externalities), with the transition led by business for durable advantage and requiring no Act of Congress.
For more information on pre-ordering the book, see the Amazon.com book site.
Grant proposals to the Conservation and Research Foundation are due by August 31st in order to be considered during the Fall board meeting. The CRF funds small grants, typically between $500 and $5000 per proposal. While projects vary from year to year, we have provided both base institutional support and education and research grants focused on five broad areas:
In addition, the Foundation funds general ecological research and environmental education that doesn’t necessarily fit into one of these categories.
The Foundation responds to an initial 1 to 2 page letter of inquiry, followed by a full proposal by invitation only. Full proposals should include a 2-page project description plus bibliography, resumes of participants (in the case of research proposals), budget, and contact information, with web links to appropriate supporting materials.
Please send letters of inquiry or invited proposals to:
Conservation and Research Foundation
P.O. Box 909
Shelburne, Vermont 05482-0909
Or by e-mail to Minda Wetzel at mwetzel@kc3ol.dynip.com.
A 2010 grant to the World Outreach Foundation helped to expand their “Innovations for the Empowerment of Women” project, in particular the work of Dr. Henry Bishop. In the following YouTube video, Dr. Bishop explains the context and goals of their work.
In December, 2008 the Connecticut College Arboretum received a small grant from the Conservation and Research Foundation to support an expansion of environmental education offerings for children in the greater New London community. The programs were specifically designed to engage children between the ages of 4 and 12, and were offered free of charge with the intention of attracting families who might not be able to afford to pay for such experiences.
The 2009 Children’s Programs included: Plant Your Own Chia Pet; Name that Tree!; Understanding Ocean Currents; Learning to Use a Map and Compass; Woodland Wildflowers – An After School Adventure; A Buried Treasure: Fun with Fossils; A Pizza Garden Planting; Ten Native Trees Walk and Workshop; A Pond Walk and Dragonfly Tale; Art in Nature: Creating sculpture with John Sargent; Picnic in the Caroline Black Garden; Hunting for Botanical Treasures on the Campus; What on Earth Can you do with an Old Pickle Jar?; Creating Autumn Sculptures in the Arboretum; Pumpkin Circle: Storytelling and Crafts; Boo! It’s A Halloween Party; Life in the Desert Workshop; If I were an Oak Tree Games and Crafts; Creating Holiday Ornaments from Nature Workshop, and the New London Youth Environmental Conference.
Congratulations on a successful year!
At the recent annual meeting of the trustees of the Conservation and Research Foundation we elected our newest board member, Dr. Ernesto Mendez of the Plant & Soil Science Department and Environmental Studies Program of the University of Vermont. Ernesto brings to the board a long-standing, innovative, action-research program in coffee communities of Latin America rooted in agroecology approaches to the joint conservation of ecosystems and improvement of rural livelihoods. His most recent book on Confronting the Coffee Crisis: Fair Trade, Sustainable Livelihoods, and Ecosystems in Mexico and Central America published by MIT Press has been described as “provocative and innovative in its comprehensive approach to researching and covering the coffee system from field to cup”. He is also a research associate with the Center for Tropical Ecology and Conservation (CTEC) at Antioch University New England, Adjunct Professor at the International University of Andalucia (Spain), and a founding member of Advising & Interdisciplinary Research for Local Development and Conservation (ASINDEC) in El Salvador and the Community Agroecology Network (CAN) in California.
The work of Ernesto and his Agroecology and Rural Livelihoods Group was just highlighted in an article in the Burlington Free Press. You can also visit his ARL Group’s home page, and learn more about about the broader Community Participatory Action Research Network that he co-chairs at the University of Vermont.
Welcome Ernesto!
The Jeanette Siron Pelton Award is made by the Conservation and Research Foundation through the Botanical Society of America (BSA) for sustained and creative contributions in experimental plant morphology. The field is broadly defined to include the subcellular, cellular and organismal levels of complexity. BSA appoints the nomination committee and presents the award at the annual meeting. Beginning in 1998, the recipient of the Pelton Award is invited to present a special address at the BSA Annual Meeting the year following the award presentation.
Nominations for the 2011 award should include a list of all of the nominee’s work to be considered for the 2009-2010 period, a statement in regards to the merits of the nominee’s research, and must be sent by April 1, 2011. More information and an online nominating form are available on the BSA’s Pelton Award nominating site.
