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Blog

Why Conservation is Broken. The Species as a Front End

Note: This is a re-edit of an old article that I wrote on the Science for the Masses blog, updated now that it’s been a few years.

I spent a summer doing fundraising for a Pacific Northwest environmental group, WashPIRG. Door to door, grassroots, still one of the most effective methods of really getting people involved. Turns out actually talking face to face with people works better than asking people to like your Facebook group. Please subscribe below.

I ended up talking with this couple out on Bainbridge Island. For the last two decades, they had been restoring their 5 acre valley to its “natural state.” This meant removing invasive species by hand. You can’t bulldoze out blackberries. You remove them by hand, you plant native species to throw shade and take those resources. Scouring the earth just gets you scoured earth. It takes time and dedication to fight against the tides of evolution and prolific spread of those tiny seeds. They fought, and won, against the development of an industrial park upstream from their property. They had the highest density of salmon running in 15 miles.

This is in an area of the country where the white settlers said that you could walk across a river without touching the water when the salmon were running. They told me that every three days they had to come out and feed the fish, bulk salmon chow. There just wasn’t enough food. I was blown away. How was this possible? The place was a paradise. The air was fresh, heady with flowers, the sound of bees, the rich scent of soil and leaves.

Turns out none of that mattered. They talked to me about shoes.

Every once in a while your shoes wear down and you throw them away. Where did the soles of your shoes go? They didn’t just evaporate, melt into nothing. They become aerosolized. Right now you’re breathing the shoes of everyone within 50 miles, maybe more. The 600 thousand pairs of feet in Seattle are kicking up tiny poofs of vulcanized rubber, which float across the Puget Sound, and rain down into that damn stream. The fish don’t really care, the way that you don’t care about breathing it in. But the microbiota do. Some amoeba can’t handle it. Then the things that eat them have less food, and suddenly there are just less insects. Not enough that we would think to notice. Update, we’re noticing now. Compared to a city street, that valley is humming with activity. But there’s just not enough food now. You could convince people to drive less, but you’re not going to get people to stop wearing shoes.

Conservation is screwed. Our model of how the world fits together is fundamentally flawed.

You can’t save the salmon. Species are just a front end for the environment. It’s the part we pay attention to, the sticker on your bumper. Say you save the salmon. Where are you going to put them? Seriously, where will you put the things you save? They aren’t individual chunks that just look good on a plate. Salmon are a region, a temperature range, part of a trophic level. You can just as easily walk on moon without a space suit as you can save a salmon. The world is changed. There is no where to put them.

Obviously, this hit home. This was the point when I decided that the world was broken and that we needed to work on fixing it. We are great at burning things. Fire is still our finest technology. It’s the fastest, most effective tool that we have. We used it to knock out the bricks in the wall of the world. Knock out enough, and things start to sag, start to fall. This is biochemical reality. It’s physics. You can’t beat the laws of thermodynamics.

Now we have new technologies and we need to love them like fire.

We only pay attention to the frontend. You can’t convince people to stop walking in shoes. We can’t even convince them to stop sucking down soda. So, now I’m working with these new technologies. Building ponds that suck methane and carbon dioxide out of the air, trap all those aerosols and turn them into living things. Garbage in, fresh air out. Plants that may one day grow as fast as we can burn them. Maybe make a place for things to go when this is all over with. It’s hard to take responsibility.

In order to make this change, there needs to be real action. We need to stop talking about things and do something. We started a forum called Crisis Biology. Please take a moment to check it out and look over the ideas that people are submitting. Maybe you have an idea of your own. This could be developing trees that grow at twice the rate so they can suck carbon out of the air, building fuel cells that run on dirt and water, and making boxes of modified bacteria that will be sucking pollution out of the air. If you actually got this far in the article, you probably don’t feel too great. Would you like to fix that? Come say hi. There’s room for you at the lab bench, building bricks to fill the holes we made in the world.

As for Scihouse, we’re now more focused than ever on making sure that something can be done. Contact us about workshops, or if you want help starting your own lab.

Categories
Public Reporting

2018 Annual Report

We’ve been doing our end of the year accounting and we’d like to share it with you. At Scihouse, we are committed to open access, and that means we want you, the community that helps us, know where your donations go.

You’ll notice that a lot of our income relies on donations from individuals or groups that are supporting specific projects. We work to make sure that if a party earmarks a donation for a purpose, those funds are spent on that project.

That’s it. You’ll note that the numbers aren’t exactly perfect; we’re not perfect, and we lost a receipt at some point.

We wanted to be more exact about how the cash moved around, but some things are hard to quantify. When you buy a case of gloves, it goes to everything. 

Please feel free to contact us if you want more information.  We’re looking forward to another year of doing cool projects, visiting schools, and making great science with all of you. 

Thank you

The Scihouse Team

Categories
Education News

Lending Library is Here!

After many donations from personal collections and libraries in town, the Scihouse Lending Library is now available.

If you’re a student looking for some resources, or just someone who wants to sit down and learn, we have a large collection of science and social science books for you to borrow.

If you work at a location that is thinking of getting rid of some of your books, consider donating to Scihouse. Don’t forget, we’re a 501c3 non profit so your donations help not just the community, but you.

Click the tab above to see our collection. More books come in every week.  If you have a request, we will do our best to hunt it down.

We’re always open Monday through Friday From 10 to 4 for walk ins.

See you soon

Categories
News Public Reporting

Amazon Smile comes to Scihouse

Hey everyone,

We’ve been doing a lot lately to rebuild the lab. We have some classes coming up and of course, the monthly meetup group.

One thing that is new that we’re very excited is that Scihouse is now a member of the Amazon Smile program.

By using this link or the banner below when you want to go shopping at Amazon, with every purchase that you make, Amazon will donate a percentage of that to Scihouse. You can get your shopping done and also support a small science focused nonprofit like us without it costing you anything extra.

Please save the link, and think about us next time you’re going to shop at Amazon.

Thanks!

Categories
Blog News

The State of Scihouse and New Exciting Things

It has been an eventful few months and we just wanted to let you know the state of things. We had put together a fantastic bio lab and were gearing up to start monthly classes and were doing some cool research. Due to a series of circumstances that created a strong conflict of interest, we had to cut ties with the sponsor that was helping to pay for some of the lab costs.

As such, we currently do not have a lab space. Luckily, as a mobile makerspace this isn’t a big problem. We still have most of our equipment and so we are moving forward.

Starting March 14th we’ll be hosting monthly get togethers where makers and scientists alike can gather some place fun, have a drink, and chat about projects ideas and more. The first will take place at Intuition and start at 6:00pm. Come and hang out and let’s talk shop about the projects you want to make. You can also find us on Meetup here.

We’re also excited to announce that on April 17th we’ll be taking part in Mini Maker Faire, hosted by the MOSH. We’ll have lasers, glowing microbes, our gene gun, bioplastics, and more so be sure to stop by – we’re looking forward to seeing some of you there!

Finally, while we’re still committed to bringing you the tools and information you need to be a maker in Jacksonville, we also want to rebuild and open a new lab. With it we’ll be able to continue our research and share the methods and materials of biotechnology with all of you. We will be able to resume the biology classes and start new ones on other topics. Access to biology tools is normally restricted to high level university students and we want to make them available to all of you. If you’d like to help make that a reality, Donate Here.
As a 501c3 non profit, your donations are tax deductible.

That’s all for now, and thank you for your continued support!

-The Scihouse Team

Categories
Blog News

DiyBio Care Package and a New Game Plan

We are happy to announce that our diyBio care package from The Odin has arrived! Exciting new toys for the biology lab are now here. Pictured below are the great materials that have been donated. You can see that we now have a PCR machine, gel box, new pipettes and tips to add to our collection, various reagents, and even a CRISPR kit! Not shown are the bacteria strains, dyes, and other materials for recombination.

If you are interested in learning how to get started as a biohacker, let us know. We’re currently testing the waters to see how many people are interested in a diy biology and biohacking class.

This brings us to the other announcement.

Due to a variety of environmental and infrastructural issues, we have chosen to move the makerspace out of the warehouse. But don’t worry! We are setting up to run classes at various locations around the city, including a drone factory and the Jax Library Makerspace. All the tools still exist and if you want to learn or do, we can pop up and make it happen. We’re still here, we’re just more mobile. Flexibility is good.

Thank you again to The Odin for their awesome donation of supplies, and let us know if you are ready to start biohacking.

Categories
News

Come join us on June 30th!

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Uncategorized

Don’t forget the Meetup, Tuesday May 30th

As you can see on the calendar, we’re closed today in observance of Memorial Day.

However, we will be open tomorrow for the Meetup at 6pm.
Please come down and see what we’ve been working on and what we have to offer you.

Enjoy your BBQs and we’ll see you tomorrow.