Soil Organisms

Date sent: Tue, 12 Mar 96 21:54:41 EST
From: cooterb@nando.net
Subject: Re: soil organisms

The Forest Service (among other groups) has assembled quite a bit of information from "urban forestry" work with things like large old parks in the Bronx where the trees just seem to have problems reproducing themselves. The problems are worse in the mixed diceiduous forests from about the Mason-Dixon line and north in zones that saw significatn effects of big ice sheets in the ice ages (which tended to zap the earthwaorm fauna). Further south, you do have native earth worms. Urbanization (or suburban sprawl) tends to help spread the non-indigenous earthworms. You get major shifts in the way nutrients arte processed in the soils -- usually with loss of native fungal organisms and a tendency for the system to "leak" nitrogen.

This is actually a fairly significant problem for the mid-Atlantic and northeast.

Bill Cooter
cooterb@nando.net

Date sent:      Tue, 12 Mar 1996 08:09:29 -0800 (PST)
From:           Dale Goble <gobled@uidaho.edu>
Subject:        soil organisms

The New York Times science section for March 28, 1995, had an article titled "It's Natives vs. Newcomers Down in the Worm World" detailing the takeover of North America by European and Asian earthworms.

The article is based on a group of essays collected in a book entitled Earthworm Ecology and Biogeography in North America_ edited by Dr. Paul J. Hendrix and published by Lewis Publishers, Boca Raton, Florida.
Dale Goble
Professor of Law
Moscow

From:           SHAFFERM@UNCWIL.EDU
Date sent:      Wed, 13 Mar 1996 09:22:45 -0400 (EDT)
Subject:        African American Women and Environment

I have a student who is interested in doing an extended research project on African American women and the environment. She is currently trying to focus her topic. I am familiar with some of the work that has been done on women and the environment, but not much beyond that. I would greatly appreciate any citations relating to work that has been done or is currently being done on African American women and the environment. Also, any suggestions concerning relevant collections of primary sources would be helpful. Thanks in advance for the help.

Peggy Shaffer
Dept. of History
UNCW
shafferm@uncwil.edu

Date sent:      Wed, 13 Mar 1996 13:39:34 -0600 (CST)
From:           Laura Dassow Walls <wallsl@lafvax.lafayette.edu>
Subject:        RE: African American Women and the Environment

I don't know if this would help, but African American women were working in the southern forest industries at times, especially during labor shortages. Although I don't have any references on hand, there did seem to be some involvement with naval stores, and during WWI at least they were working with (and sometimes competing against) African American men for logging jobs (see Edward Munns, "Women in Southern Lumbering Operations" J. of Forestry V.17, Feb. 1919). I also suspect there was some involvement in the 1930s-50s when many African American families assumed entrepreneurial roles cutting pulp wood in the South. The Forest History Society in Durham, NC, might have some leads, original material, etc. It strikes me that this possible legacy, along with involvement with small landholders owning "tree farms" for profit, might make an interesting, and certainly unique paper.

Bob Walls
Lafayette College
wallsl@lafayette.edu

Date sent:      Wed, 13 Mar 1996 12:23:50 -0600 (CST)
From:           "Jonathan R. Smith" <jon@Ra.MsState.Edu>
Subject:        Re: African American Women and Environment

Alice Walker wrote about the MOVE bombing as industrial white capitalism's response to African-American environmentalism; the short piece oversentimentalizes its object, like everything Walker writes, but it may be a useful starting point. It's reproduced in a Routledge anthology called, I believe, _Green History_; I forget the editor's name.

Date sent:      Wed, 13 Mar 1996 12:03:41 -0600 (CST)
From:           BLEND@ALPHA.NSULA.EDU
Subject:        Re: African American Women and Environment

You might want to look at Vera Norwood, *Made from this Earth*, there is a chapter that deals with the literary as well as political issues ivolved. In several anthologies of ecofeminist essays published recently there have been entries by African American women dealing with environmental racism. If you want the titles please e-mail me directly. Good luck,
Benay Blend
blend@alpha.nsula.edu

Date sent:      Wed, 13 Mar 1996 10:00:44 -0800
From:           Alair MacLean <alair@igc.apc.org>
Subject:        Re:  African American Women and Environment

You should definitely check into the Web pages maintained by Mike Meuser and Andrew Szasz at UC Santa Cruz. In addition to the overview of their work on environmental justice issues, they maintain a very extensive bibliography of sources, including primary sources, related to your student's topic. You can access the pages at:

http://www.cruzio.com/~meuser/EI/index.html

Good luck,
Alair MacLean
EcoJustice Project Director
Institute for Global Communications

From:           SHAFFERM@UNCWIL.EDU
Date sent:      Wed, 13 Mar 1996 09:22:45 -0400 (EDT)
Subject:        African American Women and Environment

Peggy Shaffer
Dept. of History
UNCW
shafferm@uncwil.edu

Date sent: Fri, 8 Mar 1996 15:48:57 -0600
From: "Kevin Cragg" crakev@homer.acs.bethel.edu
Subject: history of soil organisms

1. Has any one researched the transfer of soil organisms from one continent to another paralleling the transfer of crops, animals and disease organisms? Is this topic susceptible to historical research and analysis?

2. I'm also curious about historical changes in habitat ranges. For example, there has been some discussion of the replacement of woodland caribou and moose by white-tailed deer in the last centtury or so due to brainworm susceptibility. And a recent newspaper article implied that cardinals have extended their winter range northward in the last 60 years or so. I presume ther are many studies of individual species, but I wonder if someone has looked at this in some broader sense, maybe in map form?

Date sent:      Tue, 12 Mar 1996 08:09:29 -0800 (PST)
From:           Dale Goble <gobled@uidaho.edu>
Subject:        soil organisms

The article is based on a group of essays collected in a book entitled _Earthworm Ecology and Biogeography in North America_ edited by Dr. Paul J. Hendrix and published by Lewis Publishers, Boca Raton, Florida.

Dale Goble
Professor of Law
Moscow

Date: Tue, 12 Mar 1996 10:47:15 CST
From: "Dennis Williams, Southern Nazarene U." <DWILLIAM@SNU.EDU> Subject: history of soil organisms

Date sent:      Tue, 12 Mar 1996 04:36:42 -0800 (PST)
From:           Austin Meredith <rchow@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu>
Subject:        history of soil organisms

This database has a quite extensive timeline on the spread of the late blight potato virus out of a valley in Mexico by way of the Eastern Seaboard of the US and of certain fields in Flanders and of the Isle of Wight into the potato fields of Ireland in the early 1840s. The human behaviors which set up this tragedy and the human attitudes which caused it to be so terribly consequential are treated in great detail.

When the material is available on CD-ROM later this year, you are welcome to make use of it. In the meanwhile, please keep us in mind as a possible site of publication for your history as you build it, or for portions of your history which deal in some extended manner with the locus of our investigations, which focus upon the 1817-1862 period and upon the New England culture which surrounded and informed the life of one particular individual, Henry David Thoreau. (We have the material on the potato blight in this database because Thoreau had to deal with many of the ecological refugees from this disaster, as they came through the Boston port and spread into America.)

Austin Meredith <r2chow@uci.edu>, "Stack of the Artist of Kouroo" Project

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