One priority of Mizzou Botanic Garden’s (MUBG) strategic plan is to get the word out about the garden through outreach and collaboration with area groups and organizations. This spring and summer, MUBG is presenting cosponsored Brown Bag Seminars on environmental topics. And you’re invited.
Join us for a discussion on “The Ecological Imperative to Move Beyond Plastics,” from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., March 16, in the Stotler Lounge on the first floor of MU’s Memorial Union. Featured speaker is Dana Ripper, co-director and co-founder of Missouri River Bird Observatory (MRBO). She also is a certified speaker with the national Beyond Plastics project.
Environmental advocacy is one of MRBO’s priorities, along with bird conservation, scientific habitat studies, outreach and education. Advocacy includes educating citizens on the detrimental impact that things such as industrial agriculture, light pollution and plastics can have on wildlife — and not so wild life.
Ripper’s affiliation with Beyond Plastics began with an online class offered by the nationwide project, based at Vermont’s Bennington College, whose mission it is to end plastic pollution.
“It was an issue I was already concerned about so when spending time at home because of COVID, I took the Beyond Plastic Pollution online class from Judith Enck, the founder and president of the project,” Ripper said. “It really laid out the extent of the problem.”
MRBO became an official affiliate and Ripper additionally trained for certification with the Beyond Plastics speakers bureau. As such, she shares the project’s dire message and suggests ways people can personally respond to the issue.
Ripper said recycling is touted as the solution to plastic waste, but in fact that is a misdirection of onus of the plastic problem as consumers’ responsibility. In reality, they have few choices when making purchases.
“You really can’t live in this world without buying or consuming products packaged in plastic,” Ripper said. “Then you have to throw them away and buy them again.”
She noted that less than 10% of all plastic ever made has been recycled. And plastic recycling is fraught with its own share of issues.
“In 2019, around 28 to 30% of No. 1 and 2 plastics were being recycled,” she said. “The only other plastic that can be recycled is No. 5, but there are few outlets for that.”
Gardening-related plastics — trays, pots and cell packs — are No. 5 plastics. There are no formal “recycling” efforts for these products, but local garden nursery Strawberry Hill Farms, accepts “donations” of garden plastic containers for reuse. The very best recycling.
Of her March presentation, Ripper said, “We’ll do a reasonably deep dive — extraction, production, waste management, the ultimate fate of plastics — and health concerns. We will end by talking about solutions and personal responsibility,” she said. “By informing yourself, you may personally decide to advocate for solutions in your area.”
Wearing one of her other MRBO hats, Ripper returns to present MUBG’s second Brown Bag Seminar, “Bird Friendly Landscapes” as cosponsor and guest speaker. The event is from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., May 10 at cosponsor Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture’s Schoolhouse.
Ripper and husband, Ethan Duke, both ornithologists, founded MRBO in 2010 after settling in Saline County.
“We realized that nonprofit bird conservation was a very open niche in Missouri,” Ripper said.
“Our investigations into migrating bird stop-overs quickly developed into bird surveys in some of the most endangered habitats: prairies and wetlands. Less than one-half of 1% of original prairie and only 15 % of wetlands remain.”
MRBO works with entities such as Missouri Department of Conservation and Missouri Prairie Foundation to survey the effectiveness of management practices in those endangered ecosystems.
“These habitats are critical for migratory and prairie-obligatory bird species,” she said. “We started with science and moved quickly into education and advocacy.
“One day we took a look around and realized something was missing,” Ripper said of MRBO’s organizational evolution. “We were collecting data and doing outreach but there were still topics that needed to be addressed by policy, so we added that to our mission.”
Raising awareness by engaging people of all ages in the outdoors in order to spark a connection to and a love of nature is one of MRBO’s priorities.
“We do 100 educational events every year in Missouri,” she said. “If we can get people to care enough about nature — and birds — it can lead to conservation.”
The organization, based in Arrow Rock, is developing a place-based nature school there. To find out more about them, go to the website mrbo.org.
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