Juneteenth Day Celebration in Madison this Weekend
June 19, 2015, will mark the 150 Anniversary of Juneteenth Day Celebration in American History. The weekend’s activities begin Friday, June 19, 2015 with a Praise Celebration at Fountain of Life Church, 633 W Badger Rd, Madison, at 7:00 pm, featuring Marquis Hunt, renowned saxophonist and psalmist.
Saturday’s Celebration will kick-off with the Fifteenth Annual Parade at 11:00 am. (Expo Way–at Willow Park–to John Nolen – Olin Turville Pkwy) and the outdoor festivities will follow at Olin Turville Park, starting at Noon on June 20, 2015.
Juneteenth is the one event that is totally dedicated to the African American experience here in Madison and across the nation. We are aware of the challenges that impact African Americans living in Madison and Dane County but adversity is not new to African American community. For it was in the midst of slavery that our American experience was formed; while plowing fields and picking cotton “soul music” was born as an outward expression of hope in the midst of despair. It is the freedom from what physically binds us that is celebrated every Juneteenth Day. In 1865, it was slavery and today it is racial disparity.
Celebrate Black Lives at Juneteenth
Wisconsin Group Hosts “Bee Fest” to Encourage Pollination in Madison
Madison’s “Bee Fest” kicks off the beginning of Pollinator Week, June 15 – 21, 2015, a week dedicated to highlighting the importance of bees, bats, birds, butterflies and other pollinators.
A dramatic drop in the number of honeybee colonies in recent years drew dozens to the UW Arboretum on Sunday to understand that trend and how to encourage more pollination in Madison.
About 60 people spent their Sunday learning about pollinating insects and animals — which are not restricted to bees — and how to monitor their numbers in to help researchers track them.
The event was hosted by the Wisconsin chapter of the Society for Conservation Biology and is part of a larger effort to track populations of pollinating insects in the city.
More than 60 percent of Wisconsin’s honeybee hives have died since April of last year — higher than the national average, according to a recent survey conducted by a partnership that includes the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Now, the group is cataloging different species of pollinating insects with a focus on the rare rusty-patched bees and yellow-banded bumblebees in the Lakeshore Nature Preserve, which stretches along Lake Mendota’s University Bay between Muir Woods and Picnic Point.
Sunday’s event was the kickoff of that effort, chapter member and event organizer Wynne Moss said.
“One thing that’s challenging about studying changes in communities over time is that we often don’t have baseline data,” said Jesse Miller, a UW-Madison graduate student and botanist who researches grasslands and biodiversity patterns.
“This hopefully will be a long-term project that allows us to track changes year to year so we know what species were there in 2015, and how did that change in 2016,” Miller said. “And that can become incredibly valuable because these long-term data sets are so rare.”
Many of those attending Sunday’s event learned how to catch and identify insects using nets, special insect vacuums and by creating traps in cups of soapy water.
Attendee Keefe Keeley is the executive director of the Savanna Institute, a nonprofit based in Urbana, Illinois, that is focused on developing restorative agricultural systems.
Keeley said the effort will help ongoing research into bee hive collapse.
Anitra Johnson of Madison, a retired landscape gardener, plans to help monitor the insects, too.
On Sunday, she caught three species of bees that were drawn to baptisia and wild rose plants.
A major contributing factor to the declining bee population is a reduction in native plants they prefer, Miller said.
“In order to conserve pollinators, we have to conserve our natural habitats, and native plant gardens can be one way to do that, in addition to conserving the wild lands,” Miller said.
Miller said agricultural land has largely replaced savannas and prairie lands, especially in southern Wisconsin, diminishing the number of plants that flower at various times throughout the year.
“It’s not only having a native habitat but having a diverse enough native habitat that you have nectar throughout the summer, and that’s hard for a lot of gardeners to recognize and know when things bloom,” Moss said.
Source: Molly Beck mbeck@madison.com
EPA is joining other federal agencies, the National Wildlife Federation, the Pollinator Partnership (pollinator.org) and many more organizations in the Million Pollinator Garden Challenge (http://millionpollinatorgardens.org/) to promote pollinator health.
The Children of Today and Tomorrow are in for a Rude Awakening
The global warming genie has escaped his bottle! He has begun to show his wrath, which is only likely to worsen in the coming years, decades and centuries, and there is presently no end in sight!
He’s leaving plenty of evidence. The only way we can all help weaken him is by stopping our nonessential burning of fossil fuels, stopping deforestation especially of the tropics, and doing things which naturally result in more greenhouse gases being added into the earth’s atmosphere and oceans (such as overeating, wasting food, not recycling, not reusing things whenever possible, running our air conditioning and furnaces needlessly, using energy derived from tar sands industry, doing other things that frivolously burn fossil fuels such as going for joy rides, cruising, etc.. Because our atmosphere is where Global Warming lives and breathes (now that he’s escaped the bottle) and because he gets his tremendous strength to wreak havoc on the world by his breathing in greenhouse gases that have been accumulating to record high concentrations in the earth’s atmosphere (as a by-product of our burning carbon-based fuels in our cars, trucks, airplanes, power plants, ships, boats, trains, machinery, recreational products and the like) we need to all put him on a crash diet, NOW!
According to David Owen, author of Green Metropolis and The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions Can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse, the proportional share of the fuel burned during a round trip from New York City to Melbourne, Australia, is greater than the total amount of energy that the average resident of the earth uses, for all purposes, in a year. Forestalling global calamity is a preemptively worthy, ethically justifiable and economically achievable goal for everyone on the planet, especially in this era of television, radio, computers, Skype, the iPhone and virtual reality. Climatologists, environmentalists, CEOs, religious leaders, students and tourists seeking entertainment or to broaden their horizons, and government officials ought use the least greenhouse gas emitting technologies available to them to accomplish their objectives; they should not have to cross the oceans and great land masses of world (requiring vast burning fossil fuels) just to be present in person. Likewise, our government leaders and business people ought minimize the amount of products traded with distant countries, so as to minimize the amount of fuel burning required in the shipment of goods by air, sea and over miles and miles of terrain. Transportation of billions of tons of goods along with extensive long distance vacationing and business trips by millions of people every year is simply no longer sustainable. Such activities are becoming ethically wrong because they are unquestionably harming the planet and all the living things it is home to, both now and in the future.
We cannot and must not wait for technology to bail us out. Scientists the world over say it is now paramount that all humans begin acting in significant ways to reduce their annual greenhouse gas emissions. Otherwise, we will never get Global Warming to go back into his bottle – where he belongs! Greenhouse gases accumulate atmospherically over time – they build up in the atmosphere and oceans from year to year. Their volume is accelerating in earth’s atmosphere and as well as in its oceans, and the total volume will likely keep accelerating for some time due to compounding factors (positive feedbacks) of the earth’s natural systems. That’s why it’s of the utmost importance – paramount – that everyone act in ways to reduce their annual carbon footprint, immediately, before Global Warming becomes all to powerful, uncontrollable and for generations, a tragedy for civilization.
President Obama Twitting about Global Warming and Future of NBA
Goes to show most of the people who follow professional basketball aren’t aware of the treats global warming has on their sport. Gee, maybe Governor Scott Walker ought to have thought this through before encouraging the locals and state decision-makers to entering the deal for building the half-billion dollar arena in Milwaukee with the billionaires who will own the team and arena?
President Obama took to Twitter to talk about global warming after a briefing at the National Hurricane Center. Obama, using his freshly minted @POTUS Twitter handle, took questions on climate change after receiving his annual briefing on its effects at Miami’s National Hurricane Center.
But when he weighed in on the NBA Finals, Twitter lit up.
Most of Obama’s answers focused on climate change, though they got far fewer retweets.
His tweets on climate change after a briefing at the Miami National Hurricane Center were not as popular as his basketball tweets.
His tweets on climate change after a briefing at the Miami National Hurricane Center were not as popular as his basketball tweets.
“More severe weather events lead to displacement, scarcity, stressed populations; all increase likelihood of global conflict,” he said, explaining why he views climate change as a national security issue.
“The science is overwhelming but what will move Congress will be public opinion. Your voices will make them open to facts,” he said when asked how he handles “climate deniers” in Congress.
The Q&A was the first real engagement Obama had made with the public since he got the Twitter handle 10 days ago.
Flashback to Thursday, November 21, 2013, when senior representatives from four of the most influential professional sports leagues in the United States assembled at a closed door meeting of the Congressional Bicameral Committee on Climate Change. Officials from Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, and the National Hockey League, joined by a representative of the U.S. Olympic Committee, testified that worsening climate change poses risks to the future of their sport. They all described some of their league’s many environmental initiatives and, in particular, the work they do that is focused on reducing their contribution to global warming.
While November 21st is now known as an historic day in Congress because of changes made to the Senate filibuster rule, that date now also represents a watershed in our national debate about climate change: On November 21st, 2013, senior representatives from the major professional sports leagues in the United States testified before Congress for the first time about their organizations’ belief that climate change is real and, as Kathy Behrens of the NBA stated, “will only worsen if we do not address the air pollutants that are driving it.”
It is notable when senior officials from MLB, the NFL, the NBA and the NHL, all speak before a Congressional committee about the need to address climate disruption. While climate deniers in Congress and elsewhere might think they can attack the U.S. EPA or the United Nations with impunity, surely they would think twice before trying to impugn the integrity of those who lead the professional sports industry. All of the premier U.S.-based sports organizations are among the most culturally influential and highly regarded businesses in the world, and all of them, even including NASCAR, have now stated publicly that climate disruption is real and that we must act to do something about it.
All Things Environmental 
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