ESPP chatted with doctoral student Rich Grogan (Community, Agriculture, Recreation and Resource Studies and ESPP), who is studying excessive car engine idling, a practice with potentially serious environmental, economic and health effects.

Prepare to have common engine idling myths debunked.

“If you’re going to have your car running for more than 10 seconds, if you turn it off and then turn it back on, you’re saving gas,” Grogan says in the video.

Oh yeah — idling is bad for your car too. When an engine idles, it isn’t as hot as when you’re driving. Hydrocarbons aren’t burned completely because of this, which causes sludge buildup.

Grogan’s project looks at how MSU can reduce idling on campus. He and colleagues came up with recommendations for the MSU environmental stewardship team, a campus-wide effort that reports to the Vice President for Finance and Operations on ways to reduce MSU’s environmental footprint.

Grogan said the research remained sensitive to issues like freezing temperatures in the winter and the police department’s need to keep engines running to prevent overheating from computers in the car.

The university is currently working up an awareness campaign.

– Andy Balaskovitz

Peter Kareiva, chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy (TNC), visited East Lansing last week to discuss opportunities for collaboration between MSU and TNC scientists. Kareiva gave an open presentation to the MSU community at the Kellogg Center.

TNC is the world’s largest environmental NGO, with a mission of protecting natural places. Historically, it relied primarily on buying land; now, especially as it expands internationally, it uses “a richer array of strategies,” and emphasizes partnerships, Kareiva said.

Collaborations between universities and TNC can provide valuable synergies, Kareiva said. Most TNC scientists have “little time to analyze and publish, and it’s hard to stay cutting edge.” Few are specialists. Universities can provide valuable expertise; in turn, TNC provides sites for research. Partnerships are also often appealing to funders.

The best model so far, Kareiva said, is the Natural Capital Project, which is a partnership between TNC, Stanford University, and the World Wildlife Fund. Foundations and agencies have funded researchers to work on a topic of interest to the university and NGOs: clarifying the value of ecosystem services.

TNC is seeking to create more of these holistic partnerships, where TNC signs an agreement with whole university rather than individual scientists. After the seminar Kareiva and other TNC staff met with a group of MSU faculty and administrators, led by Jeff Armstrong, Dean of the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, to discuss the potential to establish such an agreement at MSU. One possible focus is work related to the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.

Kareiva is dedicated to “bringing the science of conservation to the people,” said Doug Schemske (Plant Biology) in an introduction. He gave an example: Kareiva once asked Schemske to write an article. Kareiva’s requirements were that Schemske write with “no puffery” and start the paper with a quote from a rock band. Schemske began with a quote from Nirvana, he said: “Take your time, hurry up – The choice is yours, don’t be late.”

-Maya Fischhoff

GreenBoard readers,

As part of our effort to share all of the great work our students, staff and faculty do, we’ve started an occasional series of short videos highlighting environmental work on and around MSU’s campus. We hope the videos will spread awareness of important issues by showing their reach into our own backyards, and that our researchers’ enthusiasm for science and nature will prove contagious.

We’ll post each new video here so that subscribers to our RSS feed will have the latest sent to them, but the entire series will be housed on a new page, available here.

In our first video, we head to MSU’s Tree Research Center, where forestry and ESPP doctoral student Sara Tanis talks about the emerald ash borer, and discusses her research into ways to halt the tree-killing beetle. She even shows us trees in downtown East Lansing that are dying from ash borer infestation.  For more information about the beetle from MSU, click here.