Urban Ecoist

A new study came out that finds that by cutting pollution in your city, you can live longer.

More importantly, the study found that life expectancy increased by 3 years over the last 20 years (approximately) in 50 cities across America. It may be in all cities, and I’m sure you could draw that conclusion; I only add the 50 cities because that is what the study included. The researchers behind the study analyzed data sets comparing life spans and levels of particulate pollution from 1980 and 2000. As pollution levels dropped, life expectancy rose. Seems simple enough…

Actually, to put a finer point on it, your life was extended by 5 months because of a drop in air pollution. How they came up with five months, I don’t know, but wait, the article mentions that factors such as “such as changes in demographics, income, migration, population, education and cigarette smoking.” So I guess due to all those factors, we urbanites in the 50 cities included in the study are living 2.72 years longer than we did back in 1980. The air pollution accounts for 15% of that increase.

Neat.

Some of the very dirtiest cities saw an increase in life expectancy of 10 months due to the reduction in air pollution, thanks to the Clean Air Act. Although even relatively clean cities show a benefit to public health standards from additional reductions in air pollution levels.

This is good news for many reasons — longer, healthier lives for one — but this is good timing for all those who are trying to undermine the intentions of the Clean Air Act by ignoring some pollution and/or not enforcing limits on things that are produced by burning, say, gas or coal. Hopefully, with a new Administration and a new EPA administrator, the EPA will start regulating such things as carbon dioxide, and then new studies will show us in twenty years how we lengthened our lives by doing so.

Just a thought.

air pollution, health, life expectancy, cities, urban, America, US, Clean Air Act, pollution, particulates, gas, coal, public health

Seems quite a lot…if used as mulch.

I ran across this little item in the American Society for Horticultural Sciences, and though I had to actually say out some of the sentences as they read like gobbledygook in my brain — all those weights, orange fruit weights, average weights and percentage of orange fruits, I think. Basically, a study found that applying leaves (in this case, municipal leaves) to pumpkin patches as mulch improved the pumpkin patch.

And you wonder where universities spend their money?

So some people from Rutgers University laid out four test plots where pumpkins were planted. Two of the plots had city leaves applied as mulch. The other two plots went with the old bare soil with the added treatment of herbicide. One of the mulched plots and one of the bare soil plots were given side dressings of 25 pounds per acre of Nitrogen as fertilizer. The other two had three-times the amount of fertilizer, but again, one had mulch, one bare soil/herbicide.

Over two years, definite differences were detected by the second growing season.

In 2006, there were no differences in total number of fruit, number of orange fruit, and percentage of orange fruit at harvest between production systems. Total weight, weight of orange fruit, and average fruit weight of pumpkin fruit was significantly higher and similar at both sidedress N rates in both leaf mulch production systems compared with bare soil…Applying municipal leaves to the soil surface exhibited a marked advantage over bare soil in producing clean fruit. In both years, the percentage of clean fruit at harvest was higher in both leaf mulch production systems compared with bare soil. –HortTech

See what I mean…gobbledygook in the brain voice.

Personally, I’d want to further expand on the experiment and try different mulches, but I understand the point of using urban leaves to see if it could be a win-win situation for pumpkin farmers in outlying areas and for city-dwellers. In many parts of this country, the autumn rain of leaves from city trees can be a tremendous amount of leaf debris to find a home for. Leaves take quite a while to decompose, especially when in such large amounts, and if a city does not have a large commercial scale composting facility at its, ahem, disposal (sorry), then that city needs to come up with some creative methods of getting rid of all those leaves.

Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up the problem of urban leaf litter picking up not-so-nice stuff that leak from cars. The study didn’t mention it, but sure, in a perfect world, municipal leaves would not touch the roadway and cars wouldn’t leak coolant and oil and transmission and brake fluids. How can a city ever guarantee that the leaves would be clean?

Maybe I should apply to the Rutgers Horticulture program…

city, leaves, autumn, study, mulch, pumpkin, disposal, compost, decompose, leaf litter, farmers, herbicide, Rutgers, American Society of Horticultural Sciences