Tues Nov 18, The Vineyard Haven Library Evening Lectures continues with our distinguished guest Dr. George Woodwell form Woods Hole Research Center. His topic is: Global Climatic Disruption: The Only New World Requires Turning Down the Heat. There is a new world coming. It is the world we generate by allowing the climatic disruption we have triggered, and still wantonly feed, to run full course and substantially crush this civilization. Or it is the world we build by checking, and then reversing, the climatic disruption. The reversal is essential. It requires substantially immediately abandoning fossil fuels and managing forests globally to stabilize the atmosphere and restore climatic stability. It can be done, but it will take bold leadership by scientists and by governments starting in the United States now and with a schedule of years, not decades.

Wed Nov 19, The Vineyard Haven Public Library will continue the series on sustainability with Peter Caban’s sessions on energy at 7 PM. Peter will cover session five, Electricity.

T. Boone Pickens, the former oilman and now a wind energy enthusiast, told reporters at an energy conference on Wednesday that his Texas wind farm project had been slowed by difficulties in the debt markets, not the lower price of natural gas.

“When we were looking at the project, we felt like we could do it with 30 percent equity and 70 percent debt,” Mr. Pickens said at the conference, convened by Forbes in New York City. “The 70 percent debt is where we’re having a little slowdown.”

http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/
2008/11/12/live-from-new-york-t-boone-pickens/

Last December, Island Grown Initiative launched a new farm-to-school program on the Vineyard, which we call Island Grown Schools. Island Grown Schools seeks to strengthen the connection between local family farms and the seven schools on the island by getting more locally-grown foods into school meals, snacks, and special events, by bringing classes onto working farms in curriculum-tied field trips, and by installing school gardens so students can have regular hands-on experiences with growing food themselves.

Go to the Sustainable section for the rest of the article.

It is a puzzle of evolution: If natural selection dictates that the fittest survive, why do we see altruism in nature? Why do worker bees or ants, for instance, refrain from competing with those around them, but instead search for food or build nests on behalf of their companions? Why do they sacrifice their own reproductive success for the good of the group?

http://www.boston.com/news/science/
articles/2008/11/10/
eo_wilson_shifts_his_position_on_altruism_in_nature/

THE inspiring and transformative choice by the American people to elect Barack Obama as our 44th president lays the foundation for another fateful choice that he — and we — must make this January to begin an emergency rescue of human civilization from the imminent and rapidly growing threat posed by the climate crisis.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/
opinion/09gore.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Federal survey results show a surge in the number of young Atlantic sea scallops in parts of Georges Bank and the Mid-Atlantic Bight that could be a boon to the scallop industry in the years ahead.

An annual dredge survey of scallop grounds from North Carolina to Massachusetts identified an unusually high number of 2-year-old, small-seed scallops, called recruits, in the Great South Channel of Georges Bank and the Delmarva area off the Delaware coast, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole.

http://capecodonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/
article?AID=/20081112/NEWS/811120318/-1/NEWS01