Some Perspectives on Land Restoration in the United States

1977 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-114
Author(s):  
James L. Liverman

Rapid achievement of energy independence has become an urgent national goal in the United States. However public opinion, reinforced by general environmental legislation and specific energy-related legislation, demands that the development of energy alternatives will not be at the expense of the environment. One area of strong concern regards landscape restoration.This subject is highly controversial, and responsibility for research and regulation is currently scattered among a number of Federal and state agencies and bureaux. Examination at the programme level indicates that many groups are working in closely related scientific areas. The Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) is making a detailed project and task analysis to determine whether true duplication rather than complementation of effort exists. From this analysis and a subsequent interagency effort, an integrated and fully coordinated restoration research programme can be designed. The size of this programme will need to be commensurate with the size of the problem. Hence, reclamation activities must be geared to the great diversity of ecological systems that are present in the United States, with due consideration of the full array of alternative energy-development possibilities.Clearly, energy development involves a process of trade-offs. Thus it is the responsibility of ERDA to ensure that energy options, proposed for the future, are accompanied by a complete assessment of environmental costs—so that energy-environmental tradeoff decisions can be made early in the development of the technology, and can be based on a solid foundation of ecological knowledge. In order to carry out this mandate we shall need to establish sites for longterm energy impact research (in every major ecosystem), help design a coherent national land-reclamation programme, support an adequate amount of basic and imaginative applied research, and develop public demonstration areas where citizens, industrialists, and professional specialists, can observe longterm results of energy-environmental effects.Prompt action demands that we capitalize upon past studies and develop a programme to learn as rapidly as possible about basic reclamation processes, so as to provide the best available knowledge to society's decision-makers. Follow-on studies must be conducted to validate and improve our reclamation predictions and management activities. The Argonne National Laboratory, which will provide a central focus for the ERDA land-reclamation research, will gather and collate all pertinent data, so that models and generic statements regarding reclamation techniques can be developed to guide us.In order to have an adequate supply of clean, safe, and environmentally accepted energy, we will need the full cooperation of all. Only by moving together can we ensure for posterity an environmental heritage as rich as that which we ourselves have enjoyed.

Author(s):  
Jasgurpreet Singh Chouhan, Et. al.

Hydrogen fuel is one of the clean fuels that can replace non-renewable energy sources. Engineering innovations in extraction and distribution are the key challenges to this alternative fuel[1].The bibliometric analysis had been conducted to understand the active authors, organizations, journals, and countries involved in the research domain of “Hydrogen fuel”[2], [3].  All published articles related to “Hydrogen fuel” from “Scopus”, were analyzed using the VOS viewer to develop analysis tables and visualization maps.This article had set the objective to consolidate the scientific literature regarding the “Hydrogen fuel”and also to find out the trends related to the same.The most active journals in this research domain were identified as International Journal of Hydrogen Energyand Journal of Power Sources.The most active country was the United States of America. The leading organizations in this research domain were the Russian Academy of Sciences of Russia and Argonne National Laboratory of the United States of America.The most active authorswere Tomasov A.A and Jacobson M.Z.


2005 ◽  
Vol 127 (01) ◽  
pp. 32-34
Author(s):  
Paul Sharke

This article discusses that according to the Argonne National Laboratory Center for Transportation Research, long-haul truck idling in the United States burns more than 800 million gallons of fuel a year. The big reasons for idling include heating and cooling of sleeper cabs and generating electricity for onboard appliances like refrigerators and microwaves. In severe, glove-cracking cold, truckers idle to avoid cold starts and to keep their fuel from turning to slush. Onboard idle-reduction systems range from simple start–stop arrangements to full-out auxiliary diesel generators. They require greater financial commitments than stationary systems on the part of the truckers or the employers who buy them. Yet, unlike many pollution prevention programs, where installing equipment often spells lower efficiencies, idling reduction stands a good chance of lowering both fuel usage and emissions. A business case can be built for many idling reduction schemes.


Public Voices ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 115
Author(s):  
Mary Coleman

The author of this article argues that the two-decades-long litigation struggle was necessary to push the political actors in Mississippi into a more virtuous than vicious legal/political negotiation. The second and related argument, however, is that neither the 1992 United States Supreme Court decision in Fordice nor the negotiation provided an adequate riposte to plaintiffs’ claims. The author shows that their chief counsel for the first phase of the litigation wanted equality of opportunity for historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), as did the plaintiffs. In the course of explicating the role of a legal grass-roots humanitarian, Coleman suggests lessons learned and trade-offs from that case/negotiation, describing the tradeoffs as part of the political vestiges of legal racism in black public higher education and the need to move HBCUs to a higher level of opportunity at a critical juncture in the life of tuition-dependent colleges and universities in the United States. Throughout the essay the following questions pose themselves: In thinking about the Road to Fordice and to political settlement, would the Justice Department lawyers and the plaintiffs’ lawyers connect at the point of their shared strength? Would the timing of the settlement benefit the plaintiffs and/or the State? Could plaintiffs’ lawyers hold together for the length of the case and move each piece of the case forward in a winning strategy? Who were plaintiffs’ opponents and what was their strategy? With these questions in mind, the author offers an analysis of how the campaign— political/legal arguments and political/legal remedies to remove the vestiges of de jure segregation in higher education—unfolded in Mississippi, with special emphasis on the initiating lawyer in Ayers v. Waller and Fordice, Isaiah Madison


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leroy Walston ◽  
Heidi Hartmann

<p>Concomitant with the increase in solar photovoltaic (PV) energy development over the past decade has been the increasing emphasis on land sharing strategies that maximize the land use efficiency of solar energy developments.  Many of these strategies focus on improving the compatibility of solar energy development with other co-located land uses (e.g., agriculture) and by improving several ecosystem services that could have natural, societal, and industrial benefits. One such land opportunity is the restoration and management of native grassland vegetation beneath ground-mounted PV solar energy facilities, which has the potential to restore native habitat to conserve biodiversity and restore previously altered ecosystem services (e.g., natural pollination services). This presentation will discuss various assessment and modeling approaches to evaluate the scale and magnitude of the ecosystem services provided by different vegetation management strategies at solar PV energy development sites. This work demonstrates how multifunctional land uses in energy systems represents a win-win solution for energy and the environment by optimizing energy-food-ecology synergies. This work was conducted by Argonne National Laboratory for the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Alexander Simmons ◽  
Christoph Nolte ◽  
Jennifer McGowan

AbstractOn January 27, 2021, President Biden signed an executive order, Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad, committing the United States to various goals within his campaign’s major climate policy, the Biden Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice. Included in this executive order is a commitment to “conserving at least 30 percent of [the United States’] lands and oceans by 2030.” This ambitious conservation target signals a promising direction for biodiversity in the United States. However, while the executive order outlines several goals for climate mitigation, the ‘30×30’ target remains vague in its objectives, actions, and implementation strategies for protecting biodiversity. Biodiversity urgently needs effective conservation action, but it remains unclear where and what this 30% target will be applied to. Achieving different climate and biodiversity objectives will require different strategies and, in combination with the associated costs of implementation, will lead to different priority areas for conservation actions. Here, we illustrate what the 30% target could look like across four objectives reflective of the ambitious goals outlined in the executive order. We compile several variations of terrestrial protected area networks guided by these different objectives and examine the trade-offs in costs, ecosystem representation, and climate mitigation potential between each. We find little congruence in priority areas across objectives, emphasizing just how crucial it will be for the Biden administration to develop clear objectives and establish appropriate performance metrics from the outset to maximize both conservation and climate outcomes in support of the 30×30 target. We discuss important considerations that must guide the administration’s conservation strategies in order to ensure meaningful conservation outcomes can be achieved over the next decade.


2019 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 126-136
Author(s):  
Stacia J. Dreyer ◽  
Ezra Beaver ◽  
Hilary J. Polis ◽  
Lekelia D. Jenkins

Author(s):  
Peter H Beckman

On 1 October 2004, the most ambitious high-performance Grid project in the United States—the TeraGrid—became fully operational. Resources at nine sites—the San Diego Supercomputer Center, the California Institute of Technology, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the University of Chicago/Argonne National Laboratory, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Texas Advanced Computing Center, Purdue University, Indiana University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory—were joined via an ultra-fast optical network, unified policies and security procedures and a sophisticated distributed computing software environment. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the TeraGrid enables scientists and engineers to combine distributed, multiple data sources with computation at any of the sites or link massively parallel computer simulations to extreme-resolution visualizations at remote sites. A single shared utility lets multiple resources be easily leveraged and provides improved access to advanced computational capabilities. One of the demonstrations of this new model for using distributed resources, Teragyroid, linked the infrastructure of the TeraGrid with computing resources in the United Kingdom via a transatlantic data fibre link. Once connected, the software framework of the RealityGrid project was used to successfully explore lattice-Boltzmann simulations involving lattices of over one billion sites.


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