How does RNA know where to go in the city of the cell? Using cellular ZIP codes and postal carrier routes

Cells move their genetic material from one place to another in the form of RNA. Christoph Burgstedt/Science Photo Library via Getty Images

Matthew Taliaferro, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

Before 2020, when my friends and acquaintances asked me what I study as a molecular biologist, their eyes would inevitably glaze over as soon as I said “RNA.” Now, as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown the power and promise of this molecule to the world at large, their eyes widen.

Despite growing recognition of the importance of RNA, how these molecules get to where they need to be within cells remains largely a mystery.

RNA is a chemical cousin of DNA. It plays many roles in the cell, but perhaps it’s most well-known as the relay messenger of genetic information. RNA takes a copy of the information in DNA from its storehouse in the nucleus to sites in the cell where this information is decoded to create the building blocks – proteins – that make cells what they are. This transport process is critical for animal development, and its dysfunction is linked to a variety of genetic diseases in people.

In some ways, cells are like cities, with proteins carrying out specific functions in the “districts” they occupy. Having the right components at the right time and place is essential.

For example, it makes little sense to put a high-security vault in the fashion district. Instead, it needs to be in the financial district, where there are tellers to fill it with currency. Similarly, proteins devoted to energy production for the cell are most functional not when they are confined to the nucleus but when they are in the cell’s power plant, the mitochondria, surrounded by the raw materials and accessories needed for their job.

The inside of a cell is much like a city.

So how do cells ensure the millions of proteins they contain are where they are supposed to be? One way is as simple as it sounds: transport them directly. However, every transport step costs energy. Dragging a heavy vault across town isn’t easy. An alternative strategy is to instead take the instructions for making the vault directly to the bank so it’s already in the correct location immediately after construction.

The instructions for making a given protein are contained within RNA. One way to ensure proteins are where they are supposed to be is to transport their RNA blueprint to where their specific functions are needed. But how does RNA get where it needs to be?

My research team focuses on this very question: What are the molecular mechanisms that control RNA transport? Our recently published research hints that some of the molecular language governing this process may be universal across all cell types.

The molecular language of RNA transport

For a handful of mRNAs – or RNA sequences coding for specific proteins – researchers have an idea about how they’re transported. They often contain a particular string of nucleotides, the chemical building blocks that make up RNA, that tell cells about their desired destination. These sequences of nucleotides, or what scientists refer to as RNA “ZIP codes,” are recognized by proteins that act like mail carriers and deliver the RNAs to where they are supposed to go.

My team and I set out to discover new ZIP codes that send RNAs to neurites, the precursors to the axons and dendrites on neurons that transmit and receive electrical signals. We reasoned that these ZIP codes must lie somewhere within the thousands of nucleotides that make up the RNAs in neurites. But how could we find our ZIP code needle in the RNA haystack?

Neurites are long, thin branches extending from the body of a neuron.

We started by breaking eight mouse neurite-localized RNAs into about 10,000 smaller chunks, each about 250 nucleotides long. We then appended each of these chunks to an unrelated firefly RNA that mouse cells are unlikely to recognize, and watched for chunks that caused the firefly RNA to be transported to neurites. To extend the mail analogy, we took 10,000 blank envelopes (firefly RNAs) and wrote a different ZIP code (pieces of neurite-localized RNA) on each one. By observing which envelopes were delivered to neurites, we were able to discover many new neurite ZIP codes.

We still didn’t know the identity of the protein that acted as the “mail carrier,” however. To figure this out, we purified RNAs containing the newly identified ZIP codes and observed what proteins were purified along with them. The idea was to catch the mail carrier in the act of transport while bound to its target RNA.

We found that one protein that regulates neurite production, named Unkempt, repeatedly appeared with ZIP code-containing RNAs. When we depleted cells of Unkempt, the ZIP codes were no longer able to direct RNA transport to neurites, implicating Unkempt as the “mail carrier” that delivered these RNAs.

Toward a universal language

With this work, we identified ZIP codes that sent RNAs to neurites (in our analogy, the bank). But where would an RNA containing one of these ZIP codes end up if it were in a cell that didn’t have neurites (a city that didn’t have a bank)?

To answer this, we looked at where RNAs were in a completely different cell type, epithelial cells that line the body’s organs. Interestingly, the same ZIP codes that sent RNAs to neurites sent them to the bottom of epithelial cells. This time we identified another mail carrier, a protein called LARP1, responsible for the transport of RNAs containing a particular ZIP code to both neurites and the bottom end of epithelial cells.

How could one ZIP code and mail carrier transport an RNA to two different locations in two very different cells? It turns out that both of these cell types contain structures called microtubules that are oriented in a very particular way. Microtubules can be thought of as cellular streets that serve as tracks to transport a variety of cargo in the cell. Importantly, these microtubules are polarized, meaning they have ingrained “plus” and “minus” ends. Cargo can therefore be transported in specific directions by targeting to one of these ends.

Microtubules are the roads proteins called kinesin use to transport materials from one cellular location to another.

In neurons, microtubules stretch through to and have their plus ends at the neurite tip. In epithelial cells, microtubules run from top to bottom, with their plus ends toward the bottom. Given that both of these locations are associated with the plus ends of microtubules, is that why we saw one ZIP code direct RNAs to both of these areas?

To test this, we inhibited the cell’s ability to transport cargo to the plus end of microtubules and monitored whether our ZIP code-containing RNAs were delivered. We found that these RNAs made it to neither the neurites in neurons nor to the bottom end of epithelial cells. This confirmed the role of microtubules in the transport of RNAs containing these particular ZIP codes. Rather than directing RNA to go to specific locations in the cell, these ZIP codes direct RNA to go to the plus ends of microtubules, wherever that might be in a given cell type.

We could compare this process to a mailing address. While the top line (“The Bank”) tells us the name of the building, it’s really the address and street name (“150 Maple Street”) that contains actionable information for the mail carrier. These RNA ZIP codes send RNAs to specific places along microtubule streets, not to specific structures in the cell. This allows for a more flexible yet uniform code, as not all cells share the same structures.

Moving mRNA into the clinic

Our research uncovers a new piece of how ZIP code sequences and proteins work together to get RNAs where they need to be. Our findings and methods can also be generalized to discover other new facets of the genetic ZIP code that direct RNAs to other locations in the cell.

Understanding how ZIP code sequences work can help researchers design RNAs that deliver their payload instructions to precise locations in the cell. Given the growing promise of RNA-based therapeutics, ranging from vaccines to cancer therapies, knowing how to make an RNA go from point A to point B is more important than ever.

Matthew Taliaferro, Assistant Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Buildings left standing in Turkey offer design guidance for future earthquake-resilient construction

Turkey’s Adana Hospital survived February 2023 earthquakes with no damage because of its seismic isolation system. Earthquake Protection Systems, Inc., CC BY-ND

Osman Ozbulut, University of Virginia

The Feb. 6, 2023, earthquakes in Turkey and Syria damaged over 100,000 buildings, caused more than 10,000 collapses and killed more than 50,000 people. These earthquakes also put to the test advanced building technologies that can minimize damage and keep buildings functioning after a quake.

Several hospitals built with one such technology – called a seismic isolation system – survived the earthquakes with almost no harm, according to local news reports, even while surrounding buildings sustained heavy damage.

Adana City Hospital was built to record both ground shaking and the building’s response. Thanks to its seismic isolation system, the building saw a 75% reduction in shaking, according to the company that designed the isolation system, compared with neighboring structures. This system allowed the building to stay up and running after the earthquake.

Engineers aren’t surprised that the hospitals with seismic isolation systems survived with minimal damage, but through my work as a civil engineer, I’ve been hearing people in Turkey and abroad ask why more buildings don’t use these smarter engineering technologies.

A year after the 1999 İzmit earthquake in Turkey killed over 17,000 people, I moved to Istanbul for a bachelor’s in civil engineering. I moved to the U.S. for my graduate studies in 2005, and since then, I have been working on advanced technologies and materials that can ensure rapid recovery and reoccupation of buildings after a strong earthquake.

Although we’ve seen the effectiveness of seismic protection technologies during past major earthquakes, these technologies have been installed in only a tiny fraction of the places where they could potentially be useful.

Earthquake-resilient building technology

Engineers can control how structures respond to earthquakes in several ways.

Traditional approaches rely on having certain components of the building, like columns or beams, absorb the earthquake’s energy. However, this method can lead to damage accumulating in these structural features that may render the building uninhabitable.

Earthquake-resilient systems such as seismic isolation devices and seismic dampers minimize the seismic energy that goes into these columns or beams by either absorbing it or diverting it. As a result, the building experiences less motion and damage and is more likely to remain functional after an earthquake.

Seismic isolation systems prevent seismic energy from entering buildings in the first place by using devices made from rubber or steel plates coated with a friction-generating material that slide over one another to minimize an earthquake’s impact. These isolation devices are installed between the building’s foundation and the building itself. Alternatively, seismic dampers, installed in each story of a building, absorb earthquake energy the way shock absorbers work in a car and convert it into heat energy to minimize damage.

The left shows a building without seismic isolation, while the right image shows a building with a seismic isolation system, which minimizes how much damage the building sustains during an earthquake. The red lines denote how much motion the building could experience during an earthquake. Ozbulut Lab, CC BY-ND

Both seismic isolation systems and seismic dampers can help a building achieve “functional recovery” – a performance objective whereby buildings are constructed to prevent damage and enable reoccupancy. Designing such buildings will not only save people and buildings but also keep the earthquakes from collapsing communities and economies.

While functional recovery is an emerging idea for building earthquake-resilient structures, global modern building codes stipulate that, at a minimum, structures must have measures in place to keep the building from collapsing – called the life safety objective. Buildings following a life safety objective are engineered to sustain damage in a controlled way, to keep the building standing and protect those inside.

While these buildings likely won’t collapse, they may not be safe to use after a quake. While this is not the same as functional recovery, if more buildings had been built to a life safety threshold in Turkey and Syria, thousands of lives could have been saved.

The case in Turkey

Much of the damage in Turkey occurred in nonductile concrete buildings constructed under a pre-1998 Turkish building code. Ductile concrete building elements, required by newer building codes, are more flexible, thanks to steel reinforcing bars at critical locations. They can accommodate the building motions induced by earthquakes. The older nonductile buildings also tended to have poorly arranged steel reinforcements, leaving them vulnerable to the sudden collapse of building columns.

This video, from The Associated Press, shows some of the buildings that collapsed in the aftermath of the Turkey earthquakes.

Similarly, many so-called soft-story buildings were damaged during these earthquakes. A soft story is a level that is significantly more vulnerable to lateral earthquake forces than the other stories in a multistory building. The first floor of these buildings – commonly used for commercial purposes like retail, garage or office space – tend to have more open areas and fewer structural components, like beams and columns, making them vulnerable to collapse.

An example of a soft-story building, where the first story collapsed, leaving the rest of the floors relatively stable. AP Photo/Emrah Gurel

These types of buildings are found all over the world, including in highly populated, seismically at-risk areas like Istanbul, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Vancouver — all located near active fault lines.

Buildings designed under old codes can be strengthened to meet a life safety performance threshold. However, these upgrades can cost lots of money, and enforcing these upgrades, especially for private buildings, requires well-planned policies.

Learning lessons

While buildings designed for a life safety objective can protect thousands of lives, the February 2011 Christchurch earthquake in New Zealand revealed the limitations of modern seismic codes centered solely on this design goal. The damage to buildings designed under a life safety goal was so extensive that thousands had to be demolished after the quake.

It was this earthquake that led engineers to focus on “functional recovery” and to implement seismic protective technologies more widely. The additional cost of such seismic protection technologies is typically less than 5% of the initial construction costs and pales in comparison to the cost of the social and economic disruptions caused by a major earthquake. In addition, securing lower insurance premiums may recoup most of these initial costs.

Total economic losses after the Christchurch earthquake was estimated at US$32 billion, not accounting for inflation, of which $24 billion was construction costs. The cost of the recent earthquakes in Turkey is estimated to be more than $84 billion and still counting.

The earthquakes in Turkey have shown that seismic protection technologies work. To avoid high economic and social consequences, local authorities can update the provisions and codes for designing new buildings to enable post-earthquake reoccupancy and functional recovery. Additionally, policies, financial incentives and tax benefits that promote enhanced building design could improve seismic safety on a larger scale.

Osman Ozbulut, Associate Professor of Civil Engineering, University of Virginia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Migrant deaths in Mexico put spotlight on US policy that shifted immigration enforcement south

Mourners gather outside a detention center in Ciudad Juarez. David Peinado/picture alliance via Getty Images

Raquel Aldana, University of California, Davis

The fire-related deaths of at least 39 migrants in a detention facility in Ciudad Juarez, just across the U.S. border with Mexico, will likely be found to have had several contributing factors.

There was the immediate cause of the blaze, the mattresses apparently set alight by desperate men in the center to protest their imminent deportation. And then there is the apparent role of guards, seen on video walking away from the blaze.

But as an expert on immigration policy, I believe there is another part of the tragedy that can’t be overlooked: the decadeslong immigration enforcement policies of the U.S. and Mexican governments that have seen the number of people kept in such facilities skyrocket.

In the aftermath of the fire, Felipe González Morales, the United Nations special rapporteur for human rights of migrants, commented on Twitter that the “extensive use of immigration detention leads to tragedies like this one.”

And the United States is a big part of that “extensive use” on both sides of the border.

Lengthy stays and fear of deportation

Today Mexico maintains a very large detention system. It comprises several dozen short- and long-term detention centers, housing more than 300,000 people in 2021.

By comparison, the U.S. immigration detention system is the world’s largest. It maintains 131 facilities comprised of government-owned Service Processing Centers, privately run Contract Detention Facilities, and a variety of other detention facilities, including prisons.

Mexico has laws in place that are supposed to guarantee that migrants in detention only endure brief stays and are afforded due process, such as access to lawyers and interpreters. The law also states that they should have adequate conditions, including access to education and health care.

But in reality, what migrants often face at these detention centers is poor sanitary conditions, overcrowding, lengthy stays and despair over the near certainty of deportation.

The fire in Ciudad Juárez was started after the migrants – men from Guatemala, Honduras, Venezuela, El Salvador, Colombia and Ecuador – learned that they were to be sent back to those nations, according to Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Deportation would have ended their hopes of asylum in the U.S.

US immigration enforcement shifts south

Why Mexico was doing the deporting, not the U.S., has a great deal to do with how the two nations have collaborated to control illegal migration headed to the U.S., especially since the turn of the century. In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001, U.S. authorities increasingly viewed immigration as a security issue – a pivot that affected not only U.S. domestic legislation on immigration but its bilateral relations with Mexico.

In 2006, Mexican President Felipe Calderón joined efforts with President George W. Bush on the Merida Initiative to wage a war on drugs in Mexico, build a “21st Century U.S.-Mexican border” and shift immigration enforcement into Mexican territory.

These efforts, supported by massive U.S. funding, continue today.

With this money, Mexico established naval bases on its rivers, security cordons and drone surveillance. It also set up mobile highway checkpoints and biometric screening at migrant detention centers, all with the goal of detecting, detaining and deporting largely Central American migrants attempting to reach the United States.

The intent was to shift U.S. immigration enforcement south of the border. In that respect, the policy has been successful. Figures from the Guatemalan Institute of Migration show that of the 171,882 U.S.-bound migrants deported to the Northern Triangle region of Central America – El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala – in 2022, Mexico sent back 92,718, compared to the U.S.‘s 78,433.

Prevention through deterrence is not working

Mexico’s detentions and deportations have done little to stop the flow of migrants entering the country en route to the U.S.

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin estimate that from 2018 to 2021, an annual average of 377,000 migrants entered Mexico from the Northern Triangle region. The vast majority were headed to the U.S. to escape violence, drought, natural disasters, corruption and extreme poverty.

Migrants are passing through Mexico in the thousands from multiple other countries as well, fleeing conditions in countries such as Haiti and Venezuela, as well as African nations.

Meanwhile, recent years have seen a toughening of border enforcement policies targeting asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border. This started under the Trump administration but has been continued by President Joe Biden despite the Democrat’s campaign promises of a more “humane” immigration system.

Since 2019, Washington has adopted a series of policies that have either forced migrants presenting themselves at the U.S. southern border to apply for asylum while remaining in Mexico or expelled them back to their countries of origin.

This has created a bottleneck of hundreds of thousands of migrants at Mexico’s border towns and swelled the numbers entering detention facilities in Mexico.

By 2021, the number of immigration detainees in such centers had reached 307,679, nearly double what it had been in 2019.

As a result, many centers, including the one implicated in the fire, have suffered from overcrowding and deterioration conditions. A 2021 report by the immigration research center Global Detention Project extensively documented how the conditions and practices of Mexico’s immigration centers had led to widespread protest by detained migrants. Rioting and protests have become more common, with incidents taking place at facilities in Tijuana and the southern city of Tapachula in recent months.

No end in sight

The tragedy in Ciudad Juárez is unlikely to affect the steady flow of migrants entering Mexico in the hope of making it north of the border. For many, the options to take a different path to safety in the U.S. are simply not there.

Only a few can apply for refugee status in the U.S. from abroad, and the waits are long. Biden’s “humanitarian parole” program – which allows entry to the U.S. for up to 30,000 people a month – is only an option for those living in a handful of nations. It is also being challenged in court. And for the lucky few who manage to file for U.S. asylum, denial rates remain high – 63% in 2021 – while immigration court backlogs mean that fewer cases are being decided. Only 8,349 asylum seekers were actually granted asylum by U.S. immigration judges in 2021.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s incoming “transit ban” will mean anyone seeking asylum at the U.S. southern border from May 11, 2023 without having first applied for asylum en route, will be rapidly deported, many to Mexico.

The likelihood is the policy will only worsen the migrant processing bottleneck in Mexico, and add pressure on the country’s already volatile detention facility system.

Raquel Aldana, Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Diversity and Professor of Law, University of California, Davis

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Go with the Gut: 6 tips for promoting pet health

When four-legged friends are feeling under the weather, pet parents may feel helpless pinpointing exactly what’s wrong. Nurturing your pet’s gut health is one way to protect his or her immune system and to promote overall well-being.

Improve your pooch’s gut health with these tips from the pet experts at Solid Gold:

Recognize the Signs of a Potential Gut Health Problem
While many problems are readily apparent, gut health isn’t one of them. There may be some tell-tale signs like diarrhea or vomiting, but other symptoms like bloating or constipation may be harder to spot. Other signs of gut trouble might include fatigue, frequent licking, restlessness, changes in coat quality and luster, and weight fluctuations. Be sure to talk with your vet promptly if you observe any concerning symptoms.

Pay Attention to Ingredients
Choose a dog food with ingredients that promote gut health. For example, Solid Gold’s Hund-N-Flocken dog food is powered by NutrientBoost, a proprietary blend of ingredients packed with protein and nutrients that help canines thrive. It features crave-worthy taste and ingredients like amino acids, probiotics and proteins that support digestion, immunity and nutrient absorption. Each bite is made with a blend of high-fiber ingredients such as carrot, pumpkin and pearled barley to support digestive health.

Be Conscious of Allergens and Food Intolerance
Dogs can experience allergies just like people. Allergies that affect a dog’s skin are common, but you might also find your dog has trouble digesting certain foods, which can create inflammation and irritation in the gut. Allergy testing or an elimination diet (removing one potential allergen source at a time) can help pinpoint the problem.

Feed Probiotics to Promote Good Bacteria
Just like humans, dogs need a well-balanced microbiome. Probiotics build the microflora in your dog’s system, promoting the good bacteria that wages war on infections and harmful bacteria when needed. Probiotics can be especially helpful if your dog is prone to diarrhea or gas, or if he or she has recently received an antibiotic treatment that may have affected the natural gut flora. You can find probiotics in the form of food or supplements like Solid Gold’s Mellow Belly Gut Health Supplement, which is made with a powerful combination of natural digestive enzymes and probiotics to aid in proper digestion. The entire collection of food and supplements are made with superfoods and probiotics to help support your pet’s immunity and get the most out of every day to keep him or her thriving.

Don’t Forget the Prebiotics
Many people are at least somewhat familiar with the role probiotics play in gut health, but not everyone knows about prebiotics. Prebiotics, which are a form of dietary fiber, function as a fertilizer or food source for probiotics, allowing helpful bacteria to multiply. Look for prebiotic treats, capsules, drops, powder and even specially formulated foods.

Manage Stress with Play and Exercise
If you’ve ever experienced digestive issues as a result of stress, you know mental and physical health go hand in hand. The same is true for dogs, so managing your dog’s stress level is an important step in helping regulate his or her gut health. Exercise is beneficial for your pet’s health in a variety of ways, including suppressing cortisol, which is an inflammatory hormone that may weaken the immune system.

Find more tips and nutritional information to support your pet’s health at instagram.com/solidgoldpets.

 

SOURCE:
Solid Gold

Food forests are bringing shade and sustenance to US cities, one parcel of land at a time

The Uphams Corner Food Forest in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood was built on a vacant lot. Boston Food Forest Coalition, CC BY-ND

Karen A. Spiller, University of New Hampshire and Prakash Kashwan, Brandeis University

More than half of all people on Earth live in cities, and that share could reach 70% by 2050. But except for public parks, there aren’t many models for nature conservation that focus on caring for nature in urban areas.

One new idea that’s gaining attention is the concept of food forests – essentially, edible parks. These projects, often sited on vacant lots, grow large and small trees, vines, shrubs and plants that produce fruits, nuts and other edible products.

Atlanta’s Urban Food Forest at Browns Mill is the nation’s largest such project, covering more than 7 acres.

Unlike community gardens or urban farms, food forests are designed to mimic ecosystems found in nature, with many vertical layers. They shade and cool the land, protecting soil from erosion and providing habitat for insects, animals, birds and bees. Many community gardens and urban farms have limited membership, but most food forests are open to the community from sunup to sundown.

As scholars who focus on conservation, social justice and sustainable food systems, we see food forests as an exciting new way to protect nature without displacing people. Food forests don’t just conserve biodiversity – they also promote community well-being and offer deep insights about fostering urban nature in the Anthropocene, as environmentally destructive forms of economic development and consumption alter Earth’s climate and ecosystems.

Community stewards planting a tree at Boston’s Edgewater Food Forest at River Street, July 2021. Boston Food Forest Coalition/Hope Kelley, CC BY-ND

Protecting nature without pushing people away

Many scientists and world leaders agree that to slow climate change and reduce losses of wild species, it’s critical to protect a large share of Earth’s lands and waters for nature. Under the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, 188 nations have agreed on a target of conserving at least 30% of land and sea areas globally by 2030 – an agenda known popularly as 30x30.

But there’s fierce debate over how to achieve that goal. In many cases, creating protected areas has displaced Indigenous peoples from their homelands. What’s more, protected areas are disproportionately located in countries with high levels of economic inequality and poorly functioning political institutions that don’t effectively protect the rights of poor and marginalized citizens in most cases.

In contrast, food forests promote civic engagement. At Beacon Food Forest in Seattle, volunteers worked with professional landscape architects and organized public meetings to seek community input on the project’s design and development. The city of Atlanta’s Urban Agriculture Team partners with neighborhood residents, volunteers, community groups and nonprofit partners to manage the Urban Food Forest at Browns Mill.

Block by block in Boston

Boston is famous for its parks and green spaces, including some designed by renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. But it also has a history of systemic racism and segregation that created drastic inequities in access to green spaces.

And those gaps still exist. In 2021, the city reported that communities of color that had been subjected to redlining in the past had 16% less parkland and 7% less tree cover than the citywide median. These neighborhoods were 3.3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.8 degrees Celsius) hotter during the day and 1.9 F (1 C) hotter at night, making residents more vulnerable to urban heat waves that are becoming increasingly common with climate change.

Encouragingly, Boston has been at the forefront of the national expansion of food forests. The unique approach here places ownership of these parcels in a community trust. Neighborhood stewards manage the sites’ routine care and maintenance.

The nonprofit Boston Food Forest Coalition, which launched in 2015, is working to develop 30 community-driven food forests by 2030. The existing nine projects are helping to conserve over 60,000 square feet (5,600 square meters) of formerly vacant urban land – an area slightly larger than a football field.

Neighborhood volunteers choose what to grow, plan events and share harvested crops with food banks, nonprofit and faith-based meal programs and neighbors. Local collective action is central to repurposing open spaces, including lawns, yards and vacant lots, into food forests that are linked together into a citywide network. The coalition, a community land trust that partners with the city government, holds Boston food forests as permanently protected lands.

Aerial view of the Ellington Community Food Forest in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood. Boston Food Forest Coalition, CC BY-ND

Boston’s food forests are small in size: They average 7,000 square feet (650 square meters) of reclaimed land, about 50% larger than an NBA basketball court. But they produce a wide range of vegetables, fruit and herbs, including Roxbury Russet apples, native blueberries and pawpaws, a nutritious fruit native to North America. The forests also serve as gathering spaces, contribute to rainwater harvesting and help beautify neighborhoods.

The Boston Food Forest Coalition provides technical assistance and fundraising support. It also hires experts for tasks such as soil remediation, removing invasive plants and installing accessible pathways, benches and fences.

Hundreds of volunteers take part in community work days and educational workshops on topics such as pruning fruit trees in winter. Gardening classes and cultural events connect neighbors across urban divides of class, race, language and culture.

Boston residents explain what the city’s food forests mean to them.

A growing movement

According to a crowd-sourced repository, the U.S. has more than 85 community food forests in public spaces from the Pacific Northwest to the Deep South. Currently, most of these sites are in larger cities. In a 2021 survey, mayors from 176 small cities (with populations under 25,000) reported that long-term maintenance was the biggest challenge of sustaining food forests in their communities.

From our experience observing Boston’s approach close up, we believe its model of community-driven food forests is promising. The city sold land to the Boston Food Forest Coalition’s community land trust for $100 per parcel in 2015 and also funded initial construction and planting operations. Since then, the city has made food forests an important part of the city’s open spaces program as it continues to sell parcels to the community land trust at the same price.

Smaller cities with much lower tax bases may not be able to make the same sort of investments. But Boston’s community-driven model offers a viable approach for maintaining these projects without burdening city governments. The city has adopted innovative zoning and permitting ordinances to support small-scale urban agriculture.

Building a food forest brings together neighbors, neighborhood associations, community-based organizations and city agencies. It represents a grassroots response to the interconnected crises of climate change, environmental degradation and social and racial inequity. We believe food forests show how to build a just and sustainable future, one person, seedling and neighborhood at a time.

Orion Kriegman, the founding executive director of the Boston Food Forest Coalition, contributed to this article.

Karen A. Spiller, Thomas W. Haas Professor in Sustainable Food Systems, University of New Hampshire and Prakash Kashwan, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Brandeis University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

6 of 8 Ivy Leagues will soon have women as presidents — an expert explains why this matters

Claudine Gay will become Harvard’s second female president and first Black president in July 2023. Erin Clark/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Felecia Commodore, Old Dominion University

For the first time, a majority of Ivy League schools will soon be led by women.

Starting July 1, 2023, Claudine Gay will assume the role of president at Harvard University, Nemat “Minouche” Shafik at Columbia University and Sian Leah Beilock at Dartmouth College. They will join current female presidents at Brown University, Cornell University and University of Pennsylvania.

Felecia Commodore, an associate professor of higher education at Old Dominion University, explains what this means for gender equity in the college presidency – and why U.S. colleges and universities still have a long way to go.

Why does this matter?

While women make up about 60% of undergraduate as well as master’s and doctoral students in the U.S., only about 32% of presidents of American colleges and universities are women.

However, the Ivy League is not new to selecting female presidents – they have been doing so for a few decades. Judith Rodin was the first, in 1994, when she became president of the University of Pennsylvania. She was followed by Ruth Simmons at Brown University and Shirley Tilghman at Princeton University, both in 2001. Rodin was succeeded by another woman, Amy Guttman, in 2004.

Still, one reason this moment may be one to watch is that Ivy League institutions are often seen as exemplars of elite, complex institutions. So seeing what one could consider a critical mass of female leaders in the Ivy League could signal the benefit of women in leadership to other boards that are hesitant or slow to hire women as presidents.

How unusual is this across higher ed?

I think it would be more surprising to see mostly female presidents at the majority of large public research universities, or at a majority of the schools in the Power 5 athletic conferences.

Despite what may seem like a boom in women leading institutions, the percentage of women in the presidency at colleges and universities more broadly has plateaued at between 25% and 30% for the past decade. This was after increasing from 9.5% in 1986 to 19% in 1998.

A number of factors contribute to this low percentage, including barriers within the college presidential pipeline – such as exclusion from networks that provide mentorship – reward and promotion structures that are not equitable across genders, and bias against women in academic leadership roles.

A recent analysis of data on college presidents explains how this bias against women occurs, specifically when it comes to academic leadership roles. This is important because college presidents typically find their way to the presidency through academic leadership roles such as deans, vice provosts and provosts.

Judith Rodin, right, former president of University of Pennsylvania, and Valerie Jarrett, former senior adviser in the Obama administration, discuss gender parity in the C-suite in 2016. Riccardo Savi/Getty Images for Concordia Summit

What are the biggest challenges that college presidents face?

The biggest priority or challenge really depends on the individual college or university. However, all institutions must ensure they are financially healthy and identify opportunities to strengthen their financial resources. College presidents have reported that they spend the most time on budget and financial management, followed by fundraising.

Particularly in the current higher education marketplace, where the average cost of college runs over US$35,000 per year, college leaders must work to keep their institutions fiscally strong and also competitive and affordable. This may involve, for example, building new infrastructure, creating new programs and cultivating new sources of funding.

What effect does having a woman in the top seat have?

For colleges that have only ever had a man in the president’s role, hiring their first woman as president can signal that the institution embraces change and evolution. This can be an especially important message to send to funders, alumni donors, philanthropists, state legislators and corporate partners, who all play a role in ensuring a particular college’s financial vitality.

Female presidents add to the diversity of the college presidency. They add different perspectives to conversations that shape practices and policies both within their college and across higher education. They might, for example, provide their particular perspective regarding compensation for female faculty members of color, who tend to engage in more unpaid service work on campuses.

Organizational scholars and business leaders affirm that diversity strengthens the decisions made by organizations and contributes to innovative solutions. A more diverse group of decision-makers can generate more decision alternatives than a homogeneous group that may be susceptible to group think.

And lastly, having women at the helm of academic institutions shows other women who aspire to become college presidents that it is indeed possible.

Felecia Commodore, Assistant Professor of Higher Education, Old Dominion University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How much is the world’s most productive river worth? Here’s how experts estimate the value of nature

Establishing the financial worth of a river’s fish is complicated when many people don’t sell the fish they catch. Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP via Getty Images

Stefan Lovgren, University of Nevada, Reno

Southeast Asia’s Mekong may be the most important river in the world. Known as the “mother of waters,” it is home to the world’s largest inland fishery, and the huge amounts of sediments it transports feed some of the planet’s most fertile farmlands. Tens of millions of people depend on it for their livelihoods.

But how valuable is it in monetary terms? Is it possible to put a dollar value on the multitude of ecosystem services it provides, to help keep those services healthy into the future?

That’s what my research colleagues and I are trying to figure out, focusing on two countries that hold the river’s most productive areas for fishing and farming: Cambodia and Vietnam.

Understanding the value of a river is essential for good management and decision-making, such as where to develop infrastructure and where to protect nature. This is particularly true of the Mekong, which has come under enormous pressure in recent years from overfishing, dam building and climate change, and where decisions about development projects often do not take environmental costs into account.

The Mekong River winds through six countries, across 2,700 miles (about 4,350 kilometers) from the mountains to the sea. Leisa Tyler/LightRocket via Getty Images

“Rivers such as the Mekong function as life-support systems for entire regions,” said Rafael Schmitt, lead scientist at the Natural Capital Project at Stanford University, who has studied the Mekong system for many years. “Understanding their values, in monetary terms, can be critical to fairly judge the impacts that infrastructure development will have on these functions.”

Calculating that value isn’t simple, though. Most of the natural benefits that a river brings are, naturally, under water, and thus hidden from direct observation. Ecosystem services may be hard to track because rivers often flow over large distances and sometimes across national borders.

Enter natural capital accounting

The theory of natural capital suggests that ecosystem services provided by nature – such as water filtration, flood control and raw materials – have economic value that should be taken into account when making decisions that affect these systems.

Some people argue that it’s morally wrong to put a financial price on nature, and that doing so undermines people’s intrinsic motivation to value and protect nature. Critics say valuations often do not capture the whole worth of a natural service.

Proponents maintain that natural capital accounting puts a spotlight on natural systems’ value when weighed against commercial pressures. They say it brings visibility to natural benefits that are otherwise hidden, using language that policymakers can better understand and utilize.

More than a million people live on or around Tonle Sap lake, the world’s largest inland fishery. Climate change and dams can affect its water level and fish stocks. Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP via Getty Images

Several countries have incorporated natural capital accounting in recent years, including Costa Rica, Canada and Botswana. Often, that has led to better protection of natural resources, such as mangrove forests that protect fragile coastlines. The U.S. government also announced a strategy in 2023 to start developing metrics to account for the value of underlying natural assets, such as critical minerals, forests and rivers.

However, natural capital studies have largely focused on terrestrial ecosystems, where the trade-offs between human interventions and conservation are easier to see.

When valuing rivers, the challenges run much deeper. “If you cut down a forest, the impact is directly visible,” Schmitt points out. “A river might look pristine, but its functioning may be profoundly altered by a faraway dam.”

Accounting for hydropower

Hydropower provides one example of the challenges in making decisions about a river without understanding its full value. It’s often much easier to calculate the value of a hydropower dam than the value of the river’s fish, or sediment that eventually becomes fertile farmland.

The rivers of the Mekong Basin have been widely exploited for power production in recent decades, with a proliferation of dams in China, Laos and elsewhere. The Mekong Dam Monitor, run by the nonprofit Stimson Center, monitors dams and their environmental impacts in the Mekong Basin in near-real time.

The lower Mekong River. USGS

While hydropower is clearly an economic benefit – powering homes and businesses, and contributing to a country’s GDP – dams also alter river flows and block both fish migration and sediment delivery.

Droughts in the Mekong in recent years, linked to El Niño and exacerbated by climate change, were made worse by dam operators holding back water. That caused water levels to drop to historical low levels, with devastating consequences for fisheries. In the Tonlé Sap Lake, Southeast Asia’s largest lake and the heart of the Mekong fishery, thousands of fishers were forced to abandon their occupation, and many commercial fisheries had to close.

Hydropower dams like the one in the photos above in Cambodia can disrupt a river’s natural services. The Sesan River (Tonlé San) and Srepok River are tributaries of the Mekong. Move the slider to see how the dam changed the water flow. NASA Earth Observatory

One project under scrutiny now in the Mekong Basin is a small dam being constructed on the Sekong River, a tributary, in Laos near the Cambodian border. While the dam is expected to generate a very small amount of electricity, preliminary studies show it will have a dramatically negative impact on many migratory fish populations in the Sekong, which remains the last major free-flowing tributary in the Mekong River Basin.

Valuing the ‘lifeblood of the region’

The Mekong River originates in the Tibetan highlands and runs for 2,700 miles (about 4,350 kilometers) through six countries before emptying into the South China Sea.

Its ecological and biological riches are clearly considerable. The river system is home to over 1,000 species of fish, and the annual fish catch in just the lower basin, below China, is estimated at more than 2 million metric tons.

“The river has been the lifeblood of the region for centuries,” says Zeb Hogan, a biologist at the University of Nevada, Reno, who leads the USAID-funded Wonders of the Mekong research project, which I work on. “It is the ultimate renewable resource – if it is allowed to function properly.”

Establishing the financial worth of fish is more complicated than it appears, though. Many people in the Mekong region are subsistence fishers for whom fish have little to no market value but are crucial to their survival.

The Mekong Delta in Vietnam is essential to transportation, food and culture. Sergi Reboredo/VW PICS/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

The river is also home to some of the largest freshwater fish in the world, like giant stingray and catfish and critically endangered species. “How do you value a species’ right to exist?” asks Hogan.

Sediment, which fertilizes floodplains and builds up the Mekong Delta, has been relatively easy to quantify, says Schmitt, the Stanford scientist. According to his analysis, the Mekong, in its natural state, delivers 160 million tons of sediment each year.

However, dams let through only about 50 million tons, while sand mining in Cambodia and Vietnam extracts 90 million, meaning more sediment is blocked or removed from the river than is delivered to its natural destination. As a result, the Mekong Delta, which naturally would receive much of the sediment, has suffered tremendous river erosion, with thousands of homes being swept away.

A potential ‘World Heritage Site’ designation

A river’s natural services may also include cultural and social benefits that can be difficult to place monetary values on.

A new proposal seeks to designate a bio-rich stretch of the Mekong River in northern Cambodia as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. If successful, such a designation may bring with it a certain amount of prestige that is hard to put in numbers.

The complexities of the Mekong River make our project a challenging undertaking. At the same time, it is the rich diversity of natural benefits that the Mekong provides that make this work important, so that future decisions can be made based on true costs.

Stefan Lovgren, Research scientist College of Science, University of Nevada, Reno

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The cautionary tale of ‘Dilbert’

What Adams writes and draws rarely attracts scrutiny – it’s what he says that has gotten him in hot water. Bob Riha, Jr./Getty Images

Chris Lamb, Indiana University

Dilbert, the put-upon chronicler of office life, has been given the pink slip.

On Feb. 26, 2023, Andrews McMeel Universal announced that it would no longer distribute the popular comic strip after its creator, Scott Adams, engaged in what many people viewed as a racist rant on his YouTube channel. Hundreds of newspapers had by then decided to quit publishing the strip.

It followed an incident in which Adams, on his program “Real Coffee with Scott Adams,” reacted to a survey by Rasmussan Reports that concluded only 53% of Black Americans agreed with the statement “It’s OK to be white.” If only about half thought it was OK to be white, Adams said, this qualified Black Americans as a “hate group.”

“I don’t want to have anything to do with them,” Adams added. “And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people, just get the f— away … because there is no fixing this.”

Adams later doubled down on his statements, writing on Twitter that “Dilbert has been cancelled from all newspapers, websites, calendars, and books because I gave some advice everyone agreed with.”

Adams is wrong. If everyone had agreed with him, “Dilbert” would still be appearing in newspapers.

The first “Dilbert” strip – a comic centered on mocking American office culture – appeared in 1989. It became a hit, and until recently, “Dilbert” ran in more than 2,000 daily newspapers across 65 countries.

Now, according to Adams, his client list is “around zero.”

Therein lies the moral of the story: Know thy audience.

Adams failed to grasp that being a social critic means your freedom of expression only goes as far as your audience is willing to accept it. Adams could say whatever he wanted to his YouTube audience because his listeners may have agreed with what he said.

Unfortunately for him, what he said on his program did not stay on his program.

But Adams’ comfortable salary depended on his satisfying a wider audience – many of whom found his opinions intolerable.

America’s tradition of free speech

In a country that prides itself on its tradition of free expression, it’s important to explore the limits of free expression in the United States. This can be done in part by looking at social criticism, as I did in my book “Drawn to Extremes: The Use and Abuse of Editorial Cartoons.”

Cartoonists are limited by their imagination, talent, taste and their senses of humor, morality and outrage. If they want an audience they must also consider the tastes and sensibilities of their editors and readers.

The United States may pride itself on its tradition of free speech, but cartoonists throughout the nation’s history have been jailed, beaten, sued and censored for their drawings.

In 1903, the governor of Pennsylvania, Samuel W. Pennypacker, called for restrictions against journalists after a Philadelphia newspaper cartoonist had depicted him as a parrot during the previous fall’s gubernatorial campaign. A state representative then introduced a bill that made it illegal to publish a cartoon “portraying, describing or representing any person … in the likeness of beast, bird, fish, insect or other inhuman animal” that exposed the person to “hatred, contempt, or ridicule.” Another cartoonist then drew the governor as a frothy stein of beer and the bill’s author as a small potato.

The bill failed to pass.

Cartoonists working for the socialist magazine The Masses were accused of undermining the war effort during World War I with their anti-war opinions and prosecuted under the Espionage Act.

And during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, newspapers canceled Walt Kelly’s “Pogo” comic strip after Kelly drew Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev as a medal-wearing hog and Cuban leader Fidel Castro as a cigar-smoking goat because they thought the strip might jeopardize the peace process.

Perhaps no cartoonist – before the ax fell on “Dilbert” – has seen his strip canceled by more newspapers than Garry Trudeau, creator of “Doonesbury.” In 1984, dozens of newspapers canceled a series of strips wherein which Doonesbury’s dim-witted newsman Roland Burton Hedley took readers on a trip through then-President Ronald Reagan’s brain, finding “80 billion neurons, or ‘marbles,’ as they are known to the layman.” And Trudeau’s syndicate, Universal Press, refused to distribute a strip that satirized an anti-abortion documentary.

In other countries, cartoonists have been murdered in retaliation for their work. Famously, on Jan. 7, 2015, two French Muslim terrorists entered the Paris office of the satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo and killed 12 cartoonists, editors and police officers after the periodical published satirical drawings of the Prophet Muhammad.

The importance of context

Such controversies were generally caused by what cartoonists said in their cartoons. There have been exceptions. Al Capp, who created the comic strip “Li’l Abner,” saw his popularity wane in the 1960s and 1970s when he began expressing his far-right political opinion in both his strip and particularly in his public appearances.

Adams was similarly punished not for what he included in his comic strip but rather what for what he said on his YouTube program.

The context here is important. This was not the first time Adams has been censured after saying something deemed to be offensive. In May 2022, around 80 newspapers canceled “Dilbert” after Adams introduced his first Black character in the 30-plus year run of the strip. The character identified as white to prank his boss’s diversity goals.

Adams lost some newspapers when he decided to mock diversity in the business world. He lost his strip when he used racist language to attack Black people on his YouTube program.

Chris Lamb, Professor of Journalism, Indiana University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.