Wednesday, September 9, from 5:30-8:30 at Angelo’s

Wednesday, October 14, from 5:30-8:30pm at Bourbon Street Grille

Sunday, November 8, from 11:30-3pm pm at Village Lanes. This is a family friendly event. Participants can watch the Packer vs. Tampa Bay Buccaneers game on the lanes while bowling. (Please RSVP by October 25 so enough lanes can be reserved.)

RSVP to tguilbert@wisc.edu

Urban Chickens

Join Ron Kean, UW Extension’s poultry guru, for a fun and informative evening of chicken chat. Ron will addres the following topics (and more!):

Why chickens?
Why in the city?
How does one get started?

Thursday, September 10
7:00 PM

Pinney Branch Library
204 Cottage Grove Rd.

Monona’s chicken ordinance continues to generate controversy

By GENA KITTNER
608-252-6139
gkittner@madison.com

In January, when a proposal to allow Monona residents to keep chickens was introduced, the Munson family was totally on board with the idea. After all, they already owned several hens.

But now that two city commissions have voted against the proposed ordinance, which is expected to go before the City Council Monday, they just want the whole issue to disappear.

“We had no idea that it was even controversial,” said Scott Munson, who worries about what may happen to his chickens if the plan fails next week. Although he’s confident no “chicken Gestapo” will come knocking, he now believes the city’s don’t ask, don’t tell policy may be the way to go.

Monona Ald. Doug Wood introduced the proposed zoning change in January. It would allow single and two-family households to buy a permit to keep up to five hens – but no roosters.

Owners would be required to keep the hens in secure and clean housing at least 20 feet from neighboring residences and would not be allowed to slaughter the animals outside.

That’s not a problem, Munson said.

“No one really knows that we have chickens unless we tell them,” he said, adding the chickens are quiet, unobtrusive and “no odor comes from the coop.”

Madison approved a similar law in 2004.

But Monona’s Public Safety Commission unanimously voted against the proposal, July 1, citing enforcement as the main reason. The Plan Commission voted 3 to 2 against it June 22, mainly because the agricultural usage was not consistent with residents’ expectations in an urban setting like Monona, said Paul Kachelmeier, Monona’s planning and community development coordinator.

Mayor Robb Kahl, who has been against the zoning change from the beginning, agrees.

Kahl said residents have told him, “If I wanted to be out in an area where things like chickens were allowed. . .I would have moved to a more rural area.”

But Wood said the effort to allow chickens in the city goes beyond reducing energy associated with transporting food and having fresh eggs – it’s also about individual property rights.

Some people have said having chickens is an “East Side of Madison idea,” and they want Monona to be different, Wood said.

“That’s not really good enough when you’re telling someone how to use their private property,” he said. “You need to have some reason. I think chickens would probably be less of an imposition on your neighbors than a lot of things.”

Supporters say some have also expressed fears that allowing chickens would make the city look tacky.

“There’s this mindset of this being something low class, that if we allow chickens that pretty soon cars will sprout up on blocks,” said Heather Gates, executive director of The Natural Step Monona, a local organization working toward an environmentally, economically and socially sustainable community.

“It’s not very forward thinking,” she said. “We’re going to be looking for ways to have our food sources. . .be more local.”

Munson said he checked Monona’s codes when his family got their chickens in September and didn’t think they were breaking any laws.

The chickens are part of the family’s sustainable lifestyle, which includes a vegetable garden that occasionally gets help from a chicken eating Japanese lady beetles and slugs. The chicken manure is composted and used as fertilizer.

“It all really works well together as a system,” he said.

September 23, 2008
By Steve Connor, Science Editor

The first evidence that millions of tons of a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed has been discovered by scientists.

The Independent has been passed details of preliminary findings suggesting that massive deposits of sub-sea methane are bubbling to the surface as the Arctic region becomes warmer and its ice retreats.

Underground stores of methane are important because scientists believe their sudden release has in the past been responsible for rapid increases in global temperatures, dramatic changes to the climate, and even the mass extinction of species. Scientists aboard a research ship that has sailed the entire length of Russia’s northern coast have discovered intense concentrations of methane – sometimes at up to 100 times background levels – over several areas covering thousands of square miles of the Siberian continental shelf.

In the past few days, the researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through “methane chimneys” rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a “lid” to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age.

They have warned that this is likely to be linked with the rapid warming that the region has experienced in recent years.

Methane is about 20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and many scientists fear that its release could accelerate global warming in a giant positive feedback where more atmospheric methane causes higher temperatures, leading to further permafrost melting and the release of yet more methane.

The amount of methane stored beneath the Arctic is calculated to be greater than the total amount of carbon locked up in global coal reserves so there is intense interest in the stability of these deposits as the region warms at a faster rate than other places on earth.

Orjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University in Sweden, one of the leaders of the expedition, described the scale of the methane emissions in an email exchange sent from the Russian research ship Jacob Smirnitskyi.

“We had a hectic finishing of the sampling programme yesterday and this past night,” said Dr Gustafsson. “An extensive area of intense methane release was found. At earlier sites we had found elevated levels of dissolved methane. Yesterday, for the first time, we documented a field where the release was so intense that the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface. These ‘methane chimneys’ were documented on echo sounder and with seismic [instruments].”

At some locations, methane concentrations reached 100 times background levels. These anomalies have been seen in the East Siberian Sea and the Laptev Sea, covering several tens of thousands of square kilometres, amounting to millions of tons of methane, said Dr Gustafsson. “This may be of the same magnitude as presently estimated from the global ocean,” he said. “Nobody knows how many more such areas exist on the extensive East Siberian continental shelves.

“The conventional thought has been that the permafrost ‘lid’ on the sub-sea sediments on the Siberian shelf should cap and hold the massive reservoirs of shallow methane deposits in place. The growing evidence for release of methane in this inaccessible region may suggest that the permafrost lid is starting to get perforated and thus leak methane… The permafrost now has small holes. We have found elevated levels of methane above the water surface and even more in the water just below. It is obvious that the source is the seabed.”

The preliminary findings of the International Siberian Shelf Study 2008, being prepared for publication by the American Geophysical Union, are being overseen by Igor Semiletov of the Far-Eastern branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Since 1994, he has led about 10 expeditions in the Laptev Sea but during the 1990s he did not detect any elevated levels of methane. However, since 2003 he reported a rising number of methane “hotspots”, which have now been confirmed using more sensitive instruments on board the Jacob Smirnitskyi.

Dr Semiletov has suggested several possible reasons why methane is now being released from the Arctic, including the rising volume of relatively warmer water being discharged from Siberia’s rivers due to the melting of the permafrost on the land.

The Arctic region as a whole has seen a 4C rise in average temperatures over recent decades and a dramatic decline in the area of the Arctic Ocean covered by summer sea ice. Many scientists fear that the loss of sea ice could accelerate the warming trend because open ocean soaks up more heat from the sun than the reflective surface of an ice-covered sea.

At the Monona Community Center, attendees gathered information from the Monona Community Gardens, myfairlakes.com, and the Monona Farmers’ Market. They perused materials from the Sustainability Section of the Monona Public Library, and were able to order rain barrels from Sustain Dane and sign up for renewable energy with MPower. At the Focus on Energy display attendees used arm strength to compare the amount of energy needed to power a compact fluorescent light bulb against that of an incandescent bulb. Comforting those who felt like “98-pound weaklings,” Renewable Energy Program Coordinator Emily Hickey said, “Nobody over the age of ten can ever get the incandescent bulb to light up.”

The first presentation of the evening was by Katie Ross of Seventh Generation Energy Systems. She explained the four “system conditions” of The Natural Step’s framework for sustainability in science-based terms, and then simplified them in a delightful physical description that had the entire audience readily repeating her moves. “The system conditions in interpretive dance,” Alder Bob Miller joked.

Anna Haines from UW-Stevens Point spoke about her city’s planning process to become an eco-municipality, sharing the positive results as well as the challenges.

The twenty-minute video The Story of Stuff was enthusiastically received. An eye-opening look at the dark side of consumption, it nevertheless uses creativity and humor to make its points. (It is available to view online at www.storyofstuff.com.)

Heather Gates of The Natural Step Monona encouraged attendees to sign up for a study circle on The Natural Step, the “most important thing we ask you to do for Monona.” Many accepted that invitation, signing up for the Sunday evening and Thursday evening study circles which started this week.  

“This is an outstanding community effort that I am excited about,” said Monona resident Fred Gluck, who plans on participating in a study circle. “It is a great opportunity for the community to come together and deal with the problem of an endangered environment. It’s a problem that affects us here in Monona and around the world.”

The evening ended with the drawing for the Sustainable Future door prize, won by Gluck’s wife, Stacey. Local businesses and members of The Natural Step Monona donated a cornucopia of items worth more than $267.00. A second door prize was created with donations brought to the event. Donors were: Rutabaga Paddlesports, Dianné Aldrich of 4Pillars4Health (Pilates and body work), Willy Street Coop, Crema Café, Monona Farmers’ Market, myfairlakes.com, Ace Lakeside, Trek Bikes, SR Bag Ladies, Shaklee Distributor Sally Buffat, Heather Gates, and Penny DePaola.

For more information about the Sustain Dane rain barrels, please visit www.rainfordane.com.

Join the rapidly-expanding and large numbers of people in our area wanting to live in ways that are less harmful to our natural systems and more healthful for all of us. We’ll have fun while we learn how we can make our lives, work, and community more sustainable.

At this free event, exhibits and representatives from Focus on Energy, Sustain Dane, MPower, the Sustainability Section of the Monona Public Library, myfairlakes.com, Monona Community Gardens, and the Monona Farmers’ Market will be on hand to share their know-how and experiences.

See the fully-accessorized Gary Fisher “Monona” bicycle, soon to be raffled off by The Natural Step Monona. (Thank you, Mead Family!) Order a Sustain Dane RainReserve rain barrel. Enter to win the Sustainable Future door prize—a wealth of sustainable goodies, including: A stainless steel water bottle from Rutabaga, a $150 gift certificate from Dianné Aldrich at 4Pillars4Health Eco-Studio, a tote bag and bag of Co-op Bakery-made cookies from the Willy Street Coop, Shaklee Scour Off Paste from Sally Buffat, a $5 gift certificate from Crema Café, a Chico bag from Penny DePaola, a pair of DeFeet “Go by Bike” socks from Trek, a copy of the book The Natural Step for Communities from Heather Gates, and a 5-pack of GE compact fluorescent bulbs from Ace Lakeside! A door prize worth over $242!

The evening includes a screening of the short movie The Story of Stuff. This fun and fast-paced film reveals the threads of our stuff-oriented lives, and provides a clear understanding of the negative impacts that our production and consumption patterns have on the planet.

Katie Ross, from Seventh Generation Energy Systems, will give a brief overview of The Natural Step framework and its system objectives.

From the eco-municipality of Stevens Point, comes Anna Haines, the Sustainable Future keynote speaker. Haines is Director of the Center for Land Use Education; associate professor in the College of Natural Resources at the UW-Stevens Point; land use and community development specialist with the UW-Extension; and member of the Stevens Point Eco-Municipality Task Force, which successfully developed A Path to a Sustainable Point, a plan for guiding Stevens Point to a sustainable future. Haines will share her knowledge about the cooperation, support, and involvement needed from all aspects of a community.

Join us this evening. The future is coming, and you don’t want to miss it!

Why install a rain barrel? One, they reduce the amount of stormwater. Stormwater takes soil, fertilizers, salt, other pollutants, and debris rushing into our lakes and pollutes them. Two, rain barrels help recharge our hydrologic system, helping lessen the drawdown of our aquifers. And three, they treat our plants to highly-oxygenated, fluoride- and chlorine-free water, making for much happier plants.

Sustain Dane rain barrels are made of thick, rugged, 100% recycled, food-grade plastic; are constructed locally; and use as many recycled parts as possible.

The non-profit environmental group, Sustain Dane, runs the fast-growing RainReserveTM  rain barrel program. Proceeds from rain barrel purchases are reinvested in Sustain Dane’s ongoing sustainability education and outreach in southern Wisconsin, making a purchase a win-win.

• Rain Barrel Sales and Orders: Sundays, August 17, 24, and 31, from 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
• Rain Barrel Distribution: Sunday, September 7, from 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.

For more information, please call 663-2459.

For more information about the Sustain Dane rain barrels, please visit www.rainfordane.com.