An invisible present, an invisible place, an invisible blog

Sorry not to have been blogging much this winter. It's been a long winter of work, and for a period of time, I didn't have a tremendous amount of new stuff to write about. My energies have also been dispersed between a number of nascent projects, and a few of them have internal blogs that have been sapping my energy to write publicly. Nonetheless, lately I've been brimming over with ideas, so I hope to get back up to speed soon.

Also, I have had a number of projects that completed. The report that I was writing for the Design Trust for Public Space, titled "Sustainable New York City", was issued in late January. You can find a nice .pdf copy here. I very pleased with the graphic design, and I hope that people find the ideas in it useful.

More recently, I wrote a guest post for WorldChanging, one of my favorite sustainability blogs, on April 19, 2006, titled "An invisible present, an invisible place". I've copied it below, and the archive copy is here.

Every day, we learn more about how we are changing the natural world, from the most intimate scales, such as the loss of unique species, to the most universal, such as climate change that will affect everyone, everything, and everywhere for hundreds of years. How can we possibly comprehend these changes in nature? As ecologists have written, we live in an invisible present, where natural processes and change occur over generations, and within invisible places, such as broader landscapes, ecosystems, and regions.

One way that we're learning about the rhythms and scales of the natural world is through the Long-Term Ecological Research Network (LTER), funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. Begun in the 1960s, the LTER network now comprises 26 research stations, each devoted to the long-term study of an ecologically-distinct area, such as lakes, deserts, cities, prairies, wetlands, and forests. An overview of the entire effort is here.

Each relatively large station, and coordination across the entire network, allows more than 1,800 scientists to study big ecosystems for long periods of time. Novel experiments include constructing over a hundred mini-prairies in central Minnesota to observe the importance of biodiversity to ecosystem health; monitoring one of the nation's fastest growing cities, Phoenix, and its surrounding desert ecosystem; finding connections between El Nino, plague, and prairie dog populations in New Mexico (plus prairie dog cam, here!); and observing lakes in Wisconsin to observe minute chemical changes over 25-year periods.

Part of the challenge of building a sustainable society will be to synchronize our perception and ourselves with the intrinsically different rhythms and scales that exist within nature. And what could be bigger than the LTER? As of November 2005, 32 countries on six continents have joined the International LTER network.

More new ideas should be following soon.