Bob's Links and Rants

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Sunday, April 24, 2005

Springtime in Michigan!


Actually, we've had about three weeks of absolutely wonderful weather leading up to this mess.

I just went down to the Earth Day fair at the Farmers' Market. I think it was the first time in four years that I wasn't staffing a table myself--all I had to do was walk around and look at the displays and talk to the nice people. The biodiesel people were there, as were the Ann Arbor Clean Cities people, the Sierra Club, the Ann Arbor Greenway folks, the UM Solar House Project students, and a guy with an electric motorcycle. In the making lemonade from lemons department, the Southeast Michigan RC&D Council presented finished wood samples from Emerald Ash trees, the trees that are being killed by the thousands by the emerald ash borer insect (including the one in my curb lawn). While the ash borer kills the tree, it doesn't impact the quality of the wood. So, rather than landfilling or burning the dead trees, they are running them through sawmills to make usable (and pretty good-looking) lumber, with the scraps being shredded into mulch.

I told the lady there that I, too, was deriving a benefit from the death of the ash trees--without the ash in the curb lawn, I'll have full sun on my south-facing roof year round, except of course on days like today.