On this West Virginia Morning, uncertainty about the future amidst a changing climate has given rise in recent years to a phenomenon known as “climate anxiety.” Ahead of Earth Day Monday, Chris Schulz spoke with Amy Parsons-White, sustainability manager for Marshall University, to discuss this mental health issue and potential solutions.
On this West Virginia Morning, uncertainty about the future amidst a changing climate has given rise in recent years to a phenomenon known as “climate anxiety.” Ahead of Earth Day Monday, Chris Schulz spoke with Amy Parsons-White, sustainability manager for Marshall University, to discuss this mental health issue and potential solutions.
Also, in this show, lawmakers had the opportunity to ask questions of state health leaders about the state’s IDD Waiver program. Emily Rice has more.
West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting which is solely responsible for its content.
Support for our news bureaus comes from Shepherd University.
Chris Schulz produced this episode.
Listen to West Virginia Morning weekdays at 7:43 a.m. on WVPB Radio or subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. #WVMorning
Recycling is a major component of sustainability – and composting highlights recycling at the organic level. At Marshall University, West Virginia’s first commercial composting facility is spinning its wheels.
Monday is Earth Day, an annual reminder of the growing importance of environmental conservation and sustainability.
Recycling is a major component of sustainability – and composting highlights recycling at the organic level. At Marshall University, West Virginia’s first commercial composting facility is spinning its wheels.
During lunch at Marshall University’s spacious Harless Dining Hall staff members will serve hundreds of meals, leaving food waste in the prep kitchen and on student’s plates. Marshall DiningField Marketing Coordinator for Sodexo, Christopher Estrada, said there was a plan to unload those pounds of scraps.
“Wedid try at one point giving it to a pig farm,” Estrada said. “He would come by and pick up stuff and feed the pigs but then he stopped showing up.”
Beginning about a year ago, Estrada said food waste removal at all of Marshall’s dining facilities took a new exit route.
“Any trims from the vegetables or any leftovers are thrown into this green container with anything that’s organic,” Estrada said “That would include paper, bones, all that kind of stuff. And anything that is thrown away by the consumer is also sorted and thrown into there as a, you know, recyclable reusable thing.”
At Marshall’s Composting Facility a few miles off campus, the XACT Systems Bioreactor’s rotation drum slowly spins waste into compost.
Marshall Sustainability Manager Amy Parsons-White said Marshall is the only university in the world with this level of technology. She said it provides the ultimate in environmentally friendly aerobic digestion. The bioreactor turns organic material into compost in as little as six days.
“We started about a year ago, taking all food wastepaper, cardboard, and lawn waste from off of our campus, as well as horse manure from Heart of Phoenix horse rescue, and digesting it in our aerobic digester,” Parsons-White said. “It is used all over the world for municipal composting, and for agricultural composting, we’re the first university to ever take that on.”
Parsons-White said the composting facility brings in around up to 15 32-gallon barrels of food waste a day, and about 10 50-pound bales of shredded paper. Along with feeding the mechanical digester, waste goes into a giant worm bin, where more than 50,000 red wiggler worms compost another three tons of waste each day.
Parsons-White said it took some legislative law changes to make the facility work.
“There was a rather antiquated law on the books that said that you could not compost food waste and sell it, so you couldn’t commercially compost food waste,” she said. “We got that law changed so now our hope is that this will be a pilot program for the rest of the state so that we can see compost facilities all across West Virginia.”
Parsons-White said the finished compost product, going to the campus landscaping crew and commercial sales, has so far saved around 300 tons of carbon from going into the atmosphere.
“We need compost to go on our grounds, not only to make the soils healthier, so that our plants and fruits and vegetables are healthier, but it also acts as a carbon sink to actively remove carbon from the atmosphere,” she said.
Future facility plans are to include community composting involvement, advanced agriculture-related student classes and create a statewide network of composting facilities.
“We could really make West Virginia an agricultural hub,” Parsons-White said. “We live within eight hours of 84 percent of the population of the United States. And everyone with a garden buys compost.”
Back in the campus lunchroom, Estrada, who helps lead Marshall’s corporate food partner Sodexo’s duties, said the composting effort is part of a national corporate push to reduce carbon footprints
“Sodexo has been moving hard towards trying to improve that carbon footprint,” Estrada said. ”This is the biggest lead we’ve had towards that. It helps the students feel better that they’re not wasting food especially if they’re throwing it away. It’s not just going in the garbage, it’s being reused.”
Meanwhile, the XACT Systems Bioreactor keeps on composting.
West Virginia geospatial officials are developing new technology to help visualize flood and landslide risk in the state. The project aims to create more accessible and updated community-level flood risk data.
Flooding events like these are familiar territory for many residents. According to the West Virginia GIS Technical Center, 286 communities across the state are located directly on flood plains — areas adjacent to waterways that can become inundated by rising water levels.
The center has long worked to identify flood risks through digital mapping software. On Sunday, state analysts presented new developments in this effort to the West Virginia Legislature’s Joint Legislative Committee on Flooding.
Currently, the center is working to strengthen local flood risk data and to create data visualization tools more easily understood by members of the public, according to Co-Director Aaron Maxwell.
Often, emergency management data comes from the federal level, which limits the level of detail available on the local level.
The center is working to update structural and flood plain data across the state to “support the public and flood plain managers in flood-prone communities,” and to develop a “higher grain of detail than what’s available with federal tools,” Maxwell said.
Last year, the center began developing the West Virginia Flood Resiliency Framework through a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). This has allowed the center to develop mapping and modeling tools on flood risk and resiliency across the state, Maxwell said.
Beyond modeling how waterways and properties would be affected by rising water levels, Maxwell said the center is also conducting a statewide survey to assess how residents feel about flood risks and recovery efforts in their community.
The center will then flesh out additional reports on flood risk preparedness locally, Maxwell said.
By providing resources like new data visualization software and survey reports to the public, Maxwell said the center hopes to bolster “data-driven decision-making in the state,” like corroborating emergency relief grant requests with concrete data.
Maxwell also said that the center has been working with West Virginia’s State Resiliency Office to compile these resources into a “one-stop shop for people to go to, to investigate their flood risk.”
This furthers the center’s goals of providing more accessible data for the public. Pulling it all together in one location is easier for every-day residents, like how 3D visualization tools are more easily understood than convoluted or industry-specific information, Maxwell said.
Aaron Maxwell, co-director of the West Virginia GIS Technical Center, speaks to members of the West Virginia Legislature Sunday.
Photo Credit: Perry Bennett/WV Legislative Photography
The center is also working to develop tools that can assess risks associated with flooding, like landslides.
Kurt Donaldson, geographic information system (GIS) manager at the center, said that landslides are the second most costly form of natural disaster to West Virginia, second only to flooding.
“Just where West Virginia is, with the steep slopes, landslides are always an issue,” he said during the committee meeting Sunday. “Sometimes they get categorized as flood-damaged structures when it was associated with a mudslide.”
Donaldson said that the center is developing a state landslide susceptibility grid.
Like the flood risk visualization maps, these aim to convey to local officials and members of the public emergency risks present in their communities. “It can be useful for identifying areas that are susceptible to landslides,” he said.
While the center will continue to work on the project in the coming months, Maxwell said their NSF funding ends in October, requiring sustainable, long-term funding resources to keep data up to date.
Sen. Chandler Swope, R-Mercer, said that flood risk management is often overlooked in financial discussions within the Legislature, which he views as an oversight.
“Flooding has been, in budget terms at least, virtually ignored for 100 years,” he said during Sunday’s meeting. “We’ve got the other highways, water, sewer, broadband, et cetera infrastructure, but flooding is not on our agenda as a major infrastructure need for West Virginia.”
Swope said that he and members of the Legislature should prioritize flood risk mitigation funding in upcoming financial discussions.
“As money becomes available after other infrastructure needs are met, I think we should give serious consideration to doing what we can for flood mitigation, and we’ll choose the highest priority places first,” he said.
Swope also said that preventing damages associated with natural disasters like floods would ultimately limit state spending on emergency response efforts.
“It’s not an expense that wouldn’t pay for itself with the proper application,” he said. “If this information had been available 100 years ago, there might be a lot of towns and cities that have a lot less damages due to floods.”
To participate in the West Virginia GIS Technical Center’s flood resiliency survey, visit the center’s West Virginia Flood Resilience Framework website.
For more information on local flood risk in West Virginia, visit the West Virginia GIS Technical Center’sWest Virginia Flood Tool.
This 3D model from the West Virginia GIS Technical Center shows how rising water levels would affect a West Virginia home.
Image Credit: West Virginia Flood Tool/West Virginia GIS Technical Center
On this West Virginia Morning, when your power goes out, water bill comes in or your nearby fire hydrant looks ancient, there’s a state organization keeping tabs on all of that and more. Randy Yohe talks with Charlotte Lane, chair of the West Virginia Public Service Commission, on how this regulating entity balances public protection with keeping utilities viable.
On this West Virginia Morning, you don’t see caned chairs as much as you used to. Cane breaks down with age and there aren’t many people who know how to repair these old chairs. But in Wheeling, there’s a workshop called Seeing Hand, where skilled workers repair old chairs and so much more. For Inside Appalachia, Folkways Reporter Clara Haizlett brings us this story.
Also, in this show, when your power goes out, water bill comes in or your nearby fire hydrant looks ancient, there’s a state organization keeping tabs on all of that and more. Randy Yohe talks with Charlotte Lane, chair of the West Virginia Public Service Commission, on how this regulating entity balances public protection with keeping utilities viable.
West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting which is solely responsible for its content.
Support for our news bureaus comes from Shepherd University.
Eric Douglas produced this episode.
Listen to West Virginia Morning weekdays at 7:43 a.m. on WVPB Radio or subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. #WVMorning
A total of 26 counties in West Virginia are now under a state of emergency declaration following heavy rains, tornadoes and storms last week, and the heavy rains and storms that hit the state on April 11.
A total of 26 counties in West Virginia are now under a state of emergency declaration following heavy rains, tornadoes and storms last week, and the heavy rains and storms that hit the state on April 11.
Gov. Jim Justice has amended last week’s State of Emergency to include Boone, Braxton, Calhoun, Doddridge, Gilmer, Harrison, Jackson, Logan, Mingo, Ritchie, Roane, Tyler, Wayne and Wirt counties.
The initial group included Fayette, Kanawha, Lincoln and Nicholas counties on April 2, and then two days later, the governor added Barbour, Brooke, Hancock, Marshall, Ohio, Wetzel, and Wood counties. On April 8, Justice added Pleasants County.
West Virginia Division of Highways (WVDOH) road crews continue to work to assess and clean up damage caused by a massive storm that moved through the state on April 11.
Most of the state had been under a tornado watch until 9 p.m. Thursday. Tornadoes did not materialize, but high winds and a largely stationary storm front dumped record amounts of rainfall on the Kanawha Valley and other parts of West Virginia, leading to mud and rock slides, downed trees and flash flooding.
Some parts of the state received five inches of rainfall in the space of several hours.
WVDOH Chief Engineer of Operations Joe Pack said the worst of the flooding was concentrated north of Interstate 64.
As of 2 p.m. Friday, April 12, multiple roads remained closed by high water in Kanawha, Cabell, Jackson, Clay, Mason, Lincoln, Pleasants, Wood, Doddridge, Harrison, Marion, Monongalia, Morgan, Brooke, Marshall, Ohio, Tyler and Wetzel counties.
In Kanawha County, record rainfall overwhelmed storm drains on Interstate 64 near the Greenbrier Street exit, flooding the interstate. WVDOH work crews waded into the rushing water with rakes to clear the drains by hand.
Pack said that, once the water recedes, WVDOH road crews can assess any damage to the roadway and plan any repairs.
The State of Emergency declaration is a proactive measure ensuring the allocation of necessary resources and expediting emergency response efforts. It allows state and local agencies to take swift and decisive actions to mitigate the dangers to protect the lives and property of West Virginians.
Residents are encouraged to remain vigilant and monitor official emergency management and local media accounts for updates.
Last week, Justice issued a State of Preparedness for all 55 counties, which is still in effect.
A Shepherd University student is leading a citizen science project that aims to repopulate American chestnut trees in Appalachia. American chestnut populations have been threatened for decades by an infectious disease called chestnut blight.
Imagine trees more than 100 feet tall stretching across the skyline of Appalachia; families resting in the shade down below or collecting husks bursting at the seam with chestnuts.
Before the 1900s, sights like these weren’t just imaginary. American chestnuts once reigned supreme in Appalachia, populating forests in 13 present-day states.
But things changed at the turn of the 20th century with the arrival of a new disease: chestnut blight.
“In the early part of the century, a strain came in that affected the chestnut tree, and chestnut trees began to die,” said Sylvia Shurbutt, director of Shepherd University’s Center for Appalachian Studies and Communities.
“By the end of the century, we had virtually no standing chestnut trees in most places,” she said. “The chestnut tree does still live. … [But] the tree will grow for a bit, and then it will die. It will contract the blight.”
According to Shurbutt, chestnut trees were a pivotal part of pre-Civil War Appalachian history.
Chestnut wood helped build log cabins and household furniture. Chestnut forests fostered regional biodiversity. Even chestnuts themselves were a staple of eighteenth and nineteenth-century cuisine.
That’s why Shurbutt and the Center for Appalachian Studies jumped at the opportunity to help repopulate the American chestnut.
“We really want to engage our students and the community in what I think is probably one of the most important and significant things and gifts that we could certainly give,” she said. “That is to bring back an iconic tree, a tree that was the symbol of Appalachia, a tree that was at the heart and soul of what Appalachian stood for.”
The project came to the Eastern Panhandle with the help of Susan Thompson, a graduate student in Appalachian Studies at Shepherd University and an affiliate of West Virginia’s chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation.
Community members pose for a drone photo beside two chestnut saplings they planted in Morgan County on April 6.
Photo Credit: Randal Stewart
Thompson began the local project last year, when she rallied together a team of community members to plant hybrid chestnut trees at a local farm.
These trees were hybridized with Chinese chestnut trees, which made them more resistant to the blight. Now, Thompson’s team aims to replant pure American chestnuts, with a little help from an ecological ally.
“When it has a symbiotic relationship with mycelium, which is the plant that a mushroom grows off of — it’s all these white tendrils. Sort of imagine how the internet has threads going in every direction and connections. It’s like that, the threads going in every direction,” she said.
Mycelium then works with chestnut trees to more efficiently capture resources.
“They connect with the tree roots, and they spread out another 50 feet,” Thompson said. “You may have 80 feet of area that a tree can collect nutrients and water.”
While environmental interventions like these support early growth in American chestnut trees, conservationists are still grappling with how to best protect trees from the threat of chestnut blight.
Finding a cure to the disease is a work in progress, and scientists are looking for answers in the genes of chestnut trees from around the world.
In the meantime, one new strategy has helped extend the lives of ailing trees. It involves taping a package of soil around an infected segment of the tree for months on end, which blocks the disease’s spread.
This is not a catch-all solution, because it doesn’t prevent new infections, and it is harder to use on big trees. More than anything, scientists need more information on how the disease works, and American chestnut resiliency more broadly.
While this American chestnut sapling is just a few feet tall, adult chestnut trees can grow to more than 100 feet.
Photo Credit: Jack Walker/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
This, again, is where Thompson comes in.
Thompson is creating a website for a new citizen science project that involves documenting the life cycle of local American chestnuts online, from planting to infection to treatment. That way, researchers have more information on what works and what does not.
“It’s bringing together minds from all over the country. Potentially, we can have people from all over the world,” she said. “But we’re first trying to bring together a group of people in Appalachia who know where these trees are, who can keep an eye on them and provide data about them.”
By engaging with volunteers on an online project, Thompson said she and other self-described “chestnutters” can also offer advice on how to treat infections and protect the species as a whole.
Thompson said the project has good traction so far, but it will take time for Appalachia to see the chestnut forests that were widespread centuries ago.
Still, Thompson said she and other conservationists are excited by the possibilities American chestnut reforestation provides. This includes protecting Appalachian ecosystems, and even combating global warming.
“These trees are out there. We know we have this big problem to solve with cooling the Earth. We have all these people who are excited about chestnuts,” Thompson said. “I’d like to see people join our group.”
“I’d like to see chestnutters making the world cooler,” she added.
To learn more about American chestnut reforestation in West Virginia, visit chestnutters.org.
