Sarah’s Simple Logic: If You Cut Down a Tree, Replace It

It pays to keep things simple.

Sarah Connor had a simple way of looking at the 20 cherry trees that had been cut down on a street in her community in New York State.

You replace them with new trees!

That hadn’t happened because the town was low on money. So Sarah got busy selling stuff.

In the summer she sold lemonade and in the winter hot chocolate. She also sold her herself and her cause to local business and civic groups.

Along with a website she started – projectlemonade.org – all of Sarah’s fundraising tactics have so raised enough money to replace most of the lost cherry trees.

Sarah’s message to everyone she meets is:

“Trees are very important to help take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. It’s nature’s way of keeping things balanced.”

  “I’m just a kid,” she says, “but I’m doing what I can about something I think is important.”

Check out Sarah’s web site

Bermuda Petrel

The Bermuda petrel is the national bird of Bermuda.

Scientists once thought it was extinct because none had been seen in over 300 years. But then, in 1951, about 18 nesting pairs were discovered on remote rocky islets.

But while the Bermuda petrel isn’t extinct, it is still critically endangered, despite being officially protected by local law.

There are believed to be only about 250 Bermuda petrel birds alive today, in part because a hurricane in 2003 wiped out much of their limited breeding area. Another problem is that these birds nest on the ground, which makes them more vulnerable to prey.

Back in the 1600s, these birds’ strange cries so spooked Spanish explorers that they chose not to settle on the islands where the birds lived, fearing the islands were inhabited by devils.

The Bermuda petrel moves around at night. His favorite foods are squid and fish. When not reproducing, Bermuda petrels fly far and wide over the North Atlantic. Read more about tthem here.

Bermuda Petrel Calling (sound only)

Would You Spend Your Saturdays Picking Up Trash in a Schoolyard?

Marleah Mullen of Wichita, Kan. did.

She even got other students to help her.

As a member of the student council and honor society, Marleah wanted to do something to improve her school’s appearance. “I am very proud of my school and wished others would be, too,” she says.

Still, would you spend your Saturdays picking up trash in your schoolyard? That takes a special kind of caring about the environment!

Marleah and her friends worked in the fall, spring and summer. In the fall they planted bulbs, trimmed trees and shrubs, pulled weeds and raked leaves. In the spring they painted the school’s basketball backboards and lines for hopscotch. In the summer they painted a huge mural in the school cafeteria.

It wasn’t always fun. “We had to deal with extreme cold and heat, major humidity and miserable dryness,” she recalls.

But it sure was worth it, she says.

For her efforts, Marleah was named a 2011 Prudential Financial Spirit of Community State Honoree.

Wasp May Save Millions of Trees

By Meranda Parker, 8th Grade, Woodbury Heights, NJThis story is featured in the January 2012 Issue of the Earth Preservers Newsletter. Download it here.

It’s a heavyweight prize fight you won’t hear about on ESPN.

The combatants are a wasp and a beetle. Scientists desperately hope the wasp knocks out the beetle before it does any more damage to the environment. The beetle is the emerald boreal beetle. It has killed millions of ash trees in the Eastern and Midwestern US. Government scientists call the destruction the worst tree disaster in America since the outbreak of Dutch elm disease decades ago.

The wasp is a species native to China that kills the beetle’s eggs and larvae. Thousands and thousands of these stingless wasps have been released. Scientists are trying to maintain a delicate balance. On the one hand, they need to stop the beetle. On the other, they don’t want to use chemical pesticides that might endanger the environment and people’s health.

With 120 million ash trees at risk just in Indiana, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Girl Scouts Discover Wonder Material inside Their Cookies

Courtesy: Rice University

This story is featured in the January 2012 Issue of the Earth Preservers Newsletter. Download it here.

The Girl Scout in the picture looks amazed, and you would be too if you had just watched a Girl Scout cookie get heated to the point where it turned into a material called graphene.

The point of the experiment, which was done at Rice University in Texas, was to show the scouts how anything that contains carbon – even Girl Scout cookies – can be turned into graphene.

Keep in mind that too much carbon dioxide gas harms the environment, so keeping carbon out of the air by turning it into graphene is useful.

What’s grapheme? It’s a thin, transparent, very flexible material that is great at conducting electricity. Scientists say graphene will soon be used on touchscreen devices like smartphones, improving how they respond to your fingertip commands.

Scientists also think that, because graphene is so thin and flexible, it will one day be sewn into the clothing you wear. When that day comes, your clothing will act as “wearable computers.” You may be able to make a phone call – or look at tonight’s homework assignments – just by touching your shirt sleeve.